DJ Rolando: Escaping the Jaguar

Roland Rocha cocks his head and stiffens his shoulders at the sight of a familiar intruder. Standing on a cobbled wynd off Thistle Street, Rocha – better known as DJ Rolando – faces the SLR lens with a strained passivity that does nothing to betray the admission that he "doesn't like having his picture taken too much." His ambivalence is likely a relic from his days with Underground Resistance, a gifted yet hermetic collective of DJs and musicians based in Detroit, whose eponymous modus operandi (something that they even took the trouble to formalise into a document called 'The Creed') left little room for self-promotional ventures, even ones as commonplace as portrait photography.

Rolando has lived in Edinburgh since 2004 with his wife and two year old son, and refers to the city as home. An infrequent producer of music, his output has made an indelible mark on electronic music nonetheless; none more so than Knights Of The Jaguar, a single that holds the distinction of being UR's biggest selling record. His post-UR work has tended towards leaner European offerings in the vein of Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann, the Ostgut Ton single 5 to 8 being a recent example. Opposite the industrial funk of De Cago, b-side Junie also showcases another element to Rolando's production, albeit one borne of grief.

"I did that as a dedication to my brother, who passed away a few years back. Junie was the first thing I did when I turned the machines back on. I made it for myself. I never really thought of releasing it, but my wife came in and said 'What is that? Turn up it!'"

That said, Rolando's period at the epicentre of Detroit techno with UR remains the era that defines him. Reasons for Rolando's departure from the label in 2005 have been attributed vaguely to 'creative differences', but the reality is that these differences were altogether more personal. Rolando's straight-batting means that specific people and incidents are not discussed, but the itinerant spirit that reveals itself over the course of the interview says much about why remaining with UR was untenable.

"From a music point of view, a lot of the UR stuff that came out after I left I just couldn't get with. I think they were going in a different direction and I wasn't feeling it. It's hard to pinpoint how it changed, because there's no particular 'sound' – every record sounded different – but it just wasn't my cup of tea. There were a lot of other reasons. It wasn't just one thing, it was lots of little things that came to a head."

Disrepair in the relationship between UR and Rolando became evident as far back as the release of Jaguar in 1997. In spite of its excellence, the extent of Jaguar's success had taken the label aback. On top of that, its initial popularity attracted the attentions of Sony BMG. After seeking permission from UR to license the record (an amusing request considering that song titles for UR twelves include "Fuck The Majors"), Sony disregarded UR's refusal and released a tone-by-tone simulacra anyway. On the back of the furore that followed, Rolando had been approached by other producers and DJs for work, but he found his efforts to reciprocate this new-found attention frustrated by UR's ethos of self-sustainment.

"I wanted to be more open and willing to collaborate with people, especially after Jaguar. So many doors had opened [that I couldn't take], or people didn't even bother approaching me because they'd done it in the past and because of the history [of UR], they were like 'I'm not even gonna bother my arse because I know the answer already.'"

Around this time, he had already formed a label with Gerald Mitchell called Los Hermanos. Over time, it too had become a source of consternation, and Rolando would leave Los Hermanos soon after.

"Los Hermanos was supposed to be two guys, me and Gerald Mitchell, but more people were getting involved, and that was never my idea. I knew these guys and they were friends of mine, but it became a dumping ground. I would come back to things like 'Oh, by the way, here's a group.'; 'Oh, by the way, we got an album coming out.' And here I was, the fucking sidekick DJ. Things were happening without my acknowledgement."

Rolando's formative years in Detroit seem pregnant with regret, of what might have been. There also seems to be an element of 'what if' about the scene in Detroit itself. The term 'Detroit techno' rightly implies a locality to the genre, but it often refers to a pre-millennial era and remains misunderstood in popular discourse. Rolando lets out a resigned shrug as he muses on the fallowness of techno as a form of popular music in Detroit.

"Even to this day, techno in Detroit and in the States is very small. People [from Detroit] don't really accept it. The majority of people, I'm ashamed to say, think that the Chemical Brothers or Prodigy, or Moby, is techno."

He is notably more upbeat about his new horizons. Via snatches of DJ sets at Berghain and elsewhere in Europe (and probably the odd night or two in Edinburgh), Rolando has found himself exposed to dubstep and UK bass music, helped in no small part by the fact that these genres are perennially reabsorbed by contemporary house and techno.

"I'm quite stuck in my normal techno and house genres when it comes to electronic music, hence why I dunno what the hell dubstep is, even though I may have heard it or possibly even played it. I couldn't tell you that this is a dubstep record, I can just say that that shit is hot and that I like it."

What Rolando calls "a magical moment in time" seems very much a bygone era now, and there's no little irony in the notion that the 'future-music' tag that was Detroit techno is now claimed by other forms. Then again, as is the case with dubstep and the many strains that have come since, history has a habit of repeating itself.