Part 1

Name: Jon Hester
Occupation: Producer, DJ
Nationality: American
Current release: Jon Hester's new Here and Present EP is out via Rekids Special Projects.
Recommendation for Berlin, Germany: With so many amazing clubs and events here in Berlin, there’s a lot to choose from! I’d recommend doing a bit of research beforehand, find the events with the music and artists you’d personally love to hear most, and go to that!

If you enjoyed this Jon Hester interview and would like to know more about his music and current tour dates, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, Soundcloud, and Facebook.



What were some of the musical experiences which planted a seed for your interest in electronic music?

At my early high school dances, hearing Chicago club tracks for the first time on stacks of speakers with huge woofer cabinets on a wooden gymnasium dance floor in 1996 opened up a portal to a new dimension for me. I soon began seeking out house music on the radio late at night, staying up listening to the point of falling asleep with my headphones on. I loved house music, I loved dancing to it, and in this pre-internet era, I also knew there was probably a lot more music out there to discover.

My high school marching band performed in London for the New Year’s Day Parade, January 1st, 1997. On that trip to London, on the radio and across the city, I was hearing emerging UKG, Speed Garage, Daft Punk’s  “Da Funk” single in advance of their Homework album dropping, Drum & Bass, and The Essential Mix, all of which massively widened the panorama of electronic music for me. It was a wild moment to be there.



On that same trip, I met a girl in another band from Michigan who was going to techno parties in Detroit at the time. She pointed me in the direction of Detroit techno and more US underground artists. It was the sounds of techno that ultimately drew me in further. Back in Chicago I started going out to clubs as a teenager, threw a couple parties at my house, and started experimenting with DJing.

By the time I moved to Minneapolis as a university student in 2000, I already knew what I liked and dove into the amazing underground scene there - mental techno on massive soundsystems. I found my place!

Most genres of music make use of electronic production means. What does the term “electronic music” mean today, would you say?

I feel like the term “electronic music” doesn’t make as much sense as a specific term of reference these days. It’s been used as a blanket term for dance music, but, as mentioned in the question, now most music of all genres is made via electronic production means.

With such a large volume of released music across numerous genres and subgeneres at this point, with the known vernacular to define it more accurately, it makes more sense to refer to a particular style of music more narrowly by the genre or subgenre itself.

Disco, house, techno, drum n bass, IDM and many other genres were about a lot more than just music. For you personally, is electronic music (still) a way of life – and if so, in which way?

For me it is. I still produce, DJ, and dance to techno and house.

Over the years this music has played a major role in my work, my play, my social life, my physical activity, my aesthetic, and my philosophy — it’s still a way of life for me!

Debates around electronic music tend to focus on technology. What, though, were some of the things you learned by talking to colleagues or through performing and/or recording with other musicians? What role does community play for your interest in production and getting better as a producer?

Community is invaluable! One of the most important things I learned along the way was how to prepare a quick master version of a track to test in the club.

Years ago, DJ / producer / engineer / professor / studio owner Phil Moffa and I were hanging out one day while he was in Berlin, and he needed to listen to some tracks he was working on in my studio. While we were there, I asked him some questions about preparing tracks to test in the club, and his answers helped me immensely.

From there I was able to play my own finished tracks out more confidently, and send them to labels as club-ready demos. Some of the tracks I was working on at the time went on to be released on my Interstellar Systems EP, originally released on Dystopian.



More recently, I have been working on collaborative projects with other producers through my label project, Participation. Exchanging sketches and ideas with Cassy, Tadeo, DJ Shufflemaster, Joel Mull, The Advent, Exos, Lady Starlight, and William Arist has deepened my understanding of how different artists create sounds and build tracks.

[Read our Cassy interview]

What are examples for artists, performances, and releases that really inspired you recently and possibly gave you the feeling of having experienced something fresh and new?

Steve Rachmad played an incredible set at Berghain recently, mixing powerful emotive tracks, synth pop edits, old school classics, guitar sounds — it was a wild journey, and at the same time such a cohesive narrative. That’s the kind of set that inspires me, when there is true artistry and risk-taking on display to build a story through dynamics and diverse sounds.

[Read our Steve Rachmad interview]

Among the music played that evening was an incredible track by an artist I had not yet heard of at the time, called Command Control, who is making some amazing music — one to watch!



Leod is an artist I have been following lately, who makes chunky percussive grooves built with references to retro elements, but with an updated modern sound, and some vocal samples sprinkled on top. I’m impressed with how each track is built effectively and functionally based on a unifying core concept, and yet they are all strong and unique individually as well.



I also recently got a promo of music from Joline Scheffler, another artist I hadn’t heard of yet, and was deeply impressed with the creative concepts, compositions, sound design, and details in her work.

[Read our Joline Scheffler interview]

What kind of musical/sonic materials, and ideas are particularly stimulating for your own work right now?

Right now I’m looking into recording more sounds from outboard synths to incorporate in my tracks, as until now I have done almost all of my productions exclusively in the box.

Where do most of your inspirations to create come from – rather from internal impulses or external ones?

My inspiration starts on the dance floor, from movement, and feelings that arise within movement. That physicality, muscle memory, created and logged over countless hours is an external influence, and then the ideas come from within.

I typically get an idea for a fully-formed track in my head, and set off to make it.

Tell me a bit about the sounds & creative directions, artists & communities, as well as the colleagues & creative hotspots of your current hometown, please How do they influence your music?

Berlin is a constantly evolving scene and community, people move here, move away, there are endless amounts of events happening, and numerous circles of communities crisscrossing over different scenes.

I’d say the creative process here is a unique one, because if you move here from outside, after going out a lot and experiencing different sounds and communities, you find what you want, and start to connect with that more. Once you’ve been exposed more deeply to this new external stimulus and influence, you have to reach inward to reconnect with the core of your inner authentic artistic voice, stay true to it, and develop outwardly from that, while standing firmly in the new current flowing around you.

Staying grounded and living a balanced life in Berlin means that on one hand you will have the chance to hear a concentrated amount of the music you truly love, and at the same time you will be missing out on a massive amount of other music, because there is always so much going on.

Today, electronic music has an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?

For me, the mark of amazing music is something that sounds timeless.

I think making music that achieves that is a result of knowing about and connecting with the roots, allowing space for dreams and visions of the future, and creating something from your authentic self with no particular expectations in the present.