pete.mcm is Peter McMinn fka DJ Küsse and aka Saberhägen (of Hi & Saberhägen). Releasing under pete.mcm is now the main focus of the Irish, Berlin based producer having finally embraced their heritage and abandoned all disguise via umlaut (although some collaboration projects will appear in the near future).
In 2019, together with Khshathra (Tim Krull) they co-ran the label Sensible Seelen. The label released three ten-track compilations, covering a multitude of genres and featuring work from various slept-on artists as well as their own productions. The label ended in 2020 following their final 10-track experimental compilation ‘In Gedenken An’ and it will now move forward as CC polygum, starting with the release of ‘Lossless Life Files’, the first album and release from pete.mcm. The album is a raw and personal diary entry of the last 3 years of the producer’s life and in keeping with tradition, spans a wide range of genres. As with the change in artist name, the album features a number of references to Irish heritage and hopes to shine light on Irish culture in a unique way.
FACTS
1. Ideas are the big gifts.
2. Be sound and the world will return.
3. I have a form of epilepsy that I believe informs my music.
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Simple answer = other music from other people. My writing bursts come most often when I’ve stumbled across something that lights up something within me. For me, this feeling is one of the greatest rushes someone can feel, and to be clear, it isn’t a case of going ‘Oh I like what they did here… let me steal that’.
It is a much more human and beautiful thing (in my opinion, at least). That’s one of the greatest things about making music, the idea that what your creativity has produced, has in turn had the potential to inspire another’s creativity. That to me transcends all notions of capitalism/ego/one-upmanship and the uglier/greedier sides of human nature. But maybe I’m just an idealist…
2. How and when did you get into making music?
From as far back as I can remember I’ve definitely had the desire to make/play/perform music. As a child I started begging for a drum kit around the age of 7 and one Christmas it finally came. That same Christmas my sister got a guitar which I immediately also started to play.
From that point on I was hooked and would play constantly. Around 12-13 years old I started playing in bands and recorded my first music with screamo band around the age of 15.
This recording was eye-opening, mainly because it showed how terrible my playing and especially screaming was. But it also taught me the importance of capturing true soul and character in a recording. By the time I was heading to university I was already getting into making stuff on my mac and from the time I got Logic (2008) I haven’t really stopped making and recording.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
In no order
– Guerilla Welfare – The Nature Of Human Nature
– Woman – Public Strain
– Black Moon – Enta Da Stage
– The Chariot – Everything Is Alive, Everything Is Breathing, Nothing Is Dead, and Nothing Is Bleeding
– Gary Wilson – Mary Had Brown Hair
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
The community. Beautiful souls and tortured souls. Beautiful summers and surprisingly tough winters. Maybe like a lot of big cities, there is dichotomy but I absolutely, wholeheartedly love Berlin. I love the feeling of being able to wear what I want and be more or less flamboyant if I wish, and not feel like there is any judgement.
Growing up in Ireland, specifically Derry, to me at least, at times it felt hard to step even remotely outside of what was considered to be the norm, when it came to fashion/music/art/ideas at least.
A lot of that of course, was my own ego at play but for me, Berlin and the amazing people I have met here, taught me to be within myself with comfort.
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
Planterwald. I look after dogs a lot so I am here often and walking through with the changing seasons is really something.
I love being in there when it has snowed and everything is soundproofed, then during Bärlauch season everything smells of garlic. In summer everything is lush again. Only a few years ago I probably would have said some bar or something… Growth?
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
Yikes. I would hope I could channel into some other line of creativity. I’m a terrible painter, but maybe I just haven’t committed enough time to it. Maybe it’s wiser to say I’m not a naturally gifted painter. I love making videos (in a very primitive way at least) so in an ideal world, maybe I’d be a director of sorts. But then again, all movies without music… that’s a world I don’t want to live in. Let’s say I’d be a tree surgeon living an über-chill life somewhere warm.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
Otherworld Experiment W/ DJEF Skot – One And All
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Tough question. I’d love to work with a singer and recently I’ve returned to Jessica Pratt. I’d love the opportunity one day to work as a producer on a record and I feel like Jessica’s voice could lend beautifully to some wavy downtempo or ode to chillout era music. Think ‘Madonna – Frozen’ but tape-y, hissy, warbled and warm..
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
As a spectator, it has to be seeing Sunn0))) in the SWG3 in Glasgow in 2016 (I think?) It was my first time seeing them and of course was all hyped on the stories of drastic volume, people puking etc. I was actually scared that they would walk out and just hit a 1000% volume first note, but instead they faded and built it up and built this complete sense of tension. At one point their singer (Attila Csihar) did a extended solo, throat singing section, after which it went pitch black. As the drones began to swell again, beams of lights started to slowly appear through the fog and eventually Attila appears wearing a crown of chrome swords that lasers are bouncing off of. It was a really visceral and quite fun experience actually – and embodied the nice meeting of theatrics, performance and sound.
As a performer, I have to say the first ever ‘Carne’ event I threw with my dear friend Angel. Angel acted as host in a sort of homage to Paris Is Burning. I played a mix of classics, house, disco, UKG and even a bit of trance at some point… It felt like a totally unpretentious night and everyone was just wasted and letting totally loose.bAt that time, we were living in Edinburgh and we had often talked that we wanted to bring a different energy to a club space and one that felt a bit less ‘*chin-stroke* what record was that’ and a bit more ‘this is our last night, kiss a loved one, kiss a stranger!’.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Well, of course everything I write eventually ends up going through the computer somehow. But I definitely still work in the same way I did back in my days in the screamo bands.
Often I’ll pick up one of my guitars or banjo even and just start noodling. More often than not some kind of idea-spark happens and eventually might make its way onto the computer. I have another album that will be out in the near future which is a collaborative project – this project was fairly bare-bones in terms of technology.
Most of the music was recorded pretty haphazardly to cassette, but naturally some elements were still ran through Ableton for effects etc. One thing is for sure though, and that is I am absolutely no music engineer. People will often comment on how I’ve done something when there is a much sleeker process that could have been used. More often than not I’ll just record more tracks rather than try and route things or whatever, I just don’t have the brain for it. OR most likely it scares me and I’m a bit lazy.
I’ll not rule anything out though, maybe one day I’ll be a little Eurorack wizard.
11. Please tell us a bit more about the making of your new album?
Apologies, this will be a longer one.
Work on Lossless Life Files started roughly 2 years ago when I was going through somewhat of a transformation. Like all good transformation stories, it wasn’t all roses. About a year prior I’d been dumped from a long-term relationship, which was forcing me to finally hold up the mirror and deal with those ugly ego-demons. Whilst I could see them, I still wasn’t quite sure how to/ready to deal with them.
I’d sort of slowly become a bit of a mess ultimately – this started prior to my move to Berlin in 2018 but had gathered a bit of steam (ahem) between then and 2020 (a classic/non-so-unique Berlin tale I guess). On a personal level, I always wanted many of the standard things a lot of us consciously or subconsciously strive for, health, success maybe even… respect? But I really did nothing to put those wheels in motion. Naturally that put a strain on the beautiful bunch of friends around me, listening to me crow on about things I wanted/needed to do but watching me do nothing about it.
I met someone during the pandemic, and probably at the height of my impending ego death. I can’t stress enough how much they guided me through that period. Guided more by example than any hand-holding really. I won’t pretend, for dramatic purposes, like I was some complete lost cause on the brink of collapse or whatever, but I was lost, for sure and I think I kinda hated this version of myself that’d I become or was becoming. Almost comically, the first track I wrote from the album – ‘Is Ainm Dom’ started after a night of failed bedroom-karaoke.
I was so self-conscious to sing in front of this new partner and their friends, that I got hammered and ended up whiteying (Irish for vomiting*) in their bathroom. (31 years old fyi). I woke up the next morning and felt ashamed to be honest. I walked home and started this thing. In the background of the track you can hear me preaching some monologue that I’m not even 100% sure what I was saying (I deleted the original stem in an act of chaos), but it is a diary entry of sorts, from the pit of my shamed soul.
Over the next 2.5 years I kept adding bits and pieces to it, working on other projects in between and over time I started realising I wanted to make something that spanned a bunch of styles and genres and didn’t play into the music PR game too much.
In my opinion at least, I’ve included some examples of the following: Downtempo, Ambient, House, Emo, Hauntology, Breaks, Jungle, Hip-Hop, Abstract, Musique concrete, Poetry…blah, blah givemyselfabigpatontheback. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions though. After some time of sitting on it, I realised it is about as done as it’ll ever be and it would be a nice way to start off the new/re-branded label CC polygum (formally Sensible Seelen).
