Antal Heitlager co-founded Amsterdam institution, Rush Hour almost 30 years ago. As a shop and label it has been a standard bearer for quality music ever since. Antal's DJ skills aren't to be sniffed at either, his travels and gigs provide inspiration for Rush Hour and create a virtuous circle of ideas, as he explained when we met recently....

Paul East: How are you? Nice to meet you.

Antal: Nice to meet you as well, Paul. I'm really good. I just came back from the United States. I just landed, so I'm a little jetlagged, but it's okay.

Paul East: Where were you?

Antal: I was in New York and in Philadelphia. I had a nice weekend. I played the Making Time Festival in Philadelphia. It's a good festival. And then I played the opening night of the new club in New York called Refuge. It's run by some classic people that have been doing stuff in New York for a long time and the sound system there is amazing.

Paul East: What did you play?

Antal: I played some house, a little bit of disco. I never know. I always prepare and then end up doing completely different things but that has to do with the audience, how they respond. You put your first record on and then from there on you just follow the audience, feeding off each other, so in that sense preparing is just like programming the brain. But what's going to happen on the night, I never really know. But I hope the whole thing went ok.

Paul East: Was there any track that went down really well?

Antal: The OJ's ‘I Love Music’, I have this Lafayette Afro Rock Band version that people don't seem to know. We were in Philadelphia, so I felt like playing that without it being cheesy, a kind of a tribute. People recognized it obviously, but at the same time they were like I don't know this version, and these are the nice things.

Paul East: I don't know that one either.

Antal: There's one pressing, a French one I think, that all of a sudden has a version of ‘I Love Music’ on it. Actually Tone Nimble in Chicago put me on to that. but yeah, these are these nice little finds.

Paul East: Did you get much time to look for records while you were there?

Antal: I always make sure I have time to look for records. Otherwise, it's missed opportunity. Let's put it like that. So, I go a few days before and a few days after. I went for six days, two days of gigs and then I have some days to just hang out. Especially in places like the States or Japan or whatever. When you go overseas, then I want to stay a bit longer and enjoy it a little bit.

Paul East: Did you find any good digs while you were there?

Antal: I don't look so much for new stuff, but I mean if it's there is there then I go for it. But in this case, looking for American music. Be it jazz music, gospel music, soul, funk, house, and especially the older stuff because that's what you find in the record stores.

Obviously, I have my own store here in Amsterdam specializing in new music. Plus new music is more digital, Bandcamp, all these places. But when I go into record stores, it's often older stuff. But if they have something recent and it's great, then I'll pick that up as well, of course.

Paul East: Are you looking for things to sell in the shop?

Antal: We sell old records. So yes, it's gigs and digs when I go out, I try to make use of my time and my first drive is to find stuff that I don't know. But I’m always looking for stuff that can go in the shop, So I'll take it along. That's basically how I roll. It's a little hustle.

Paul East: Do you always travel with an empty suitcase then?

Antal: I go empty to a country and I come full! For me, I love vinyl. I love digging for records. I like to play records. But in this day and age, a lot is digital and not available on vinyl. So why would I limit myself? I don't see a reason for that.

Last summer I played with Geology in New York and it was a vinyl only gig. And I do think it's a different thing, because it's a different technique and it's a different way of playing. Not everybody can do it. So it's nice to do this as well, I do these gigs where I play longer sets and I only bring the records. But then there's also clubs where it doesn't really make sense to start playing records, because it’s is not catered for it.

Paul East: Where do you enjoy playing most at the moment? Do you have a residency in Amsterdam at all or anything like that?

Antal: I don't really do a residency apart from three dates I now accepted in Naples in the basic club and they just announced that and that's kind of a residency for them because they don't bring the same DJ three times in a year and in my case now they do it, so they call that a residency. But in Amsterdam I have a few spots where I often play but it's physically not possible to do a residency because I play most of the time abroad. I try to go everywhere a few times a year. Be it London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, these sort of places I go maybe like three, four, five times a year, also New York.

Paul East: How do you split your time between the DJing, the label and the shop?

Antal: The good thing is at Rush Hour we have a really good team and I would say every position is occupied. So, I have my hands free in that case. But in that sense I'm like the baseline So the operation is running and I sometimes put a little bit more energy into a certain direction. That's how it works. But Rush Hour is 28 years old now. It runs in a different way now, compared to when you had to do everything yourself. That’s how it started in the early years. We did a lot of the stuff ourselves but wouldn't be healthy if that is still the case 30 years later. So how do I split my time? I have a really good team and that allows me to do the other stuff as well.

The whole DJing thing is an important part of what we are doing, because it gives me a reason to travel, meet other people. It means we have a lot of ideas that come back to Rush Hour. So, that works hand in hand I would say.

Paul East: 28 years is a long time, I'm sure it's grown and changed in lots of ways.

Antal: I mean, we were super young when we started. I was about 19, I think. And around that time, we also opened the store. What’s really changed is obviously the whole thing of music being digitized. All the options we have at the moment like listening to music on YouTube, Spotify, all the digital portals, shazaming music and finding out, what a certain song is. The whole distribution of music nowadays is completely different than when we started.

When we began it was literally only records/CDs and maybe radio. I think music also moved a bit slower, because when you bought a record then maybe the record was sold out then other people couldn't touch it until it was repressed but sometimes it wasn't repressed and then also the distribution obviously was super obscure. People couldn't go on Discogs to read about catalogues or stuff like that. Along the way that happened more and more. But I think that was quite a romantic period to discover things and finding out about artists. Things were also held back for you in certain record shops, they didn't want other people to have certain records. So, it was also a game. That's actually why we started traveling, because we felt like in each city they treated the whole thing a bit differently and then you would encounter different music and that's also how our distribution network grew. But, I think that's the biggest difference. Things were slower and you couldn't really discover it very easily. You discovered it slowly.

Paul East: Is there anywhere you've traveled recently would you say has kind of surprised you? Maybe the scene wasn't what you were expecting or club you played at or even records that you found?

Antal: I travel to certain spots more often, so it's not that the spots surprise me. But I do think it's surprising that after all those years, you can still really discover great music, that just never stops. And although sometimes it feels like you have reached something, then there's always something new. It never stops. It’s incredible and it's also worrying sometimes, because I feel like after all those years and then you still discover!

I just discovered a Johnny Hammond track, and I'm like, okay, I'm 30 years in and only now I am finding out about this track, it's just crazy.

Paul East: This feels like a good moment to ask you about the new compilation, because that scene, genre, that was new to me. How did you come across it?

Antal: I've been traveling to Japan since the early 2000s. Slowly but surely each time I came back, I started to get more into Japanese music and also being intrigued by it and then slowly but surely you start to discover about certain genres they might have. Light in the Attic, a few years ago did a compilation about environmental music, sort of Japanese ambient style music and then you have the city pop music which is coming more from funk and soul basically. It's a cleaner approach they have, and I've been digging into that.

Obviously there is Yellow Magic Orchestra from which Sakamoto and Hosono are probably the most known Japanese artists outside of Japan. They are often referred to as the Japanese Kraftwerk. Our crews knew them for the more electronic stuff they'd been doing that was also played in the Chicago house scene. ‘Firecracker’ that song from Yellow Magic Orchestra is probably the most known but then also Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence from Sakamoto…That's stuff that I've been following, but then every time with the digging you go deeper and deeper and people point out stuff start to realize that there is a certain sound coming from the 80s that has quite a technological feel to it.

It has this poppy feel but it also brings in that electronic element. Basically it started with Yellow Magic Orchestra and then going deeper. Constantly digging and discovering and finding new artists. Then there's a little bit more in that scene and then at some point you find a certain genre or a certain movement or a certain period in time and you can kind of catch these things under the same umbrella. The name techno is something that it was actually called, there in Japan, but previously I wasn't too familiar with the term itself.

It's just like you're opening a new jar and you start to discover. We thought we'd like to do it with local people because these people live it every day. Dubby is one, just like Chi Shimizu, who have been exporting or promoting Japanese music to the outside world for over a decade now, if not longer. We've been in contact for different things. So then at some point I said “hey do you want to get involved in doing a compilation around this theme” and he was up for it.

Paul East: How did you meet him?

Antal: Through digging. He had a shop online and he was selling mostly stuff via his website outside of Japan. So we were already in touch over the internet. But one day I was in Japan and I met up with him and we went digging together. Once he came to Amsterdam to sell some records at the same fair we were at, we shared a table, things like that. It's always organic. That's how I like it. I want to work with people in an organic way. So, it's never really designed. It's just like things happen and then I guess they happen for a reason.

Paul East: Did you meet or connect with any of the artists on the album as well?

Antal: Not necessarily on this album. This is a selection mostly coming from Dubby's hand and when we did selecting it and then having it trying to license it that's the part where you end up working with labels or record companies and through this situation then it's possible to eventually meet artists. So that's most of the time how it goes. Especially with this music from the 80s, there were often bigger record companies behind it. So, it's not always easy to go directly to the artist, because at the end of the day, the recordings are owned by record companies. That's much different compared to, for instance, house music because that was way more of a do-it-yourself culture. So often these labels were set up by the artists themselves.

That’s how it was with Soichi Terada which we released in 2015 it was basically just email to him direct and within half an hour there were a few gigs of music coming through WeTransfer! First there was communication like this and then later you meet each other. I mean, that's fantastic. That's really nice. He’s one of the friendliest people on the earth. It was funny because this compilation came together with my friend Hunee who suggested the idea. We were listening to his music and I reached out to him. He emailed back and the compilation was set up quite quickly.

And then he sent through this photo where he has a big smile in the photo. And we found that picture so iconic Then Orpheu, who used to do Red Light Records, he DJs now. He's from Amsterdam and he did the artwork. He just put this photo on the cover and in the beginning, I was a little bit like, that I probably could have done myself, but the fact that he put the photo on the cover was actually a brilliant move, because this is actually who this person really is. We were doing a Rush Hour tour in Japan, and we had one show in Kobe and the distributor there said “hey shall we bring Soichi for a live show?”. So we said yeah that's a great idea. Soichi did a live show and that's where we met for the first time and I had no idea how that would be, but seeing him perform and the joy he expresses and how happy he was and how sweet he is as a person and just the whole thing together and how people reacted on it was so overwhelming. I was like, “wow this is something special”. This guy is so special. Then our agency Octopus in Amsterdam, they booked him four shows. He did one in the Panorama Bar, then one on Concrete in Paris, Corsica Studios in London, and one in Amsterdam during the dance event. That kicked off whole new part of his career.

At the time that I spoke with him he was still doing game music, and he was not involved in the house music anymore but when he started touring he was received so well that immediately other places wanted to have shows from him. He's been touring since 2015 and still going strong.

Paul East: I think saw a video of him it was in Croatia this summer…

Antal: He's such a sweet person. It's fantastic. And there's no ego, nothing. It's just him and the music. He completely personifies it. And yeah, I think people feel that, that's why people love him and that's why he keeps on going.

Paul East: You've got the compilation that's coming out very soon…what's next?

Antal: We have a whole bunch of 12 inches coming up. We just released the Arp Frique album, which is a local artist with a half American, half Dutch gospel band. Ron Trent ‘Lift Off’ of course. Joe Clausell did a remix for Arp Frique on a song called ‘Save Your Soul’, that's about to be released. We have a release from Format, Orlando Voorn, a Dutch techno producer who was among the first to go to Detroit and work with Detroit artist in the late 80s. He lives in the States now though for a long time. We have a new record by Boo Williams coming up. New music from Gigi Testa from Naples…..

Paul East: So, not very not much then(!)

Antal: No, just a few things. And There's way more. Hu Vibrational, which is a bit of an ambientish album. I mean, that's what we do…! Work with people and release music. But the compilation, I'm very happy with how it came out and how the artwork too because when you do we do a compilation like this then you want to give it a face and it has to be with respect for where it's coming from but it also has to be our vision on it. We work with an artist named Johan from Denmark. He's been doing all of our artwork, but he really nailed this one. I hope people enjoy this and discover a bit more once you listen to it and you like it, then there's more to be discovered and maybe people want to do that themselves as well.

Paul East: I don’t think you've ever lost any of the quality, it’s never dropped, the focus and the passion for the music is just there. It's so obvious.

Antal: That's good to hear that you perceive it like that. I mean there's been so many moments where you can do it differently, but I don't think I could stand one day in something that I don't like to do. I wouldn't last, so there's only one way. How we want to do it. I feel we reached a certain critical mass and from now on we can just go with it.

Paul East: I don't think you need to prove anything to anybody.

Antal: That's what we will do!

Techno Kayo is available via Rush Hour on 20 October