Originally written for Clash in March 2021. Read the original article here.

‘That music sounds the way I feel’ has always served Danny L Harle as something of a defining mission statement.

Having risen to prominence as key member of the PC Music collective, Harle has carved a distinct niche for himself over the past decade, with his unique brand of hardcore, rave, pop and everything in between. Meanwhile, his work with the likes of Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, Clairo and Rina Sawayama continues to mark him out as a production talent like no other.

His latest project, Harlecore, is the culmination of years of cross-genre experimentation – a seamless blend of ostensibly disparate club and dance genres melded in to one thrilling experience. Part album, part immersive audiovisual club journey and, in non-COVID times, a very real club experience like no other.

As an album, Harlecore couldn’t really have arrived at a better time. Born from collaborations with fellow producer Hudson Mohawke, Club Harlecore began life as a one-off event in a Stoke Newington pub in 2017. That sell out night of thumping rave, hardcore and gabber would soon evolve in to a movement of sorts, with the Harlecore brand evolving in to a worldwide phenomenon of its own.

Alongside the album, with punters currently unable to experience Club Harlecore in all its physical glory, Harle has cultivated an online space in which locked down ravers can dabble in its virtual iteration, complete with a line-up of his musical alter egos.

There’s DJ Danny, who serves up a selection of euphoric hardcore tracks, joined by MC Boing, Harle’s partnership with fellow PC Music alum Lil Data, who amongst other things narrates the thrilling experience of being in a car or playing a piano via lightning fast raps over high tempo bass kicks.

Elsewhere, DJ Ocean, an entity that re-teams Harle with Caroline Polachek following 2019’s stellar PANG, delivers a wave of ethereal ambient melodies, while DJ Mayhem rounds off the group with several doses of brash, confrontational gabber, courtesy of Harle’s continued collaboration with Hudson Mohawke.

As disparate as that all might sound on paper, the end result feels like the final word on the stay-at-home rave experience, which just so happens to be exactly what the world needs right now. Clash recently caught up with DJ Danny himself to discuss the project.

—

How has lockdown been treating you, Danny?

Well, because as a music producer I spend most of my time indoors making music and playing video games, as it is for most of my producer friends, life is pretty much the same. I don’t think music producers are the ones who’ve been hit worst by this pandemic.

First and foremost, congratulations on the album. ‘This music sounds the way I feel’ is a line that sort of defines the Harlecore experience. Is that still kind of the case right now, especially during lockdown?

Yeah, that phrase has always meant a lot to me in the sense that it’s the closest thing I’ve ever been able to work out to express this very strange feeling when music seems to express something that you feel like you’ve felt for a very long time but have never been able to actually say.

‘Car Song’ really nailed that for a lot of people, I think.

Oh yeah. When you’re in a car, it’s hard to truly… I don’t think being in a car has ever been better expressed, in all honesty.

It’s the full stop on that conversation.

It’s like somebody finally has the balls to just fucking say it, you know?

Several producers and musicians I’ve spoken to during the pandemic thought that lockdown might be this time of creative inspiration where there’s loads of time to create, but it went the other way for them. I get the sense that that hasn’t really been the case for you.

Well, I immediately lost the impetus to write dance music, which is weird one. But not to write music – it’s just that the nature of the music changed a bit, much more along the lines of DJ Ocean. I’ve sort of been making playlists for myself that resemble that kind of thing. But yeah, different vibes have different moods. At no point have I been uninspired to write, but I never assumed that lockdown would be this creative thing at all. I think it’s a bit foolish to think that anybody knows what it’s going to be like in the first place because it’s beyond anyone of our generation’s experience of anything, in the west at least.

I have a note here as a sort of follow on to the lockdown question: You haven’t tweeted ‘Huge Danny’ for a while. Is everything okay?

Um, that’s the best question I’ve ever been asked. Everything is okay. And yes, I also haven’t tweeted ‘Huge Danny’ for a while but, you know, it’s a treat when it happens.

The crowd goes wild.

Exactly. And if I do it too much, the crowd will only go mild. 

On that note, Club Harlecore feels like it couldn’t have landed at a better time right now. How does it feel to have released a club record in the midst of a pandemic?

Well, luckily, it’s not a normal club record. I’ve provided the club that the record is set in. I came up with the idea for this three years ago and I was kind of tearing my hair out at the thought of presenting people with such a new concept.

Also, this is a very personal take on all this music. I was initially quite shocked, but then very relieved when the idea of a virtual rave became much more of a familiarised and normalised thing, because it sort of did the legwork for me in terms of presenting a rave that appears to be in a kind of other plane. So for that reason, it was kind of the perfect club record to have come out in this period.

For the uninitiated, how would you kind of characterise the Harlecore experience?

Images that look the way that music sounds, because the music sounds the way I feel.

This is something that you’ve been planning for years. How far back do some of these tunes on the record go?

Me and Ross [Birchard aka Hudson Mohawke] decided to play a gig in the Three Crowns in Stoke Newington, just to play a bunch of the tracks that we liked… I just thought I’d shoot off a quick flyer for it, because we’d got a bunch of other people that we liked and then it was packed. We just thought it was just going to be a fun mates thing, but there was real interest in it. Then we started doing it again and again and it just got bigger every time… Because I was basically choosing all the artists that would appear, it was kind of like what I want to hear from the hardcore euphoric rave scene.

The word ‘Harlecore’ was just a very useful umbrella term for all of that. I realised that quite a lot of the music that I was playing in my sets was music that I had actually made, or made with Ross or Caroline [Polachek] and that meant that there was a music of Harlecore that you could only hear if you went to these events, or listened to some illegal recording somebody had done… This was a sort of living culture in a way and therefore it was worth presenting that to people.

The visual element of it feels as important as the sound, both physically and virtually. How did you kind of go about developing that?

I never thought I’d do a project where the visuals are equally important as the music, because I’ve always just been like a music-y person. But the more I grew up, the more I realised that sort of experiencing something like that is just a holistic experience and that you can’t really just isolate one of these things to another…

We don’t live in an age where you can just be a musician that just makes music, really. Like even people who purport to be just people who just make music are often the most fascistic about keeping the visual aesthetic one way or another, even if it’s like a very minimal one. It’s all related, because it’s not really about music or visuals in the end. It’s about kind of like cultural association, and that sort of placement…

My main takeaway from this whole project is that I’m just really glad that I’ve put out this artefact that truly expresses my experience of this music. And if anybody sort of enjoys it, they’re truly like sharing something with me. And yeah, that’s what like a lot of the Harlecore phrases are referring to like, ‘This is Harlecore’, ‘This is euphoria’, ‘You are not alone’.

Which is nice at a particularly weird moment in time like this, where I think people do feel really detached.

I’ve always enjoyed those gestures of connecting people who feel isolated and alone… This is going to get nerdy, but if you think about the rune mechanic in the game Dark Souls where you can leave a message for somebody. You don’t know where they are or who they are. And then you feel a very strange connection with somebody else.

Sometimes it’s a joke that will make you laugh that someone you don’t know has made… I think those kinds of connections I find really interesting… I just think that those methods of community are something that I really value and an inspiration for some of this project.

You’ve re-teamed with a number people that you’ve been working with over the years for this. DJ Mayhem is you and Hudson Mohawke creating gabber together. How do you guys work on those tracks together?

Basically, I sit in the corner of the room writing chords and tunes, air drop them to him and he just fucking makes the biggest smashing drum drops I’ve heard in my life… I can make like five tunes a day because we’ve got such a good system.

Is it a similar process for Lil Data as well with the MC Boing stuff?

Oh, yeah. But the thing is, with all this stuff, is that that’s not necessarily how DJ Mayhem came about, or MC Boing, because it’s more strange than that… You can hear our DNA, but it’s very much like neither of us could make that music on our own… There’s a moment in a Boing session or DJ Mayhem session where it’s just like he is conjured or summoned, or something. And there is a sort of moment of magic to that… It’s like the process is erased.

How did Caroline Polachek react when you asked her about getting involved in a great big hardcore / gabber / party project?

As usual with Caroline, very few words exchanged… It was actually originally because I couldn’t find enough people playing this kind of music in New York at the time and I had to sort of invent some people to play at the New York Harlecore…

I started making music with Caroline and then just came up with these chords. Caroline started doing some improvisation and then somewhere between those two things, DJ Ocean came about. I can’t even quite remember how the name came about.

Her cover of ‘Breathless’ was great as well.

Yeah, I did the production on that. I’m very happy with that. I love the original as well.

On the subject of pop, there’s something interesting about 90s pop music; this much maligned thing that now it feels like it’s been re-appraised. There’s a whole new generation discovering a lot of that music and enjoying it completely unironically.

Yeah, definitely. Sadly, it just happens every 20 years. It basically means that there will be a 20 year old who was born at that time not experiencing it who will look back on it with none of the cultural baggage and those people often like it. I had it with the 80s. My parents got it: “Oh, that stuff’s crap. This is the crap that I was listening to.” Because the baggage is released, then it can be like looked at just for its aesthetics, rather than sort of cultural placement and that’s what leads us in this inevitable sort of death march of culture, like a dog regurgitating its own vomit.

Are there any particular pop tunes that make you go, ‘I wish I’d wrote that’?

‘Kiss From A Rose’ by Seal.

Yeah?

Unbelievable… My absolute dream song to have written. Like, what that what the fuck is going on in that song? It’s my karaoke song. It’s in a really bad key for me as well, so I have to really scream the chorus… It’s not even good for my screaming range. None of it sits right in my voice. It’s all way too high for me. It sounds horrible, but I just love that song too much to not do it.

Putting it out there: a DJ Danny version of ‘Kiss From A Rose’.

[Laughs] Yeah, you know, maybe I’ll release an official cover, like a crap MIDI version of it.

There’s also ‘Everytime’ by Britney Spears. It’s my absolute favourite. Guy Sigsworth produced it as well and that’s just amazing. It’s funny because Guy Sigsworth was in Frou Frou with Imogen Heap, and that’s respected, but then like the Britney Spears thing is like, “Oh, no, of course that’s trash.” People confuse aesthetics with cultural placement. They think just because something’s placed in the pop sphere, that means it’s not good aesthetically, when in fact the two have no relation.

It’s kind of what people project onto it.

And that thing where something makes you look clever to like it and that kind of thing… I just came upon pop music and electronic music as this zero baggage thing, not even knowing about techno purism, rave nostalgia, about prejudice to do with pop music and that kind of thing. It’s just always flabbergasted me, these kind of fictitious barriers that people put up. But it’s important, I suppose. It’s just tribalism, isn’t it? People love a bit of tribalism.

I feel like that’s been broken down by covers on Twitter and the like. Somebody could put out a cover of Cher, or something, and people will go, “This is great. They really got the emotional quality of this song.”

True, but Cher was 20 years ago… I think TikTok’s done more for breaking down those barriers than anything. Like, an electro swing sound can be trending on TikTok and that will sort of dominate the feed in a way that it just wouldn’t on Twitter.

Obviously electro swing is the evergreen genre that everybody supposedly can’t bear, but because of the atmosphere, and the evocativeness of it, there’ll be people playing around with it as a sound because they’ll just be reacting to the pure aesthetics of it without any kind of baggage. And I think because of the flatness of history that TikTok presents you with – you don’t know where anything’s coming from, you don’t know where any of the ideas have come from. It has sort of given, especially young people, a really blank slate to play with culturally in a way that I think is really interesting.

Back in the early days when PC Music was this big sort of enigmatic thing, there was a perception that you and AG Cook went from satirising pop to becoming pop. I’ve always assumed you guys must have found that an incredibly kind of thrilling, but ultimately hilarious experience.

Oh yeah. I just always find that really funny. It’s just really funny just to be doing something and then for a bunch of people to write a really long think piece about what they think you’re doing. It’s completely nowhere near. AG’s skill was definitely making it so enigmatic. I was always very much with my head down, just making the content and discussing the ideas of the content… AG handled the presentation of it as a label. It was quite an extraordinary time.

Once that sort of fan base was established, it was interesting dealing with people’s feelings of betrayal. We would basically be continuing to do what we were doing, but it’s like, “Oh, I thought you guys were this,” or “You guys have changed from being this to this.” But it’s like the ‘us’ in their head was just like a completely different thing. Dealing with that kind of relationship is quite an extraordinary thing.

Was it kind of strange? I remember when the Carly Rae Jepsen collaboration came out. People were going, “It’s gone mainstream now,” but it still felt authentically ‘you’.

I think one of my issues that I think I’m gonna face for my entire career is that I’ve got quite a complicated kind of personality to express. The fans who follow me really get it, but it’s hard to express from a sort of more pop perspective, so there’s always going to be misunderstandings for that.

With PC, because I came from a experimental jazz and contemporary experimental composition background, I was just trying to make pop music. I was trying to be what I thought was just good music that the majority of people would like. I just thought playing around with pop stuff was just a fun way of getting to that point. The fact that we were then branded to be this kind of like underground electronic label, completely nothing to do with what I was always interested in.

I was always interested in just making this music and I always had fantasies of being like just a big pop producer person, like Max Martin or whatever – very like versatile pop producing, straddling genres and that kind of thing. But I’m just not that. I can just make the music that I want to hear. That’s all I can do… It takes very little creativity to be seen as a kind of innovator to be honest, because so many people copy.

Sam Sutherland made a video about PC Music about six years ago when it felt like this really unknowable thing, where he recounted going to a PC Music showcase at SXSW. He had this experience where a bunch of EDM dudebros came in and were really kind of repulsed by it. How did you guys find that reaction to what you were doing?

Yeah, love that. Always loved negative responses to my stuff. The thing is, I’m putting out music that I love to listen to, always. And if people love it, I’m really happy. It means we sort of share a thing. If people don’t, that’s totally fine. I’m impossible to kind of upset in terms of that, because I would be happy if nobody listened to it because I want to hear it. It’s as simple as that. I just get really entertained when someone gets insulted by the music. That’s what I kind of love.

I mean, the dudebros? Yeah, it’s all about criteria. Like they think music should have certain things in it, otherwise it’s not good music or whatever… It’s this kind of relationship between aesthetics and cultural placements… They want this epic drop, basically, to be able to ‘dudebro out’ with each other, which is totally fine, because that’s a sort of cultural thing that they do, but they associate that with it being good music. It’s a hilarious thing.

You’ve been in demand as a producer and remixer of late. I think the one that probably surprised people the most was that Ed Sheeran remix.

[Laughs] Yeah.

That blindsided a lot of people. How did that come about? What was Ed’s reaction?

Ed Sheeran messaged his producer, “I’ve just realised that if you speed up Beautiful People, it sounds really good” And his producer, Fred Gibson, messaged Ed back saying “I know the man for the job”, messaged me and said like, “Hey, quick, do a remix of Beautiful People” without even telling me to speed up the vocal, but I just did anyway because I generally do. And then he sent it and Ed reacted positively.

Then it just went up and went largely ignored, but I was really happy it happened. It was so without context. And that’s exactly what would have happened to Harlecore if I had just uploaded the tracks, I think. 

I imagine that there were probably a lot of Ed Sheeran fans that found it on Spotify and thought, ‘What the fuck is this?’

Oh yeah. You’ve got to place yourself properly in the world, you know? People think that if you just get exposure through a big person that that does lots of favours and it just exposes them to the wrong people. I think you’ve got to work out who your people are and what sort of crowd will respond best to your stuff. Like Justin Bieber sort of discovering Carly Rae Jepsen by re-tweeting her – it wasn’t just that, it was the fact that it was a perfect mix, a perfect storm of somebody who would appeal to that audience and that kind of thing.

Can you talk a bit about what’s coming next?

Lots coming, but I’m not sure I can do about any of it, unfortunately. I have to say, but with this project, I’m just, I’m so happy I put the time into making it exactly what it needed to be. Anything less, anything compromised would have just been a waste of time, because it’s not part music.

It’s a very specific expression of my love letter to rave music, and I just wanted to do it properly. And I’m glad that people are appreciating it for what it is as well.