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synth to have another sound on it and so on. You
end up with everything in a sampler and self contained at the end of it all. So it has its advantages, but I’ve always been that way, never had a load of gear; I was too poor. I mentioned seeing you DJing before and it was in The Funnel. It holds a very special place in the hearts of those who went week in week out. Did you share the affection for the venue? Yeah, it was a really interesting place. The people who ran it, who owned it were music lovers. They picked the people to put stuff on there that suited what they wanted to do. It came at just the right time where a lot of clubs in Dublin were starting to bed in. Switch and The Kitchen were doing great things and great gigs week in week out but it had settled. You had techno on Thursday, drum and bass on Friday, house music on a Saturday. So I think The Funnel gave a home to the types of music that weren’t being represented anywhere else. Drum and Bass had a weekly thing and the Detroit stuff and the electronica and a bit of everything. I think a lot of people who are making music now, still, all met back then in those places. It was a good time and I think it lasted just about long enough. Like it was only two years. There’s a lot of rose tinted memories about it because people say “oh it was brilliant” but it was empty most of the time. A lot of nights were very sparsely attended, but there would have been an exceptional act playing. Then look at all the labels that sprung up, came from there, came from people meeting there and sharing ideas and going “here, I’m putting out a record, I’m putting out a CD” and “this is how you do it”. A very interest40 ing coming together of people and we all still know each other today. Like the whole Front End Synthetics came out of that. Definitely a different time and it was right at the point when The Funnel was sold to become an office block, that’s when the whole city started to go that way and the point at which Dublin changed and its closing was like a foreshadowing of what was coming. Any thoughts on the Give Us The Night campaign? Yeah, I mean, good luck to them. I still have my original Give Us The Night T-shirt that someone gave me back in the very early 2000’s. Dublin 100% needs the staggered closing, nothing happens after a certain point and it’s always been the way. It’s a massive negative. It’s the usual crap. It’s vested interests and it’s hard to fight against it in this country and there’s certainly not the political will to change it. Plus there’s not really the illegal after hours party scene that would force change. If you had a massive warehouse scene where every weekend the police were shutting down things going on from 3pm until 8am. Someone, somewhere would eventually go, “well, there’s a market here”. Whereas now people just don’t care and there is a massive opportunity. These days people don’t go out until late. You’d love to see it happen, I mean we call ourselves a modern European city. I have to hand it to Sunil sticking with it for so long, an absolute trooper. He’s been such a force for good in music in Dublin and Ireland as an ambassador for techno. He’s absolutely brilliant getting up there in the news and he got treated really badly, horrendously and he got through it and more power to him. He’s definitely robust in that way. He means it as well. He’s doing it because it’s the right thing. Decal’s album The Echoes Are Decoys is avail on frontendsynthetics.bandcamp.com How in tune are you with the Irish electronic scene? I stay in touch with Tim Smith, Takeover Recordings. I check out DeFeKT stuff, brilliant and Sunil’s label Earwiggle. Whirling Wall of Knives is one of the best acts out there, right down my street, industrial techno. I don’t really follow it as such, just dip in and out of it and along with techno, Rustell is really good. New guys running around include Breakdata who did a remix of an old track for me, a remake of a track from Rotter’s Golf Club days but it’s getting time to find the stuff.