Charlie Sparks talks culture clashes, anime, and a new era of a techno

CHARLIE SPARKS HAS SHAPED A TECHNO IDENTITY THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO BOX IN. FROM DISCOVERING RAVE CULTURE LATER THAN MOST TO CRAFTING HIS EARLY TRACKS ON A LAPTOP IN HIS BEDROOM, HIS SOUND BECAME A COLLISION OF TRIAL AND ERROR, PLAYFUL POP FLIPS, AND DRIVING, HEAVY TECHNO THAT DOESN'T CHASE TRENDS. WITH HIS DEBUT ALBUM ON THE HORIZON, CHARTING THE HIGHS, LOWS, AND WILD MOMENTUM OF THE LAST THREE YEARS, CHARLIE IS STEPPING INTO A NEW CHAPTER.

IN THIS INTERVIEW FOR ANOMIE, HE OPENS UP ABOUT THE CULTURAL MIX THAT FORMED HIM, THE ANIME-FUELLED MINDSET THAT KEEPS HIM GOING, AND HOW HE’S STAYED GROUNDED WHILE THE SCENE AROUND HIM HAS TRANSFORMED AT BREAKNECK SPEED. FROM BEDROOM BEGINNINGS TO GLOBAL STAGES, THIS IS CHARLIE SPARKS FINDING HOME IN CREATIVITY, COMMUNITY, AND THE CHAOS HE THRIVES IN.

Sparks

ANOMIE: Hi Charlie. So, you grew up between London and Tokyo, two very different worlds. How do you think that mix shaped you and your sound?

CHARLIE: I think it has a huge impact just from the diversity of culture. I lived in England longer, but I feel more Japanese as a person. Which is great because of their fundamental beliefs, respect, way of life, that’s all really influenced me without me even noticing it. It’s all ingrained in me, so I'm grateful for that. Then I have the UK side, which is a bit more gritty, grimy. So it's a good mix.

ANOMIE: Whereabouts in London were you?

CHARLIE: Well, actually, it's not really gritty there. It's West London, as gritty as it gets *laughs*. It was nice; I had a nice upbringing. Music-wise, it was more pop that was around me. I didn't even know what DJing was until I was 18 and heard Calvin Harris on the radio. Then I started going out into London properly. You see the grittiness, the busyness. That's when I started to find rave, I found it quite late. I got into house and drum and bass around 18, and then discovered techno when I was 20. I think experiencing all these different genres and kinds of music has helped me with my sound. I have the elements from grime, I've done pop edits, I've not stuck to one sound. It's got a bit more of a mix; I think you can hear that. I mean, why not do something that's different? I used to get told off at the start of my career by these older DJs for making pop edits, because at the time, techno was techno. When I was producing, I was sort of thinking, “I like ‘Hollaback Girl’, I like ‘My Humps’, I like techno, so let's just mix it all together.” It worked. I heard from people, “You don't need to do this, techno needs to stay real,” and that's the exact reason why I do it, you can't tell someone what to do with music. There are just millions of genres now.

ANOMIE: It seems to have worked out pretty well for you! Growing up like that, it can be easy to feel like you sort of belong everywhere, but also nowhere. Do you relate to that at all?

CHARLIE: Right now, yeah. It's nice to belong and to have a home, but it's also nice to not be situated in one place. My home is where my friends are. If my friends or my mum come with me, then wherever I am, that's my home. That's how it is. Home is where the heart is, as cheesy as it sounds. It's less of a place now and more of the people around you.

ANOMIE: There's a really sweet clip of your mum supporting you at a show going around online, very cute. Not every parent understands what their kid does, especially when it's techno in a dark warehouse. How did they come around to understanding what you do?

CHARLIE: So I had done my degree, an architecture degree down in Bournemouth, and I turned around and decided, right, I'm going to give this my best shot. I'm going to give it a year or two and give it my all. If it doesn't work, I'll go back to architecture. I needed to give it a go. I loved football growing up; I played well, but I didn't have a passion for it. I liked playing it because I was good at it. Techno was the first true passion I felt. I just… I lived and breathed it. I didn’t want to wake up one day and be like, “I wish I'd just done it, I wish I'd given it a go.” I wanted no regrets, especially being young. I felt like I had my netting, you know, I have my degree, I've earned it. I’ve earned the risk. I lived in my family house and had my studio in my bedroom, which was just two speakers and a laptop. That’s where I made all my music. All they’d hear is doof, doof, doof, doof. My dad was saying to his colleague, “Should I be worried about Charlie? He's not doing architecture anymore, he's in his room. All I hear is doof, doof, doof. Should I say something?” His colleague was a bit younger and he was like, “He's fine. He's going to do well, I can see it. So just trust him.” It wasn't until they saw visual proof that they understood what was going on.

ANOMIE: The numbers?

CHARLIE: Not even numbers. It wasn't until they saw live footage of me in a crowd, on stage with people there, that they were like, “Oh wow, you should actually start taking this seriously.” They were supportive. They wanted me to do what I loved. They didn't understand where I was until they saw the visual proof… and my mum likes the partying *laughs*. Last time I was in Scotland, she came to Terminal V. They all loved her there. I was like, “Mum, please don't run around and go into the crowd because this is a bigger stage, it's not a club.” I play one song and see her down in the crowd with the fans, taking photos with the security guard. I just let her have fun, and then she's back at the hotel, passed out. She's done her bit, power nap next.

ANOMIE: She sounds like a trooper. With that, you're constantly on the move, a lot of travelling and new places. Do you find that that feeds your creativity or it drains it a bit more?

CHARLIE: Funnily enough, I get a lot of my creativity from Anime. While I’m travelling, I get to just watch Anime.

ANOMIE: Which anime?

CHARLIE: One Piece is the best. Luffy’s mindset in One Piece… a lot of people would say it's childish, but it's actually so deep. The character building, the development, the failures, the journey, it's so inspirational. I give so much credit to One Piece just for the mindset and drive. So it's quite inspiring travelling because I’ve got time for that. I guess it feeds the creativity when you get back to the studio. When you're out experiencing this, experiencing life, and then these things that you might not know have an impact end up having an impact in the studio.

ANOMIE: Obviously you've dropped quite a few records this year, including a recent drop with Armada Music. There's also been a lot of talk about music potentially coming next year, potentially a debut album… Any hints for what kind of sound we can expect?

CHARLIE: Yeah absolutely, the whole album is basically the journey of me over the last three years, the battles, the happiness, the sadness, how the sound has changed, where I came from. It's a variety of tracks. Honestly, I don't know if it's the typical hard sound you hear now… it's not the commercial hard, hard sound. At the moment, I think a lot of the techno scene is not actually techno, it's a bit more hardcore, industrial, hardstyle, bounce. The album is the feeling I only get from when I actually listen to techno. It embodies that but in a new sound. There are also some bouncy ones and fun ones as well, there's a bit of everything.

ANOMIE: Are you excited to put that out?

CHARLIE: I'm very excited. Now I'm back to producing, I was a producer first, and then when COVID finished, I went straight into the deep end of DJing. I joined Apelago, had three shows, then five shows the next month, then ten shows the next. I wasn’t a DJ before; I was solely producing. I was still learning what sound I wanted DJ-wise and I was focused on that, I didn't have time to produce anymore, so for two years I didn't even open my software. The gap was good because I came back with a completely different sound, so much so that I had to learn how to produce again because it was so different. I was doing tutorials, learning again, and now I'm back to actually being able to make what I want. Just going down the rabbit hole and producing, I'm happy. I’m excited to get it out and into the world.

ANOMIE: Do you still enjoy the experimental trial and error side of producing, or has it become a bit more instinctive?

CHARLIE: I've always gone off trial and error because I'm self-taught, I didn't have any music theory. I was constantly making music, and every time I made something it would get a tiny bit better, and over time it became good. As long as you try over time, with trial and error, it will get better. Those are the moments when you actually create something you're not expecting, something you do by accident. You hit a keyboard and something happens and you're like, oh, that actually sounds pretty good. That's the beauty of it: if you're not trying to make something perfect, you get the journey of different parts and possibilities, something a bit more special. The main thing is you don't need to make the perfect thing straight away. You can’t get caught up trying to make it perfect; otherwise you're never going to make anything. Yeah, you can be stuck in a loop for hours and it's suddenly six in the morning and you're like, what am I doing?

ANOMIE: As you said, the techno scene has obviously changed quite a bit. Do you still feel like you're part of that wave or do you feel like you're starting to pull in a bit of a different direction?

CHARLIE: I've always been labeled as hard techno, which has become quite commercial now, and I’m happy about that. I get feedback from fans saying things like, “It's so nice you don’t play what everyone else plays; you’ve stuck to your own sound.” I really have stuck to my sound, but I don’t mind being put in that bracket, that’s what’s popping off at the moment. Especially here in the Netherlands, it’s getting really hard now. I feel like the album is harder techno, not hard techno, it’s techno that’s harder.

ANOMIE: Obviously, ‘Welcome to London’ was a very big track. Did you ever feel pressure after that came out to follow up? Or did you feel a bit more freedom to mess around with your music?

CHARLIE: ‘Welcome to London’ is four years old now, its fourth birthday was yesterday. I did think about this… people asked me if I felt like I needed to make a track that's better, but I think that’s when it can go wrong. If I was to tell myself that my task is to make a track better than ‘Welcome to London’, then that's more like business and it's not art. When I'm making music, I'm not thinking okay, this one needs to be better than the last. This one just needs to be how I want it to sound at the moment. If I'm going for a certain type of emotion, I want to embody that as much as possible. If the people like it, great. I don't think there should be pressure in having to try and make something better than your last, then you're just limiting yourself. As you go along in your career, it does change from that starting point when you're this producer just finished uni, producing just for fun. There's tiny sacrifices you have to make, but you just have to stick to your own sound. Sometimes your “worst” creation can be your best to someone.

ANOMIE: How has your relationship to validation evolved over time? When you pour yourself into a track you’re genuinely proud of but it doesn’t land the same numbers as something you made faster or felt less connected to, how does that shape the way you think about your music?

CHARLIE: Obviously you want people to hear it and like it, but if I'm happy with it, that's what matters. Even the minority of people that actually listen to it, I appreciate them. I'm not worried about why the other people aren't; I'm grateful for the listeners because they're the ones actually supporting it, so you should give them love instead of being like, “Why don't they like it?” I'd rather show appreciation to the people that do like it. ‘Welcome to London’ was out for ages and no one had really heard it, and then all of a sudden there are millions of listeners, so there's no need to worry about that. It doesn't have to get a million views in the first month for it to be a great track. Validation is fine to want, but not to need. The worst thing you can do is make music to get someone's approval.

ANOMIE: You launched your own company Elektra. How has it felt to build something that’s entirely yours, from the sound, to the visuals, to the meaning behind it all? CHARLIE: It's amazing. I've always wanted to do it since the start of my career, but I knew that I had to wait for the right time and place. We slowly got all the foundations ready for it to come out, and then when you're able to finally bring something like this out, it’s so fulfilling. The community is great, and I can give other fantastic artists opportunities. It’s about creating a family and sharing the experience, that’s the main thing for me. It’s an amazing industry when it’s good, and it’s at its best when you experience it with people. You can go to the coolest places, but if you have no friends to go with, what the fuck’s the point? Sharing it with people you trust and who actually care about you is what makes it beautiful.

ANOMIE: It’s lovely that, as someone who’s been successful, you want to bring up smaller artists and give them opportunities as well.

CHARLIE: Absolutely. When I was growing up in West London, I'm pretty sure no one even knew what techno was there. My best friend and I, we're so lucky we found it. We had to really go on this journey and find ourselves... When I started to produce and DJ, I didn't know anyone who did it.

ANOMIE: With everything moving so fast, what keeps you grounded?

CHARLIE: My team, my family, and anime. My family travel with me as well sometimes, I always take my mum abroad, it’s nice to give back just a bit of what they gave me growing up

ANOMIE: You’ve played in Amsterdam quite a few times now, did you come here much before you started playing sets?

CHARLIE: So many times, I really love it here. I used to come with friends to smoke, and... God *laughs*. I once ended up dropping my phone in a fountain near the centre and I had to carry it around in a bag of rice all day round the city to dry it out. To the outside world it must've looked like I’d lost a very unfortunate bet or something, as there’s a half Japanese guy carrying a bag of rice all day.

ANOMIE: That is unfortunate. The Dutch music scene is a bit of a melting pot; it’s a bit trance-y, groove-y, hard, do you feel at home in that mix?

CHARLIE: Yeah I do, I actually came for shows before COVID, that was the real rave scene. It was the techno that I fell in love with… I was like “I need to move here”. Corona hit and there was no point in me moving when I could stay home and focus on producing. Awakenings and Welcome to the Future is just so good though, it's sick.

ANOMIE: Lastly, you're playing Unreal & Free Your Mind tonight at ADE, what can we expect?

CHARLIE: Some bouncy, fun, hard, and happy chaos, we’re gonna bring a good show. I’m excited, it's good to be back.

@CHARLIESPARKSMUSIC