Eyeing his suitcase, DJ Cam wanted to know what the weather is like in South Africa. The French producer/DJ arrived in South Africa on Thursday and will perform at the Vudu Lounge in Cape Town on Friday and at Carfax in Johannesburg on Saturday evening.
On his albums (a famous one was Mad Blunted Jazz), Laurent Daumail plays a kind of cool, abstract hip-hop- inspired house (if that makes any sense), but he says his live sets are harder, packed with cut-up vocals and disparate beats.
In fact, he seems to spend much of his time telling music journalists intent on pigeon-holing his sound, what he doesn’t sound like.
I first heard of Cam around six years ago when he remixed a clutch of Miles Davis tracks. These were uncompromisingly repetitive bass notes, with Davis soaring above it all.
His last album, Soulshine, was mostly sweetness and light, like a stroll along a spacious French boulevard.
He’ll typically start making a track with a sample, perhaps from some scratchy long-forgotten jazz record and expand on it, adding beats and other instruments later.
“I’ve finished my new LP and I’ll release it next year in January or February. I want to keep it a secret. It’ll be a return to the Eighties ‒ that kind of drum machine, electro hip-hop with an old-skool flava.”
On file sharing, he says: “It’s good if you want to know about music. I mean, I’ve got a name, I’ve been in the music business for 10 years. But if you’re a young artist and with all this [file sharing] shit, there’s no money. Making music is a real job. You spend one year working on an album and two days later you can download the whole album. It’s a bit hard.”
But enough talk. Lets listen.