In The Studio With | Eris Drew

One of the few DJs still performing with turntables, house producer Eris Drew also uses her Technics as a production tool. Danny Turner delves into her debut album

In common with many DJs, the pandemic obliterated Eris Drew’s schedule, which had recently expanded to almost a hundred gigs globally. So Drew took the bold decision to trade her hometown of Chicago for a secluded forest cabin in New Hampshire, living with production and label partner Octo Octa (Maya Bouldry-Morrison), and started work on her debut album. Titled Quivering In Time, Drew’s solo effort feels not too dissimilar to her DJ sets, fastmoving percussion-heavy dancefloor tunes alight with upbeat party vibes. With her tracks built from a stack of vinyl samples, Drew added kicks, scratches, vocal samples, hand-played keyboard riffs and percussion to recreate the communal euphoria of a club scene slowly returning to life.

Tell us about the move from Chicago to New Hampshire on the US east coast…

“The practical story is that I fell in love and wanted to move here, but there’s a spiritual story too, as for years I dreamt of having a life where I could be in nature and make music but still have some connection to cities and DJing. As a Chicago girl, the move seemed so irrational to me because the music I make is so in the bones of the city and leaving seemed something distant for my older years, but I fell in love with Maya who grew up here and ended up in rural New Hampshire in a log cabin. I look out my window now and it’s just forest.”

Your partner Maya published a DIY guide to building a home studio. Has that helped you both settle into this new environment?

“I wouldn’t say the guide was related to that, but it’s the first time I found an environment where I shared a studio in a space with someone else, so there was constant collaboration and discussion about music. The cabin itself really does affect our music-making experience because it’s kind of like setting up shop inside the body of a guitar. It’s an extremely resonant space. My subwoofer is on an all-timber floor and I’ve got slats above me that bounce the sound around. It’s an extremely warm-sounding environment that colours the sound, but as a songwriter I love it. We’re not so remote that we don’t have any home comforts and there’s a generator in the basement that we only need to run in emergencies.”

Presumably, at odds with your previously hectic Chicago lifestyle?

“I’d been in Chicago for so long and it’s a tough town but I’m so grateful for my experiences. Having lived in the city for 25 years you get to kind of know everybody, but the club scene is tricky there now because it’s shrunk quite a bit. There are only a few venues and party crews that support this kind of music, so even though Chicago is huge, it feels like a small city because a lot of people want to work but aren’t able to.”