What happens when top DJs and producers are given the keys to classical music archives?

Decca Classics invited the world’s foremost electronic producers, including Mr Scruff, Starkey, Martin Buttrich and Kate Simko, to pick a track from their archives and rework it for a new album. They tell Elisa Bray how they rose to the challenge

Kate Simko and London Electronic Orchestra (Rex)

Mr Scruff

Steve Reich: Six Pianos

Initially it seemed like quite a cheesy proposition in the history of “modernising” classical music for a potentially wider audience, like all the corny classical pop stuff in the Sixties and Moog Bach, that kind of thing. They suggested quite a few tracks and a lot of them were quite well-known classical tunes that reinforced that – Mozart, Bizet, the kind of things you’d hear on the Best Classical Album in the World Ever.

I perused the whole catalogue and I stumbled across Steve Reich. He’s got so much in common with modern electronica and I’m a massive fan of his music so that was instantly ‘OK, here’s something that I can really get my teeth into and get excited about’. I think it’s a familiarity thing as well. I’m not massively knowledgeable about classical music, but obviously Steve Reich stands out on his own. I play his music in clubs so it made sense. So many electronic producers can tell you that Reich had a massive influence on them and I’m no different.

A few things inspire me about Reich’s music. One is the hypnotic quality of it – the music is constantly shifting. I like that floating feeling where you can’t quite anchor yourself into the tune; it’s slightly elusive. I wanted to not compose something specific because I didn’t want to try and copy Reich’s approach, but what I wanted to do was jam and relax and enjoy myself and make sure the end result had a similar feeling without using any of the same techniques.

It was nice to add some extra piano to it. I added a rhythm section, but without making it like a cheesy updated dance version. That could have been an obvious route to take and I wanted to go a bit deeper and create some kind of swirling underwater exploratory mood to it. The middle section goes all over the place, the loops going out and coming back in again. It was a piece of music that I genuinely admire and have listened to a lot. I suppose the amount of extra elements I added, it was almost like I’d done my own tune and samples with a one bar loop of Steve Reich in it.

I have played it [on the dancefloor] and it’s gone down really well. It’s not a standard piece of club music; it’s quite heavy in parts. But it was nice to add bass elements but without it being at odds with the more delicate orchestral arpeggiated elements.

Starkey

Satie: Gnossienne No.1

Originally my artistic brain started thinking about finding the weirdest, most obscure music thing I could work with and transforming into something. And then I was having a conversation with my wife about the project and we started saying, wouldn’t it be more fun if I worked with something that was really recognisable, a piece of music that I personally really liked, but had been used in many different situations, instead of something obscure? So I took it as a challenge to recontextualise something and take something that people know and make it my own.

I grew up playing piano since I was five. I really liked the simplicity of the Satie – I’d always enjoyed that because as a kid it was something I could learn how to play. A lot of Mozart or Beethoven was a bit difficult to perform. So it was going back to that. I really liked the repetitiveness of the material, and I liked the fact it was just piano and I was able to construct the entire orchestration around this single piano track.

I knew that I had to have some kind of grandiose structure to the song. I wanted to have an arc where the song grew to a climax, which is typical of a lot of my music; but I also wanted to have a new chord progression, so I found a little motif of piano that I could repeat and work with the existing chord structure. The introduction hints at that and then the end section, when all the horns and synths come in, that’s the realisation of the new chord progression.

The first electronic music I remember enjoying was Eighties synth music that my dad would listen to and after that it was trip-hop and Björk that I would hear in middle school. Since I was going back to something that I did as a kid I was listening to lots of Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack records. That was definitely something I thought about a lot when I was working on this song. I want to get that vibe, so I went for trip-hoppy throwback beats.

Kate Simko

Schubert: Schwanengesang (Standchen)

I moved to London to get a masters in composition for screen, which is composition for film and orchestra. I already had a DJ career internationally.

I started experimenting when I was writing these film scores, combining productions I had done the past 20 years with these orchestral instruments, and that’s what led to my project London Electronic Orchestra and combining these two very separate worlds – they were very separate for me previously.

I was on holiday in Tulum, Mexico, and I was looking out to the sea and into the catalogue for two days just trying to figure out what to remix because it was such an incredible catalogue. This Schubert piece that I chose I had on a Spotify playlist from when I was at the Royal College of Music. I had stumbled upon it a couple of years previously and it was something I always wanted to recompose.

What drew me to the piece is the very beginning, the first four chords – it’s very mysterious, and also I love some of the vocal melodies. I didn’t want to use vocals or an operatic voice, but they allowed me to put the vocal melodies onto violin and cello.

I thought there were catchy melodies and a great chord progression which is the starting point of a great song. There were some amazing melodies that I always thought would translate to the dancefloor because they’re quite hooky. The whole song is so catchy: Schubert would have done well in pop music.

I’m going to DJ next month and I’m planning to play it. Ibiza sunset – that’s the time for my remix. I just had an album in the same vein – London Electronic Orchestra – and on that album and in this track what I’ve done is use classic drum machines and classic synth. It’s the idea of classical instruments with classic analogue synths and drum machines combined sonically.

Ulrich Schnauss

Bach: Prelude and Fugue in C Major

Rather than browsing through the archive, I just checked whether an interpretation of that Prelude by Bach was in there and it was. The reason why is that I had to play that piece when I was learning piano as a kid and prior to that I had to play lots of other stuff which I didn’t really connect to. But that all changed when we switched to Bach Preludes. I found it incredibly moving even as a young child so I just wanted to revisit that 25 years later.

When I was told to start practising those Bach pieces as a kid I didn’t really have any idea about electronic music and synthesisers, but what occurred to me in hindsight a couple of years later, especially when I started listening to some electronic classics from the Seventies, is that there is actually a very strong similarity between those Bach Preludes and the type of sequencing that was used in a lot of electronic music. It was quite a revelation.

What I found most interesting trying to play that piece with synthesisers is that it confirmed my suspicions that it’s essentially classic sequencing that Bach wrote. The classic sequencing of the Seventies is indeed heavily influenced by Bach because I think it almost sounds like it has been written for sequencing; it has that sort of fluidity and that ocean wave type movement in it which translates really well to an electronic context.

Whenever I work with other people’s compositions, whether it’s remixes or cover versions, I try to retain the mood but just arrange it with different colours sonically. For me it is a very emotional piece and I think the most interesting aspect of it is that it’s obviously in major key, but it’s a very romantic sentimental piece, so although it’s in major I certainly wouldn’t describe it as one-sidedly happy and joyful. It has a very melancholic connotation as well. That’s something that I wanted to retain.

Re:works is out now on Decca