Submitted By: trocknroll

Genre: Hardcore / Breakcore

Date of Set: Jun 17th, 2003

Filesize: 50.56 MB

Total Downloads: 6

Jason Forrest makes music under the moniker 'Donna Summer'. He has released records in the US, the UK, and Japan. He has been featured in periodicals such as The Wire, XLR8R, Crash, Muzik, The Village Voice, Go mag, Grooves, De:Bug, and Vice. His music is a combination of stadium rock, 70's disco, electro-acoustics and hair metal. His live shows are intense participatory events of fast music, bad dancing, and the occasional shattered laptop. His new album 'The Unrelenting Songs Of The 1979 Post Disco Crash' will be released in the US and EU by Sonig records of Koln Germany in April of 2004.

Donna Summer is an up and coming breakcore/noise producer hailing from New York City. His own particular style of mashed up disco breaks and start/stop editing have won him critical acclaim throughout the electronic music community. His weekly Advanced D & D radio show on WFMU (www.wfmu.org) has featured live sets and interviews from producers such as Hrvatski, Dan Doormouse, and Emotional Joystick. We were able to get an exclusive with Donna as he emerged from Studio 54 on the way to his limo.

1. OK, so, why 'Donna Summer'?

Well, there's the smart-ass answer and the academic answer: Academic: I have always felt like there has been an astonishingly small Amount of any sort of diversity in electronic music. We're just all goofy white-middleclass computer geeks. Imagine what would happen if someone out of that safe little niche were to start working with the same tools? Radness might ensue. Also I have been interested with issue of appropriation for years, and I don't think anyone has appropriated someone else's name for use in such a different context. Oh, and I love her work with Moroder. Smart-ass: Cuz it's funny to virtually masquerade as a black woman. You'd be amazed how many people have never heard of Donna Summer, and they think I'm just some lady named Donna making this music.

2. Name some of your 'influences', what have you been listening to recently?

I guess my main influences would be: Public Enemy, Yes, His Name is Alive, ELO, Emperor, and Squarepusher. But I always really dislike dropping the top few names because that really does a disservice to all the other artists that I adore and have ripped stuff off from! Maybe I should just say that I'm very interested in dynamic music of all genres. I'm very interested in people who break from a given mold and pursue their idiosyncrasy to make something that didn't quite exist before.

3. And artistically?

I've been a contemporary artist for about 11 years I suppose. When I had the idea to start the label I wanted it to have a pretty definite look. One that you could pretty much tell what it was when you saw it, one that was open minded and broad but still maintained a cohesive vision. Another important factor was that the aesthetics needed to straddle the fine line between obviously 'hardcore' and artyness. I've been strongly influenced by artists like Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, and Ashley Bickerton, but also have been extremely under the influence of more conceptual photographers like Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky. But if pressed hard, I would say that one of my very favorite artists would be the UK painter Glen Brown. He has worked in the past as more of an appropriation sort of artist repainting works by a disparate few artists ranging from Salvidor Dali to science fiction illustrator Scott Foss (I think that's right). The works then generate radical new contexts in proximity, which is precisely what I aim to do with my work, both visual and auditory.

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