Chris Lake: Fireside Rewind
Earlier this month we were joined by Chris Lake for a fireside chat in our Discord. The Scottish born house producer and DJ routinely plays to sell-out crowds across the world, hanging on his every beat. Speaking with emanate founder Jimi Frew, Chris shared that that wasn’t always the case. The road to musical greatness would require perseverance, self belief and integrity above all else.
Location Doesn’t Matter:
Sharing his origin story, of life growing up in Bylands St Fergus, Chris shared that location doesn’t matter.
“This place is in the middle of fucking nowhere. We didn’t have broadband or anything like that til about 2005. I was producing in a farmhouse, making all my music in a bedroom there. Very disconnected from the dance scene. My one connection to the scene was the dial up internet. The only way that I knew how to send music people was via AOL messenger. I’d send an mp3 and every file would take an hour to send. That was how I got my music out to labels.
I was just on message boards, finding out about the dance scene. And that’s how I started creating buzz around my own music.”
Getting Started:
For Chris, developing his chops as a producer was a matter of trial and error, usually spent recreating his favorite tracks to sharpen his skills.
“I started saving money buying equipment and learning; having fun with it. I actually started by doing a little bit of writing, but predominantly spent my time recreating dance tracks that I knew. I never did a good job of it, but it helped me learn a lot of techniques, that was my thing. This was before DAWs, they were just starting. Being able to do music completely on your computer wasn’t really possible. You could sequence it via MIDI but you didn’t have Ableton.
Twenty years later and I’m just focussing on my own original ideas, but I’m pretty much the same person: Still trying to impress myself.”
On Breaking Through:
“My first international show in Stockholm on top of through roof of an arts building, beautiful location. The gig was great, I really enjoyed it, got to play what I wanted and got to represent who I am. When I arrived I got taken to an apartment in the centre of the city. I get there and I’m chilling out and the owner of the apartment comes over. The owner is this young kid called Sebastian Ingrosso. I was playing him CDs of stuff I’d made. I’ll never forget playing the music in his living room and him dancing around the living room like he does now on stage and he was really pumped for my music. I think Steve Angello was there as well.”
Listen to Chris Lake on emanate
Working With Deadmau5 & The Importance of Output:
Working with Joel Zimmerman in the early 2000's, Chris revealed the importance of output and how having a unique sound can change everything.
“It was verging on concerning how good his [Deadmau5] music was sounding. It was a new line in the sand. I was definitely not the only one that was noticing him, around that time there were a lot of people noticing him, that’s because he was putting out so much music on Beatport in a short period of time. The key part was that he ended up working with my manager, and I helped make that happen. They’ve been massively successful and I’m proud of that.”
“I remember being at Ultra and being introduced to this kid Sonny Moore. “This is Sonny, he’s a great producer. Then a year later he put out ‘Scary Monsters’ and it absolutely melted down Beatport.”
Moving to America & Self Belief:
“That period of time was a little bit weird because I’d started putting my focus into other areas. I put less focus on my own production, I had less belief in it and I’d started listening to other peoples opinions and this is the biggest error that I ever made. I started making decisions based on what other people were saying. That kind of happened for a couple of years. I eventually got out and reconnected with who I am as an artist and set out to retell the story of who I was as an artist. That’s been a process of seven or eight years. Probably the thing that I’m most proud of is that I stuck to the project of Chris Lake; that’s me. That’s my name. I represented myself the way I wanted to be represented.”
Reputation, Opinions & Artistic Integrity:
Torn between his artistic identity and the opinions of others, Chris highlights the importance of staying true to yourself and knowing when to say no. In spite of what others might think, or the money they might offer, your reputation and integrity should always come first.
“I’m not saying don’t listen to other people. There’s many people around me that I talk about stuff with, but at the end of the day I still hold belief that the most important is mine. You have to be careful about not straying too far from who you really are. I’m not saying don’t take anything on board. I was definitely not portraying myself the way I really feel like I should of.
I had to say no to a crazy amount of things. There was a big difference between how I saw myself as an artist compared to how other people saw me. I had to say no to eighty to ninety percent of work offered to me because it would give the wrong look. That was one of the hardest things to do.
Establishing that the most important thing is making the right decisions, irrespective of money. Money is a secondary decision. If I had made decisions with money as a consideration I would have allowed certain things to happen that shouldn’t be happening.
I went for huge periods of my career where people didn’t give a fuck about what I was doing. I had to work to get to the point where people would take notice and answer my calls. Reputation is one of the key things for me in how I make my decisions because at the end of the day each decision can color your representation. Based on your decisions you have the ability to influence how judgement ends up transpiring.”
Cutting Through the Noise and Standing Out In 2022
The musical landscape is worlds away from the one Chris set out on twenty years ago. With self publishing and platforms like emanate at your fingertips, the barriers to entry aren’t as high, or as expensive. In spite of these changes, Chris maintains that in order to stand out, the formula has remained the same:
“At the end of the day it’s very easy to own your own rights. It’s very easy to release your own music, emanate is a fantastic example. The problem will always be how do you capture an audiences attention. This is always going to be the problem that needs to be solved. For me personally, the avenue that I have always found that has had the greatest impact has been making music that is playable by DJs, having DJs play it and increasing interest in your music. That’s the focus that I’ve always put on. At the end of the day, make music that people want to play. You can own 100% of your rights but you can be a bit stuck in the mud because it doesn’t have an audience, this is where people need to become creative. It’s really hard. Even as an established artist it isn’t the easiest thing to get people to notice. There are fantastic tools to own and self publish, this is where it comes to understanding yourself, trying to find your strengths within what you do. That’s what becomes important, you have to find what makes you special, what makes you standout?”
“A lot of people are quite afraid of what makes them stand out. Standing out is your strength. Whatever is your unique identifier is your strength that you should absolutely focus on. Innately as humans, we all want to fit in and belong, but the way to actually stand out is to focus on your individuality. For some people it can be really obvious, for me I felt like I had a signature sound so luckily people could listen to a song and can feel like it’s one of mine. For some people it’s their personality or a dance move or a tag line; their social media presence.”
