Contributing WriterRoland Leesker has been at the heart of Get Physical for almost 15 years. He has helped shape and define its house sounds, new artists, and curated hit releases. He is also a producer who has contributed many great solo cuts as well as in collaboration with greats of the scene such as DJ Pierre and Roland Clark. We sat down with Roland to discuss his most complete and impressive body of work to date, ‘Searching for Peace’…
Hey Roland! Thanks for chatting to Music Is 4 Lovers. What have you been up to recently?
Hi dear, thanks for your interest and support! I just arrived in a small town called Bol, which is on the island of Brac in Croatia, where we’ve spent our summer holidays for the last 20 years.
Next month, your hotly anticipated debut LP, ‘Searching For Peace’, arrives on Get Physical Music. What inspired the decision to create a full length project at this stage in your career?
My career as a professional DJ already ended back in 1997 when I decided to close my record shop in New York in order to study International Finance and Law to create the necessary basis for my future. Until then, I was a resident DJ at the Wild Pitch Club in Frankfurt am Main. Listening to music day and night, living within the music 100%. Of course I never fully stopped playing music for other people and until the pandemic hit us, quite regularly in South America, especially in Brazil, but my main focus always was on my daytime businesses.
Naturally I lost touch with what actually motivated me in the first place: Music and the joy it brings, creating it, and I wanted to get back to that original feeling, to treat myself well, to have fun and to make my inner peace.
You’ve been at the heart of Get Physical Music for almost 15 years, what are some notable memories you would say defined your journey with the label?
There are too many memories of great music, good parties, stupid mistakes and more to mention. Running an independent record label is like biking up a mountain, you need to keep pushing on, or you risk falling behind or even crashing. I am really happy that we have been able to create a mind set and team structure that keeps us young at heart.
How did you approach ‘Searching For Peace’ in terms of the production process?
The original idea for the album was to pick a few of my favourite records and excerpt some key elements as a basis. A bass-line here, a string melody there and so on. I created short loops and had them in my library for over two years. They popped up in my playlists once in a while. But I wasn’t sure what to do with them for a long time and almost forgot about them. Last year though, it just felt right and I took a few of them and started to produce all instrumental versions of the album in only a very few sessions. It all came together very naturally. What I like to do is start with the basic idea and go with the flow, catching something only I can hear or feel at that very moment and trusting that feeling, radically eliminating everything else that might be an option. Once the instrumentals were ready I wanted to have some people involved whom I always liked as singers and for „All These Lives“ for example I was connected to Jacinto from Detroit and we created the lyrics on something going through my mind for a while.
For ’Let It All Go’ (with Dan Diamond’s vocals), it came in handy that we acquired the catalog of Definitive Recordings as the original vocals are from ‘Let It Go’ with Dan Diamond, John Aquaviva and Olivier Gicacomoto which was originally released on Definitive back in 2013. For ‘Afunukuthula’ I asked Sobantwana from Tsolo at the Eastern Cape in South Africa. She has one of the most beautiful voices I ever heard and I always wanted to work with her. I told her how this instrumental was created; my production partner Neil and his new born child ‘Honey’ and I were in the studio and we were all playing around with some bells and drums together with baby Honey and at some point we started recording our jam and had the basis for a track! It was such a beautiful moment and when Sobantwana heard the story she came up with her lyrics describing the love of a mother for her newborn child,’Afunukuthula’, means ‘Searching For Peace’ in Xhosa.
What have you been listening to recently?
To my album, a lot and on repeat!
Do you have any passions outside of music?
I am a Kung Fu student. At our school we are influenced by the ideas from the Wu Dang. Like in music, if you want to become better, you want to practice on a daily basis, with your body and your mind. I also love hiking and swimming during the summer days here in Croatia and being with my family is my biggest passion of all of them.
With summer in full swing, how are you planning to celebrate the release of your LP?
I will be up on a mountain here in Brac, overseeing the coast towards the island of Hvar, very early in the morning, sending love and thankfulness.
