Joey Beltram Places

Tresor, 1995

When it comes to ‘album time’, a lot of producers like to take that precious opportunity to show you just how bloody creative and versatile they are. “Ooh, look at me, I’m an artist.” They meander through the genres, trying on each one like a big stupid festival jester’s hat. Not Joey Beltram. He lived and breathed dancefloors in the mid ’90s. Every time he sparked up the gear in his studio, the club was still ringing in his ears. When he was making music, it was to be played on the turntables in a sweaty, dark, twisted, techno haunt; not on your headphones while popping out for some milk, and never for being piped into the background of anything as wholesome as a coffee shop.

“As a DJ I was playing out a lot back then, so that’s what I wanted to make my music for,” says Beltram. “There were a lot of albums that came out that just had one or two tracks made for the dancefloor. Everyone was trying to make ‘artist albums’ with little artsy tracks thrown in, trying to show versatility. I remember wanting to come out with an album that was just bangers. Every track was made for me; what I’d wanna play. I wanted eight-to-ten tracks of just peak hour dancefloor.”

Making the album was like playing a peaktime set, with a lot of what you hear done live, late at night, with Beltram sweating over the mixing desk and an arsenal of hardware.

“I’d be riding the gear in real-time,” he says. “I was doing all those parameter changes with the resonance and cutoff, live. I was like an octopus, with one hand on this bit of kit, and the other on the other side of the studio on a different keyboard, moving things as I needed to.”

With Places you can almost see Beltram running around the studio, opening up the cut offs, then riding the volume on the mixing console, live.

“Places was like all 133bpm or whatever the speed of techno was back then. It was like buying eight 12" records, which is what I wanted, and why I think people dug it.” Indeed.