Clairvoyant Dimensions arrived recently, the latest album from Jordan GCZ and saxophonist Jeff Hollie.
The record features Hollie’s horn winding through processed haze and a standout track, “Duct Tape Blues,” which relies on a delicate pulsing shimmer generated by a specific rack unit rather than a standard synth patch.
David Abravanel
Jordan Czamanski has long been difficult to categorise. As one half of JuJu & Jordash with Gal Aner, he helped define a loose, hardware-driven strain of dance music that became synonymous with the Dekmantel party and label. Expanding the circle to include Magic Mountain High and his solo work reveals a consistent preference for imperfect machines over pre-planned setups.
The new record was recorded in Amsterdam before Jordan moved to Toronto. He uses a method established over most of his career: hook up the synths, press record, and jam. What survives the edit is what was alive in the room.
We caught Jordan at home in Toronto a day after the release, with his dog Herschel making a cameo. We discussed his all-hardware live rig, the airlines that destroyed it, the vintage-gear market, and why he trusts real converters over plugins. He also talked about a sober record that pulled him back to MIDI and the saxophone “heresy” that used to get him mocked backstage.
David: You were in Amsterdam for a long time before Toronto. What prompted the move and the change of pace?
Jordan: I was based in Amsterdam for like 20 years, then the pandemic happened, and I realized I was done with touring and done with that whole scene, for now. Touring for 15 years was kind of a nightmare for me!
You’re a keyboard player originally, and a lot of your live work meant hauling some fairly serious keyboards around. What were you traveling with?
It changed over the years, but basically my rig evolved into a well-protected rack that had an Oberheim Matrix 1000, [Yamaha] DX11, a [Korg] Wavestation rack unit, a couple [Arturia] Keysteps, and a [Roland] TR-8S and TR-606.
The DX11 isn’t the usual Yamaha FM synth you see most often.
It’s like the best of both worlds. I prefer the DX7, but it’s very heavy. The DX11 has four operators, and they were very cheap, so I had three. Each time an airline destroyed one, I could just bring a different one on the next tour – that happened twice [laughs].
And you mainly played with hardware?
Yeah. After a certain point, I guess from 2007, I went all hardware, because just the way we worked, our live shows were all improvised. It made every show interesting, but every gig was a real challenge and a bit of a headache. It would take us around two hours to set up!
The clubs usually supplied us with something as well, a [Roland] SH-101 or a [Roland TR-]909, whatever they could get.
The clubs would actually source that vintage gear for you? Seems like another era.
We had a lot of gear, and we had a lot of nice promoters who went through a lot of effort to find that gear. This was before Behringer started with the clones, so if I needed something like a monophonic synth with a trigger input and an internal sequencer that I could sync to my 606, we needed to use an SH-101. We didn’t have a laptop, and the Keystep didn’t exist back then.
The SH-101 has a great internal sequencer. Still to this day, it’s the most fun kind of synth to jam with, because of that sequencer.
That gear was cheap and uncool then; now it’s collector money. A friend of mine is thinking of selling his 909 because it’ll fetch seven or eight grand, enough to get a TR-1000 and much more. The CS-80 is over 50 grand at this point!
That is…that is so fucking crazy. I don’t think I have any big-ticket synths like that, though I don’t know – I don’t check anymore. The Juno 60 never got to crazy prices, right?
Depends on what you’d call crazy [opens up Reverb and sees that the floor price for a Juno 60 appears to be $2,500]
I bought mine for 600 bucks, so I was lucky. I love that synth.
You’ve also got a CS-30, which is a much weirder, more overlooked Yamaha.
Oh, I adore it, but it’s not at the level of the CS-60 or CS-80. It’s monophonic. It has an internal eight-step sequencer, with knobs. I love that synth, and somehow it’s not as popular now.
You mentioned the SH-101 as one of your favorites earlier. Do you still have one now?
I borrowed an SH-101 for about 10 years, and had it in my Amsterdam studio. When I moved to Toronto, I had to give it back, so I got the Behringer clone [MS-101], and I never use it.
If you compare, even pressing one note on the Behringer vs. one note on the 101, it sound similar. But when you record it and work with it, it just…does not have that magic. Technically I don’t know what it is – they’re both analog, but something just doesn’t click.
You’re a big proponent of old digital synths, too.
I’m a huge fan of digital synths from the 80s and early 90s. As much as people praise software emulations of the DX series of the Casio CZ synths, there’s no real software comparison.
I don’t think it’s the chips – it really is the convertors, the digital-to-analog conversion. The outputs just sound so much better than just working in the box. Technically it should be possible to emulate a digital synth perfectly.
Do you use software synths when you’re working out ideas?
I compose a lot now, and when I want to sketch ideas, I don’t necessarily want to start printing everything to audio early on, I want to keep it in the MIDI realm, so I use a really good DX7 emulator plugin to write sketches.
Yes! I’ll program a sound on Dexed, and then when I compare the audio output there to what I get from loading the SYSEX patch on the hardware DX7, I can hear it. I’m sure if you’re not a synth nerd you wouldn’t notice it [laughs], but to me it so painfully noticeable.
When we toured, Gal brought along a [Korg] Volca FM, another cool little synth. I like it, it really cuts through.
Terrence Dixon & Jordan GCZ – “Space Chime”
You’d mentioned improvisation, and I wanted to come back to it. The album you did with Terrence Dixon was basically recorded live in the studio, right?
Every album I’ve ever recorded in my life, all jams.
So how does that process work from jams to finished tracks?
I set up the computer like a multi-track tape, basically hook up all the synths and drum machines I want to have on a separate channel, press record, jam for like half an hour — or with David Moufang, it’s usually like an hour — then just listen back to where the good bits are, chop them, and there’s an album. I also spend a lot of time mixing, but rarely are there any overdubs. If it’s not there in the moment, it doesn’t really end up on the record.
Is that true of your solo material too?
Most of it. I did an album of non-dance music about a year ago on Quiet Details, Hope isn’t a Four Letter Word. I MIDI’d up my studio before I did that. Since the 90s, I’d shunned MIDI – “I’m recording audio, fuck it, I hate MIDI, it annoys me.” But for this album I thought, “I have all these digital synths. Why don’t I just sync things for once, and then I can spend more time on each part?”
Jordan GCZ – Hope isn’t a Four Letter Word. Dig those digital synths!
That’s also the only sober album I’d done. I took a year off of weed; I’ve been a huge stoner my whole life [laughs]. I’d had this weird sore on the roof of my mouth, and I thought I’d killed myself from smoking. I went cold turkey – no tobacco, no weed. It turned out to be absolutely nothing, but that forced me to quit smoking completely. I think it jolted my creativity, so I recorded the album differently, spent more time on each track.
I started thinking, before I went to bed at night, “what does that track need?” It’s something I hadn’t done since childhood, when I was recording with a four-track tape machine. I’m doing composing for film most of the time now, which forces me to be more thoughtful. I can’t rely on improvisation alone.
How did you come to meet Jeff Hollie? He’s also based in Amsterdam, yeah?
20 years ago, I think it was when Gal was working as a live sound guy, he just met him through that live squat show circuit or something. Jeff played actually on Juju & Jordash’s first album.
We stayed in touch, and over the years he played some live shows with us in Amsterdam, at early manifestations of the Dekmantel gigs. We loved playing with him. He’s not necessarily a jazz guy, more of a funk guy, very open-minded. He played in a lot of interesting bands, like he was in a metal band in LA in the 80s.
He was in Burning Sensations — they did that Jonathan Richman cover on the Repo Man soundtrack.
Yeah! I remember that blew me away when I found out who he played with.
I guess he just came over to the studio, probably back in 2018 or 2019, and we recorded some jams, and then had a couple gigs. I always enjoyed playing non-dance music gigs, so I don’t really remember the timeline exactly. Right before the pandemic we kind of had an actual group and played a string of four or so gigs. The night the pandemic restrictions started was the last time we played live together.
And the record’s release got derailed along the way?
Clairvoyant Dimensions was supposed to be released on a different
