by RAF KATIGBAK

Jason Forrest, a notable name in this year's MUTEK lineup, likes to get in your face. Never mind his music, a maximalist mashing of Kid 606's noisy, Ritalin-fuelled big-beat manipulation and the brazen fist-pumping of stadium cock rock. He literally gets in your face. "If people aren't dancing at my shows," he warns, "it's not unusual for me to go off the stage and attack people. One show, I actually climbed on a girl's shoulders and rode her around. She was up for it too, which was nice."

But pony play is par for the course for the 32-year-old, Buffalo-born producer's hyperactive live performances, which he likens to watching an accountant being possessed by the spirit of Iggy Pop and David Lee Roth. It's just another way he and other artists, like Kid 606, Blectum From Blechdom and Peaches, are challenging the status quo of electronic music culture.

Somewhere along the way, muses Forrest, electronic music stopped being fun. The bedroom producers that started as a nameless, faceless antidote to Clear Channel's force-fed commercial schlock had alienated the audience in the process, and the joys of a memorable album that survives repeated listens were all but a distant memory. With laptop music being written into the ground by music journos looking to flex their eloquent adjectives and the self-serious, turtlenecked fanboys barricading the dancefloors with folded arms, the prospect of a good time at an experimental electronic music event looked rather bleak. Enter Jason Forrest and his last album The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash, a 140 BPM sonic beacon of hope proclaiming, "Yes! Raise your fists! I'm a former Dungeons & Dragons gamer and I proclaim, electronic music is fun again!"

The Mirror recently chatted with Mr. Forrest, who also performs under the utterly disco alias of Donna Summer, over the phone from his new home in Berlin.

Mirror: What I like about your album is that while it samples heavily from the side of '80s music that a lot of people would prefer to forget, it's so catchy and hooky that I think it's unfair to dismiss it as ironic.

Jason Forrest: I'm 100 per cent the opposite of irony. I can tell you right now, right after this interview, I'm going to go put on the new Foreigner album that I bought yesterday, or my Supertramp album that I just got for a euro. Something I've had to battle to a degree is that, for some reason, some of these '80s bands have been stigmatized as being lame. But acts like Journey and Night Ranger, they have songs that have a real power to them. It's a real, concrete thing. In a way, I try to discern what it is that makes these songs powerful and try to use this to make something new for me.

M: Which brings us to sampling. Your album is sort of this post mash-up sampling free-for-all. Have you kept track of how many songs you've jacked so far?

JF: No, I've lost count, sometimes there are over 70 tracks sampled in just one song. Styx is probably one of the most sampled bands for me. I've been thinking about this, and they're quite technical and really heavily about structure. My music is heavily about structure so it only makes sense, if I'm looking for samples to restructure, to find a band that had a lot of structure.

M: The thing about sample-heavy albums is that the copyright cops often don't really care unless you start selling albums. It must be strange, worrying about getting too successful.

JF: I had a realization about that recently. I figure that I can't live in fear, I have to do the music that I want to do, and if it ultimately causes me dire consequences, it's something I have to deal with then. Basically, the fear of not doing what I need to do as an artist outweighed the fear of being sued.

Jacking Judas Priest

M: I'm psyched about this sampling symposium you're taking part in next week. Where do you think we're at in the sampling game?

JF: I think people have stopped thinking about sampling as a gesture. By sampling anything, you're making an implicit reference to this. When you're sampling James Brown, James Brown has a history, James Brown is a person, who lived and is still releasing records. If you're sampling from early James Brown that means something and late period means something else. The acts of sampling from King Crimson, and from Judas Priest are not the same thing. This is important and for some reason people just haven't thought about that.

M: How has this worked its way into your music?

JF: I started sampling things being specific to genre, like prog rock. How do I make something that is prog rock that is just samples? Then I asked, how do you make prog rock only using disco samples? I think these are interesting questions to ask.

M: What other kinds of questions are you asking these days?

JF: Lately I've been really thinking about how you add more sex into this music and this live show. I really don't think I'm a sexy guy, but I've had some really amazing propositions from ladies. It's been quite surprising.

M: Sounds like the whole Steve Tyler syndrome. Like, the dude's kinda butt, but you just know he buys Viagra in bulk.

JF: I think it has to do with letting go on stage. I'm not a very good dancer, I just kind of freak out. But somehow, in Paris, this girl was gesturing to me between songs and I went to the side of the stage, and she went over and said, "You look like a nice fuck. After the show let's go up and fuck," and she's not an ugly lady saying this. It's really shocking.

With Herbert, Crackhaus, Isolée, Krikor, Rip Off Artists, Egga nd fax at Metropolis on Saturday, June 5, 9pm, $35

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