^LIVE Adam Marshall

After a few years of tightly regimented sounds and scenes dominating the dance underground, it now seems that people are making electronic music more freely once again. Techno guys are playing deep house, old-
school flavors are mingling with cutting-edge production techniques, and the spirit of the times is more open to DJs and producers who are willing to mix it up than it has been for a long while.

Step forward Toronto, Canada native Adam Marshall. With nearly two decades’ experience as a DJ, not to mention his acclaimed work as a producer and label owner, Adam has amassed considerable respect from the
electronic music community for his finely tuned blend of lysergic house grooves and smart, sharp techno. And with forthcoming releases on esteemed imprints like Simple, Cynosure, and of course his own labels New
Kanada and KUJI, it seems that many of the scene’s bigger players are now catching on, too.

As a teenager rebelling against his parents’ love of disco ? “You can’t like what your parents like, right?” he says ? Adam initially rallied against electronic music, before chancing upon Primal Scream’s ‘Screamadelica’. Like many others, he was bewitched by Andrew Weatherall’s masterful approach to electronic production, and soon found himself immersed in the early 90s world of Warp Records and the so-called ‘intelligent’ techno movement. From there, it was short hop to Detroit, which combined the emotional value of electronica with a
sound that was, to him, “moody, dark, raw, and funky as hell”. It’s a combination that’s stayed with him to this day.

“I always liked the dark, tripped-out house stuff from all the Midwestern raves I used to go to,” he remembers. “All the early morning music ? not necessarily hard or soft, but rather the moodiness and sex appeal of that
twilight groove.” Increasingly inspired by mixtapes and live sets from US legends like Derrick Carter, Mick Huckaby, D-Wynn,
and Ron Hardy, Adam started DJing himself, and soon became instrumental in the burgeoning mid-‘90s Toronto scene alongside his long-time friends Jeremy P. Caulfield, Jeff Milligan and Mike Shannon.

“Toronto always had a really good underground house scene from way back in the day...” he explains. “It was a very multicultural city so there were many, many people around in the early ‘90s that went to warehouse parties and listened to house music - and that weren't into the normal North American hair metal fetish. This was a good thing.”

By 1995, Adam had bagged a job as head buyer at Toronto’s most underground and respected record store, Speed. During the week, he’d make the 5-hour trip to Detroit to Daniel Bell’s 7th City distribution centre,
cherry-picking the very best records of the time. And at weekends, he’d be spinning those records at Blue, the seminal Toronto club night where he and Jeremy P. Caulfield held a long-running residency. With a booking
policy that ranged from deep dons Theo Parrish, Chez Damier and an early, pre-schranz incarnation of DJ Rush, to the harder sounds of Surgeon, DJ Hell and Neil Landstrumm, the Blue residency set the foundations for
the genre-melding style the Adam would continue to refine in years to come.

Similarly, Adam’s acclaimed production career has followed a path that deftly weaves between the traditionally conflicting pastures of deep house and jacking techno. Starting out on his own Killer label ? which
he describes as being “really about DJ tools... dub tracks for mixing fun” ? Adam was soon appearing on respected imprints including Dumb-Unit , Cynosure and Deep Night Essentials, quietly honing his sound and
impressing techno connoisseurs on both sides of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, his DJ schedule swelled accordingly, and by the mid-2000s, Adam had played at almost every respected club throughout North America.

As the techno world went minimal-crazy in 2006, Adam realigned his plans with a fresh label, New Kanada. In the spirit of imprints like Planet E, New Kanada avoids easy pigeonholing, preferring to put out a wide
variety of quality music without being particularly genre-specific.

“I think this was a reaction to some of the digital labels that always had three exact tracks of the same minimal stuff,” he says. “I hated that stuff.... take a chance guys! Some days I like it deep, some days I like it hard... I always respected labels that switched it up a bit, and there were not a lot of those labels anymore.”

Fast-forward to the present, and Adam, now based in Berlin, is busier than ever. Recently acclaimed remixes for Seth Troxler, Radioslave’s Rekids label, and his own forthcoming outing on Cynosure (described by
renowned techno writer Philip Sherburne as “absolutely gorgeous”), are all gaining serious props with heads from across the underground divide, with neo-house fans, minimal die-hards, and techno purists all showing
their appreciation of late. He’s also recently set-up a new label, KUJI, who’s first release (‘Chord Tracking’) was record of the month in techno bible De:Bug.

Accordingly, he’s been devoting major chunks of time to his new live-set, which will see a move away form plug-ins and towards a gear-based setup. Add to that a bulging release schedule, continuing worldwide DJ gigs, and a renewed media interest in the deeper side of the dancefloor, and it looks like Adam Marshall’s
time is most definitely now.