Recent interview with Robert Squire aka Sixtoo and a link to recent music under the name Prison Garde. via Subdivision
Download: Prison Garde – Système Hermès
Prison Garde. Yeah man, I just don’t know what happened there. My partner in Megasoid (my dear friend Hadji Bakara) returned to the U.S. to teach college, and I moved to Vancouver right around the same time… I didn’t really have any gear after moving because my place got broken into in Montreal, which was kinda the catalyst for me being here in the first place. I was kinda fed up, and kinda went a bit berserk there for a minute. I went though a bit of an identity crisis and came out of it on the other end as a gainfully-employed grown-ass-man.
Long story short, I was like ‘fuck music’ and just opened up an art gallery / creative agency. Through the agency I produced the RBMA tour, and then just kinda found myself re-inspired after hanging with my homies for a month, and then just started writing a lot of tunes again.
The West Coast music scenes are really different from what I was familiar with when I moved here, and it took me a little bit of time to really figure out what I wanted to be doing out here musically. I was DJing alot, everything from big money shows with dudes like Joker, FlyLo, Gaslamp etc, and then also doing smaller, tighter nights with dudes like sub⎹div and Lighta! (who I am grateful for) all while trying to figure out whether I was actually gonna stay out here, which I have committed myself to.
I suppose part of that contributed to the broadening of my musical palette in some ways, but closed it in others. I started listening to a lot more club-tempo music, and had this realization that a lot of the music I was working on previously just felt stale. I went back to just writing a lot of 808 music of various tempos, and started borrowing gear off the homies when it was available, but yeah, somehow in the last year I just wound up with this surplus of tunes that have mostly been parts of my live PA sets. I just put together this collection of 14 joints, and have another grip that I will be putting out sometime soonish. I think for the slower tempo stuff, a lot of boogie and funk influences have appeared, and for the faster stuff, a bit of everything from footwork to techno and old school house have kinda seeped in. I am kinda all over the map right now.
I feel like all of it is tied together by how minimal it is, but people have told me I am tripping out thinking that this stuff is minimal music.
