DJ Adam Freeland talks to Hot4s about his band Freeland and their debut album, Cope, working with Tommy Lee and hearing Michael Jackson singing in the bathroom.

Adam Freeland (the DJ) is a huge presence on club circuits around the world. A residency at Fabric, regular appearance at Coachella, his own label Marine Parade, several huge releases and compilations; suffice to say he's done a fair bit. But there are limitations to the music you can make as wrangler of the wheels of steel. And so we have Freeland the band, and their debut album Cope, featuring Adam on decks, Kurt Baumann out front, Hayden Scott on the drums and guests including Twiggy Ramirez, Joey Santiago and Tommy Lee.

Cope has your club anthems, but it also has the edgier, rock-infused "e-drone" tracks. "Someone on my facebook sent me a message and said 'Dude it's like a shoe-gaze dance party!'" says Adam. "I thought that was a pretty good description."
Rather than a chart explosion that lasts for five minutes and then fades away, Adam says the album is a grower; a record that he says many journalists just didn't get it because they only listened to it once. "A lot of people have listened to the first time and gone 'that's alright' and then come back to me later and said 'oh dude that's f***ing dope'."

Cope has been a long time coming. Four long years. What started as a "shoe-gaze drone" album became electronic dance floor, and then eventually a hybrid party mix of the two. Adam is quoted as saying the music he wanted to listen to and ultimately make was "somewhere between Soulwax and Sonic Youth, Justice and My Bloody Valentine." Did he succeed?
"The thing is the way I make music, I always have an idea in my head and making it never comes out anything like what I’m trying to do. But it always comes out as something that I’m happy with. It gets my shoe-gazing elements out that have been a big influence on my musical taste, and also my dance floor elements. "

Freeland recorded Cope in LA, a city where rumour has it there's a quite a few famous people around. Still, you don't expect to get a private concert from Michael Jackson while you're in the bathroom. "Our friends own this recording place that is also a gear rental place. We were dropping off the gear and I went to the bathroom, and I heard this singing, and I was just like 'wow!' Literally [Michael Jackson] was just feet from me, but behind a door, so I could hear him talking and singing." Could Adam hear anything in particular? "All the people around him were clapping every time he said something; it was really kind of bizarre. I spent about fifteen minutes standing by this door just listening to him. No one even knew he was in America."

Cope kicks off with Do Ya, a grinding, moody amalgamation of heavy synths, minimal vocals and crashing percussion. Later on, the listener is hit with Mancry, an epic and atmospheric wall of sound. It's certainly shoe-gaze, but features Tommy Lee of Motley Crue on percussion, giving it a stadium rock feeling. The collaboration came about after Lee approached Adam at a festival. He had all of Adam's records and was keen for them to work together. "He's super passionate about music and really into electronic music...He came up to me at this festival and we just totally hit it off." Says Adam. "The thing about Tommy is he's a unique man. He's an amazing guy who's living this crazy life in this eternal suspension of being 17, and still getting away with it. And if you can, why not?"
So what was it like working with the poster boy for badly behaved, big haired rockers, whose antics were well documented in the Motley Crue biography The Dirt?
"We have had some fairly Dirt-ish experiences together over the last few years, touring around America on private jets. There's generally a wave of mayhem in the wake behind wherever he goes. Not necessarily because of him, but because of his reputation. You walk into a particular situation and these ridiculous scenarios just unveil themselves to you and you're just like 'this is crazy', gotta go with it and enjoy it."

Cope does defy description, and any attempt to describe it becomes tangled in awkward metaphors and invented genres. These descriptions do your head in but they are unavoidable, it's just that kind of album. Sometimes haunting and introspective, sometimes fun and superficial, obscure sounds, political commentary and paranoia; nothing is the same and yet everything fits. it's both futuristic and old-school. The album has been called a "crucially heretical wake-up call" to dance music, and fits with Adam's intention to make a stayer of an album rather than a flash-in-the-pan. "I have a very long term approach to the way I make music. It's very easy to make something hip, now and ultimately disposable. It's harder to make something that's going to stand the test of time."

Interview by Helen Davidson