Trus’me
To start this year off on a positive note, we have the honor to present Yamcast #5, by one of our beloved residents and big music head, Trus'me. Founder of Prime Numbers record label and recently established in Lisboa, David has always been a favourite of ours because of his top selections of both soulful and eclectic records.
Expect to find him playing live for us next summer. In the meantime, we sat down with him for a small chat regarding music, creativity, and what's happening nowadays in his life.
Who are you?
I’m known as Trus’me, but my real name is David Wolstencroft. I’m from Manchester originally and I fell into music very early with a label called Fat City Recordings who took me under their wing. I started a label called Prime Numbers and that was my platform for releasing music for the last 15 years.
Now I find myself in Lisbon, I needed a change. I was living in Berlin for 5 years and it’s quite hectic - you know, clubbing, DJing, continuously in the music, I wanted to get away. I wanted sun, I wanted beach but I also wanted the music at the weekend and Berlin’s a 1 hour flight away, so Lisbon seemed like the best place to live. When you’re a constant travelling DJ, you’re always thinking about moving and the sun, the beach and Lisbon is like a little bit of everything. Everyone sort of B-lines through here, so I see everybody at some point in the year, but I also can go to the beach in 10 minutes. So like, this is the place for me right now.
What’s your creative process?
I’m literally repressing my first album right now, so it’s kind of in vogue right now the style of the album right now, 10-12 years later. My first two albums were just a buildup of ideas of DJing local bars, listening to different types of music and listening to artists that I’m influenced by such as Moodymann, Theo Parrish, J Dilla all this kind of stuff. I was more into sampling of music. So the first two albums were just like a massive blowout of all those ideas. The first album was very sample-based and the second album was a joy to work with all my favourite musicians who were all working with Moodymann, so I was working with Amp Fiddler, Paul Randolph, I even worked with Dâm-Funk who was right up there at the time who did a vocal for me at the time. So I had those two experiences.
The third album was more like going back to basics and I just wanted it to be me and electronic machines more or less. Then my fourth album was purely my experience in Berlin: it became a bit more techno, became a little bit more electro, a little bit more intended for the club, while the previous albums were just more ideas and concepts. The fourth was something more “DJed out”.
So there’s like these two levels. When you’re DJing and when you’re producing, they’re never really at the same skill level. I would set my DJ level has up here and my production level here (leveling with hands indication DJ level higher than production) and then it eventually kind of caught up and then I could make tracks that would actually DJ out myself and that was the more exciting time because, when you’re DJing and you play out and people react to, you know, a famous record at the time, that’s great. But when people react to your record, I mean, the first time that really happened was with “Somebody”, which was like a big track of mine and you see people react in the same way as they did to a Kerri Chandler record or some huge, well recognised record, that’s kind of the moment you realise “oh, I really caught up to my DJ level now”.
That really affects the way you make music essentially. And now with this fifth album I’m making, I’m going all the way back to the beginning and just trying to, well, it’s been a while since I made music, so I’ve been listening to a lot of records and it’s always from records that I get ideas. I hear the way two records mix together and I think “oh, they would work well together” and then my brain starts to tick. It’s been a while now, so there’s a lot of ideas in there so I’m sure the next album is just going to be an explosion of ideas again.
I mean, many producers, they go into the studio everyday and they knock out 5 tracks. That is not me. I have to have an idea, a project, I even need to have an image for the cover and concept and that I make specifically for those tracks. I don’t make a surplus. I focus all my energy as if a painting artist would. You don’t make 10 different paintings of the same thing that you want to paint, you just work on one canvas. I would say that’s the way I work, but most people work in the other way where they just make a million ideas and then pick the best ones, but that just doesn’t work for me.
Creative in other areas
My degree was in graphic design and media, so I would say that the creative juices were always rolling but with that particular degree, it was all different areas. Music and production was one of them and I think I just held on to that one more than the other stuff. I’ve always been creative when I was younger, I always took art, I was always drawing, painting, I played an instrument in a windband, I was in orchestra but it was never really ticking the box or giving me that fulfilment. It was only when I found the Detroit sound, where they kind of bring everything together. The jazz, the soul, the hip-hop, the disco. They bring an electronic edge to it and it’s a little bit, you know, coming from Manchester, rainy city, it was a little bit deeper and it’s a little be darker but not in a miserable way, just more moody. And that’s when I found that particular world, a globe, where it doesn't matter what genre it is, it's just the vibe of the music. That’s where I felt more creative and that’s when I started to produce music.
But with a creative process with other things, I find that more with bringing people together. Right now I have different projects that I’m doing and the fulfilment I get is the creative process of it. So the theme, the style, who’s going to put it together, what the imagery is going to look like, what the concept is going to look like. And I think I learn a lot of that by running the record label because that’s the fun part. You have somebody with talent and you have some amazing music but you don’t know how to showcase it and I get enjoyment out of showing them how to market yourself, how to PR yourself, what’s your image, your branding going to be, what kind of packaging are we going to use. Are we going to use the reverse of the card, the front of the card, like, you know, what’s your vibe. I get a kick out of seeing them (the artists), you know, the enjoyment of them going through this creative process so they know what to do next. So it’s always been music orientated, but you can bring all those things together as well, with each project that you do.
Idea behind the mix
The mix I’ve recorded for Yamba I actually did the mix in my studio here, also at a place called Boa Lab. The two kind of combine together, the ideology of everything I do and bringing in creatives locally within Lisbon, so it’s kind of a nice setting to the music that I wanted to play. In the first couple of years, I think I played one of the opening parties and the closing parties for Yamba so I feel like I have a good idea of the style of music that works there and I’ve tried to show that in the mix. It’s never just stagnant in one style in the night. If we go from slow, soul jams, to disco, to boogie and then it gets more kind of fun, kind of Detroit house as I was talking before and then it can even get a little bit more minimal towards the end. But the fun factor is that there is always like a push and pull. Whenever it gets a little bit this way, there’s always like “hey we’re on a beach” so lets make it more fun, lets make it more happy and I think that’s the Yamba vibe really. They’re not scared to go into the groove but they’ll always bring it back and it doesn’t matter about the tempo or the style, there will always be that fact that we’re on a beach, in the sun and we’re all outside. I tried to create that within the mix so that hopefully you’ll feel like you’re on the beach dancing and you’re going from a club till midnight.
What are you doing now
This year has been strange as it has been strange for everybody. The last gig I actually did was in Berlin on the 9th of February so that was quite a long time ago. And I think every DJ more or less around the world had to go through this process. So I just decided straight away, I could see what’s happening, there’s a lot of ideas that I had in the past, so I did a Masters in business so I do have creative business ideas. But one of those dreams was always to open in the theme of a Japanese listening bar, Lisbon seemed the perfect place. There was nothing like this here before, I found some partners who had similar kind of dreams. One came from the natural wine world, one has just won the best chef in Paris right now and he has curated our menu and together we’ve created a themed venue within the heart of Lisbon. The concept is that you can come in, most of my records will be on the wall, we have spent almost 20,000 on a really high end sound system that you would see in any kind of Japanese listening bar to the same spec. So we’ve really gone all out on that.
When people open bars, their sound and the music is always the last demonitor. We wanted to make sure that that was the main thing because we all come from music and we all have been DJs and we don’t want that to be the last, secondary thing within the process, so we probably spent a lot more than we should’ve done. But the feeling that you’ll get in there is that you’re going to hear an incredible sound when you come in and you’re going to hear things in records you didn’t even know it was in that particular record. We’re going to be serving everybody natural wines, as you’ll see in my house there’s a lot of natural wine bottles everywhere. It’s been quite fun tasting and sampling to pick. And also the food side is we all love food. So in my world, these 3 elements have always been together: food, music and wine. Now we brought all three together and we’re about to open a place hopefully in the beginning of next year.