Ahead of their party this Friday (18th Oct) at Off The Square. PJ Ford from Bonsai Mcr has put together an hour of deep house tunes to get you in the mood. AMF caught up with PJ and the team ahead of the party to chat about their brand, influences, and inspirations. Check the interview below.
Hello Bonsai! I hope you’re all well, welcome to the AMF blog. Could we start the interview with a bit of history? Could you tell me how your night got started and what you’ve been up to from your inception up until now?
Hi! Alex & I (PJ) met in Manchester where we both work for the same company, we bonded over our mutual interest in electronic music and vinyl records. Someone in our company brought their 1210s and mixer into work so we started staying behind Fridays to play records and have a couple of beers, that’s really where the idea of Bonsai was born.
So far we’ve been running our mix series promoting other upcoming DJs, played a few events across the UK under the Bonsai alias and ran our own event at Eastern Bloc.
Have there been any collectives, DJ etc that have inspired you to start running events? Is there anyone out there you’d cite as inspiration?
Manchester’s musical history is legendary, clubs such as The Haçienda, Sankeys and more recently The Warehouse Project are known the world over and have brought the world’s biggest names to the city. However, while we can appreciate the incredible spectacle that Warehouse Project night can be I think our favourite clubbing experiences are on the dancefloors that only hold a couple of hundred people and where the DJ is within touching distance.
I think two of the brands that are killing it in Manchester at the moment are Animal Crossing and You&Me, both are really pushing the envelope with incredible underground bookings and are both constantly finding unique new spaces to throw their parties.
You’ve got a party coming up with the team at Tranquil (October 18th). At Off the Square. How did that come about and what do you think of the space?
We actually met the guys from Tranquil on a night out at The Bagel Shop, we got speaking and arranged them to come play some records for us at our first event, the event couldn’t have gone better so teaming up again was a simple decision.
In terms of the venue, we’re really excited to be having our event at Off the Square, it’s got a really nice industrial vibe and the sound and lighting are top-notch. Plus it only opened last month and we’re hoping it will be the first visit for a lot of our attendees.
Manchester’s had two new club spaces open in as many months (The other space being Cotton). What’s your take on the city’s underground scene at the moment? Anywhere you’re really keen to play or any other collectives you’d like to work with?
Manchester’s underground is going from strength to strength at the moment. I think the fact the amount of venues and promoters that are working within the city is growing is really pushing people to be creative with their line-ups and production. A great example of this would be the first Hide & Seek festival which we both attended this year. The music, the location and the crowd were all absolutely top and the whole event had a really intimate feel to it, I really hope they manage to retain this in future years.
Let’s talk a bit about the mix you put together for AMF. How did you go about putting the mix together? Do you like to meticulously plan your sets or just dive straight in and feel them out as you go?
I work in a job where I’m listening to music about 90% of the day so it’s an ideal time to discover new tunes, if I’m going to be recording a mix for something like AMF I’ll normally find a new track I love and then build a pool of tracks around that, then just do it on the fly from there.
When me and Alex are playing together we’ll do minimal planning beforehand and just let the feeling of the room guide what we’re going to play, I think it works really well as we both have a good idea of what is in each other’s library and also means we can vibe off one another.
Could you share one or two standout tracks from the mix? Are there a few tunes in there you really like?
Chaos In The CBD – Global Erosion, I think this might be my favourite song ever, the drums are just so hypnotic and the horns over the top are so sexy, if this track was 3 hours long I think it would be too short.
grad_u – Winds Of Change, I love the dreamy synths in this and how all the layers in the track slowly build. Feels like something you should be listening to in a spaceship.
Finally, you’ve got Josh Baker playing at Off the Square this Friday but have you got any other events in the pipeline you can tell us about? Any radio shows or mixes coming out?
We’re buzzing for Friday and we hope to see loads of faces there. In terms of the future, we’ve got our weekly mix series over on our SoundCloud and we’ve also got another extra special vinyl-only event lined up before the end of the year, keep it locked on our socials for more information about that.
