Andrew Hogge is also know as Lovefingers, the guy behind lovefingers.org, formerly the best crate-digging website ever. He’s also a member of The Stallions with his partner in crime Lee Douglas and most importantly he is in charge of ESP Institute, the record label he created.

We made the most of this rare occasion to catch up with him around a beer or two, and questioned him about his views on DJ culture, digging and music in general.

Long hair, does care, sorry to all our hippie readers.

How did Lovefingers.org start?

Maybe five years ago, kind of accident, I was starting a music website with my friend and it was going to be something completely different. We got in a fight because he didn’t like the name and I didn’t really care I just picked the name very quickly so then I did something completely different with it because it already existed. And I saw a friend of mine, Bumrocks, who did the same thing so I just stole his idea.

You started with one track per day…

Yes one track every day, but at the end it was too hard. I didn’t have enough time to do it this way, so I would take some time, wait three weeks and then put three weeks of tracks at one time. It was still chronological, so it would make sense.

Did all the tracks come from your vinyls collection?

No, mostly, maybe 75%, other stuff were tracks, that would have never existed on vinyl, music my friend sent me. I had a really good friend Tim, he plays in this band Ariel Pink, who would help me a lot, sometime he would do a week, I would do one, but he got too busy eventually.So I did it, mostly, by myself.



By the way, this made me think of this song I really like that you put up one day, Windsong by Black Merda, very Jimi Hendrix…

Every song they did sounds like Jimi Hendrix, right? It had a red cover ?

I don’t know, I just know your version (laughs)

(laughs) ah ok, a lot of the records, I haven’t seen them in a while because I didn’t have room for them when after moving from Los Angeles to New York City so a lot are in storage. I’m from Los Angeles originally but I lived in New York for about five years.

So part of your collection is in Los Angeles and…

No it’s all in New York. It’s actually a big problem. Now I moved back to LA and all my records are still in New York so I keep going there to get some records.

When did you move back to Los Angeles?

Just before coming here, so two weeks ago. I don’t know for how long, but not permanently.

I remember reading an interview of you saying that New York City was a better place to party and for the dance music scene in general…

I think it’s not the same anymore. A lot of my friends moved from New York to Los Angeles. A lot just do back and forth so now it’s maybe the opposite. There is still, I guess, the best music coming out of New York, compared to Los Angeles, not to the world, of course not. But Los Angeles’s got a lot going on now, more than when I probably said that. A lot of older guys are doing more stuff than they used to do. When I moved out of New York, DJ Harvey’s parties were not as big as they are now. They were still going on, but now a lot of younger kids are sort of getting involved, and I think this is really cool. Either they are growing up a little bit, or maybe, it’s just spreading out a little bit. It’s good either way, because there is a lot of people who were not doing anything before and are now doing things. There are lot more options in Los Angeles, but it’s still kind of bullshit that everything closes at two though.



It’s not good for partying, last call is at 1:40…

There are always after parties, but you know, it’s kind of shitty because you have to start at 3 because no one’s gonna show up until midnight, and you will play for two hours, and then wait one hour for the after party. You can’t have a good vibe that way. Harvey’s thing is still very good because it’s underground spots and he plays 10 to 7 or 12 to 7 and it’s illegal…

About music business opportunities, is NYC better than LA?

I think music business opportunities are shitty everywhere. There is no opportunity. People are making or stealing music. I put up vinyls, but there is no money to be made. It’s business, but at the end of the day it’s for the love of it. You put up music for your friend, and you make just enough money from one record to put up for the next one.

Or just getting paid for DJ’s gigs?

DJ’s gigs in America play really crappy too, especially in Los Angeles. I don’t know, there is always this cheesy corporate thing you can get all the time and if you want to make money you have to do this. I don’t know, there is not much more money to be made in Paris out of DJ’s gigs anyways. A lot of places in America do not value it as much, especially with all this digital stuff. People don’t really have to try to DJ, everyone is a DJ, and some guy is not going to pay a DJ because he has a USB stick and he can DJ himself. Underground stuff is really nice because it always had been, people are there because they want to be there and not because it’s a new place to be.

Vinyl vs mp3 thing…

That’s the kind of thing, when you travel around, you will have very bad looks with turntables all the time now, because people don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know how to set them up, and they just expect somebody to come up with something that does not rely on having vibrations. People with vinyls are either really purists now or dinosaurs, stubborn people. I’m one of them. I don’t have a problem with something that sounds with good quality, on the other hand sometimes they should turn the volume very low so no one can hear how bad it sounds.

We already discussed this with Justin Miller, we read, on RBMA website, an article by James Pants, very insightful article, about how mp3 is killing vinyl digging, because if no one buys rare vinyls, no one will have access to rare mp3s. When you are a real digger, at one time you have to buy vinyl, you cannot get everything in mp3s…

There are so many websites of music you can instantly get music from. But yes if those guys were not there digitalizing their crazy collections, you would have no choice just to go buy it yourself. I guess some kinds of music will just disappear. If it never becomes digital, it never becomes digital. I’m sure the music that it digital now is a fraction of what you can find, compared to what you can find in record shops. My idea is that if people could only have just sample in mp3, they could be intrigued and would want to go buy it in vinyl because it’s the format it exists on. Unfortunately, people prefer collect bad quality mp3s, it’s the end of it. People say vinyls are making a a comeback but I mean, I can’t tell.



We’ve been hearing that for 15 years. In USA, you still have shop such as Amoeba or Fingerprints…

Fingerprints, I’ve not been to that store for ten years but Amoeba is a whore of a store. When it came to Los Angeles, they shut down lots of little stores. Everybody went go to work at Amoeba, and all the other stores had their stocks for sale and Amoeba put out a call to everybody to say “come sell your vinyls here” and for two months you went at the back door and there is people selling vinyls all day. So It’s good thing that they exist because they have so much in stock you can still actually go there and find something but also it killed a lot of mom and pop stores. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I cant say.

I just visited the Berkeley and San Francisco ones and I was a little bit disappointed…At least, for what I was looking for…

This one is smaller as well as the Brooklyn one but the Los Angeles one is huge. It’s two floors, it’s crazy. I haven’t been to San Francisco in awhile but it seems a lot of really good stores closed down too. Lots of stores are closing down everywhere. Dance records stores in NYC are shutting down. You can still find their vinyls if you know where to look but it’s a little bit depressing.

Why did you choose to stop updating music to your website after reaching a thousand songs?

After one year of doing, I just decided to stop at one thousand, just to do a one thousand songs mix.

The famous 999 songs mix…

Yes. I thought that eventually I would try to update all in separated parts so you can download part one, part two, part twenty, or something like that, but it’s pretty time consuming so I haven’t time to do so. And also I used to put up the all thing at one time around holidays so everybody could download it but I did it once and I had so many people downloading at the same time I ran over my bandwidth and it costed me $200 (laughs) I didn’t do that anymore and I had to make sure it doesn’t happen again if I put it back. Maybe I’ll make a one hundred disc boxset.



And then you started ESP Institute project which is unlike Lovefingers.org about new music? And you’ve got Blackdisco as well?

Blackdisco has started even before I did Lovefingers website. I ended up meeting some cool people through that website, people contacting me to send me some cool mixes or whatever, some of them now are my best friends in the world and it’s very cool. They’ve also done 12″ for Blackdisco. My friend Tako, he does Sombrero Galaxy with another friend Jonny Nash, they made the first record on ESP, I met him from website shit which is sort of taboo or maybe not anymore. It sounds like I met a girlfriend (laughs) It’s cool that a lot of people who were very isolated can get together now through that, just as communication thing. Otherwise I would not have met a lot of people, I probably would not have been in Paris now.

DJ History is a good platform as well for this.

Yes, but I go there less often than I used to do. I try to avoid computers as much as I can, but it’s a hard thing to do. I don’t want my baby to see me on a computer all day.

You do ESP Institute by yourself as well?

Yes, it’s a very small operations, it’s just me and my apartment. Everything that I put out is friends stuff. I have not been searching really hard for new stuff to put out all time, it happens very slowly and organically. It’s not like record labels which have new records every month because I dont want to put anything out that I dont really love so when they are finished they are finished. There are records that I have been waiting, have been worked on for over a year, two years almost. Some stuff have not been ready for a long time, some sort of conceptual dance music that I think is really cool. Also, it’s a weird thing because the community I sell the records to is not necessarily the same kind of dance records stores one. It’s not as accessible as the club stuff, some of them maybe more than others. I think it’s interesting but not necessarily good for sales (laughs).

About the name ESP, was it a dedication to the ESP jazz label?

No, it has nothing to do with that. Honestly, names for me are a problem. Lovefingers is a pretty bad name. ESP was actually the design studio that I had for a long time with my wife and we use it for everything. We also do clothing at that time, children clothing. That’s why I’m in Paris actually, for a tradeshow. That’s our project number one, and we are doing some women stuff, books as well.

What type of books?

I was talking with a friend and we thought about heavily illustrated books for children. I don’t want to talk about that too much because it’s not really yet ready to talk about. I really would like to have a physical place, a basement for party, a gallery on the bottom floor, a design studio on the first floor and then a house…

Kind of dream…

I think that’s a lot of people dream…



When you dig a lot of old music, is it difficult to put out new music?

I think at this point the things that I have been doing and you consider new is really relying on cheap technology. It’s always some new advent in new technology or some weird place where there is a lack of technology, either one of those is the way that music comes out. And now everything is available to everyone all the time and relatively inexpensive so people don’t know how to make something new and if they do something new, it’s a mix of three old things, dubstep or something like that. I think half of the reason a thing can be new now is strictly context and for instance the record I put out for COS/MES I don’t think it sounds like something never heard before but in the context of dance music, it definitely has a unique spin on thing and all sort of sounds even if it is something as using the same little reverb, a certain precaution on every track. To me, it’s as close to me as something new that I have heard in awhile. That’s new and it’s actually good. The best thing I’m hoping for is something that is still derivative but has a new spin on it. Who knows? Maybe something new would happen, there is a big earthquake and there is no more computer and we would make something cool again (laughs)

Do you think that records diggers is someone necessarily blasé?

I think that’s pretty common yes. Record digging as a culture is pretty terrible as well. There is a lot of lame competition and people acting like children. It’s actually kind of a disease, mental problem. There are people who are no longer friends with each other because one guy edited a record that another guy found. It’s so pathetic. When I’m in a city, I want to go to a record store, but I want to discover it by myself. You have to deal with having conversation like “Oh where have you found that!?” and all the blahblah, and then have to make some trades…

And then you have the “I don’t share my playlist” thing

Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I’m totally being an hypocrite I know. You spend a lot of time finding something and you put it together in a very nice way to make a mix and then you put the tracklist and the record becomes much more expensive, and blahblahblah. And someone gets pissed off because you put a track in the mix before he does and he’s trying to make this mix for a year now… If you really care and if you want to ask somebody, that’s fine. Otherwise, it’s just part of the thing, to intrigue people, to search for stuff on their own… You know when you find a record in a records store and you put it on, you’re like “Oh my god, this song! I’ve been looking for it for so long and I never knew what it was!” It’s a really exciting moment and I still like to have that moment, but I don’t really agree with the hustling that is involved in this records culture: people just getting stuff so they can sell it for more, like buying and selling cars. There is no appreciation for the music, it’s simply objects. It’s greed. (Laughs) Sorry…



It’s maybe a good introduction for your Concentration compilation, which is friends doing music for free for the Harmony project (editor’s note: a non-profit organization that helps at-risk youth thanks to music). Can you tell us about it?

Some of the things on this are just edits, but others are really old songs made into totally different and new tracks. It was just the idea of a mix that is a collaboration of everybody involved in the label. There is a lot of people part of that compilation, some of the people I was talking about them earlier, I’m just waiting for their releases to be finished. So it may seem there are not involved with the label but they will be or they’re just really good friends and I try to get them involved somehow.I just wanted to make something that is not a dance compilation, more of a storytelling kind of thing. I did not want on ESP to have bootleggy things per se so I found the idea of taking this stuff that is not original and using it for a charity instead of pocketing money from somebody else. Blackdisco is more like that (laughs) No, there is no money anyway but this is more a dj thing. Concentration is made for listening, it’s not a dj thing. This is why it’s on cd. So I sell it in places such as furnitures stores, etc. It’s a “at-home music” experience. I don’t know if I answered the question. I lost myself I guess.

My mom is a music teacher, it’s always been sad how in America they are taking money from schools, shutting music program since I was a kid. My mom is always upset about it. There is a lot of those organizations buying instruments, offering music programs, I think it’s really an intelligent way of educating children. There is in general, less and less money for school, but music programs are always at the top of the list when there are budget cuts. Not every kid wants to do it, so they always cut the art program first and that’s very upsetting with my mom teaching music since I was a kid. And especially because I have a son, I want him to grow in a musical house and not a computer house, or at least a balance because it has become impossible to live in a non-computerized house.
About the tracklist thing, you were thinking about the Concentration compilation and the fake names I put?

No, we were talking about the mix you did in december 2010, for Noise In My Head radio show.

Oh just email me and I’ll send you the tracklist. That was for a radio show in Australia a friend does. It’s live.

What’s the French song on this one? The very moody, talking about mountains?

Yes, Danyel Gérard.

It’s a pretty good one. Speaking of French moody music, are you into the psyche rock French music scene from the 70s?

I know French disco from the 70s but not very well, only thing like Jean-Pierre Massiera….



He produced lots of psyche rock music, he had a studio in the south of France.

His catalog is insane, some much stuff and even the latter stuff is very nice too. I have a lot from him but at some point it became so expensive…

Even in France…

For a while, some people knew what’s going on found some Massiera stuff and one of them bootlegged, someone found out about it and the prices skyrocketed. Anytime, you see Massiera on anything, you can raise the price…

And you did this very meditative mix as well at the beginning of ESP?

Lot of that stuff are not released yet on the label, this is original stuff. There are tracks from Chee Shimizu, Jonny Nash sort of alternative mix of COS/MES as well as some new age stuff. There are tracks I did not have time to put out yet. I don’t know why I don’t put the tracklist, but no one asks for anyway.

You have two sides, the new age one and the dance one with The Stallions for instance…

I just try to mix it up. I don’t like to listen banging music at home, maybe a little bit. I have a rock & roll background and I just listen to guitar & bass stuff. I also think big clubs are not the right places to play super weird shit alienating everybody. You have responsibilities as a dj. It’s not the right thing to do. Mixing this two sides together and keeping interesting was one of the reasons I started ESP. So A side could be gregorian chants with harp, no beat, retarted stuff and B side could be super crazy techno remix. Two different people can buy the records (laughs)



Do you manage to hook up with people while playing psyche or prog rock? It’s not club musics here in Paris.

No, not really in club context but honestly I was Djing for years before I did the website and that’s also why I think it was a good idea to take all the stuff that I like in a new context. I would have love to do soundtracks. I’ve been to places where I played techno dance music and people were like “Why don’t you play some weirdo stuff, some Lovefingers stuff?” It’s party. There are certain places where you can do that and it’s very cool. There is this place in Dusseldorf, Salon des Amateurs, you can really play some wild stuff there. I’ve been to this place Golden Pudel in Hamburg, where the crowd is young and open-minded. It still has to be party stuff but you can drop some craz spirtirual jazz thing and freak people out.

A place like Café Caché where you played is cool….

I love this kind of place, chill out in the garden and play some cool music. There is still a groove and you can relax in your chair. It’s not too academic. I played maybe too chill out for a moment but if you can’t do it there, there is no place to do it then (laughs)

You didn’t’ have any chance to work on soundtracks?

No, not really. I’ve done some horrible commercials. Maybe the closest thing I did the music for was for a seven or eight minutes animated film for Nike a long time ago but it was still an art project very poppy, funny. I don’t even know how to get into this soundtrack thing and I’m not a networking guy. If someone asks me to do it, I’d be more than happy but I will not check the credits to find who does this or that.

Are you into those italian composers such as Piero Piccioni, Piero Umiliani, etc. ?

Of course! I think a lot of those things can be mixed up, from different periods and places, in a very nice way. I love all the Pierre. There is this french guy, doing library music from the 1970s. It’s not a movie soundtrack musician though.

Jean-Claude Vannier?

No not that guy. He as very nice records, the one with the rainbow cover is insane. Oh Serge Bulot is the guy I was looking for. Rituel is a great track. I found his LP Sanctuaire d’Éole in Paris.



Precisely, how did you start digging records? Hiphop?

My first records were stolen from my parents, Eagles, Beach Boys and all the stuff they used to have later on. Obviously, when I was growing up, no one was buying records, people were more into tapes, that’s what was popular. When I got into early hiphop, vinyls were still really going, cheesy west coast stuff like J. J. Fad. Then I just got really into punk and hardcore stuff, and then 70s rock, anything that was aggressive. I always like different stuff, I was into something for two years and then something else. The older you are, the less you really care about doing that, now you can go back and go to your records shelves and pick out things and see how they go together, and sometimes it works in a weird way.
That was the idea for the website. I really started digging hard, going to the shops all the time, when I get into funk, soul, etc, when I get out of hiphop and breaks. For a long time, I was “only this for certain years is cool because when it starts to sound too disco, it’s shit” and then I was “actually disco is good”.

Do you know the Stones Throw guys?

Not very well, I’ve hung out couple of times with Peanut Butter Wolf and I did a party in L.A. with him last time I was there and it was really good.



Because he released the Minimal Wave compilation.

Veronica is a great person. She has impeccable tastes. I used to be heavily into this kind of things. I lost a lot of money because minimal synth records are so expensive, so many weirdos are into that, fighting over because so many releases are small. I heard about her, her label, the website back then. I moved on but I moved to New York, she was friend with a lot of people I already knew. She’s a great person. She has one of the best label going on.

And you worked with Oki-Ni as well?

One of my friends, Jonny, used to work there so they sold my records in the music part of the webiste. They also used to give a mix I did with their orders, something very obscure. Now he no longer works there and has his own store called LN-CC which is really nice. Some of my stuff moved there. We will probably do Soft Rocks release party in London.

That’s the good thing about UK stores. Oki-Ni, Oi Polloi, LN-CC, they are all more into music, giving cds with order, having mix for free on their website, etc. Unfortunately, we don’t really have this in France, except Colette.

There is a COS/MES song on the new Colette compilation. I’m working on something for my friends from Perks and Mini as well.

Thank you.