EVERYTHING IS OK

One of Canberra's finest young DJs is a mild mannered fella called Jimbo. When the sun goes down and people are getting sweaty on the dancefloor, it’s often because of Jimbo; but when he’s behind the decks, he’s called Jaytech.

Fresh from a hectic schedule of international gigs plugging his debut full length release, 'Everything is OK', Jaytech is proving himself as one of the slickest producers to come out of Oz this year. “I just got back from Indonesia, and the whole time I was there I was getting two or three hours sleep. I was stopping there for a couple of gigs on the way home from London,” Jaytech explains, despite feeling a little fuzzy from jetlag.

“I was playing at a beach festival; the whole thing is sponsored by Marlboro cigarettes, you've got Marlboro branding all over the party and between each of the DJs sets they played the Marlboro song and it’s like this little ‘Chariots Of Fire’ style anthem to remind everyone of the joys of smoking, that was really interesting being at a party like that. To mix out of the Marlboro song into my set was actually quite funny.”

Mixing marketing ditties into your set is one thing, but remixing, as Jaytech admits, can be a tough one for any DJ to tackle. “Working with a remix can possibly be the hardest thing to do as a producer because you have to incorporate other people’s sounds into your tracks and they are usually sounds that you wouldn't have come up with yourself, so that's always an interesting challenge for me working with other people’s sounds. But I think there are many different elements that go into a track that has club appeal.”

Jimbo is well versed in creating club-friendly tracks and he knows how important it is to stay true to his sound. “The best way to describe my sound is definitely melodic house, anything between house and trance music and it’s usually got some pretty uplifting melodies and chords in it and it tells a bit of a story as well.”

Not one to rest on his laurels, Jaytech, despite only just returning from an exhaustive world tour, has already found time to get back in the studio. “The last eight months, after the album release, I've been travelling around the world and playing lots of parties basically. But now I'm back in the studio for the next couple of months working on another release, so I'm hoping to have that finished by the end of June.”

Releasing ‘Everything is OK’ as his own self-produced album has given Jaytech an opportunity to showcase material that wouldn't have survived as a single. “Doing this album has been really good for me. It’s meant I have been able to release some down-tech, chillout style tracks and other styles that I don't usually get to put out on a day to day basis because they won’t really fit by themselves as singles in their own right.”

Advances in technology has meant dance music production is now more accessible to a larger cross section of people. “Since the introduction of newer versions of Logic and Ableton Live software, all these much better sound engines, (home production) has sort of just taken off. Now there are so many places you can go to learn how to produce dance music, and the way that's changed the music is that people are falling into these predictable patterns of production. Someone will write a track and they'll put down a riff or a method of production that's already in place and they'll elaborate on it just a little bit, and so that's the way things are moving forward now.”

Catch Jaytech at Planet Nightclub May 15. 'Everything is OK' is available thru Stomp/ Anjunabeats.