Held up as one of the key figures in alternative dance culture, Erol Alkan is hugely respected by both guitar-toting indie kids and club-going techno fiends.
Back in the early 2000s, Erol’s clubnight Trash became a regular fixture for the various distinct quarters of London’s nightlife, uniting them under one banner.
Spinning the likes of LCD Soundsystem and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Alkan was driven by a desire to spotlight music he genuinely liked – and not caring much about genre rules and restrictions.
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This then led to a career as a producer, remixer and industry figure that garnered respect from all corners of the musical map. Reworking the likes of Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, Tame Impala and Interpol and producing the Mystery Jets, Klaxons and many others.
Back in 2014, we had the great privilege of spending a day with Erol in his purpose-built studio space, Phantasy Sound in North London – a hub for both himself and those artists on his Phantasy label. Intrigued by what such a seminal figure would rely on, gear-wise, we started snooping…
First up, what was Erol’s DAW of choice?
“I use Pro Tools when I record bands, especially if I’m tracking drums, but Logic when it comes to using MIDI or anything like that,” Alkan told us.
“I tend to use the native plugins within Logic as I think they’re fine. To be honest with you, I haven’t found a stereo width plugin better than Logic’s one. EQ wise, they’re pretty good transparent EQs which seem to do exactly what you need an EQ to do. I tend to find that, if you’re not getting what you want out of a sound at that stage, maybe the EQ isn’t the main problem – maybe it’s another aspect of it? So I tend to use all of them in a pretty simple way, rather than expecting miracles from plugins.
“I don’t use any particularly esoteric plug-ins. I’ll focus more on what’s going in; that’s about 90% of it for me.”
We couldn’t help notice the Yamaha NS-10s, a studio staple. They’re essential for Erol. But, not particularly for the reason you might think…
“I just have them because they sound so bad.” Erol admitted. “As they say with NS-10s – if it sounds good on them, then it’ll sound good anywhere.”
A classic Roland TB-303 we discover was a recent snag…
“This is a recent purchase and something I’ve been wanting for a while. I’m in love with it – not just for the fact that it’s a 303, but also because it’s got cool things like CV out, so you can actually write a pattern inside of it and send that to other synths.”
Speaking of synths, and Alkan’s Russian Formanta Polyvoks were particularly intriguing…
“I’m fascinated by Russian synths, in the sense that they were built to try and mimic what Moog was doing at the time. They kind of didn’t get it right, but they came up with something quite different.”
