Ron Trent interview – “Music has helped us get through so many bad times”

Ever inspiring and energised, Trent lets us into the world of his new project WARM

Ron Trent is sat in a hotel room in Portland, smiling from ear to ear. He’s got plenty of reasons to feel positive, too: not only is he back performing as a DJ following two years of pandemic lockdowns and shuttered venues, but his first album in 11 years is set to drop in a matter of weeks. He survived the worst crisis to hit dance music – and arguably humanity as a whole – in living memory, and for that reason he’s feeling blessed. That’s not to say riding out the pandemic has been easy though, even for a producer, musician, and DJ of the Chicagoan’s sky-high standing. 

“Of course, the pandemic allowed me to be more creative than I would have been able to have if I’d been moving around a lot, but at the same time, financially and emotionally it wasn’t one of the best times,” he says honestly in his rich, deep midwestern accent. “The bottom line is, when Covid happened, it was like, ‘Wow, what do we do now?’ But I have an iron stomach for these things. I’ve been in the business a long time, so I know how to move things around and meet the obligations.” 

Trent is one of those rare specimens in dance music culture: an innovator who has constantly evolved musically and whose vast back catalogue contains some of the most sublime house music ever made. Famously, he recorded the tracks that made up his debut EP – including the still startling and peerless ‘Altered States’ – when he was 13 years old (it was eventually released by his friend Armando Gallop’s Warehouse Records imprint in 1990, by which time Trent was 17). He’s not stopped since, combining a tireless work ethic with a constant desire to move on musically. 

Along the way, there have been countless classics, several extended spells of successful collaborations (most notably with Detroit’s Chez Damier, with whom he ran Prescription Records during the 1990s), an insane number of high-quality remixes for other artists, often unheralded work as a mentor (Trent was key in nurturing the careers of Anthony Nicholson and Trinidadian Deep), and the slow definition of a now trademark, dancefloor-focused house sound that combines his own love of organic percussion, keys and live instrumentation with effortlessly immersive electronics and sumptuous grooves. 

Alongside fellow Chicagoan Larry Heard – a man he credits, alongside the likes of Marshall Jefferson, Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy, Vince Lawrence and Jesse Saunders as house music pioneers – Trent has become synonymous with deep house, a style that has always been tricky to define and seems open to interpretation. After all, no two people’s definitions of ‘deep’, musically speaking, will ever be the same. 

“To me, deep music does what music should do,” Trent says, thoughtfully. “It allows you to think or dive into other parts of yourself, where one can think about being someplace else, or something else. It’s not just this kind of ‘surface philosophy’ music. It has the breath of life in it.” 

He pauses momentarily, before continuing: “Some people approach music like, ‘I don’t have to think about it, it’s just there’. Well, okay. I don’t come from that. I come from music being enriching, and empowering, and having the ability to heal, or to put you in a place where it allows you to deal with the more internal and even retrospective kind of synthesis. Music has helped us get through so many bad times, helped us celebrate good times, and helped us analyse. It’s a spiritual science. If you’re not allowing the music to touch you, that’s something going on with you.” 

In truth, you’ll find no better definition of deepness, musically speaking, than Trent’s new album, What Do The Stars Say To You. Credited to Ron Trent presents WARM – a kind of shape-shifting studio band that will, someday soon, become a functional live act – the album transports the Chicagoan’s ultra-immersive, soul-enriching sound from the dancefloor to the sofa, offering a gorgeous, sun-kissed and sonically detailed journey. 

“This is a serious listening album and it’s very much in the tradition of the things that have brought us here today – the albums, musicians and producers that have been monumental, that help us rise with our energy and make us who we are,” Trent enthuses. “It’s not a topical album. It’s meant to be timeless. If you don’t hear it in the way today, maybe you’ll hear it the next time you listen to it, or later the content will make more sense.” 

What Do The Stars Say To You is very much a Ron Trent record – his trademark pads, chords, percussion and distinctive sense of atmosphere are all present – but it was informed as much by his musical roots (he grew up with a father who had been a professional percussionist, keen record collector and the founder of a record pool for DJs) as his journey through dance music over the last 30-odd years. 

“It’s a nod to the powers that helped to shape some of my sonic orientations, working with some of those same kinds of people and energies,” he explains. “It’s a coliv music and electronics. Synthesisers were being used, studios were being developed and there was a certain level of freedom and innovation there. It birthed a lot of things.” 

The freewheeling Feel of those times – if not the specific sounds and styles that emerged – is evident throughout What Do The Stars Say To You, with Trent’s hard-to-pigeonhole (but hugely enjoyable) musical fusions drawing on everything from ambient, soul and jazz-fusion, to space rock, psychedelia, downtempo electronica and samba. 

“The first track I released from the WARM project, back in 2018, was called ‘On a Journey’,” Trent points out. “If you listen to that, it opens the doors for this album. A lot of people who call themselves DJs or producers these days pigeonhole themselves in one genre and say that they’re ‘purists’. Bullshit. If that’s what you want to call it, that’s cool, but the truth is that house music or whatever you want to call it comes from something else – it’s a hybrid or adolescent of some other music that came before. As a creative force, it’s my responsibility to be open to channelling what came before. That’s my perspective and the perspective of the people I studied.” 

The album’s gestation, which had been long planned (he says he got the idea back in the early 1990s but didn’t have the time to develop it), involved reaching out to musicians and artists who inspired him. Although Trent played many of the instruments himself – keys, bass, drums, percussion and guitar included – he also recruited an impressive cast- list of collaborators, including Texan band Khruangbin, Italian ambient don Gigi Masin, German deep house veteran Lars Barktkhun, and vocalist Venecia. Oh, and two members of Brazilian jazz-fusion legends Azymuth, bassist Alex Malheiros and drummer Ivan Conti. 

“Azymuth have been a great inspiration to me in my time – I could say so much about them,” Trent says giddily. “One night I was making this track and I was like, ‘this to me is Azumuth’. I decided to ask Alex if he’d be interested in playing on it. So, I hit him up on Instagram, he said he was interested ,and I sent him the track. He said, ‘congratulations, you’ve learned the samba sound!’ I was like, ‘yes!’ The next day he sent me six passes! Amazing!” 

Trent was arguably even more excited by the album’s most surprising and high-profile guest: pioneering electro-acoustic jazz fusionist Jean-Luc Ponty. In the early 1980s, Ponty delivered a string of inspired, out-of-this-world albums that combined his own freewheeling violin and electric violin parts with synthesizers and drum machines. A track from one of those sets, ‘In The Fast Lane’, became something of a secret weapon for some influential DJs in Detroit and Chicago during the formative years of techno and house culture. ‘Sphere’, the Trent’s track featuring Ponty, offers a few audible nods to the latter’s most famous track, as well as deeper cuts from the now 80-year-old Frenchman’s vast back catalogue. 

“I learned about Jean-Luc from more of a home listening aesthetic,” Trent explains. “He’s made music that magically takes you to other places or puts you in a certain pattern of thinking. The feedback I got from him after I sent him the track was the goal, because I’d created it with him in mind. I told him that and he said, ‘you must of, because I can see myself in it.’ I was humbled, grateful and thankful, because it meant that my level of studying and mastery is astute and acute enough to tap into. I was letting him, and others involved in the album know that I love, appreciate, and respect them, and wanted to collaborate in a way that I could pay homage to them.” 

Excitingly, What Do The Stars Say To You is just the beginning of the WARM project, with Trent admitting that a second album is not that far off. He also has an ambitious plan to recreate the album live – something that requires detailed planning due to his admirable obsession with sound design and the quality of sound systems – and is itching to develop his career as a producer, musician and composer. 

“This album is a soundtrack and I’d love to score some movies or TV shows,” he admits. “Seriously, I think about music on a cinematic level – I’m into movements and pictures. There’s that, and I’d also like to move into artistic performance and create artistic situations – opening venues and doing other things that allow people to be more immersed in sound and washed in it if you will. That’s the reason the project’s Instagram handle is @warmsupersonics – sound is spiritual, it’s powerful, you can feel it and it has got depth. That’s the goal.” 

Matt Anniss  

What Do The Stars Say To You by Ron Trent Presents WARM will be released by Night Time Stories on June 24 – pre-order it here