The Portland Sound: Strategy

[April 22nd, 2009]

• Most treasured studio item: Farfisa Mini-Compact organ.
• Admired artists: Brian Eno, Can, Seefeel.
• Required listening: Strategy’s own Future Rock, remixes of the Blow, Starfucker, etc.

It’s not a stretch to say Paul Dickow really likes keyboards. The Portland electronic artist’s attic recording studio is a shrine to the synthetic; a tiny, 10-inch Lenovo laptop sits at the center of his workstation, and it’s surrounded on all sides by a mass of keys—KORG synths and modules, a Wurlitzer electric piano and a vintage Farfisa organ he bought for $200 in high school. In fact, Dickow is so dedicated to getting the right sound that he’s learning a craft few musicians ever tackle: building instruments himself.

“I’ve actually started to make my own equipment,” Dickow says, walking over to a small table covered with tools and wires. “You order a circuit board and you get maybe some chips. There’s the paperwork that tells you where to put stuff and you solder it in and hope that you don’t make any mistakes.”

The 32-year-old Dickow has made very few mistakes creating his own elastic, malleable electronic music for 10 years under the guise Strategy, but soldering is new. Sporting a blue Ben Sherman shirt and thin wire-frame glasses, he strains to avoid hitting his head on his home studio’s low ceiling as he searches his computer to play me cuts from his latest project. Dickow gets animated and visibly geeky when talking about his craft, cuing up samples of a few recent pieces (he’s taken a cappella versions of songs by the Beastie Boys and Erik B Rakim and created shifting, amorphous textures to put behind them) as he tries to find the remix he just completed for Starfucker’s “Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second.” Though Strategy released two of the decade’s best electronic records (Future Rock, a gorgeous amalgam of dub, Krautrock and dreamy pop; and last year’s ambient suite Music For Lamping), he’s better known for his remixes for artists like the Blow, the Juan MacLean and Stars as Eyes.

“I keep almost everything of the original or almost none of it,” Dickow says of his remixes. “Like on the Blow remix, I didn’t use any of the original sounds except the vocal. That was important to me—to completely start fresh. I think, generally, when people ask me for a remix, that’s what they have in mind.”

The odd thing about that request is that Strategy’s sound—both on his own records and in reinterpretations of other artists’ work—is difficult to pin down. Dickow has an incredibly eclectic musical palette; besides his main gig, he co-runs the Community Library label, DJs at Ground Kontrol and Holocene, and plays in the improv group Nudge. Though most clients come to him looking for a dance edit, his job is hardly as simple as adding beats to a rock song. Most of his remix work takes one vital element—a vocal melody or bass line, maybe—from the original piece, adding the Strategy stamp (“lots of spring reverb, real saturated space, not very minimal or clean”) and creating a whole new narrative from the rubble.

“A lot of times it’s easier to remix music I’m not attached to—it forces me to reserve my opinion for another time, work with the material in a way that works for me, and provide the artist with something they enjoy,” Dickow says. “It’s not really about whether I like it or not, but when I do like the music a lot I sometimes reach indecision because I don’t see any ways to improve it, or [worry] that I’m taking away the elements that I like about it.”

Walking back downstairs to his living room, Dickow steps around a mess of colored tubing (a track for his ferrets), and puts a CD on his stereo. Rifling through two huge shelves of vinyl, he skips albums by Miles Davis and Galaxie 500 before grabbing a few things he really digs. After being dormant for much of the past year, Community Library is gearing up for a reissue of the long-out-of-print early discography of San Francisco New Wave band the Units.

“This was punk music at the time, but for us now it relates to all these different things,” Dickow says, nearly blushing with enthusiasm. Hearing the band’s “High Pressure Days,” it’s clear why the project is so important to him: The Units used synthesizers in place of guitars.