Hiya Chimp Hardy. Tell us bit about where you are from and how you got into music?
Hey. I’m Chimp. I’m originally from Austin, Texas, but have lived in Berlin for 10 years.
Growing up I always had beats and melodies in my head. I was shy when I was younger, so I did Choir Tech in junior high instead of Choir. My family bought me a Casio keyboard when I was 14. I started raving at 15 and I instantly started making cheesy dance pop music.
I really wanted to be a music producer, but music production was too expensive, so I went to Uni instead. At uni, I played around with DJing and singing in different kinds of bands. After working for a few years, I saved up money to go to music production school, played around Austin in bands and making pretty house music (opened for Crystal Water, Robin S, Erasure, Vince Clarke) then had to get back to Berlin to the belly of the beast.
What’s the live music scene like in Berlin right now?
Things have changed significantly in Berlin since the pandemic. With inflation and rent increases, many mainstay clubs have closed down. Those that still exist seem to be booking more DJs and fewer live shows.
That said, since the first of the year, I’ve noticed an explosion of underground parties that are more into immersive, artistic experiences with not just DJs, but live acts and performance artists.
Ask me again in a year 🙂
Anyone we should be looking out for (bar you, of course)?
There are some amazing artists from Berlin. In terms of live artists, I’m really digging on:
JakoJako — she throws a bunch of synths, modular and conventional, together and does outrageous shows purely based on improv. Dancey yet atmospheric.
CYRK — This duo brings drum machines and synths to make everything from Detroit electro to more Italo vibes. Fun!
Nadia Struiwigh — very impactful live electronic shows full of so much emotion. I saw one where she marked the passing of her father. I was in tears.
Andi A + Negrolator – loving these two as a duo or separately — nothing but breaks and love
Dina Summer — Dark sythwave pop Biesmans — new album coming out that matches his ecstatic live sets
Do you think its easy to become a victim of of our surrounds sometimes?
100% Berlin is a heavy, raw place. Many people come here to lose themselves — and there’s a fine-line between hedonism and self destruction. It’s very dark.
Me, coming from Austin, bright eyed and wet behind the ears, it was like being caught in a whirlpool. I didn’t know what hit me and I felt a bit like that scene in “NeverEnding Story” where Atreyu’s horse gets sucked into the swamp. Many people don’t come out. I fought my battles, found myself, and returned to myself. It took a lot of work and was painful, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
What are your ambitions for Chimp Hardy as an artist?
I want to connect people around the world through music and empower them to connect with their bodies and emotions. It’d be cool to collaborate with some of my heroes (Future Sound of London, Underworld, 808 State, Orbital). I want to tour the world.
I want to keep learning and growing as a musician and producer. I want to build a sustainable music career. Grammy?
Whats your favourite social media platform to use and why?
I’m a YouTube fan. I’ve recently returned to long form content. I have a lot to say and I’m not sure a TikTok or an Insta Reel allows me to say it. Lock into my YouTube. I’m in the midst of recording content on the rebellious history of dance music and connecting with your creative voice.
We believe its essential to have a presence on Facebook, Instagram and X to introduce yourself to all the different types of audiences out there, what’s your thoughts on that?
That’s what I would have said in the past. In fact, I was all about social media. I won a Texas Social Media award around 15 years ago.
Now I’m not sure about it and here’s why:
Those platforms are addictive, draining, and also psychologically unhealthy.
It’s hard to compete against AI Slop
It takes the focus off of the music and puts it on the superficial
It’s polarizing us and trapping us in ideological bubbles.
Some days I don’t want to be a content creator or on camera.
We become content share croppers, creating for big companies who make money off of us and control our connection with our audiences.
Here in Berlin, there’s a growing trend for real world. This includes the return of zines printed at a copy shop and events that are immersive that get you into the real world community. To support that, there’s also a return to email newsletters and artist- or party-driven telegrams. These are the types of connections I want to make.
IRL is the future 🙂
What’s your view on the Music industry today?
Deezer recently released a stat that 90,000 AI-created tracks are being uploaded to their platform DAILY. Not only does this make it harder for real musicians to be heard, it dilutes the already very strained earnings, especially for the platforms that pool the money.
With that context, I think we have to really ask, what is success? How do we break through the noise? Will we get heard? And as mentioned above, I think it means a return to grassroots organizing and community building. Despite all of that, I think it’s still possible to make it through.
Two musician friends have said that I’m delusional to think that anyone can make it today. Another friend who is a multiplatinum artist said I’m blessed with Delusional Confidence. I have been doing this for too long to believe otherwise.
A lot of musicians talk about how it was before the pandemic — and for me, it was great. I was touring a lot. It felt like things were on the up swing. But 2019 was 7 years ago. Everything has changed. And by understanding the state of the industry now, we can make realistic choices.
Two and a half years ago, I got a day job so that I could make the music I wanted to make without having to worry about writing the next hit to make ends meet. It has liberated me in ways I never would have imagined.
Whats your thoughts on AI generated music?
I don’t like processed, fake food, so I don’t like fake music. I’m pro-human. I like the energy and soul that we infuse. I like that we can make new things, new sounds, new ideas. I like that we have happy accidents. AI can’t do that. It looks at data, determines what the two ends of that data look like, and then gives you the middle. It’s mediocre. It’s milquetoast.
And listen, music is a craft. By skipping ahead, you miss out on the joy of learning and growing. Everything has a price, and by relying on AI for anything, your own skillset gets weaker. You deny yourself future growth.
It also has a huge environmental impact that simply can’t be ignored.
Whats the biggest thing you have learned recently as you progress with your music?
Don’t overthink. Don’t question myself or my abilities. Take the steps. Make the music. The rest will come through.
What’s currently in your ears and on rotation at the moment?
Sun Ra, Beastie Boys, Lykke Li, Underworld, Plastikman, Lana del Rey, Bad Bunny, Björk
What was your worst experience on stage? Any funny stories to share?
I was around 26 when I got my first residency. I was so excited to play in front of a group of people every week. My second week, I got on stage, plugged everything in, stepped up to the mic, looked out on the crowd, and…no sound. I crawled around, couldn’t figure it out. I got under the table, and started to see if maybe I’d hooked something up wrong.
The promoter got on stage, crawled under the table next to me, and with a smile plastered on his face, looking straight ahead into the crowd, he whispered to me, “You’re face is too expressive. You look scared shitless and the audience can see that. Put a smile on your face right now.”
So I plastered a big ass Cheshire Cat grin on my face and waited for the sound engineer to come over. It was actually something that they hadn’t plugged into the mains.
From that point on, I make sure my face hides what I’m really thinking on stage…and it’s good for zoom calls, too. 😉
Got any fun, funny stories from life on the road?
So many funny stories. Moments full of exhausted laughs and joyous friendship.
But I’m in a sentimental mood tonight, so I want to tell a sentimental story. I’d been touring through Germany in 2018. Summer. I played a small festival outside of Weimar. My friend Fabi had organized a special event for all the artists the night after the festival. We went on top of the hill overlooking the city and setup all our gear, synths, amps, a generator, in the middle of this orchard. We jammed all night, around 17 of us playing to the trees and the stars overhead. I fell asleep in one of the cars for a bit, woke up, and continued jamming as the sun came up. I’ve never had anything like that.So. Much. Love.
You have a new album called Animal. What can you tell us about it?
ANIMAL tells the story of ravers turning into animals, taking over the city, and starting their own society. I call it a rave opera, modeled after the Rock Operas of the 1970s, epitomized by the Who’s album Tommy. But instead of rock music telling a story, it’s rave genres from the 90s and current vibes from the underground.
Looking at the news the last couple of years—the rise of the far right, symptoms of climate disaster causing havoc, economic pressure, increase in war, and the impact of AI looming in the background—I felt overwhelmed and helpless. In fact, my last single, a moody house track called “Watching the World Burn”, was about just that. Then last year, I suddenly stopped feeling sorry for myself and society, and realized we still have agency. We still have power.
In the rave and underground club world, we often create a space that mirrors the world that we want to see. Everyone is welcome. We look after each other. We have ideas of peace and liberation. And a lot of people in the mainstream look at us like scum.
The album is the manifestation of that rave ethos. I’m a huge fan of Sci-FI and Anime, and for this album, I imagined a world in which we, the wild animals of the night, take our ideas and infect society with them.I want it to help people reconnect with their wild, feral nature, and realize, we can change the world.
I also wanted people to see that gay or queer electronic music doesn’t always have to be pretty or euphoric. I don’t feel pretty or euphoric. I feel like my way of life is under attack and I want to fight back. I want people to hear the wild tribal acid punk vibes on “Emergency on the Dance Floor” or the hard feral bass and beats on “Breakdown of Public Order” and know that a faggot made that.
At the same time, I want people to also feel hope. “In Order to Survive” is a moody classic drum-n-bass track with vocals reminding us that sometimes we have to take things into our own hands. And “Dawn of the New Age” is a New York House inspired track that welcomes the coming of a new age where we integrate the joy and pain and create a society for all.
Ultimately, to me it’s a pop album that represents what’s happening musically in the underground and inspires people to reclaim their body, life, and society. I hope people can feel that.
What was the recording process like?
I was making it during a time of deep recovery. I had been assaulted in 2022 — it was a gay bashing — and put in the hospital. It took me a couple of years of physical and psychotherapy to get my life feeling somewhat stable and pain free.
So the recording process was about finding my larger self and reconnecting with my body after the assault. When I think of body, it all comes down to the rhythm section: drums and bass.
I think that’s why the composing and recording kicked off with drums and bass. I love drumming, so I just went wild when playing them in. Most drums on contemporary dance tracks today are so pretty, perfect, and kind of like wall paper, not really taking up space. I wanted to create a wall of drums. I wanted them to take up space and feel a bit chaotic and wild. This was so cathartic for me after the assault because it was like me reclaiming my space.
People have asked me if those are drum loops or samples, and the answer is, no. They’re all played live, BUT through a sampler. I’ve created a large library of one shots, hits of the same kind on the same instrument, recorded with various intensity and then put on a round robin sampler in Ableton to give it the random feel of different hits each time the key is hit.
For the recording session with GLOR1A, the vocalist for “Release Your Animal”, the track was just drums — and she smashed it despite no melodic parts being written or recorded at that phase. GLOR1A has such a wide range, from gritty to airy, and we wanted to use that for this track to really give the vocals more dynamics than most contemporary dance tracks. Her reference for the grit was soul singer Betty Davis, and she nailed it.
I also wanted to give the album its own space and feeling. To help that, the vocals, drums, and many strings/synths were all recorded through an old school TASCAM 4-Track Recorder onto cassette tape and then recorded back into my DAW, Ableton.
You can hear this the most on “Emergency on the Dance Floor” and “In Order to Survive”. For Emergency, listen to the pitch modulation on the vox. That’s from me tweaking with the tracking speed when while recording in and out. The crispness on the vocals from Survive comes from the cassette. A DJ played it on HÖR the other day, and the comments were blowing up asking about where the sample is from, some folks even arguing that it’s from Splice — surprise, it’s not. 100% all me. I also did the same processing for the strings on “Toxin” and “Unbound” to give them a bit of an eery feeling
Would you change anything now it’s finished?
I’m trying to not overthink, so I look at the album as complete, final, and exactly as it was meant to be expressed when it was created. I will say that getting the live set ready for clubs made me think about how to arrange the tracks differently to make it work on a dance floor that, for the most part, needs to have a continuous flow. If I were to do the album again, maybe I would have made to into a continuous dance mix. Gonna have to wait for a live recording of the show to get that!
Is there anything else you would like to share with the world?
We have to remember that everything changes. No matter how stormy it seems, the sun is always shining behind those clouds.
Some days we feel so full of joy that it’s like we radiate the sun. Other days, it’s nothing but gray skies and we can’t get out of bed. It’s just weather. It may be raining today, but the sun has to come out eventually. If you’re having a rough time in your life, know that it will pass. Don’t beat yourself up. It’s just weather. It can’t rain forever. You will be healthy and stable again soon. Don’t give up. The world needs you and your voice. You are loved. You are loved.
Every day alive is a blessing. I’m thankful for every day that I have pain-free mobility.
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