Def Jammer: Iroro Orife
Dec 5th, 2009 | By admin | Category: Big Shot Magazine, Features
Def’child Productions’ keeps indie techno alive.
Whack techno tracks are ubiquitous in the age of the laptop producer. Thankfully there are still producers like San Francisco’s Iroro Orife. In addition to running his Def’child Productions imprint—a label that still presses vinyl—he releases highly improvisational dub-techno music as Ruoho Ruotsi.
The label was founded in 2004, and Ruoho Ruotsi first rose to prominence in 2006 when Orife won a remix contest sponsored by BBC’s Radio using Steve Reich’s seminal piece Music for 18 Musicians to win. Orife’s focus since the label’s first release in ‘05 has been creating a collectible wax. To accommodate that, he has pared down his release schedule to just a few limited-edition pieces per year to allow artists the time to properly work on a track and also to create handcrafted sleeve art for each Def’child release.
This dedication to the medium has ensured that Def’child tracks have a built-in audience. In fact, last year’s release Isaac Haile Selassie Meets… EP has completely sold-out. “Part of the reason for the success,” Orife explains, “is Ruoho Ruotsi’s favorable standing in the pecking order of dub techno.” But, as an artist/label owner, he’s also shrewdly capitalized on this cadre of hardcore but fickle fanatics by using an extensive musical background (exceeding even the toughest critic’s expectation.
In true dub style, he simply plays the studio and improvises large portions of his music along the way; editing the best parts into tracks that could be best described as Jamaica-meets-Detroit with jazz legend Eric Dolphy at the helm.
Orife is excited by upcoming collaborations with Triton and Hollis P. Monroe and expects them to be this biggest sellers yet. He also hints that the label’s future may lie in multimedia: “I want to bring all kinds of artists together and see what falls out—that’s what improvisation and good music are all about.”
Words: Sean-Michael Yoder
as featured in Issue 29
There’s the man with the master plan! You forgot to mention that Iroro is one of the coolest and most good-hearted dudes you could ever hope to come across in this scene. It was a pleasure to work with him and I hope to do so again in the future.