INTERVIEW: DJ DETWEILER

THE FLUTEDROP ORIGINATOR FINALLY MADE A FULL-LENGTH ALBUM

You’ve probably heard the Darude song “Sandstorm.” The trance pop track has been an anthem at mainstream dance clubs and sports events for decades now. But have you heard the Flutedrop version? 

We gotta flash back to 2013. That’s when a mysterious producer by the name of DJ Detweiler developed a winning formula: take a major dance or pop song, let it build all the way up, and then overdub a chaotically jarring, ear-piercing recorder on top once the “drop” hits. And you know the internet loved that shit!

Sometimes Flutedrops had additional production. Sometimes they included airhorns. They were always satisfying. The artist’s version of “Sandstorm” is probably my favorite, but there are plenty: “Wrecking Ball,” ‘Super Sharp Shooter,” “The Bells.” Flutedrops were both meme music and experimental music. They spread around the internet really fast. But before you knew it, the genre was over.

Now it’s 2023 and DJ Detweiler has made a full-length album. It’s called Back to the Fluture. The artist refers to it as a “post-Flutedrop sound journey” and it is a 42-minute set of abstract, trilling recorder music, anchored by a 20-minute ending drone called “Flute Meditation.” It’s Detweiler’s first flute-based work in nine years. 

In the time between, the artist has run a record label and hosted a radio show and done all sorts of shit, but the Flutedrop remains a major part of the legacy. Its combination of pop, comedy and atonal woodwinds is eternal. I asked Detweiler some questions over email, which seemed to be fitting. 

It's been around a decade since your Flutedrop remixes changed the internet… And the world. Why an album now? 

Why not??? Honestly, I’ve been neglecting my creativity for some years now, and now feels the best time to just do whatever comes out, and that is an all-flute album!! A bit of looking back but projecting into the future with the lens of the present if that makes sense?

So, the record is all flutes? Or, recorders? Or are those interchangeable to you? How would you describe it?

The record is only flutes, yes. I went to my hometown and recorded some long improv bits and then edited them all together a month later. The result is my first album: Back to the Fluture. Although in English a “sweet flute” (how we call it in Spain) is called a recorder, recorder sounds funny to me, so I like to stay with the Spanish version, which is flauta=flute. Also, in German they say blockflute. 

I'm not trying to make this interview all Flutedrop, because you've done a bunch of shit. But I gotta ask... What was the story behind the Flutedrop? Take me back.

Story time!!! It is quite an interesting one. I guess it’s important to understand the context first: It was the summer of 2013, Skrillex was pretty popular worldwide, hard dubstep/brostep and EDM were extremely popular, especially an EDM sub-genre called “Big Room.” I don’t even know if this is a thing anymore. Not that I was a massive fan or a listener of it, but the popularity of all of this was shifting electronic music scenes to be extremely “DROP-centered.” 

So I was in my hometown in Spain working in the summer and I think I heard the sound-memes by “dj @@,”“best drop ever” and similar accounts on SoundCloud (some years later some music journos would coin this genre “Soundclown” and I would be included in it). I didn’t give them much importance, I mean… I liked them, but I didn’t overthink it. Little did I know that they would influence my music career lol.

NOW THE STORY ITSELF: I had a dream where I was in a massive rave and that Prodigy track "Smack My Bitch Up" was loud on the sound system. When it was reaching the build-up, everyone was freaking out waiting for that sick drop with their hands in the air, etc. etc. Then a flute–also called recorder–appeared out of nowhere in the drop, and people were like WTF, laughing and dancing at the same time. I woke up from the dream and wrote it on a piece of paper, and in the afternoon, I recorded the very first batch of Flutedrop remixes. I uploaded them to SoundCloud and within days I had like half a million plays. And the rest… Is history!

I want to go backwards even further. Where did you grow up? How did you get into making music? What kind of stuff were you listening to as a kid, as a teenager?

Where did I grow up? It depends on who asks me!!! In every interview I’ve given, I’ve said I was from a different Spanish city, to protect my anonymity I suppose, but in this one, I’m going to be 100% honest. I’m from Zaragoza, Spain. Between Madrid and Barcelona.

How I got into music is not an exciting story, it’s literally like every other person who makes music. I studied music for some years, then it got boring; I played in some punk bands, then it got boring; I got into mashup music, it got boring. Then BREAKCORE appeared in my life, mmm that was more interesting, then later on PC MUSIC appeared, that felt like the same mindfuck as breakcore to me, but well I wasn’t a teen anymore… Anyway something important is that #Flutedrop wasn’t my first flute project, I had created this online beggar website one or two years prior. 

One of the only records that I really wished I owned is that Flutedrop 7 inch. It would go nicely with my Jud Jud record. Anyways: How did Chin Stroke start? What are some of your favorite releases on the label?

I love Jud Jud and DJ their music a lot! About Chin Stroke Records: My friend Bert (DJ Dadmagnet) and I decided to take advantage of the virality of my project (DJ Detweiler) and shift the attention to something more than the Flutedrops, and create something bigger. I think we did a good job TBH. We were missing the parties, the releases, and the attitude of Shitmat’s label “Wrong Music” who stopped existing some years before (and is where Dadmagnet and I met), so we decided to create something similar.

All of them are favs honestly, but my double fav releases I think are the more “experimental” ones:

CHINSCAPE - A 12-tape pack by 22 artists. No more credit than a list of the people who contributed. When you listen to the white tapes (no labeling), you have to figure out who made the music.

140 blindfolded drawings of EastEnders characters - This is a book by artist Henry Collins, the title says everything.

The Eminem Paradox - This was a 7 inch vinyl that took form of a fanzine.

You've been doing a radio show for some time now. Could you tell me about that? Any standout episodes? Where should the casual listener start?

Well, at the moment I’m in the middle of the 4th season, I’ve done 43 episodes so far… Crazy. Weird Flex is a radio show where every episode is unique, and showcases songs sharing specific patterns across all types of music genres, sometimes more broad, sometimes extremely specific. It is not easy to put it in words. Some topics I covered to get an idea:

-Songs that romanticize stalking, chasing, etc.

-Songs where the singer is a text-to-speech software.

-Songs where the lyrics are gibberish nonsense.

-Really short songs.

-Songs where water is the main element (played on water, using water instruments, etc).

-Songs where all the audio or music is produced with the human body, without instruments.

One of my fav episodes is the Extremely Specific POV music.

Really don’t know where the casual listener should start, each episode is different from the others, but I guess this episode, which is the most played so far, could be a good start.

Take me through a typical Detweiler DJ set.

I play a lot with expectations, I like to make it equal parts frustrating and amusing for the audience. Some people said my mixing was BDSM for the club lol… For a lot of years I was really secretive about my sets, and didn’t want to record them, a “whatever happens in the club stays in the club” attitude, but last year I decided to show that part of me as a DJ a bit more. Luckily, you can now listen to two live recordings of my last dj sets HERE and HERE.

You once had a track pulled from SoundCloud because it "illegally sampled" John Cage's "4 ' 33." 

Well that’s another loooong story…… It wasn’t a remix of John Cage that I uploaded, it was a Justin Bieber song that I was 100% sure would get a copyright takedown. 

I just renamed the file to “John Cage - 4'33 (DJ DETWEILER REMIX)" and then uploaded it, and as expected, I got the e-mail from SoundCloud saying it was taken down. So I uploaded a screenshot of the takedown e-mail online, went viral.... And the music journalists and click bait culture did the rest... It went MEGAviral.. And everyone thought it was true. Also, for context, back then SoundCloud just started with the copyright takedown system, so they were pulling a lot of music from artists, even the creators of those songs. It was so close to being true that no one questioned it and everyone believed it. 

At the end, some journalist (I believe from the Business Insider) got a response from SoundCloud and they corrected the story. But this didn’t make any change, because they corrected it like 48 or 72 hours after their story went viral, and that means a TON of people believed the original. I sent this statement to all the media outlets who wrote about it, but I believe most of them didn’t change anything. It was some kind of internet performance/culture-jamming thingy on post-truth, fake news and clickbait (and it was happening one year BEFORE Donald Trump got elected). Artnet did a good job at reporting about it though, shout out to them!

To this day I still meet people every now and then who re-tell me the story as if it happened, and I have to explain the whole thing. 

What is your relationship with "avant-garde" music? 

I never looked up avant-garde music on Wikipedia or the dictionary tbh, probably I listened to some of the artists and “subgenres,” but dunno, can’t say more about it. I didn’t study it, I’m not academically trained to elaborate on the question.

While we are at it, what are your feelings about dance music? Where do you think you fit within that wide-ass axis?

Extremely broad question, haha, I guess dance music is music that is made deliberately to dance to, right? As long as it is the music that makes people dance, and not the idea that you should be dancing to it because that’s what you are listening to or that’s where you are (for example, an annoying DJ telling you every two minutes to put your hands in the air and to “let go” at some EDM festival) then I’m ok with it. :)

What do you got planned for the future?

Doing my radio show as long as they host me, and hopefully releasing a lot of new music this year. I’ve opened the creative DJ Detweiler Pandora’s box with this album and now anything can happen!! I'm supposed to be releasing a 7” vinyl on an Austrian label, and I should be sending them music at this very moment, but I decided to release an album before that and I'm procrastinating… I hope they don’t read this interview… Timo, I'm sorry, I'll send you something soon!! xx

And as a fantasy future… I would like to work doing music research somewhere, but I don't know how to look for that type of job, so if someone is reading, please reach out!! Also another fantasy would be having a “morning radio show,” the type where I play music for three hours Monday to Friday in the morning. Again, if someone is willing to pay for this: reach out!!!

Back to the Fluture is out now. DJ Detweiler on Instagram and Twitter and SoundCloud