> interview / chris lake
Landing in the UK still buzzing from an extraordinary Coachella set, and the recent release of the pumping, Aluna-guesting Beggin’, we seized the rare opportunity to speak with DJ and modern house titan Chris Lake, and find out more about his epic 20+ year journey as a music-maker, his label Black Book Recordings and get his viewpoint on the industry’s latest innovations…
>For many readers, Chris Lake will need little introduction. The Norwich-born DJ, producer and artist first achieved recognition in the mid-2000s with the single Changes featuring Laura V. After a rapid-fire assortment of increasingly impressive collaborations, his high-profile work with deadmau5 on the album 4x4=12 garnered Lake a Grammy nomination. From then on, Chris’s star rose meteorically, with recordbusting remixes of tracks such as Jess Glynne’s Hold My Hand and Calvin Harris and Disciples’ How Deep Is Your Love reaping tens of millions of streams globally. All the while, Chris displayed a Midas touch when it came to writing modern house classics, such as the mighty Boneless (with Steve Aoki), Turn off the Lights and the mesmerising euphoria of last year’s In The Yuma.
We met the now LA-based Chris Lake in London, during a rare trip home. We’re happily bemused to find that this globe-straddling mega-star is himself giddy about the prospect of being interviewed by Computer Music. “When I first got into music, I was picking up Computer Music off the shelf every month. It really helped me learn and understand what was possible, and what was available for making music. I remember the magazine grew off the back of the possibilities of the first seeds of the DAW. It’s funny how I remember some of the old cover features and those artist interviews still stick in my head.”
It’s clear, then, that Chris Lake started out as one of us, as he nostalgically reflects on a much simpler time. But down to business, and the first topic on our agenda is the mind-blowing Coachella set that he performed with long-time collaborator Fisher: “Ah, it was intense. There was a lot of work involved. I actually felt a lot of responsibility honestly. There was a lot of thought behind why we were doing that set and why we were doing that show. There’s been this real growth of house music, particularly in North America.”
Chris explains that a little bit of techterraforming had to take place to prepare the stage. “One of the reasons we were booked for that show was that we wanted to see if that kind of music would work, on that kind of size crowd and on that type of stage. Coachella is a multigenre festival, but those kinds of stages are really not set up for what we do. So, we had this opportunity to go in and bring our vibe and experience to that stage. It wasn’t a case of just setting up the decks to play music. We put a lot of time, effort and thought into how we
