Music
GEORGE FITZGERALD
TEXT BYLILY MOAYERI
George FitzGerald rubs his head vigorously. This is a vain
attempt to rustle up some coherency as FitzGerald is still foggy
after his Saturday DJ set at Brooklyn’s dance hotspot, Verboten,
two nights ago—a party that carried on until 1am on Sunday
for FitzGerald and friends. This is the last hurrah of his twoweek North American tour, which after a six-day break picks up
again for a month around Europe. He may be bleary-eyed, but
FitzGerald is in good spirits, with grins escaping his countenance
at regular intervals.
FitzGerald should be grinning. Things are going extremely
well for the British-born, German-based DJ/producer who has
made his way up the ranks of the international dance music
cognoscenti within a handful of years. Starting in the dubstep
and UK garage world with releases on Scuba’s tastemaker hub,
Hotflush Recordings, at the turn of the decade, FitzGerald
switched styles, leaning towards the 4/4 beat for his releases on
Will Saul and Fink’s experimental imprint, Aus Music. Throwing
a monthly Man Make Music party from 2003 to 2008 in trendy
East London, FitzGerald’s label of the same name grew out of
the event, and eventually became the only remnant of the legendary night. It was his sparkling Child EP on Aus and its moody
shuffler of a title track that transitioned FitzGerald into the upper
echelons of dance producers.
Right around this time he made his move to Berlin. FitzGerald
had lived there previously, working as a translator. (He studied German at university.) Like so many before him and many
since, that city’s famed den of dance music iniquity, Berghain,
had an impact on FitzGerald. His next release, Needs You EP on
Hypercolour, shows marked signs of dark sensuality.
“Berlin is where I got into house and techno,” says FitzGerald.
“But the city is so different from the place I moved to 10 years ago.
It was completely open. You could do whatever you wanted. It’s
still quite relaxed, much more chilled out than London, with
more space, and a lot cheaper.”
FitzGerald is changing right along with his surroundings. His
debut album, Fading Love—almost two years in the making—is
released on powerhouse independent Domino Records’ Double
Six imprint. Wholly written in Berlin, Fading Love is a beautiful,
considered piece of emotionally-driven electronic songs with
features from Boxed In and Lawrence Hart. Not one song track
from Fading Love would fit into FitzGerald’s driving DJ sets at
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a club—although they would sit nicely in the unmixed portion
of his two-hour monthly slot on the BBC’s Radio 1 Residency.
“It was quite a liberating thing to not make something strictly
for DJing,” says FitzGerald of Fading Love. “I had done all I
could do with straight up and down house and techno. It wasn’t
interesting for me anymore to go down that orthodox route. I
was starting to get a bit frustrated with how limited that felt.
Especially with an album, I wanted to do something less clubby
and superficial and with more depth.”
No fans have been sacrificed with the release of Fading Love.
In fact, FitzGerald’s crowd is happy to hear songs from the album
embedded into his club sets. FitzGerald, however, only feels
comfortable starting or ending a set with the original version
of the material on Fading ݙK