mr confuse

Mr. Confuse is a traveller between the styles. „Feel The Fire“ is the debut solo album
by the producer, arranger, composer and DJ from Hannover Germany. Collecting 14
tracks on his album Mr. Confuse takes us on an excursion from HipHop to Afro,
Electro and Latin back to Funk. „Feel The Fire“ comes as an organic statement for the
analogue link between HipHop and Funk as well as an authentic and up-to-date plea
for the original brass arrangements in the Funk and Jazz music of the Seventies.
As part of the producer team Breakout, Mr. Confuse was already a household name
in the Funk and HipHop community in 2006. His idea to reinterpret Afrika
Bambaataa’s „Planet Rock“ as a Funk tune and in a Jazz-Breaks version gained
Breakout massive international attention. Breakout split in spring 2007 and released
their last 7“ „The Funky Goofball/Lyve Wire“ during the summer of that year. Mr.
Confuse kept being a requested producer. He had numerous contributions for
compilations (“Brazilectro”, “Battle Of The Year”, “Viertelbar”, etc.) and released three
Mix-CDs („Catch The Beat“, „Confunktion“ and „Brazilian Cuts“), using a wide
spectrum of styles.
This album was created in exactly that way.“ But
sampling alone is not enough: „When the structure is there I will go and meet the
musicians I work with. I work pretty much autodidactic and very intuitive - this can turn
out really bizarre from time to time. Sometimes I’m humming or buzzing the melody
I’m looking for to the musicians. I do not play an instrument myself, except that I use
the MIDI-keyboard to be able to work with plug-ins and think of melody and rhythm.
The musicians I work with will turn the ideas which I have in my head into music.“
This concept is as exciting as it is hard work: „I will return to my sampler with what the
musicians played and often do a completely new cut. You may say that I use a
musician as a sample library.“ Consequently recording „Feel The Fire“ took quite
some time, exactly „from the end of 2006 up to January 2008. In the end the complete
album consists of about 10000 samples now. To finish an album like that is a matter
of sweat and tears ...“.
So it comes as no surprise that Mr. Confuse can very clearly define his references
and inspiration: „At the moment everything is Electro or Techno actually, at least whre
I am based. The sound is very much Eighties, so clean, full of synthies and 808
programming. When we did Breakout in the summer of 2005 we felt completely
different. It was all too clean for us, especially the mixes. I draw my influences from
HipHop and I want to work on something I can identify with. HipHop is pretty much the
only style I like in the Eighties, apart from Punk probably. Today everything sounds so
calculated. It was the snare in the Eighties, today it is the kick drum. What I tried is to
transfer the idea, better say the musical basis of HipHop, from the Nineties back to
today. This is what it was like in the Nineties: HipHop tried to transform the sounds of
the Sixties and Seventies into the here and now. So it was just natural for me that I
tried to keep my sound dirty like it was in the Sixties and Seventies. My main idea by
doing songs like “Planet Rock” or “Lookout Weekend” was to put the Eighties back
into Seventies or Sixties by using technology of the Nineties – got it!? In the UK and
elsewhere there are so many new bands who release handmade organic sounding
Sixties and Seventies music right now and I think that is brilliant – it sounds