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PROXY: FEROCIOUS INDUSTRIAL ELECTRO

New album on Turbo Recordings

Russian techno producer Proxy — like many others — was inspired to start producing after seeing unstoppable, titanic rock/rave pioneers The Prodigy.
“I saw The Prodigy in Red Square [in Moscow] in the '90s,” he says, “and the gig just blew my mind. Not many acts have had an influence on me as big as that.

“Now my main influences are probably just rave in general,” he continues. “There are so many acts out there doing great things.”
If it was Liam, Keith, Maxim and Leeroy Thornhill (who left The Prodge in 2000 to concentrate on DJing and producing) who first lit Proxy’s fuse, he soon hunkered down in his isolated Russian outpost and started learning how to produce.

“I’m from a cold dark place, and this influences me in many ways,” Proxy tells DJ Mag. “Music is an expression, as everybody says, but it’s true. I like to put my moods and emotions into my music.”


Proxy first pricked up our ears with an inventive In New DJs We Trust
 technoid mix on Kissy Sell Out’s show on BBC Radio 1 a few years back, and he’s gradually been slipping out techno tracks via Turbo Recordings. You can see why Proxy’s rulebook-flouting techno appeals to Turbo boss Tiga, and while chatting about the diminutive Canadian, we ask Proxy to tell us a secret about Tiga.

“He's got a favourite shirt,” the Russian deadpans, seriously, not quite second-guessing that we were after a more salacious tit-bit. “It’s white with small black dots on it.”

When he was asked to remix his formative heroes The Prodigy a little while back, he was beside himself. “It was a great honour,” he says. Now his debut album, the 20-track double CD ‘Music From The Eastblock Jungles’, has arrived on Turbo.

Just to sample some of the tracks beginning with ‘r’: ‘Raw’ is a collapsing dystopian discursive emission; a dark grinding ‘Revolution’ is enough to give Russian premier Putin nightmares; ‘Raven’ is metallic, industrial and edgy; and ‘Red Juke’ is dramatic and filmic. “I love movies like Predator and all movies about space,” Proxy says. “I like the idea of space being endless, and films that show this are a great influence to me.”

Proxy’s radioactive technoid sketches demand to be heard. “I just like to experiment with my music,” he continues. “I like to build a general atmosphere of sound rather than being in a specific 'genre'. I just make what I feel inside.”