Helming seminal record shop Superior Elevation for time as well as the man behind House of Spirits, Tom Noble knows music. We caught up on a sunny afternoon from his base in New York to talk records.

Paul East: Looks nice where you are.

Tom Noble: Yeah, it's pretty good, surprisingly warm right now. I'm liking it. Are you in London?

Paul East: Sorry, it's a British thing. I have to ask you about the weather. I’m in Manchester.

Tom Noble: Manchester, isn't it eternally raining there?

Paul East: Yeah, it's rained all day, which is pretty standard, it's easier to say when it doesn't rather than when it does.

Tom Noble: I was there playing a show one time, and it was the first day the sun had come out and they shut down the whole of downtown. Everywhere was like, "No, we’re putting up barricades. We’re just going to walk around and get drunk. Everything's shut down today". Love that.

Paul East: When was that? Do you remember?

Tom Noble: I do. That was in spring of 2018. It was the anniversary of my shop. So, it was Record Store Day 2018.

Paul East: How long have you had the shop for then?

Tom Noble: I mean, we've had this shop in New York since 2015 and it's like it went to 2021 and then it got flooded and we moved to this location that we're at now, but I mean I've been doing this since 2000/ 2001. We started with a place called Lotus Land Records in Milwaukee, me and my brother and that was a long time ago, but it was still kind of the same thing. We were just record diggers at that time. You could still sell CDs and stuff. We were really trying to push just all of our interests on people, that was a long time ago.

Remember the Ethiopiques? No one knew what those were. Soul Jazz Records was killing it with the 100% dynamite compilations and that was paying our rent. We would sell those. They would sell, they had the best album cover artwork and just everyone was like ‘buy me’!

Paul East: Yeah, I remember when they came out, were You just selling new stuff then or you picking up collections as well or both?

Tom Noble: Yeah, we had old stuff and then we would have our little new stuff selection. We were broke. Our rent was $250 a month or something. We all had jobs still. We all worked at crappy places, like coffee shops and delivered pizza. But then right around that time, I met Dante Carfagna in Chicago through a British magazine which was called Big Daddy.

Paul East: I remember that one.

Tom Noble: Well, they wrote an interview with this guy Dante from Chicago, and we're like how the hell do we not know this guy? Why are we hearing about a guy from Chicago in a magazine from Nottingham? this is weird because again, globalisation. I met Dante and it was just like my god, this is how you sell records! This is how you dig! Everything else before this was just bullshit, he gave up the goods on how to really find records.

At the same time, we were kind of starting to learn about these other tastes around the world. Boogie was popular in England and France, a couple hardcore collectors in Japan and Germany, and stuff like those scenes really only happened in UK and then France it seemed. We would take that stuff and normally throw it away. We just give it away because no one cared about it. But then we started learning about these global markets, like northern soul too. We knew about independent music, because my mom used to manage a local soul musician, Harvey Scales, so we knew about his records. We would look for local Milwaukee 45s and then we just became obsessed with independent music.

Paul East: Where did you pick that stuff up from then?

Tom Noble: We’d smoke weed, watch a full exploitation movie and then just go into the ghetto at 10AM because I didn't want the gangsters to be awake! I'm like, if you go early enough, you can go to any bad neighborhood and go digging around and then you would find rare stuff. You just have to keep your eye out for independent labels, things that say Milwaukee. Then we would just go on the phone book and just call them up and just get copies of their records. And then you'd buy a bunch of their records. Their record collection would have 10 other local records in it that you've never seen before.

But, I mean, what Dante was doing back in those days, and he didn't want anyone to know this, is that he would literally just go to a library in a small town that had a black population, and he would say, "Give me the entertainment magazines. Give me the black made publications". Because there's always two or three small time, real skinny publications from the black community and he would be like, I want 1968 through to 1976, all these papers. And then he would microfiche print out the entertainment section for all those places.

He’d write down the name of every single band, every single band member, every single label, every single label owner, every record store, every single thing he saw in the book, and then just exhaust every name on the list until he had every record from every single person in every town! And this was in ’99. He knew before everyone else knew.

Egon too was kind of like that. Egon stumbled onto some very rare stuff when he was in college, and it turned into the Funky 16 Corners. Then Jason Perlmutter did the same thing in North Carolina, and it turned into Carolina Soul. Gerald Jazzman was deputising people. He was giving him money to put together compilations for him. Dante had Gerald's credit card when I met him. He's like, "Yeah, if I find a huge record collection, I'll just buy it with Gerald’s card and then we split it". He did that with Shadow, too. I mean that's why the Numero group is so good, because it's really just all Dante's collection and his digging habits and his awareness of what was important about music. What stuff you should not leave, even if it's cheap as hell, don't sell it, hold on to it.

Paul East: It still blows my mind that stuff's getting found, even now.

Tom Noble: Honestly, it's less and less. And all these eBay records are just like, they're okay, I mean, they're just okay. They're super rare, but they're just okay. They're songs, not really great dance floor tunes. I mean honestly, I think the majority of the work has been done. It's just like now we're just filling in the gaps with and then trends change. So, 10 years ago no one cared about late 80’s stuff and now people are starting to care more about it.

Some of the records I used to source from artists and sell, used to be $75 records that I would have to push on people really hard. Get this it's really good, and now it's like $2,000. Also, people who are like my age, I'm 48, some of these people have really good money right now. And the people who are like 10 years younger than me that just work for Apple and they're obsessed with the same stuff that maybe some of me and my friends put into motion taste-wise over the years. That electro soul or digital drum machine soul kind of music that me and Dante and people like that, we've been up on that stuff forever and we've always thought it was really cool, but now that stuff is three or four thousand. There's new discoveries on that level. But my brother's obsessed with that kind of stuff. He still to this day wants to find the craziest, hardest to find shit. There's a little bit of stuff that's really good, that no one knows about, but it's tiny,

Paul East: Where does he go looking for that?

Tom Noble: I think nowadays he just knows about it, and he'll just wait for people to be like, I have a copy of this for sale. Or he'll see he'll see it on eBay and hit them up. He just bought a copy of ‘Mellow Madness’ for $3,000 but that's I think to a certain degree my brother just wants to keep his money in records, like a kind of an investment. But that won't really return that high, but he'll at least be able to have these great records and when he wants to sell them, he knows they'll have gone up maybe a couple hundred bucks or something.

Paul East: But would you only ever buy something that you like though? Or will you get something just for an investment?

Tom Noble: I mean, sometimes I go out digging, I come back, and I have a really great record in my hand. I'm like, "there's one copy on Discogs and it's like $200 and I'm like, "This record's dope and no one knows it. I'm going to buy that and just wait." Sometimes you're like, "This is really cool and it's really weird and people aren't getting this right now, but there's 10 copies of I'm just going to buy them all." So sometimes. I used to do more stuff like that, but now I live in New York, so the past 12 years, I really haven't much time to think about stuff like that. Because it's good here, it's too good to worry about one thing.

I mean everywhere here you just get stupid records all the time. That's how in a weird way, as myself, as an artist, a digger, as a DJ, I kind of feel like sometimes I'm not as dialed in as some of the people I know. For instance, Danilo Plessow is an awesome disco DJ. He’s just focused on his kind of stuff because he goes out and DJ’s all the time, so doesn't have time to dig. Just focusses on the stuff that he loves the most and just nails it one after the next. Whereas me, I'm more like I go out to 16 record collections a week and I get all these random really cool things from all over the place and I don't really have to sit around and be like, I'm going to wait for this one to come up and buy it. I'm going to buy that, I just get so much cool stuff that I end up like I'm satiated. I don't need to sit there on Discogs and buy stuff that I already know.

I do that sometimes; I just got this huge house record collection and everything I got for $1 or $2 a piece. I'm going to buy this $200 house record that I want, know what I mean? I think I've earned a $300 record collection today or something! I'll do stuff like that now and then, I desperately want it, and I'm like fuck it! But for the most part, I've been relaxing on DJ gigs anyway. So, nowadays I'm more into really good albums, start to end good. What I call white people dance music which is new beat EBM that kind of stuff just like Euro funk. Bands with drum machine kind of stuff, like sleazy euro trash that's fun. Your friends in Manchester definitely like it too - Red Laser guys. We all love that kind of stupid funny shit that's just sometimes so good.

I think I'm just gravitating towards European stuff because I'm just like I didn't ever have a chance to hear it and even five pound records are just like killer, this is so good, greasy disco. It just doesn't even need to edit. It's just high energy good stuff. I've kind of lowered my standards over the years. I started out with only $2,000 disco grails that Zaf has literally been calling me about ever since I was 18 years old! Just trying to talk me down on prices. But basically by 2005, I had every rare disco record you could possibly think of, the good ones all the expensive hard to find ones. I either knew them well or had them. Now it's more like I just want a three crappy Euro 45s by someone random named Catherine or something. That's like what I'm having the most fun with now.

Paul East: Sounds like it’s come full circle, you started off with no money buying what you could afford and now you’re back picking up the stuff no-one wants?

Tom Noble: You know what I was? I was like that. How I used to consider myself back in the day, because there was not very much information on the internet. We have this expression in America, ‘Captain Save a hoe’, which is, I guess you can kind of figure out what it means. But it's like, there's this really good underground record from Arkansas that nobody has, and it's crazy sick ass disco, but it has this really bad section in it. So, I'm to make the edit. I'm going to save this under underappreciated really cool disco morsel.

Then, I'm sitting here making all these edits and stuff out of these really fucked up songs that have bad mixes and I'm like "here's my disco edits!" Then my friend Kon would be like, "Here's mine." And the shit bangs 10 times harder than mine. I'm just like, "Jesus Christ." and he's always, "Dude, you're wasting your time. just make the shit sound good out the gate. Start with just editing major label songs, or whatever".

Paul East: You might have heard of it, but I've just made it a little bit better for you….,

Tom Noble: Yeah, and it's playing off people's general lack of education. I didn't know there was music before Daft Punk and stuff like that. I just went back to caring about the Dantes and the Shadows, let's get the weirdest shit we could find and blow people's minds. We started that record label, Lotus Land and that had some rare stuff on it. I was just trying to be smart. We're talking to all these people who made these disco and modern soul records that are thousand dollars each to buy. Everyone's a funk person right now but I know they're going to get sick of that shit in two years and then everyone's going to go into Boogie.

Paul East: Was that when you were in LA then?

Tom Noble: It was disco then. We said let's just start the label now because we know it's going to work. We were actually a little bit ahead of the curve. We started that in 2003. One of the first things I did was meet up with Kenny Dope in LA to give him the master tapes of this record called Family of Eve. A disco track. Because he loved that song and word got around to him that we had the tapes to it. I went there and met him at Marcus Wyatt's and I gave him a tape and there was only a few people that cared about disco then. Kenny Dope, Dimitri from Paris, Alex Barck, there were less than 20 people around the world that actually cared about these expensive hard to find disco records, and no one was really doing stuff with them. That was kind of the beginning of that. Then that whole thing just took over via DFA. DFA for disco and Dam Funk for Boogie. But then by 2008, those two whole things were going pretty hard.

Paul East: Was that what made you move to New York then, from LA?

Tom Noble: I mean I was at a gas station in Compton in LA and I had a $1,500 Bluenote jazz record in my hands. It's a J.R. Monterose, like a kind of like Bill Evansy Bluenote guy. It's a super expensive record and I was filling up my tank of gas with one hand because they're smart enough there to have the thing that actually holds the gas thing in place. I was filling up my $80 tank of gas that I would do once a week, and I'm looking at this Bluenote Jazz record. I just see the address on the bottom. Lennox Avenue, New York. And I'm just like, ‘what am I doing out here?’. A bunch of these beat up shitty electro records in LA and bad Mexican records and just nothing. No dance 12 inches, no disco, shit 45s...So, I'm just going to go there. Let's go. Nothing's ever going to change in LA. I may as well go to New York and shake it up a little bit. And I mean, God damn! Was I right! It was almost like you look at your friends as they betrayed you afterwards. It’s been this good here forever and no one's ever talked about it.

For instance, case in point, in five years of buying collections in Los Angeles, I found I don't know maybe a hundred good reggae records and in one afternoon before I even had advertised or anything, I literally just talked to some Jamaican cab driver and I gave him my card. I'm like, "Give me a call if you ever want to sell." He's like, "Never." Next day he calls me. He's like, "Meet me in the corner. I got a couple boxes for you”. I'm like, "All right, I’ll go”.

I'm used to going through a crate and pulling out three or four records that I want. I took out three or four records I didn't want and bought everything else. Cornell Campbell, Sister Nancy LPs. You're just like, "What the fuck?" Upsetters, 12 inches… I bought a jazz collection three months after moving to New York that I sold for $100,000 and I bought it for $4,000. It was just like I mean I've never seen that ever again. That was just some purely gift from God shit. So, you moved to New York, But that was just unheard of in LA. Just never happened and it's just so much more fun because you go to everyone's house. I thought everybody was going to have less records in New York because of the space in their houses but it's completely wrong. Everybody had 10 crates of records in their house, right? LA would be maybe a hundred. I got in the first week, I got, I don't know, three or four copies of every ESG record, three or four copies of the Liquid Liquid record. Every single house that has Disco 12 inches has two copies of Chemise, ‘She Can't Love You’ in it.

Every house would have ‘Mystery of Love’ by Mr. Fingers. Every house would have 10 Nu Groove 12’s, just crazy shit like that. Then the Jamaican collections, we're talking 10,000 records, all 45s. Everything you're pulling out is a cool rock steady. There's endless amounts of the not so good dance hall stuff, too. But I'm even developing an ear and eye for that now, too. I can find the good sound system dance hall ones versus the $2 ones that are just dime a dozen on a rhythm kind of thing. I got into records through Jamaican music, but I wasn't deep. It's kind of hard to be deep in that.

Paul East: So, what were you listening to when you were growing up

Tom Noble: When I first got into music, we had MTV, so we liked all the coolest videos. Songs like Pretenders, Clash, Rolling Stones. But then 80s Rolling Stones, then my first thing I got into was probably skate rock like Suicidal Tendencies and then as I got a little bit older I got more into Metallica, Iron Maiden I loved and then I went straight from metal into Two Tone. Just overnight. During that time my brother was in a pretty good ska band. Someone gave us The Specials Live CD, singles collection, or something like that. I was just like “My God!” ‘Message to you Rudy’ all this…I think I just always liked melodies and catchy songs and a little bit of punkiness.

Then Madness, the English beat. I just went crazy, I was like, "This is the best s*** in the world." Then I started listening to the Skatalites, the Wailers,…the 60s stuff. I was trying to buy Bob Marley ‘Legend’ and I bought this bootleg compilation called ‘The Legend of Bob Marley’ or something and it was just like every sick Wailer song ever made. It was 10 times better than getting ‘Legend’, but I didn't know that. Eventually I started liking that stuff more. So, I got really into rock steady vocal harmonies around that time I was in bands and stuff. We got into mod culture really hard. We got into garage bands in general. I started going to Brazil…

Then I started getting into Samba and Samba rock. Like the stuff that was like Tim Maia funk records. Then I got obsessed with French pop, orchestral pop. Obsessed with all the psychedelic Brazilian psych in general. Really love soundtracks through everything. always had Lalo Shifrin records, every weird exotica, lots of Jamaican records. really into dub. But yeah, I was never into dance music. That was the one thing I was never into. Where I grew up, I was one hour away from Chicago! But, we had Happy Hardcore.

Paul East: In Milwaukee?

Tom Noble: We had actually just got one of their records in some collection a couple hours ago. Drop Bass Network, kind of like Gabba basically from the Midwest. So even though I was sitting one hour away from the sickest house music that I know, I would have liked it if I heard ‘Can You Feel It’ by Mr. Fingers back in those days, I would have liked it. But I was hearing nosebleed stuff like that. I just didn't listen to it for 20 years, literally just didn't really start buying dance records until I moved here. So go from 1995 to 2013. That's how long it took me to recover from my happy hardcore experience.

Paul East: Post hardcore stress syndrome or…something like that.

Tom Noble: PT EDM SD!

Paul East: So, when did the DJing come into it then? Were you doing that all the time or…

Tom Noble: Me and my brother were DJing around this time, the late 90s, early 2000s. We started a mod night, which is basically a blanket for us to play all the influences we were playing Latin Bugaloo, Harmless compilations. We’d be playing Kinks, we'd be playing Joy Trunk, we'd be playing Trio Mocoto, we'd be playing Tim Maia, we'd be playing Pizzicato 5, we were playing Stereolab, everything under the guideline that it was mod, which it kind of was.

Our friends who loved us were like “you need to do what DJ Shadow is doing. The problem with you guys is you play everything. You need to just play funk 45s. You guys have all those records, just play the funk, just play soul, don't play other stuff, just play that”. We did that for a while and it did take off, it did really well and that's kind of like where my brother stopped. But I was finding all this disco and I had the store and trying to find things to resell. I started getting these want lists from people around the world and they would be like Starvue, Rumple Stiltskin LPs, all this shit. I want all these rare records from America, and I wanted the mod sleazy soundtracks the stuff that the European people had, but then I started getting the records and I was listening to them and I was like, “dude this is so sick!”.

I just got into modern soul and disco and I didn't ever trade. I just changed my direction musically. ‘Upward Bound’ by Starvue is probably the record that really changed me. I was like, "Holy shit." Then I started getting all those collections in the ‘hood, and I've been finding sealed crazy ass 12 inches. Just getting into disco funk and modern soul and boogie and I had so much of the cool shit at that time, but there was nowhere to play it. It's 2001-2003, Milwaukee, Midwest. It was like trying to play whatever the futurist trend in London is right now in the middle of Luton.

That's kind of what was leading me towards. People that know me as an artist usually know me starting from the disco or boogie era on up. I found the James Mason record for 75 cents next door to my house, sealed. So, I was bringing that out to gigs, for two people in Milwaukee. And then I was getting some of the cool stuff from collections that to me looked rare, but it really wasn't. ‘Que Tal America’ and ‘Get Another Love’ by Chantel Curtis and starting to piece together these disco can kind of kick ass. When it's good, it's kind of the best. And then, my friends started telling me about disco edits and how these people were doing disco edits.

And again, this is 2003 and so I started learning Ableton software and Pro Tools and figuring out how to do edits. and then I started kind of getting in touch with the people who were part of the house music world that were getting gigs and had some kind of notoriety. And I was like, "this is weird” because the shit I'm into, no one ever cares. You’re never going to get booked for playing rare, weird soul records. But you do get booked to play house. And now I could see this bridge of people who liked house, but also the same music as me for the first time in my life. I used to talk shit about people like Jazzanova because I thought they were just flash in the pan crappy dance music people because I didn't like dance music. Remember I was a hater!

So, here I am going to meet Kenny Dope at Marcus Wyatt's in LA and I'm just thinking to myself this sucks. But here you go. This is cool. It's disco. I guess you're cool because you like disco, Kenny Dope, whoever the hell you are! I was literally like that. I didn't know a thing about any of this. Nor did I really care. I just knew that Kenny Dope liked rare disco, and he bought rare records from my friends. So, I was like okay, he's one of us, but I started seeing this bridge of house and disco people. Then my friend Kon at the time, he was giving me a lot of phone calls telling me about the real-world New York London and I'm sitting here in Milwaukee like okay, I get it. I need to adapt to the real world. I can't just play freak music for freaks. Then, around that time, he was even talking to me about Al Kent. Ewan's record's are dope, man. And I listen to it, and no offence to him, but I was like, I could do better! No, I love Al, and I love the Million-dollar Disco, but I was just like I knew I can do this better. I'm a band guy. So, I started putting together the House of Spirits music at that that was 2005/2006 when the wheels first started turning.

Paul East: So, it's been a long time in development?

Tom Noble: That music is hard to make, and it's expensive, and so in the meantime I'm getting better at my programs, and I was starting to write more like beats and stuff at my house. People could listen to this. This is interesting. And that's when Clone found out about me and they put out the thing in 2010 which is the Tom Noble ‘In Liger Vision’ record. That was literally a couple songs that my friend who used to work at Stones Throw had posted on his MySpace page. And then I think there was people from Clone were following the employees of Stones Throw’s MySpace pages to kind of search for unknown tracks, things that haven't been released yet and poach them. So I got poached via MySpace. That's why my name's Tom Noble because they didn't give me time to come up with an artist name! We like Tom Noble. We're just going to use that. I said, "There's another Tom Noble from England." They're like, "No, he stopped making music".

Paul East: So, if you could choose an artist name now, you had to time over again, what would you go for?

Tom Noble: I don't know. I would do something cool, though. I'm pretty good with naming people. Flatmate. I'll be Flatmate and I'll only be doing Dark Electronica. No, I don't know. I mean, House of Spirits I thought was a good name. It's the name of my liquor store.

Paul East: You shouldn't have said that. I don't think I'm going to be able to think of it in the right way anymore.

Tom Noble: It’s even better though, it's kind of like a joke because it's like House of Spirits. You could think it's a spiritual thing. It's a church thing. I have all these gospel songs. But secretly it's a liquor store. That's even though I ended up doing the artwork for the album cover. I told the graphics department, I was like, "Yo, mix gospel and alcoholism!" That's what you got to mix. Those are the two things going on here. Alcohol and Jesus. You mix those two things.

I'm into the Pastor Barrett record, ‘the ship without a sale’. I found a copy of that a couple weeks ago. Mint condition for $2. It's like a $2,000 record. I was reading the Wikipedia page on him and he was got into trouble, he got taken to court and got sued because he was collecting donations for some stuff that never happened.

Paul East: So, how come it took so long then? Is it just perfectionism…?

Tom Noble: Yeah. It's perfectionism. It's me. I like disco so much that I couldn't really put out a subpar product. You know what I mean? It was just like I'm going to be the judge of my own work here. And rhythm tracks came off so good that it was sounding so good. I have to honor this. At first I didn't know how I was going to do the vocals. I hadn't written songs over any of these things. These are just beats that I slapped into fake arrangements and we recorded these makeshift arrangements like verse chorus verse style. And sometimes I'd even just try to make an intro up when they're playing it. Maybe hold one bass note down. The intro to ‘Holding On’ was actually something where I said just hold the bass note down.

Because they're such good musicians they don't sound terrible when they do stuff like that and this is an intro now. It sounds like an intro. I had to find singers. I wasn't going to do it. And I decided against the James Murphy school of hiring some white dude to sing on top of black disco, So I was like I wanted to kind of keep it holy to me. I was reissuing music from these people who are amazing. I'm like let's call them up and let's see if I can just get them to work with me.

I managed to get this guy from Darwin's Theory, which is an incredible record we put out. He was really cool. He's just a monster when it comes to arrangements. He's a piano player that was supposed to be in The Gap Band but he decided not to be because he wanted to keep his band Darwin's Theory together a little bit longer. They brought him out to Hollywood and he started working as a session guy. That guy can harmonise. I said, " You're a music director at a church. Can you find singers?" He's like, "Hell yeah." I said, "Can you arrange all the vocals?" He's like, "That's what I do for a job!" I'm like, "All right, boom. Do you have a piano in your house?" He's like, "Hell yeah."

He's got synth at his house. Upright piano. So, we just went to his house and cut the vocals. Problem was, I didn't have anything yet. So, I had to write words and melodies to these songs at his house on the fly. ‘Holding On’, I wrote at the airport on the way there. Then ‘Love Trip’ I wrote in the studio on his couch. We actually recorded bad song, a bad melody and a bad lyrics before that. And I went the next day, I woke up in the middle of the night with the melody in my head and we just kicked it out in 10 seconds the next day. What really took me so long was I was just in the prison of my own mind. I had to finish writing these songs. And like I said, I'm a harsh critic so everything on the record I think I don't really regret.

It sounds like an OG old school disco record it's this band called Orgone and it's funny because one of them used to go to see DJ Harvey shows because remember Harvey was doing all those sarcastic parties in Los Angeles. One of the guys was going to those parties, doing the drugs, seeing Harvey. So, when I got into the studio, first I heard about them from a friend. He was like, "You should work with my friends. They're really good." I went to go see them play and it was kind of like West Coast Sharon Jones, really good playing, but not my kind of stuff. Then they did a cover of ‘It's Serious’ by Cameo and I heard that and I was like, they can play this. They can do my record, they murdered it. Knowing though, these were different times, like I said, "Look, you can slap bass on this record if you want. Not hardcore, but you can slap and pop strings. That's fine with me”. I know Gabriel Roth will kill you if you do that and a Daptone song or something. They'll kill you. They’ll kick you out of the band, but you can do that here. It’s a safe space.

But also, not a safe space, because I'm like the drummer now, you have got to stop crashing so much. You have got to limit your dynamics, so other things can take over that part of the mix and then be minimal with guitar. Don't overplay, and the keyboard player, Dan, just got it and he would just coach everybody because he would go to Harvey parties, so he kind of already knew Loft classics and stuff like that. He was kind of up on that because of Harvey, he was educated a little bit in terms of what good 70s disco would sound like so with that between the stuff I had already written which was already pretty much Patrick Adams inspired they could kind of go no long with it with those limitations and with that, we kind of just came up with the framework of it.

They would always laugh about it and be like “whoa dude check it out, we're making this disco record”. It's crazy like they were like that and then now they're Say She She, the Indie disco band. That is literally my entire band, it's different vocalists. But that's Orgone, they just kind of morphed over the years into that, so now they're in a disco band.

Paul East: Have you sort of drawn a line under that for now?

Tom Noble: To be 100% honest, I haven't really made music in the last five years. It's basically like I've been releasing music every year for the last five years. But it's almost like finishing things on my hard drive that have already been done. I haven't really cut anything since, so I'm kind of pretty far away from my zone of writing. I was considering it, because Danilo Plessow from Space Grapes had asked me about doing something for him and I kind of came up with an idea for doing some kind of Mediterranean style disco. More European, stuff I'm interested in now. I was thinking about kind of doing more stuff like that, getting away from the church vibes! That being said, I have kind of four or five really good tunes from the sessions that I haven't finished yet. So, there's potentially four or five more House of Spirit songs that are just sitting there unfinished. But we saw how long it took to get eight songs done!

The 45s are coming out though, which is pretty cool. I got the label to put them on 45. The funny thing about that is that Razor ‘n’ Tape, they're like dance music people at the end of the day. I mean, Jason's a little bit more than a dance music person, but I brought up 45s to them right off the bat. I'm like, "Dude, we should just put out a holding on 45 because everyone wants that. There are some people out there who only play 45s and it's so I think maybe because there's a lot more interest in 45s now that they're starting like Koco, every day in the world, Koco is turning more people into 45 nerds.

I take it for granted that I think everyone understands where formats fit into the world of DJing. But I realize that that's not common knowledge anymore. And a lot of people out there probably don't know that there's entire populations of British people will never play your songs if they're not on 45 just because it's a format thing. I won't bring a 12 inch to a gig. I'm not going to bring an album to a gig. I only play 45s. And there's just people who think they're cool and will buy them anyway. This has been a dream of mine to have these on 45s for a while. And I'm really excited to finally see them come up because I too am a bit of a 45 nerd.

We have a night here. It's like Daptone session drummers and friends from that whole Daptone circle and stuff like that. They're the same way. Gabe, Neil Sugarman and all those people who started those scenes like they're 45 nerds. They're not going to show up with an album in their hands. It's like sacrilege, it's regional condiments on food or something, people it's like playing a soul song on a 12-in single is putting ketchup on a Chicago hot dog. You might not even know this, but you will be killed in Chicago for that. It could actually start a war.

Paul East: What about your label then? Is that sort of on hiatus?

Tom Noble: I mean, I was never really good at running a label to be honest. It was pretty hard. it's just a lot of work, you have to order things, you have to deal with these people who are bad constituents and I don't know. I'm a bit lazy. I'll miss stuff, things keep getting put off. Then all of a sudden, a year has passed since you're supposed to put this thing out and records come back warped….I don't know. It's just I don't really see a reason to do it anymore. I'm kind of old. I'm kind of out of the game.

Paul East: what are your plans then or you just kind of taking it as it comes?

Tom Noble: My plans are this. Basically, I'll continue taking gigs if they're cool. If someone wants to bring me out to something, We Out Here festival or something like that, I would play the shit out of something like that, where people actually care about me and it's not just like a bunch of ravers trying to do pills. I'm always down with doing cool gigs like that. But, yeah, I have music in me still.

Paul East: What about remixing then? Is there anyone you really like to do?

Tom Noble: Too many to count. I don't know. I really just like whenever I hear something that I like and I feel like someone made it too shiny or glitzy or something like that or I wish they wouldn't have made this sound a different way. I like deleting stuff that people play too. I feel like everyone plays way too much. I like taking modern funk type people or house producers and they just have a 100,000 bass notes and I'll just delete the baseline, just like the whole song like that. I like being dubby. I like making it spacier and dubbier for the most part. I feel like that was my strategy for the record label. Get your songs that you like to make cool. Choose the best song from them, and then make a version of that that is going to work on the dance floor. okay this song's really cool and I understand why they made it this way. Now I'm going to make sure this gets played every time.

I feel like it was pretty successful, especially with the Benedek and Noble stuff that came out on Superior because he's the classic example. He makes a million songs a day. He might not take enough time on the drums or overplay his basslines. It was so fun to mess with that stuff and just put real drums where we had drum machines before. Making things super greasy for the dance floor. It's really not that hard. I just don't copy and paste. Just keep playing things by hand for the entire song so that it sounds interesting, things like that, I love trying to, correct things. Taking someone's song that's totally quantized in MIDI and totally not making it quantized. That would be super fun.

The project I was thinking about for Space Grapes, which is just late 70s early 80s just ‘elegant ladies’ of disco type thing. Flowing silk gowns, cocaine poured into their champagne and that kind of sound versus like the churchy super lo-fi middle America late 70s early 80s sound, I think would be really fun.

The 7 inch release of ‘Holdin’ On’ is out now via Razor-N-Tape and in all good record shops.