Warriors Of The Dystotheque was started as a production project about ten years ago by Jonny Mac. This iteration of the band is the first time that all the participants have met in real life and fully integrated a mass of contrasting sounds, ideas and influences.
It’s a Beautiful Thing is the result. It’s a quietly celebratory, subtly uplifting collection of tunes, specially sequenced for the delight of listeners on the vinyl format.
Here’s a quick list of sonic and cultural ingredients - to feel how they come together you’ll have to listen to the album.
Growing up in the Troubles in Northern Ireland; the 90s rave days; life in the sunshine in Florida; a mash-up of live and electronic music; friendship and loss; Ibiza sunlight and dark cloudy nights; despair and enlightenment; and the power of music to lift us up and create joy and harmony, which, we hope you can agree, really is a beautiful thing.
Jonny Mac says - “It feels like we’ve joined the dots on this album, it sounds more like the band coming together than the online project. It’s A Beautiful Thing.”
File under: Trip Hop / Balearic Beats / Library Music / Funktronica / Downtempo / some kind of jazz /
Read more about the Warriors' story:
It’s A Beautiful Thing and stories about connection, friendship, redemption and the healing power of music - an interview with Jonny, founding member of Warriors Of The Dystotheque.
It’s A Beautiful Thing is an evocative and powerful title for an album, how did you choose that name?
It’s from a late, great person in the Northern Ireland dance scene, his name is David Anderson. He would have been great friends with David Holmes, going back to the art college days of the late 80s / early 90s, and he’s been a player on the scene all this time.
In lockdown Phil Kieran tried to put a night on in Belfast with Sean Johnston (ALFOS), but at the last minute it all got shut down and Sean didn’t get into the country, after some thought Daveyalong with Aidy McLaughlin thought they could get round it by not flying anyone in, so a new night was born with Davey calling it Plan B.It was in an old Masonic hall. It’sstill got the chequered dance floor where the masons would do their, um, rituals, for want of a better word.
After the first night Davey came up with - it’s a beautiful thing - maybe due to the irony of having a party in that venue, and the gathering, because it brought together a crowd with the average age of 48-52; all the older crowd who for years had nowhere to go as there's teachers,doctors,solicitors and more who still want that fix of electronic music but over the later years found themselves rubbing shoulders with students, patients and clients.
Unfortunately Davey got cancer pretty soon after and went downhill and passed away before it was a year old.
It’s an honour to use his words as the title of our album, Plan B has just turned 2 and every penny raised goes to 5th Element Charity which helps the kids get into music, graffiti, dance & all things street which is also in the old Masonic building, and of course David Holmes has made several appearances and delivers a hell of a trip for the Plan B crew.
So, is the album about the power of music, the old days of dancing, or something broader?
Yeah I guess, It’s about the community spirit and family that I’m witnessing in re-connecting with those 50 year old people, be that atPlan B in Belfast or over a Bloody Mary at Pikes in Ibiza.
I’ve been going to Ibiza for severaldecades and after a break of few years I’m seeing it through fresh eyes again.
The power of music, the power of friendship and everything that comes with it, it feels right. And musically, it’s not a thrash album! There’s loads of live vibes going on in the recordings be it 12 part string harmonies or the unmistakable sound of a 73 Rhodes as well as sampling, programming and some cosmic electronics, so yeah, it felt really right, and being able to pay tribute to Davey is great.
There’s a picture of Davey that hangs behind the decks in the masonic hall, done by the graffiti kids, and I’ve got a picture of that in my studio, overlooking the production. I thought it would be good to have him oversee the album. I hope he likes it!
Let’s talk community, parties in Belfast and the power of music bringing people together.
Absolutely. Roll this back to the early acid house days in ’88 when there were shootings and bombs and people from both sides of the fence getting killed every day, as well as police & soldiers. Many people on one side of the community wouldn't speak to the other let alone be in the same area or club. And then all of a sudden Acid House arrives , we started taking Es and going out clubbing to the same venues and within five or so years the peace process came about. They can try and play it down all they want but the raving and the ecstasy played a major role in it. And the comparison is the football terraces in England. But this was more powerful than uniting people on football terraces.
All of a sudden we’d be in night clubs next to people, not that everybody wanted to be split apart, but you just wouldn’t be there because you’d fear for your life. You could literally have said just one wrong word and next minute you could be drag out the back of the bar by a group and kicked to death, shot & dumped in a bin it was that bad.
But all of a sudden that was almost gone, and you’d be going to after parties in areas that were predominantly loyalist or republican and you would be the opposite, and not caring, everybody became friends. And now thirty years later and it’s vibrant over here, the laws are just slightly draconian. We can’t go raving after 2am but that’s not so bad now we’re all over 50. I’m all for things finishing early and getting back to my bed!
You live in Derry, near the border. How do you feel about the island of Ireland now?
Yes I moved back to Ireland in2011 after 15 years in England.
We did a track with Howie B in lockdown called No Borders, and that’s my outlook. We should be free to do what we want, go where we want be who we want with who we want to when we’re there, without question. And that should be the same on this island. I’m not saying reunite the country because I’m a catholic and I want that to happen, I just think the whole world should be like No Borders.
With your slightly, how can I put it, difficult background, how did you end up making such happy music?
Well, it took a while!
In 1994 I got a pair of Technics. I was in my house one Friday night along with my good friend Steven (Steky) and Ken Ferguson, who is the brother of the DJ Fergie, they were both DJs as well and Steven asked - where would your ultimate gig be? Steven said Cream, Ken said Ministry of Sound and I said Cafe Del Mar, but obviously then it was a pipe dream.
I moved to England in 1997. I was DJing at that time, playing loads of trip hop and into the big beat and nu school breaks scene. I started a night at uni, then I ended up touring and DJing with Leeroy from The Prodigy and Phil from Orbital.
I was in England for about 15 years and I took a few wrong turns and got heavily into the drugs and then my best friend, who I lived with, died in our home, and I found him dead. So I got up and left straight away and decided - that was it, I was getting off the drugs and getting home and totally getting out of music because I had the silly idea at the time that music was making me make the wrong decisions because I wasn't in control. So I totally stopped listening to music for about three years around 2011.
In 2014 I put the radio on, listened to 6Music and started thinking about the music that I used to love - Cafe Del Mar, trip hop, downtempo beats, DJ Shadow, sampling old breaks, and the goodness of that kind of thing. So I started the Warriors project and I sent some music to my good friend Sean, who I had studied music with in Coventry, and he said oh, that’s really nice.
I’d seen Mike & Nick, the Rufolo brothers, who were living in New York at the time, on YouTube, they were only about 18 then, multi instrumental and jamming on this channel and I thought, that’s the live vibe I need to add to my electronic sound, so I sent them a message and they agreed to do a thing and then the Warriors was born.
Our first EP did really well over here, Radio Ulster, RTE. The second one was picked up by Nemone and was on the breakfast show on 6Music. It was slightly darker trip hop and I figured out that this is the type of music I should be doing, it was my real love from the days when I got my Technics, it made me happy and it fulfilled me. So we went on and did a couple of albums. They had darker moments but they also had moments of beauty on them and I think those albums, with their mix up of dark and light, were helping me getting what I had to get out of my head from those years of the trauma and the misery of the drug addiction and stuff.
I’d been sending tracks to Ken (Resident DJ) at Cafe Del Mar since 2016, he said oh, send this to Pikes and then they asked me to come out and DJ at Pikes and to do sunset at Cafe Del Mar, So before I went out we wrote On The Balcony (a tribute to my mate Moosa) because I was doing sunset and thinking, ok, I may only get one go to DJ at sunset ever so I’m not going to play somebody else’s track!
Then when I came back home from Ibiza Chris Coco signed it to Disappear and remixed it, it’s been our most successful track to date and from there it’s reinforced that this is what I should be doing, this is what makes me happy. So that goes back to my pipe dream of wanting to play at Cafe del mar, I think it all ties in. It’s a beautiful thing.
Tell us about the Rufolo Brothers and Florida.
Mike & Nick Rufalo are twins, unbelievable musicians. They moved to Florida a couple of years ago afterspendingtheirlives inNew York.
With them being twins there’s a musical telepathy between them. They’re jazz rooted and they’ve got a picture of Frank Zappa on the wall, he overlooks what goes on in the studio, just like I’ve got Davey here!
Up til November last year, everything WotD had been done online, for 8 years we had never been in the same studio, so I flew to Coventry to do a weekend session with Sean for what was to be an EP for Chris at DSPPR, after a chatwith Chris we decided on an album but our first2 albums took a few yearsbecause of the natureof WotD being an online band. Then I decided to go to Florida at the end of February so from the end of November until the end of February oh and during this time we recruited a new member to WotD, Kevin Sharkey we got 9 tracks down, we overdubbed the 9 in Florida and wrote 3 more and laid down the demos for a few more.It was a great decision mainly because I didn’t need a big pair of socks over there, which I do now. They took me into their home, where their studio overlooks a pool in the back yard, a perfect setting to get summer vibes in winter.
One of the tracks, Beachside Drive, was based on a drive from their place at Melbourne Beach, about 40 minutes up to Coco Beach. It’s all A1A, literally a beachside drive and when we got back to the studio we wrote the track and you can feel the warmth and vibes of being in Florida.
So you’ve got this big soup of different influences - your upbringing in Ireland, the troubles, the rave days, Ibiza, the reconnecting with the old clubbers, the boys in Florida and the UK, live and electronic, friendship and loss, light and dark. Now the album and the title are starting to make a lot more sense. It really is, ahem… a beautiful thing.
