Thinking out loud...

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Building an Iconic Sound: Squarepusher

If there's one thing that will probably never vacate the world of electronic music, it's the scores of imitators ready at a moment's notice to ape the latest forward-thinking concept and blow it out and water it down until it becomes a limp, played-out, unfunny punchline. Frankly, we're sick of 'em. Which is why, for this music technology edition, we've decided to assemble a few of electronic music's trailblazers to tell us about what goes into creating a truly iconic sound. From dubstep stalwart Mala's punishing low-end to Cocteau Twins' heavenly guitar processing, we got the straight dope on how these innovators crafted their unique sonic signatures—and how they continue to move forward.

Since he began releasing music via the Warp and Rephlex labels in the mid-'90s, Squarepusher (a.k.a. Tom Jenkinson) has become inextricably linked to a large number of genres—like drum & bass, IDM, electronic-jazz fusion, and gabber, just for starters. Responsible for some of electronic music's canonical records—Hard Normal Daddy, Music is Rotted One Note, and Go Plastic among them—the UK-based musician/producer/auteur gradually carved a signature sound for himself, only to rethink it with his recent d'Demonstrator LP, a jazz-centric collaboration with "a bunch of kids" (his words, not ours) under the moniker Shobaleader One. We called up Jenkinson to see what else has changed.

XLR8R: You've said that Shobaleader One is the realization of a fantasy group hinted at on your Just a Souvenir album. How does the songwriting process work as a band since the whole thing stems from your ideas?
Tom Jenkinson: I wouldn't say it's markedly different. I'm basically making a rough outline of what I want to record prior to anyone arriving, and then playing it to people and seeing what they make of the parts and if they've got suggestions. It's sort of an extension of what I've always done in the past, but instead of me being the sole person that experiments with the parts and tries to modify the way they fit with other parts, I'm actually getting input from other people. The point is that I'm definitely not interested in using musicians as just an extension of a sequencer, where I tell them what to do and they produce a result. I don't really see much point in that because, with a certain amount of effort, you can program a sequencer to sound reasonably like a human being. Sadly or otherwise, you don't necessarily need people on board to convey the impression of music which is made by a human being. So what I'm keen to get from these people is a sense of their own take on the ideas, and hopefully, bit by bit, them bringing their ideas to the table.

What was some of the gear used on the d'Demonstrator album, as opposed to your recent solo records?
The main difference is the [mixing] console. It's the first time I've used something that [could be described as a] "professional" console. Until recently, I was using the Mackie 24-8 bus, which is a perfectly usable console. I'm now using the Euphonix CS3000 console. It seems to sound a bit clearer. If anyone thinks this record sounds quite a lot clearer than my older work, that might be a reason. As far as instruments, they're not necessarily instruments that I've not used on recordings before, but I've tried to develop new ways of processing them. Even though a sound is originally coming from an electric guitar, there's quite a lot of processing in between the guitar and the recording equipment, so you don't necessarily hear it as a guitar.

Squarepusher: Shobaleader One - Cryptic Motion

Let's talk a little bit about early Squarepusher. Even the complexities of Go Plastic were attributed to using solely hardware. How did those machines help shape your sound?
Well, each machine determines, to an extent, what's done with it. Each machine that I was using in those days—as much as I would try to use it in an open-minded fashion, and try to keep reassessing and developing the way I used it—had a specific mode of operation. There's no way of getting away from that. Regarding Go Plastic, for example, the sequencing was done on a [Boss] DR-660 drum machine and a Yamaha QY700 sequencer. These things have their specific idiosyncrasies. Certain options are ruled out by using those, and other options are promoted. Certain things are harder to do than they would be on other machines, so you get guided away from some things and towards other options. In any case, you have the result of what happened. That, in a way, is the best articulation of how those different machines were making me operate as a composer, at the time.

You've been quoted as saying, "In order to prevent myself from being fully incorporated into any musical ghetto, I have to incorporate every musical ghetto into myself." How does that apply to Squarepusher today?
I must admit, hearing you say that now, that just sounds really pretentious. I think I had a point, but I think I might have been trying to phrase it in a way to just deliberately annoy people. Nowadays, I would say what I was trying to convey was something along the lines of '[I'm] trying to just keep mobile.' One of the problems of working in the music industry is that it's best for the companies you work for to market you in a quite simplistic fashion. What I've always tried to do is to keep those attributes fluid, which makes me quite an awkward proposition in terms of the marketing process. But that's exactly what I want to do. I want to stay relevant. I want to make things which people actually buy, but I don't want to be a slave to all of those processes. The one-dimensionality, which I perceive as being a convenient thing to people marketing music, I think is very damaging. So, I've gone on to try to be inexplicable. To try to incorporate so much into what I'm doing that it can't be summarized sensibly—that there is no way of getting down on paper exactly what Squarepusher is. And even if you've succeeded at one moment, next time, you're going to have to think about it again.

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Artist Tips: Mike Monday

Cheeky house producer Mike Monday isn’t the type of guy who just pops on Ableton Live and pumps out a rigid club banger. “We are now in an age where literally anyone with a computer can write and produce music,” he offers, criticizing the ease with which producers can churn out a track. So how does one subvert the dominant sound of quick-take choons stuck to the grid while still keeping their studio set-up on the cheap? If Mr. Monday’s recent full-length, Songs Without Words (OM), or collaboration with Will Saul offer any clues, it’s got as much to do with the pre-production stage as it does clicking and dragging. Below, the London-based producer throws a few keep-it-real ideas our way to make computer-made tracks sound more human.

1. Think outside the box
At least a few parts on every piece I write don't originate from the computer. I record sounds extensively with a microphone and use as many analog synths and drum machines as I can in order to get a broad a sonic palette. I have two mics permanently set up and I often record my voice, instruments, and pretty much anything I can lay my hands on. For instance, all of the hums, grunts, and groans on "Through the Keyhole" are by yours truly, and I played and recorded the saxophone and bassoon parts on "Bad Wind."

2. Sample creatively
I'm not talking about wholesale theft, but a more creative, judicious way of sampling. This makes the chances of anyone else having done the same thing in the same way virtually nil. For instance, the main melody in "I Am Plankton" is a percussive bass sound tuned much higher and doubled a 16th later up the octave, creating a unique aquatic effect. This would never have occurred if I'd tried to do the same thing with a plug-in. In fact, I think it was the aquatic nature of that sound that provided one of the initial inspirations for that track.

3. Use different programs
One of my biggest bugbears is when you can hear exactly what program a whole tune was written in. I want my music to sound like me, not Logic, Ableton, or Reason. So I've started running Ableton as a slave to Logic via Rewire. On my new track, "Mr. Gone," I used Ableton to write the parts and do the basic arrangement, and then mixed down and added extra parts and effects in Logic. My next task is to learn Cubase and Reason so I can pick and choose what I use for different tasks when I'm writing.

4. Don't quantize everything
I have a competition with myself every day to see how few things I can quantize in a track and still make the groove sit tight. I'm instantly turned off when I hear a track with all the parts locked to a particular groove, as it sounds so cold. If you can leave in a human element, the music will instantly have more soul and warmth.

5. Don't over-process
For every calculation you ask the computer to make—no matter how good the software or powerful the computer—there will always be a slight reduction in the sound quality. There's no need to compress much in electronic music. In fact, I rarely compress anything, instead preferring to ride the volume automation if there's a problem, and I only use EQ very sparingly. As long as your music is going to be professionally mastered (preferably with you in attendance) by a good engineer with high-end compressors and EQs, then I have found that this "less is more" approach always ends in a warmer, wider, and more powerful result.

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Artist Tips: Tittsworth

Jesse Tittsworth might reside in suburbs of Virginia, but the music that he makes is undeniably Baltimore. The breaks-driven, chopped-up bangers on his latest, Twelve Steps (Plant Music), combine club music’s heavy low-end with bits of pop, R&B, and old funk and soul, and play as well on the dancefloor as they do beneath vocals from The Federation, Nina Sky, and Pase Rock. So how does Tittsworth craft Baltimore club tracks that make MCs wild out and dancers shake shake shake dat ass? Read on and find out.

1. Less is more
Keep in mind that B-more club music is generally pretty minimal. Not techno minimal, but my favorite club tracks of all time breathe really well. There’s room for the drums to be big and for the bass to sound mean. Try not to overcrowd the mix with tons of notes and instruments.

2. Break 'em
Don’t be afraid to tear the drum breaks apart and rearrange a specific slice or slices. Assign the different sections to a keyboard or drum pad and experiment with the groove or sequence. Loop a section of one break and maybe layer it with a piece of another. Take the groove and replay it with your own instruments.

3. Keep it natural
Keep in mind the milliseconds that separate the live drummers in many club breaks from beats made on a drum machine or with software. Programs like Ableton are really good for getting everything on beat. The result is something that’s easy to mix but might not groove right. To get it natural there are times where I will turn quantizing off altogether. Turn away from the grid and just beat your rhythm in real time. Any controller will do–I’ll pound a keyboard, mouse, or even my laptop directly to get those notes to sound right. Programs like Reason also have a percentage function so you can quantize something a little closer without snapping to a cold beat.

4. Low-end theory
A big part of Baltimore club music is bass, so your low-end has got to sound right in the club. This might mean a lot of back-and-forth mixing from the car to the club to the studio, but don’t rest until it thumps in all places. Try to make sure things aren’t fighting in the low-end (do your kicks and subs get clouded together?).

5. Do your homework
You can learn from programs, studio techniques, tutorials, and all that but there’s also going to be a lot you will only get from context. Take the time to learn where club music came from–what made the pioneers and classic records great.

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Artist Tips: Intrusion Talks About the Five Parameters Most Central to His Sound

Chicago-area producer Stephen Hitchell (a.k.a. Intrusion) crafts dub-techno that sounds like it's underwater, or floating through the air from a basement club 10 blocks away. Under his many monikers, including the collaborative Echospace project with Rod Modell, Hitchell has helped bring about a renaissance of the genre, which many had assumed would falter after the dissolution of Basic Channel. But with a studio full of analog gear and a penchant for warm, crackling tones, Hitchell has brought an airiness to a sound that originated in hard, deeply contrasting sonic textures, particularly on this year's Seduction of Silence (Echospace).

Sound Design
Sound design is by far one of the most personal aspects of my music and what I generally spend the most time doing. Get involved with your synths—every aspect of their functions and unique personalities. Like a person, each one has its own unique sonic signature, its own "sound"—one which could be built upon by learning the instrument inside and out. If you get a new synth (hardware or VST), delete the factory presets and start from ground zero (most synths have a factory restore!). Build a library of sounds that are your own, as it will help to build a unique sonic signature for yourself.

Sampling
Sampling is an art in itself and an integral part of how this music came to be. Many samplers out there can help add warmth, and give a flat and dull digital sound a new lease on life. I've found with samplers, the older the better. Some of my favorites are the Emulator 1 and SCI Prophet 2002, both of which use 8- and 12-bit sampling at lower frequencies. The unique tonal character they give to whatever you're sampling is out of this world. Sometimes in moving forward it's best to go in reverse.

Signal Paths
It's best to research how a sound should be processed rather than playing the guessing game, which helps to highlight and emphasize the best acoustic and tonal characteristics. It's like running an EQ into a compressor—when you change the EQ settings, your compression rate also changes, and usually turns into a muddy mess. Learn about your processors (whether hardware or VST), how they can be best applied, and how to highlight their own unique features. I've had numerous clients run their entire mixes through compression and hard limiting to the point of hammering the mix into a square box, and this is not a good thing!

Recording to Tape
Everything I record I bounce down to tape. Granted, 1/4" and 1/2" tape is getting harder and harder to come by (at least stuff that isn't shedding), but if you can find a good machine and tape, it will warm your mixes in indescribable ways. Part of its magic is in the machine itself: old tape machines, if calibrated correctly, can push the compression scheme three-fold without distorting the source signal, which adds to the saturation and yields a much higher quality master than in a DAW. Tape compression and true tape saturation make for some of the best masters you'll ever hear.

Mastering
Some of the best mastering engineers I know were not musicians. It's very important to separate yourself from the music you make when mastering it. I try to explain to my clients that I don't listen to their music. Rather, I pay attention to the technical data and what the equipment is telling me. You can make a good song sound bad if you're not paying attention, so it's important to go over every small detail in the finalization process. I don't ever try to get material to its "peak" level but to its most "natural" level. And always check your master in different environments: your car, headphones, home stereo, crappy boom box, studio, and club, if that is your target audience.

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Read Up on SBTRKT's Production Tips

After hearing SBTRKT's recent self-titled full-length, you might be surprised to know that the heaving, heavy jams he kicks out are largely the result of simple tools in Logic Pro. Here, the masked mastermind behind one of our favorite albums of late fills us in on how he goes about making his clubby bass tunes.

1. Make use of the basics
If you use Logic Pro as your sequencer, don't hesitate to use the basic instruments. ESP is great at making polyphonic lo-fi synth sounds. Pretty much all of my remix of Modeselektor's "Art & Cash" was created using the ESP instrument—basically a lot of square wave, a touch of saw wave, a long attack/decay, and sustain all the way up. Also, a touch of reverb on the channel gives it some more depth.

2. Automate your effects
The easiest way to add dynamism to an otherwise linear synth or drum arrangement is to automate effects on the channel. On an instrument channel, instead of using Inserts, add a couple of bus channels in the Sends and to each bus add an effect. If you set the button above the volume control to Touch, and play the track back, you can use the Bus Send knobs to add more or less of the chosen effect. If you let go of the knob, it will automatically go back to zero. If you then press the letter A, it will bring up the automation overlaid on the sequencer window, and you can adjust it with the mouse. Don't forget to reset your Touch back to Read, to make sure you don't overwrite the automation you've already done.

3. Transform your individual tracks
One of the most usual features to use is the Transform feature. Say you've played in a melody quickly, but want to tidy it up a bit. Double-click the part to get to the drum layout page, select Function and Transform, and then a number of options come up. You can try things like Double Speed, Fixed Note Length to create unbroken chords, or Fixed Velocity.

4. Need inspiration? Mess around!
The easiest way for me to get inspiration to make songs is just to mess around with synths and virtual instruments until I come across a great sound. So having various software tools makes that much easier. One of the best soft-synth makers is Native Instruments, and they have a free plug-in called Kore Player that you can download sounds for. There are already a number of sounds included. I've made a number of tracks using that as a basis.

5. Compress your sounds before mastering
To make sure your tracks have enough weight and dynamics if you work inside the box and don't use outboard, you have to utilize compressors on separate sections of your track. I tend to bus drums, keys, and vocals separately, and add master effects to each of these before they go to the master channel, where I add a multi-band compressor. It is better to have your tracks sound great at a lower level than to max the channels out and for sounds to go over the 0 db line, as there is little room for error if all your channels are already at the top level. Be aware of how your tracks will translate onto bigger systems, and try to play on as many types of speakers as possible—from iPods, to cars, to club systems. Tracks should sound great on all formats before they go to mastering. Mastering should only enhance what is already there.

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Keepers Of The Flame: An interview with Kahn & Neek



Bristol’s Kahn & Neek have been gaining plaudits over the past year for their contemporary take on instrumental grime and reggae. Oli Warwick caught up with the pair to discuss the roots of their projects, vinyl culture, and swapping steak for dubplates.

We live in a time of unprecedented velocity. Information travels at fibre-optic speeds, ideas go global within minutes and styles emerge and dissipate before the download has completed. In music culture, genres once took decades to form, rise, peak, and then trough, with ample time for tributaries of sub-styles, variations and experiments to trickle off and form their own pools of sound. There’s something vital and exciting about the rapidity with which new pockets of electronic music spring up in these times, not least when the results come bolstered with a lasting quality that may hold steady once the hype machine moves on. However, it does get a bit tiring, and sometimes you long for a time-honoured approach that seeks not to break down the latest boundary or reinvent the standard, but simply continue the great legacy of well-matured music.

Joe McGann and Sam Barrett hold fast to the ideal of longevity, rooted deeply in the tradition of their inspirations and looking to uphold the values that shape the music they love. Their reputation has steadily grown from their grime driven output as Kahn and Neek and their steppas project Gorgon Sound. Under his own steam Joe has carved out a healthy name for himself with various strains of bass-driven music for labels such as Idle Hands, Deep Medi Musik and as part of the Young Echo collective, but the collaborative work with Sam has been building a buzz all of its own.

Their partnership formed around The Sureskank Convention, a dubstep and grime night entrenched in their home town of Bristol. “I met Joe a couple of times through some people at college,” Sam recalls, “but he actually hijacked our first ever Sureskank that we did. We had open decks at the end and that’s the first time I saw Joe DJ, and after that we invited him into the fold of our DJs and we started playing out together.”

We’re sat talking in Joe’s studio space in Kings Square, in the same labyrinthine network of rooms that Young Echo host their intermittent radio shows from. To say it’s cosy would be an understatement. The pair are reclined on a sofa that fills the width of the glorified broom cupboard, the dim light of one solitary desk lamp creating something of a clandestine atmosphere. The clamour of various bands rehearsing in adjacent rooms coagulates into a background dirge which seems at odds with the world Joe and Sam operate in.

“After Ruffnek Diskotek and Dubloaded, Sureskank was one of the first dedicated dubstep and grime nights in Bristol,” Joe explains of the party that formed the basis of their collaboration. “There was a whole year I think where Sureskank was the best place to go for grime and that more party style of dubstep in Bristol.”



The party still happens intermittently now, having been in the vaulted cellar of Cosies in St Pauls and its spiritual home of curious city centre space The Tube, moving around various venues but by and large focusing on more intimate locales. “The idea about Sureskank is to be able to see the DJ really up close,” Sam states. “That’s why we’ve always done it in small places.”

The list of residents for the party should speak volumes in itself, including such Bristol luminaries as Gemmy, Superisk and B-Lam (better known these days as Young Echo’s El Kid). Meanwhile the guests reflected the nascent days of dubstep when today’s big hitters were more accessible to the smaller promoters, including Kromestar, Tes La Rock, Spyro, Logan Sama and Heny G.

“I built a lot of contacts just through meeting people at events,” Sam reveals as he looks back to the earliest Sureskank parties. “I’d be seeing DJs and saying, ‘can I get your number,’ and literally booking them by phoning them up.”

This informal process of sorting out headliners wasn’t without its pitfalls though, not least once these artists broke through to a wider popularity. Where Sureskank was making savvy bookings based on a few releases that hinted at a new talent, returning to build upon the links forged with those artists relied on mates’ rates and sneaking behind agencies.

“I was running Sureskank down in Brighton as well as in Bristol,” Sam recalls of one such situation while he was studying on the South coast, “and we had booked Chef and Walsh. Chef was doing it dodgy, not through his agent, and obviously he got booked through his agent to play in Sweden or something, rang me the day before, and I was thinking, ‘oh great, you’ve just left me without a headliner!’ I rang up Walsh and was like, ‘mate, what am I meant to do?’ Walsh was the second on the bill, and he said, ‘don’t worry, erm, N-Type’s here. Wait there I’ll just ask him’. You could hear him shouting in the background, ‘N-Type will you do it for a oner?’ and he was like, ‘yeah mate no worries!’”

For all the work put into securing guests, like all the best parties it was still the residents that came to define Sureskank, and it fed a great deal into shaping Joe and Sam as the artists they are today. “The best thing about it was cultivating the actual crew of people,” Joe points out. “It gave us all an opportunity to play out and play what we wanted, and I know certainly for me that was really informative in terms of learning about DJing properly.”

While the events laid some sturdy foundations for the DJ sets Joe and Sam perform now, either individually or as a pair, it can’t be overlooked that the grimier side of their ventures was shaped by Sam’s passion for the genre from an early age. “I used to listen to old Sidewinder tapes,” he reveals. “The older kids on my street used to give me cassettes I just used to dub off. Some of my friends got decks when I was 16, and we all just started buying records.”

Joe’s eyes light up when looking back to the time he spent getting educated after he and Sam started hanging out. “Sam introduced me to a lot of grime,” Joe explains. “I was producing since I was about 16. I had the equipment, but Sam had all the records. I knew all the popular stuff, but going through someone’s record collection and properly listening to things has a different effect.”

Beyond their DJ sets, the first tangible proof of Kahn and Neek’s love affair with grime manifested last year in the Percy/Fierce single, which dropped seismically on their own Bandulu imprint. The release seemed to wilfully tap into a somewhat forgotten culture within electronic music; those mythical white label instrumentals that demonstrated how creative grime was behind the work of the MC. In the guttural, squelching throwdown of “Percy”, the direct, no-messing construction positively whips around the ears, even without the help of the infamous vocal hook from Flowdan.



Similarly, the follow-up single “Backchat”, which emerged on fellow Bristolian imprint Hotline Recordings, captured the immediacy of a heated dancefloor with a similar blend of snagging vocal and simple-but-deadly percussive muscle.

“We made them both in about half an hour each,” Joe says of “Percy” and “Backchat”. “With “Backchat” we were just messing around on Ableton with that vocal looping. As soon as you’ve got something like that, the tune makes itself. That was a dubplate of ours for a year or something. It might not have even come out.”

The lack of pretension in how these tracks came about speaks volumes for their widespread popularity, but equally it buys into the notion that Joe and Sam are more concerned with an instinctive continuation of the music that came before them, rather than some aggrandised appropriation of a style to be reclaimed as their own. It’s a similar ethos that looks set to drive their Bandulu label in the near future, off the back of the runaway success of that first single.

“We’ve got some wicked young producers in Bristol making some really cool stuff,” Joe explains of the next releases they have lined up. “The ethos of it is instrumental grime, simple 8 bar stuff, which surprisingly it doesn’t seem that many people are putting out.”

“We always wanted to just continue that lineage of grime from where it stopped coming out on vinyl,” Sam says of the path Bandulu will take, encapsulating his and Joe’s own grime output in the process. “It was never thinking, ‘we’re gonna be reinventing it’. If we’re out doing a Kahn and Neek grime show, we’re gonna be playing dubplates but we’re also gonna be playing old grime instrumentals, things that might have got missed. B-sides of stuff that we think, ‘oh that was a hidden gem’. We’re still always digging and buying old vinyl.”

“I’d rather cut a dubplate than eat steak for dinner. I can eat pasta for two weeks and I can cut some dubplates.”

It’s evident from the way vinyl creeps into both of their vernacular that the pair are devout wax romantics, which is of course in keeping with the traditions they wish to uphold. However, in their Gorgon Sound guise the sense of ritual and sacrament is even greater. While only one single has surfaced from the project thus far, already Joe and Sam are steadily working their way into a world that operates independently of the trends and fads of the wider dance music scene.

“It was going out to Teachings in Dub and the big reggae events that got me into it,” Joe says of the inspiration behind embarking on a more rootsy, steppas-inspired production tangent. “We obviously both loved reggae since we were really small, but seeing things like Channel One, Iration Steppas, actually involving yourself in the music in that way blew my mind. I started messing around with the idea of doing steppas and Sam was into it as well.”

Bristol is not short of inspiration when it comes to reggae and its derivatives. The soundsystem culture that descends from the Jamaican population has long defined that unique kink in music emanating from the city, and groups such as Dubkasm and Henry & Louis have carried the torch for roots-based music through to the present day. If there’s one exponent of Bristol’s dub and reggae legacy that it’s worth snagging the attention of, it’s Rob Smith (he of Smith & Mighty fame).

“We were basically just making tunes to send to Rob Smith,” Sam admits, thinking back to their first experiments with reggae elements in their dubstep tracks.

“Dubs for Rob,” Joe nods sagely.

It wasn’t until they were booked to play at Dubloaded in October 2010 that Gorgon Sound started to really take hold as a separate entity to the rest of the Kahn and Neek material. With the pressure of an impending gig for Pinch’s flagship bassweight dance, Joe and Sam knuckled down to finishing a raft of tracks and cutting them to dubplate.

“We had lots of tunes pretty much finished, and I think we cut about five or six dubs, so it was about 12 tracks altogether,” explains Sam, “and after that it became a full dubplate DJ operation. We were still playing other records as well at the time, and it’s just evolved since then, into a whole show of our own material.”

It’s a level of commitment that reaches far beyond the convenience of burning off a CD of your latest creation or simply dropping it into your digital platform of choice, and in Bristol perhaps more than other places it represents something of a creative nirvana as a DJ producer (look no further than our recent discussion with Borai for further proof of that). While it may be something of a costly venture, the bar was already raised for the likes of Joe and Sam to step up to.

“If you see someone play a whole dubplate set, that’s quite inspiring. Seeing people like Mala, Pev and Pinch inspired me to do it,” Joe says of their decision to cut dubs. “When you see people just playing dubplates, it sets a standard. I can’t really rock up with a laptop can I? You put the work in and do it properly. It’s a tradition.”

Of course earning the respect of your peers and forefathers is one thing, but it must be considered that a younger generation making their first steps into the clubs now are not necessarily so enamoured with the pomp and ceremony of vinyl.

“I think some kids see it and think, ‘oh why are you bothering with vinyl?’” Sam muses. “We had a guy the other day basically saying I was being pretentious by cutting records and not putting my music on the internet. I said to him, ‘I’d rather cut a dubplate than eat steak for dinner. I can eat pasta for two weeks and I can cut some dubplates. He just said, ‘why don’t you get Serato?’”



With both the Kahn & Neek releases, and the Gorgon Sound material, there have been backlashes to the popularity of the music with its vinyl-only mandate, not least in the grime scene which has arguably moved on from being a primarily vinyl-focused genre. For Joe and Sam though, the way their music is presented, both in terms of releases and their shows, is simply a continuation of a long-standing tradition within DJ culture.

“Some people have a sense of entitlement, they don’t understand,” Joe bemoans of those that consistently call for their music to be released digitally. “They get frustrated by exclusivity with music, but nowadays it’s so hard to keep hold of a bit mystery for longer than a week. It’s not like us saying, ‘oh no you can’t have it’. It’s for DJs that are taking it seriously. If we put the work in doing our bit, buying records, digging, then we want to be part of that tradition, not the tradition of ‘here’s 30 tunes for free’.”

In the draining pace of the online music world, it’s hard to disagree that the glut of availability struggles to match the significance of a new record you can hold in your hands and put on your shelf. After all, thirty tunes given away for nothing does not say much about the worth the artists themselves put on the music. Beyond notions of value, there is also the endless feeling of transience as another deluge of downloads, uploads, streams and shares waits in the wings for another musical phase to take hold.

“I think what attracts me to steppas is the absence of trend,” Joe muses, “and it’s a slower building thing. You see the big guys, they’ve been doing it for twenty odd years. It’s a long game, but you’ve got to earn your respect really.”

“In dubstep people can be around for six months and can be a flash in the pan,” Sam adds. “That’s what I really like about the reggae scene. You keep working at it and you put out your records, you do your shows and you build up a fanbase.”

Aside from the music they make and release, Joe and Sam are equally conscious to have a physical presence that can stand the test of the time, and so they’re channelling some of their considerable creative energy into the Roots Radical Soundsystem. Being built by Bristol’s resident fixer of all things audio-related, Beavis, it’s a slow-burning labour of love that reflects the nature of the reggae scene as a whole.

“We’ve built some dubplates for him and put money into the system as well,” Joe explains of their involvement with the system. “Beavis has been working on that system since he was sixteen, and that is going to take time to build and build and build. In twenty years time we’ll hopefully have our own soundsystem and be still doing reggae dances. That’s the way that world works.”

It’s a reassuring vision of the future, where music that matters now can live on and resist the tides of hype. With their strongly grounded principles and consideration for the way their message is spread, it’s safe to assume that Joe and Sam, whether as Kahn and Neek or Gorgon Sound, will be around for a long while yet.

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A Life In Sound: Borai’s potted guide to Bristol



Bristol based producer Borai takes Oli Warwick through the various record shops, club nights, individuals and institutions from the city that have helped shape his sound.

As soon as you meet him, you’re not likely to forget Boris English. His boundless energy bowls you over in a barrage of facts, anecdotes and all-round enthusiasm for most subjects, but most of all music. As a Bristol resident all his life, Boris has arguably been raised by the music scene of his city, guided through his formative years by that quintessential West Country cocktail of rumbling low-end and spiritual purity, steadily maturing in his tastes and knowledge and moving with the stylistic shifts that have naturally occurred since he first became possessed by the beat.

The past year or so has seen a definitive culmination of those years of dedication, via a series of lauded releases with sometime studio brethren October on such labels as Apple Pips and BRSTL, and now taking full flight with a solo 12” used to herald the start of Chicago label Tasteful Nudes. It’s a decidedly house-orientated thread that has started to define the disseminated sound of Borai, but truthfully Boris’ musical background comes from a disparate range of exploits and undertakings that tell a humble story of the Bristol scene away from the media frenzy that has occasionally gathered around key artists in the past. It’s an experience that speaks out for the many unsung heroes of any local scene, from those that do little more than pop into the record shop for a chat once a week to the tireless, flyer-loaded promoter hustling people to the dance.

Through his various engagements with music on an assertive level, Boris provides a neat snapshot of some of the hidden treasures a city like Bristol has to offer. It’s not so much about the artists the city has been made famous for, but rather a celebration of a life dedicated to music on a local level, where it matters the most.
Prime Cuts & other Bristol record shops

It would be easy for even a keen-eyed record hunter to miss Prime Cuts. Were it not for the sandwich board jutting out onto the bustling treadmill of Bristol’s Gloucester Road, you might never know it was tucked away in the basement of Repsycho. The steady stream of students and party people looking for vintage threads are just as likely to glaze over the little door that leads downstairs, its poster-plastered door jostling for attention amongst garish shirts and classic jackets.

Once you do find yourself in Mike Savage’s record shop though, it’s easy to envisage hours sinking away in front of you as the compact cellar space bristles temptingly with reams of records across two rooms, stacked high, deep and far. If the spread of genre sections seemed daunting enough, one glance at the cash desk and the fit to bursting room behind it is enough to ensure full-blown vinyl fatigue sets in. Endless towers lean precariously next to each other, some bagged up for job lot shipments, others awaiting guidance after being dropped off by someone looking to de-clutter their life. This shop is a constant celebration of the ephemera that defines us, filling every space made by a sale with an instant replacement for fear of exposing too much wall space.

Stock wise, it’s a canny selection that Mike offers in his twelfth year of trading, with a healthy balance between pleasant surprises and trusty classics on most trips to hunt out wax. It’s not the same kind of bottom-dollar digging you can enjoy in charity shops, but equally you’ll have to sift through a lot less dross and if you’re not precious about mint condition, you may just get a bargain.

Mike represents an archetypal contributor to the music industry, honing his multi-tasking skills and thinking creatively in order to carve out a living. His formative Bristol years were spent as a prolific promoter, packing in as many nights as the week could give him.



“Bristol used to be Monday to Saturday,” he recalls as we stand around in the shop at the end of a sweltering summer day. The warm conditions bring out the comforting mustiness of a second hand record shop, and it fills every corner of the room. “You could put on a night on a Tuesday and fill it, and now it’s different. Everything’s free. Free things are nice but it devalues music I think.”

When he was done with promoting and DJing, Mike’s insurmountable stack of records and the vacant basement space under Repsycho arose as a possible new avenue to pursue. “We opened in 2000, and Boris was coming from the start,” Mike recalls, turning to look at his partner in dusty record dealing. “How old were you?”

“Oh god from about 17 I used to come in here,” Boris exclaims.

“Him and Jules (better known as October) used to come in, fresh from the night before and just bouncing round the shop. It was like a crèche,” Mike chuckles.

“Jungle and drum & bass were the first new records I was buying,” Boris explains of those early days, “I’ve always had an interest in second hand stuff. Down here it was the funk section that I was going through quite a lot and again second hand drum & bass records.

“And a bit of nu jazz I seem to recall,” Mike chimes in.

“Lots of nu jazz!” Boris proclaims enthusiastically, “and then lots of things to sample too.”

Before he was dipping into the world of crate digging, jungle was Boris’ first love and he spent his formative record buying days in Breakbeat Culture, a shop that used to reside in the back of a clothes shop (notice a theme here?) named Cooshti on Park Street, right in the centre of town. BC was run by the same team behind the seminal Ruffneck Ting nights that represented the vital advancements Bristol was making in the business of sped-up breaks, and it stood proud as Bristol’s only dedicated jungle shop.

“I went in there when I was 14 or 15,” Boris remembers, “and I was just getting into it. They didn’t have any listening turntables, so you had to ask them to play any record you wanted to check on the big soundsystem, and that just meant that there were those horrible moments of, ‘what have I picked?! There’s ten people in the shop and arrggghh!’ One time, I can’t remember what it was but I picked something and played it and there were nods from everyone in the shop. That was the moment I was like, ‘oh it’s ok, it’s fine, it’s good enough’!”

“Good music is timeless. The Invada thing is timeless. Massive Attack is timeless, and the same now with Tectonic, Punch Drunk, Idle Hands.”

After a few changing of hands and location switches, Boris wound up working at Breakbeat Culture before it ceased trading, although in his words it was more a chance to, “turn up, keys to the place, rant out jungle music all day.” Before all that though, Boris could be found serving the Bristol populace from the age of 15 in the decidedly less edgy surroundings of the Virgin Megastore in Broadmead.

“I was given the jazz and classical department on a Saturday,” Boris says of his formative training in the world of record shops. “I was given my own soundsystem and allowed to play jazz and classical music so I went, ‘ooh jazz, fuck classical,’ and I started at A and went all the way through.

What used to be the Bristol Virgin Megastore has become symbolic of record shops’ position on the high street, changing ownership quarterly and dredging through unwanted stock from a netherworld of forgotten musicians who never quite struck gold. It still limps along now as Head, with a sizable vinyl section packed full of future charity shop material at bargain bin prices. As with all these places, there’s still a chance you might get lucky somewhere in between the scores of disposable funky house and breaks 12”s, but its days as a spot on the record shopping circuit are numbered.

“When I first arrived in Bristol there were about 18 record shops,” Mike guesses of the good old days, “or maybe more. I think there were one or two which I never even found, but getting on for 20 actually, and what is it now? Seven if that?
Jungle and the nature of the Bristol scene

Back when he was in his mid teens and getting a taste for vinyl, Boris was usually found combing the plethora of record shops that centred around Park Street in the mid 90s. As well as Breakbeat Culture, he speaks of picking up on house in Bang Bang, not to mention digging in Eat The Beat, Giant, Tony’s and Purple Penguin.

“You don’t know Purple Penguin?! Man! That was an institution!” Jules ‘October’ Smith exclaims. It’s a torrentially wet Thursday evening and we’re sat in The Mothers Ruin under the dim glow of skate videos while a band sound-checks badly downstairs. “Skateboards and hippity hoppity. That’s also where I discovered house music. I got a few Carl Craig bits, some Paperclip People and some 69 bits. I didn’t think that those records would be techno or whatever. I used to think that techno was something completely different.

“Bristol has a long history of techno but it has a long history of nosebleed, banging techno,” Boris explains, thinking wistfully back to clattering gabber mixes by DJ Fade heard on ropey fourth hand tapes at school. However it was jungle that brought Boris and Jules together after meeting at Breakbeat Culture while Jules was working behind the counter.

At that time, jungle was the main currency in Bristol clubs, much in the same way dubstep and more recently house music have been representing the city globally since. “Essentially you had two big crews,” Boris explains of the scene as it was in those days. “Full Cycle started a bit earlier. If memory serves me correctly Breakbeat Culture was people coming to university and starting something, like half of all Bristol residents, whereas Full Cycle were born and bred so they had a few years above Marky and Darren.”

Full Cycle of course had international repute, spearheaded by Roni Size and his avalanche of critical acclaim that helped break jungle and drum & bass into the wider public consciousness, but the Marky and Darren that Boris refers to were known at the time as Decoder & Substance, later to become chart-hassling hybrid favourites Kosheen. While Breakbeat Culture was their shop, their Ruffneck Ting parties were the definitive snapshot of the nascent jungle scene, and the accompanying live tape series featuring the likes of LTJ Bukem, Randall and Hype circa 1995 has attained something of a mythical status.



“I went to a few Ruffneck Tings,” Jules recalls. “They were pretty rough, pretty scary. The first thing I went to though was a Ganja Kru thing at Powerhouse. That was like ‘96, so it was still really jungly.” The heaviness of the parties at the time is widely agreed upon, but by the time Boris joined in there was another go-to destination for all those needing a D&B fix. Drive By was run by Gerard and used to take over Level, a long lost club near Park St, and The Thekla, an iconic nightspot for Bristol on an old cargo boat that still packs out gigs and club nights every week to this day.

“Gerard used to drop free passes to all the record shops, a very clever man,” Boris remembers. “He’d bring the big drum & bass guys in, and it was wicked. In the end we all stopped going to it ‘cos it was just full of children, but what I realised was at that kind of age range two years is quite a lot. I had a lot of conversations with people who would say, ‘yeah Drive By is just full of kids.’ And when were you going to it? ‘When I was 17’.”

“We were just young, enthusiastic, going out all the time,” Jules says of those days, “but I soon got very disenchanted with the whole thing. It was a very aggressive atmosphere at the parties.”

Of course with age the need for tribal loyalty to a particular scene wears off, and so both Boris and Jules grew and explored their own paths through a diverse spread of beats. Whatever the case their approaches have always shied a little from the zeitgeist at any given time, but now their own idiosyncratic takes on house and techno find themselves associated with a wider tag of Bristol house music, perceived by some as the critically admired operations of labels such as Idle Hands, but also by many as the widespread success of acts such as Julio Bashmore and Eats Everything.

“I never felt any real affiliation with any scene in Bristol until the last couple of years,” Jules muses, “and that’s only because what we’ve been doing is suddenly popular elsewhere. Idle Hands, Pev, Kowton, that whole little crew, that’s what I feel that Bristol is really like.”

It’s true of many underground music scenes around the world that the perceived success of the protagonists from outside is quite often a far cry from the day to day reality on the ground. “Back in the day, you had Nick from NRK putting on Richie Hawtin at Thekla and 30 people turning up,” Jules continues. “Paul Purgas from Emptyset put on Underground Resistance at the Arc Bar years ago, and no-one ever talks about that! I worry now that there is this idea of Bristol house music that is really popular and there’s so much hype on it; it all seems a bit faddy. Good music is timeless. The Invada thing is timeless. Massive Attack is timeless, and the same now with Tectonic, Punch Drunk, Idle Hands.”

Of course this perspective reflects just Jules and Boris’ own experiences of partying, DJing and living in Bristol for most if not all of their lives, when there are countless tributaries of subcultures at work at any one time, populated by enthusiastic heads from first-timers to seasoned pros. Like any self-respecting urban enclave, it’s the mixture of these pockets of culture that make up the ambience of the city’s creative corners, and there’s no denying Bristol has had a healthy injection of such self-reliant imagination over the years.



Cutting dubs, spinning wax

If there remains one constant through so much of Bristol music culture, it must be vinyl. Even as digital technologies tempted many away to a life of convenience, a strong contingent of the dubstep community made a specific point of sticking to wax. Buoyed by the soundsystem undercurrent that has always emanated from the Jamaican population of the city, the likes of Pinch and Peverelist were (and still are) religiously cutting dubplates of exclusive material, both maintaining the tradition and making a defiant statement in their commitment to it.

Henry Bainbridge is one of those dedicating themselves to the preservation of vinyl culture, both with his Wuk Up parties but most significantly with Dub Studio. Based off the beaten track in suburban Bristol, overlooking a nature reserve no less, Henry lives with his family on the top two floors of his house while the basement is given over to two rooms that make up the studio. From there he masters and cuts both vinyl and acetate, whether it be a dubplate or a 78rpm jukebox record.

“My inspiration for the name Dub Studio was taken from a book about dancehall culture,” Henry explains, “which described how a ‘dub studio’ was a focal point for many facets of the music industry. I never wanted to just process audio and transfer it onto vinyl, or fire digital files across the net, I wanted to be part of what’s going on around the music.”

With Wuk Up operating as an extension of the Heatwave collective once a month at The Bank on Stokes Croft, Henry is certainly active in engaging with the music beyond his studio, committed to pushing the true sound of dancehall. “Dancehall is always bundled together with other genres like reggae, jungle, dub and even roots,” Henry explains. “I wanted to do a night that was all about dancehall, without having to rely on other genres to prop it up. I sometimes think we might be freaking some people out a bit, but the harder the dancehall we play, the more people love it.”

Having crossed paths through an assortment of musical endeavours, Boris and Henry got chatting at Shanti Sound, a party Boris, Rapid and Embassy were putting on some four years ago in Cosies, a cellar bar in St Pauls. With a shared passion for dancehall and Boris’ unbridled willingness to learn, a plan was hatched to bring Boris into the fold at Dubstudio.

“We currently have more space than before,” Henry explains, “and I’m finally in a position to train Boris up on running a lathe. It’s been in the pipeline a long time, about three years now, but Boris stuck around and made it happen, which not many people are willing to do these days.”

“I’m going over there for weekly sessions and at the moment it’s cutting stuff for me!” Boris beams about the tutelage he receives from Henry. “With the use of the lathe on evening sessions I thought, ‘why not cut my stuff’? Then it gives me a way to go, ‘boom, it’s finished’, and I’ve got it on dub and I can play it on a mix or play it out.”



Certainly Boris’ sets around Bristol are peppered with dubplates, from the collaborations with October to bashy party riddims, but as he gains control of the craft he already sees further ways he can get creative with the ability to cut records. A recent post he made on Facebook showed a picture of a freshly cut dub entitled Battle Weapon 001, purportedly featuring a pair of new tracks of Boris’. The catalogue number can’t help but suggest the beginning of a series.

“It gives me an excuse to do things like preparing material to cut onto dubplate that’s special or very stripped down,” says Boris of his plans formulating around his burgeoning skill. “Eight minutes of one kick drum with nothing on it; that can be a kind of weapon, a battle weapon. That’s part of the idea, it’s not just forthcoming material.”

Boris’ passion for dubplate culture and everything that surrounds it isn’t hard to spot. You can see how much he romanticises the aesthetic as well as the practicalities of the format. At a time when there are ever fewer trained vinyl engineers, it will be the likes of Boris that the resurgent wave of vinyl lovers will be depending on to keep the wax spinning.

“One of the things I’m striving for is to be in a position to cut lots of dubs,” Boris says of his own ambition in the world of cutting. “Ideally my ultimate plan is to turn up with a ten inch record box that’s got nothing but dubplates in it. That’s the ultimate goal.”

Boris makes for a great example of the multi-faceted nature of being involved in music. There’s no question he has the energy for keeping up this spread of endeavours, but he also represents the discipline required to acquire a new skill. Along with patience it’s a quality you can sidestep and still get ahead in the digital age, but it’s reassuring to know that some people are focused enough to take the time and do it properly.

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New Structures For Loving: An interview with Cosmin TRG



In the last three years, Cosmin TRG has shaken off his dubstep roots to craft some of the most innovative techno in a scene awash with staid facsimiles. On the eve of his second album release, he talks to Tom Banham about Dadaism, ancient myths and real ale.

“You don’t get this in Berlin,” says Cosmin Nicolae, sipping his pint of Everards Tiger. It turns out that this Romanian ex-pat is quite the ale connoisseur; he recently tweeted his love of Thornbridge’s IPA Jaipur, and is looking forward to investigating the Sheffield brewer’s wares in more detail when he plays in the city next week. It’s a pleasure he embraces whenever he visits the UK, and he laments the close-mindedness of a Teutonic brewing scene yet to embrace the pleasures of warm, flat booze. “Before I left Romania, the beer scene was a lot like in Germany,” he continues. “It was all pilsners, lagers – loads of beers but all kind of the same. Then six months after I left someone started an ale revolution.” He smiles, and drinks deeply. “Now it’s everywhere.”

It’s a peculiarly British quirk for this son of Bucharest, but then Nicolae’s had his eyes trained on these shores for some years. In 2007 after a decade dancing to the sounds of UK jungle, 2-step and drum & bass he released his debut record, the sizzling garage cut “Put You Down”, which was embossed with that historic stamp – HES001. Hessle Audio has since served as the paradigm of the indefinable and ever-mutating sound of UK bass music, and home to some of our most exciting homegrown artists.

Nicolae’s story is indicative of how global dance music has become. Not merely as the commercial force illustrated by a glance across the Atlantic, but in the way that geography has waned as a sonic influence. Detroit techno, Jersey house, Bristol bass – what do these terms really mean when a young man from Bucharest can make sounds almost indistinguishable from their local proponents?

He’s in town to play the second room at Fabric, a club he’s been a regular guest at almost since that first record dropped. Noticeably, he’s been one of the few artists who’ve managed to successfully cross the divide between the low-end pressure of Friday, and Saturday’s more considered excursions through four-four. In fact, listening to the throb of his more recent output on Rush Hour and Modeselektor’s 50 Weapons, it’s strange to think that in the nascent stages of his career he was a regular alongside the likes of Skream and Benga. But even when he was making dubstep, his sound was always more measured than their speaker-shredding aggression.



“I was actually making 4/4 stuff around the time I put out the Hessle record,” Nicolae reveals when I probe this stylistic shift. “I’m happy I didn’t put it out, because it wasn’t any good, but I was making a lot of different things at the same time and all the tunes were kind of feeding off each other. At some point, I felt some of the stuff I was making wasn’t as good as the other stuff, and I was actually more excited about the things that I couldn’t play in my DJ sets.”

He pinpoints the move away from garage-inflected sounds to a Dub Police party in Fabric in 2010. Uninspired by the heavily swung sounds he felt obliged to play, he called Caspa up ahead of the gig and floated the idea that maybe he wasn’t going to spin any dubstep that night. “And he said, ‘Like what then? UK funky?’,” Nicolae recalls, in a surprisingly accurate cockney accent. “And I said, ‘No, notUKfunky. It’s different.’ I was really sure it wasn’t gonna work, because I was supposed to play one ’til two in the main room, right after Skream and Benga. And then when I turned up for the gig a couple of months later, my set had magically been moved to the end of the night.”

It turned out to be a blessing. Stepping up in the wake of former Flux Pavillion collaborator Trolley Snatcha, Nicolae gave no quarter to the wobbles and dug straight into his collection of classic house, and “a fair few techno curveballs.” The floor, buoyed by an influx of hardy punters from room two, went with it. “So after that I took a long break, and just decided to play the stuff I wanted to play.” he smiles, “And not take those bookings anymore.”

It was a risk that paid dividends, allowing Nicolae the space to develop a sound informed by the rhythmic experimentation of his earlier work but bolted to a techno chassis. Releases like Liebe Suende on Rush Hour and Separat on 50 Weapons demonstrate Nicolae at his most bruising, the latter especially a cantering slab of warehouse techno in the mould of Sandwell District, whose kicks drove straight and crushed everything before them.

I put it to Nicolae that dubstep’s most exciting elements, the absence of boundaries and the freedom from classic techno’s inelastic four-to-the-floor, became formalised structures of their own over time, choking creativity. The migration of dubsteppers into classic sounds has given them the opportunity to explore more expansive ideas, to flex against structure rather than sticking rigidly to it. “Definitely,” he agrees enthusiastically. “I felt there was much more open space, just because you weren’t restrained. If you want to touch on the classic house and techno sounds – if you wanted to do that three or four years ago, you couldn’t because they wouldn’t have that idea of what house and techno is, or was, or what it should be.”

Though from the outside it may seem as though Nicolae’s working within greater constraints these days – his music is often austere, greyscale and laser-focused, as opposed to the freewheeling shifts of records like 2010’s “Bréton Brut” on Hemlock – he says that he finds a freedom in self-imposed boundaries; knowing that he could do anything, but forcing himself not to.



It’s a methodology that’s informed his latest album, Gordian, which is released on 50 Weapons late next month. Although he admits that, despite his best efforts, it’s a record that broke free of its moorings. “To be honest, I’d intended the whole album to be really minimalistic and kind of hypnotic,” he explains, “and it’s not minimalistic at all. I didn’t want it to be musical, and it is fairly musical. There just seems to be a lot of stuff going on, when in fact I was trying to subtract.”

When I push him for an explanation as to why Gordian ended up sounding quite as lush as it does, he seems perplexed. “I wish I had an explanation for it. I’m still mad with myself for it, because it’s too musical,” he says, laughing. “Melodies are not my forte. I’ve got no musical training, I’ve no idea about harmonies and keys and stuff. And it’s come out so musical, which was an accident.”

“I was actually making 4/4 stuff around the time I put out the Hessle record, I’m happy I didn’t put it out, because it wasn’t any good.”

He shrugs, but this tongue-in-cheek critique would be wholly unfair in anyone else’s mouth. Yes, Gordian is brighter, perhaps more open than his debut album, 2011’s Simulat, or the whip-crack techno of tracks like “Fizic” and “Separat”. But it’s no Faithless-aping stride into stadium techno. What hooks there are remain obtuse, buried under layers of crackling static and even, on “Desire Is Sovereign”, utterly subsumed by a kick drum that threatens to shatter every surrounding element. Gordian may be more melodically evolved than his previous work but it still requires a deft ear to unpick.

It’s appropriate considering the album’s title, named for the impossible knot that would grant success in conquering the East to whoever could untie it. Faced with this challenge, Alexander the Great chose to simply slash through it with his sword. Though there’s no such simple solution to the complexities of Nicolae’s work, parsing it is a pleasure, elements emerging and clarifying as you uncover each new sonic layer. And while it might not bestow any military might, it’s pregnant with dancefloor-conquering potential.

This legendary reference stemmed from Nicolae’s research into his home country’s artistic heritage, especially the exodus of painters like Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, who left Romania for Paris and Zurich in the 20s and 30s, and whose radicalism led to the boundary-crushing surrealism of the Dada movement. “They were making something new. They were stretching things out and they weren’t prisoners of a single art movement,” Nicolae explains. “They were just making things on the go, and they were really radical at that time.

“The other (inspiration) would be (Constantin) Brânçusi, who was really important to me because – and it’s a trivial thing – but I had this poster of him sitting in his studio when I was five or six,” he continues. “I was really fascinated by all these shapes, and reading up on it and looking over his career, I started thinking how it came from a really traditional, paternalistic background, but his art was just really radical. It wasn’t really anything that you might see as traditional – traditional Romanian or eastern European – but at the same time the titles he had for his works were really traditional and Romanian, going back to myths. Something really ancient and ancestral. And this is how I went to the final title, Gordian, which is this ancient myth. So I guess I was trying to find some roots, and find some really basic structures.”

It would be tempting as a critic to draw the parallels between Dadaist’s rejection of artistic standards, and the musical conditions that led to Nicolae’s own, boundary-morphing sounds. Dubstep is, without delving too far into a rabbit hole of cultural analysis, a most post-modern genre, adopting and repurposing myriad individual movements into something new. And as Nicolae explains, though being distanced from the UK scene while everything was fermenting was frustrating at the time, it gave him an outsider’s perspective on the music, unsullied by its wider cultural significance.

“I’d always been into the mutant 2-step thing,” he reveals, “and to me, 2-step wasn’t the same thing as it meant – as it represented for people over here. I had no idea about the posh 2-step clubs, the ‘no hats, no hoods’. I had no idea. To me, even grime was this proper underground movement, it didn’t mean – I had an idea about the knife crime, life on the estates and stuff, but it was very surreal because it was like a film; my own projection. As a DJ, the music to me wasn’t anything to do with the lifestyle. Because I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t experienced in this stuff.”



Nicolae admits that he hadn’t even been to a proper dubstep night until 2008, after the release of his first handful of records. Indeed his forays into production were inspired not by wanting to ape dubstep, but by a frustration at the dearth of records that fitted into his DJ sets, records that married the 2-step swing to dubstep’s crushing subs. “I wasn’t listening to any genre of music and thinking: ‘I’ll make this’,” he recalls. “I was just trying to do my own thing, within that framework. And I was lucky with the Hessle guys. I was just sending them tunes, to Dave (Pearson Sound), because he was one of the more adventurous guys.”

These days Nicolae’s at the vanguard of techno’s new-school, FWD>> transplanted to Berghain in a cross-generational, highly fertile exploration of rhythm and texture. Most telling perhaps was his appearance on Bleep’s Green Series in February, a pseudo-collaborative project starring techno’s most innovative names – those recent converts, and those who’ve been working in the medium for years. “I was really thrilled by the idea,” he says. “But at the same time, everyone was really competitive. I saw the list and thought, ‘Amazing’. And then “Ah, right – banger.”

He laughs, but the no-holds-barred releases from Nicolae, Objekt, Karenn and The Analogue Cops certainly aren’t subtle. But then, in contrast to the constraints of writing for an album, he admits that having that dancefloor freedom was a relief. “I knew it would be one of my few chances to write a club track that I’d love playing out,” he says. “But I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I just wanted to make a good track because I knew everyone would do their best.” And how does he think he compares? Has he won? A smile, a sip of beer. “It’s OK.”

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Shaping Perceptions: An interview with Function



It’s been a long time coming, but Function is finally about to release his debut artist album. One of the founding members of Sandwell District, Brooklyn-raised and Berlin-based Dave Sumner has maintained a low-profile since the seminal label/collective closed at the start of 2012. Over the past year, Sandwell’s other key artists Silent Servant and Regis have been busy; the former releasing his debut artist album, the latter curating and starring in a post-punk compilation and expanding the Downwards label into the US.

Having disbanded the seminal label at the height of its popularity, Sumner has had the time to reflect, record and remix and perform, but now it’s his turn to face into a flurry of activity, with his solo debut album, Incubation, due to drop on Ostgut Ton at the start of March. Following on from Silent Servant’s debut album last year, there’s a real sense of anticipation about Function’s debut solo long player. But isn’t hype the kind of thing that Sandwell District shunned, albeit in their own understated way?

“It’s more about how you go about doing it. If you’re shameless, it won’t work, but if it’s something that draws you in…. I don’t have an issue with becoming bigger, but do I want to be a bigger artist? Probably not, it destroys a lot of things. There are a handful of big names who are great, but this way of shamelessly self-promoting music, that’s not where I’m coming from,” Dave says. “It’s not about forcing things down people’s throats - but I’m all for word of mouth promotion.”

Apart from the hypnotic music, this disinterest in engaging with the system is something that initially attracted this writer to Sandwell District. The dearth of information, a lack of even basic contact details and an avoidance of the kind of attention-seeking antics so beloved of minimal techno artists at the time felt like a breath of fresh air.

“You see this kind of shameless self-promotion all the time with social media, and the shitty thing is, it works. Personally, I am not into into it. I’ve nothing against Facebook, but it’s not my style. Maybe I am losing out a bit and people don’t see you. It’s not something we’re trying to do consciously, but it is like the 90s. There’s no such thing as trainspotting anymore, that was part of the culture. The info you got on the record was all you got. There was something amazing about closing your eyes and imagining what was happening when you listened to the music,” Sumner believes.

“Look at Model 500’s ‘Nightdrive’,” he offers by way of example. “It came out in 1985 – I only got into it later – but just trying to understand what he was singing about (“Well … I’m driving in a black on black in black Porsche 924/tempting fate for a little bit more”). “I mean you couldn’t look that up on the internet. Mad Mike wore a mask, no one knew who he was or what he looked like. You heard all these stories that he was a drag racer. A lot of that stuff gets lost nowadays.”

Surely that’s the price we pay for progress? After all, the internet and new technology has allowed unlimited numbers of people to experience artists who in the past would have remained the preserve of a small underground. “Yeah, but when Burial came out, a journalist exposed him and that was really unfair,” Sumner counters. “The technology is great but that doesn’t mean you have to broadcast your child being born.”



Despite Sumner’s views about the relationship between technology and music, he believes that the notion of artistry has become more important than ever. “As far as releasing music goes, you have to shape a perception,” he believes. “There is a picture that you paint when you release a record – if it has some kind of point, you hear it in the music. This whole scene started with DJs, then producers became DJs and got booked because they released records, but now the DJs have taken over again,” he feels. “Now it is the case that the producer bows down to the DJ, and you need to be worth your shit to stand out. “

This, Sumner believes is due to the widespread availability of cheaply priced digital technology: “When it comes down to it, this music is easy to make due to technology. It used to be that you had to be part of a secret society to make electronic music – I learnt about drum machines and synths and wanted to be part of of it. Now you can be a producer without spending money, but back in the 80s studios cost thousands, so you had to be pretty serious or at the fringes of society if you were making techno.”

Despite the availability of technology, he believes that it has not resulted in a deluge of great music- “the thing that sets artists apart is still talent. You can give anyone a box of tools, but that doesn’t mean that they can all build a house,” he notes. It’s hard to imagine calling into question Sumner’s levels of talent, but he says that he tried to disregard much of what he learnt over the past 20 years as a techno producer during the recording of Incubation.

“When I was making the album I had to get away from the process. In the last few years, I shelved a lot of material. I removed myself from the process so I forgot how I did it. I would like to forget how I made some of the music, and there are tracks that I forgot I made [laughs]…”

The recording of the album happened over a short time period, with the majority of the tracks made during a two-week session. Sumner then let the tracks sit for four months and then “towards May/June” went back to them, or as he says: “I sat on the album to see if it sticks; I feel very confident about it”.

“I had never recorded a solo album before,” he adds. “Feed Forward was a success; initially the idea was for me to release an album soon after it, but in the end there was a feeling that we let it settle. It worked out quite naturally. Juan [Silent Servant] was working on his album and got it out, so it was better to keep it a bit spaced out,” he explains.

Sumner traces his roots back to early 90s New York clubland, and has been making techno music since the mid-90s, first on Damon Wild’s Synewave and his own Infrastructure label before Sandwell was established. Given the fact that he’s been active for over 15 years as an artist, why is he only releasing his debut album now?

“I don’t know, I guess I didn’t think about an album in the beginning,” he explains. “I just wanted to get 12″s out and I suppose I looked at EPs sort of as albums. Also in the 90s, there were a lot of double packs that were viewed as albums… approaching an album is a different thing, but I did use that approach doing 3-4 track EPs,” he feels, citing Ember as an example of an EP recorded and curated as a ‘mini-album’. However, he is quick to add that “the reason it has taken so long is because I didn’t feel I was ready. The first five to six years I was just putting out records and I knew eventually I would do an album”.

“There’s no such thing as trainspotting anymore, that was part of the culture. The info you got on the record was all you got.”

At the risk of sounding too much like a pop psychologist, is this why when he finally decided to record a solo album, he called it Incubation? “Partly yes, but also because it looks good written down – the word is part of the project, the way it looks written down, on a record, it’s our signature,” he explains. How does the artwork, in essence a cut-out of a human eye mounted on a petri dish, complement the music? “Juan [Silent Servant] did it, so it’s not best explained by me,” he says. “There’s definitely a Dada-esque influence. When you look back to that time, Dadaists were revolutionaries against war – thankfully we don’t have to deal with circumstances like that,” he says.

It’s a point worth heeding if one accepts the argument that great art thrives during period of political and social upheaval. Sumner started to make music during the 90s, a period of great prosperity and peace in the West, but his greatest work has been in the last five years, as the world slips over the edge and into uncertainty. Does he see a connection?

“In many ways I feel very lucky,” he replies. “I never fully realised it before. The way I live my life is outside society. I’m 39 now and if I look at some of the pressures that friends of mine endured, say about 10 years ago, the way I live my life is so different. I’ve seen other friends having girlfriends forcing them to become wives or families telling people to get out of music. I made a lot of sacrifices myself and suffered to do this,” he says, adding that “it’s a difficult thing standing your ground and it comes with consequences. You sacrifice a lot of relationships. There have been times in my life where I wish I hadn’t been so passionate about music, but then life goes on and you realise that nothing else gives you the horn. “

Interestingly, Sumner says that his path of struggle is most closely aligned not with a musician or music producer, but with a comedian.“I can really relate to Louis CK,” he says. “He’s a writer, but he’s really transformed comedy. He’s just super real and crosses the line, but in a charming way, it really works - do you know him?”

I show my ignorance and admit that I am not aware of him.

“He has a show called Louie, that’s where he really took it to the next level,” Dave explains. “He writes and stars in it - he’s an incredible writer, but he’s suffered and really stuck it out. It has worked out for him, he was in his 40s, same as Larry David, when he made it. David was a schmuck most of his life- it wasn’t until he was in his early 40s that stuff started to happen – he was unemployable before that,” he adds.



Sumner also believes that he experienced a turning point in his music making life, which he can pinpoint to “the day I touched the ground in Berlin. It was November 29th, 2007 and it was just when Isolation [one of Sandwell’s breakthrough records] was released. My whole life I was being told to get a real job and then I went to Berlin and people were ‘wow, I’ve got your records on Synewave,” he recalls. “I was known in New York, but all the people who knew me were married with kids in the suburbs. Meanwhile, I remained an outcast – it’s something I pride myself on,” he laughs.

Sumner’s approach to recording Incubation would also have driven most techno producers mad with frustration. He wanted to make an album the old school way, with a high level of involvement from an engineer during the post-production process.

He set his sights high, hoping to secure the services of Francois K or Tobias Freund. In the end, Frank Farian’s former engineer was chosen, with the veteran adding greater clarity to Sumner’s glacial synths, throbbing basslines and murmuring acid segues. “I was probably being a bit self-indulgent, but it was something that I always wanted to do and it’s how I imagined it happening,” he says, adding that his artistic whim came at a price.

“Psychologically, it was more difficult to do than I imagined, and I’ve sacrificed a lot of my sanity for this, but it worked out well.”

Post-production work took place in Tobias’s studio, ‘the old CIA office in Templehof airport’, and Sumner is glad that he chose Freund. “When you listen to the demo version, it sounds pretty much the same, but Tobias has the Midas touch when it comes to engineering. I always wanted to do this process of making music and it was either Francois or Tobias - they are involved in what we do, but they also transcend generations,” he notes.

Sumner is also dismissive of the criticism that working with an engineer somehow lessens his own input: “When I was a kid and looked at records, finding out who the engineer was interested me. I was fascinated about all the different people who were involved.” he recalls. “I wanted to get the album to sound exactly how I wanted it to; for a while people were criticised for working with an engineer, but if you’re a singer-songwriter, the record label will put you in a studio with an engineer and no one criticises that,” he points out.

Irrespective of how Incubation was conceived, it sounds like the culmination and distillation of Sumner’s releases on Sandwell. Slicker and more streamlined, shinier around the edges, it nonetheless seethes with an understated menace, the low growling basslines and tingling percussion threatening to send the listener down the rabbit hole every few bars. Acid lines gurgle, synth lines hang eerily in the air and haunting melody lines suddenly fall off a precipice, giving way to screaming victims sucked backwards through a vortex.

In short, Incubation is redolent of the best of 90s techno – Plastikman, ambient Beam Me Up/Ginger-era Speedy J (although Sumner disagrees with me about this reference ), Sahko, Detroit techno, Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series – and filters them through Function’s hypnotic, pulsing grooves. It’s rounded off by Tobias’s magic engineering touch, which lends the productions a real clarity.

“It’s me expressing my love for early 90s techno,” Dave says, adding that he took the “all things considered approach. I appreciate the compliment you made, and it’s everything I hoped that someone would say about the album,” he says. “One of the things I see myself exploring are those classic, old school sounds and ideas and relating them to something modern. When I was making the album, this is what I had in mind.”

At the same time, Sumner feels that ‘it is very hard to put into words’ some of the ideas and motivations behind the album. One of the crucial points he makes is that in the run up to the recording process, he slowed down on his release schedule.

He feels that his grueling touring made the recording more of a challenge. “It’s difficult for producers to make lasting music when there is a need for them to play out to survive in the DJ environment,” he believes. “It takes away your focus – unlike rock musicians who disappear to write an album for a few months, there’s a tug of war going on for techno producers. I’m trying to stay more grounded. I love to perform and it’s great if there are demands on you to play, but I’ve found a happy medium and I feel a lot more relaxed about this whole experience [the recording of the album], ” he explains.

Does he feel that the artistic direction of Incubation will face criticism because it draws on 90s techno? “Not really, I hope it brings that music up to date – if you look at other styles, say like Northern soul, it’s the original records that get played. I’m not trying to preach a gospel with this album, but this is my vision for techno, that’s why I did this project,” he says.

This claim is borne out by Function’s skillful, magpie-like ability to collect and re-imagine familiar nuances and yet somehow bring his own musical identity to each piece. On “Modifier”, heavy, dubby Berghain beats are strafed by the whiplash snares of Chicago, while “Voiceprint (Reprise)” sees the pre-junglist bass boom of Reese married to one of Sumner’s hypnotic, linear rhythms.

Yet Incubation also shows signs that Sumner’s artistic development continues. He cites “Voiceprint”, with its eerie vocal samples as being influenced by John Carpenter and unusually for him, short vocal samples. “Drexciya and Arpanet are also influences, but maybe not so obvious,” he adds. It is ironic
that in creating a techno album with a real sense of permanence, one that will sound as good as it does now in 10 or 20 years time, that its structure is informed by Sumner’s DJing and has a beginning, middle and end.



It starts with the eerie ambient menace of “Voiceprint”, notches up a gear on the acid-soaked “Against The Wall”, takes a breather with the ambient trance of “Counterpoint” before going for the jugular on the murky bass-led “Modifier” and the percussive “Incubation (Ritual)” before going down in intensity for the hushed vocals and layered synths of “Inter (Album Version)”. The booming Reese bass of “Voiceprint (Reprise)” bring the album back up, before “Psychic Warfare” unleashes a typically sinister, droning Function groove, and the spine tingling beauty of “Gradient 1” rounds off the release.

“I wrote the album as a DJ set – not as a peak time one but based on the roots of what I’m into and with my own style,” he explains. “Mixes have had an influence on me generally – the Sandwell District podcast for Resident Advisor helped me to realise a lot of things. I think it’s because I was given a chance to express myself when the stakes were high,” he says. Maybe Sumner works well under pressure?

“The same thing happened when I was recording Anticipation,” Dave explains. “I was leaving Berlin to go back to the US, I needed to get it done and completed, but didn’t have that much time. I need to be motivated and to realise where I’m going. Now that I’ve completed the LP, I’m ready to jump in and do more – this is something that you don’t get from making EPs,” he adds.

Which leads us neatly onto the subject of Sandwell District’s forthcoming mix CD for Fabric. Featuring “other people’s music, but a lot of stuff that’s Sandwell District-related and internal Sandwell stuff”, Sumner is confident it will be as a bold a statement as Incubation.

“It’ll represent everything that we stand for at the moment, expressed in an hour and 15 minutes,” he claims. “We hope people will get an idea of what a whole set would be like,” he adds. “Karl sent bits over to me and I integrated them into the mix – it’s the way we play together in clubs. We still perform together and talk all the time.” Before the Sandwell mix arrives however, Function’s audience will be eagerly awaiting the delivery of Incubation.

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MGUN: Sounds for the true music translators



Last year saw Manuel Gonzales grace a succession of our favourite labels with his own distinct take on Detroit sound under the MGUN moniker – we despatched Brendan Arnott to track the producer down in his Detroit hometown.

Looming behind Manuel Gonzales are hundreds of boxes of records, precariously stacked on top of each other, high enough that they look like they could topple. They’re not all his, though. He’s snuck away from his day at People’s Records in Detroit into the back room to talk, and provides a quick rundown of the shop owned by friend Brad Hales: “It’s a local record store, it’s one of the better ones in the city, specializing in soul 45s and of course, anything Detroit – house, techno, all that. I get a lot of stuff over here, I’m helping them out and I’m helping myself out at the same time.”

Earnestly positive, Gonzales radiates the infectious energy that categorizes his home of Southwest Detroit. Emerging as one of the first collaborators on Kyle Hall’s Wild Oats label, he quickly made a name for himself with the crushing raw analogue techno sessions of the abbreviated New School Nineteen Ninety Four Techno Project (NSNT PRJCT). Since then, he’s worked under the production name MGUN and graced UK label Don’t Be Afraid, Wild Oats and most recently Will Bankhead’s Trilogy Tapes imprint with his unique, sticky slow-motion acid-tinged techno.

But for someone with an ever-growing discography, much of Gonzales’ past is secluded from the internet, aside from small, cryptic press releases. Perhaps predictably though, he was raised in a household full of analogue hardware. “I was always interested in stereo stuff, turntables and tape decks and speakers and stuff. I grew up around it, my dad always had stereo equipment in the house.” Gonzales states, one of the several times his encyclopaedic knowledge of technology enters our conversation. “So, just messing around with different pieces of equipment got me interested in hooking stuff up and trying different things, like alternate ways of hooking a tape deck, recording off the radio, anything like that. Maybe a few years after doing that stuff, I had a little Casio keyboard, messed around with that for a while, got a four track, started diddling and dabbling with programs, and that’s kinda how I got started.”

Detroit’s eclectic radio scene also provided the impetus for Gonzales to get exposed to the hits of the time; “I’d listen mostly to the radio, anything like, the early 90s rap shows, like, the night mixes, they were broadcasting live from the club or some shit like that, a lot of booty mixes.” One thing that distinguished Detroit from other cities might’ve been the eclectic nature of radio in the pre – Clear Channel days. Gonzales reminisces that “you could hear techno, any day, at night on the radio. I can’t remember the names of the shows, but DJs like DJ Zapp and Gary Chandler were always playing”.

Educationally, Gonzales’ formative years got a boost from the Urban Arts Academy, also known as “The Hip-Hop High School”, funded through the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation. “It focuses on the community in Southwest Detroit, and it’s a resource for everyone, not just Hispanics, but anybody in the community who needs help with stuff. If you wanted to know what to specialize in or go into in college, they were there for that too… and the school program I took part in, that was a one year thing. I don’t think they had any other funds to do anything after, so I got lucky to be a part of it. Music and media were a big part of the curriculum.”

One of the select few mystifying press details available about Gonzales was his touring Europe with Underground Resistance’s Interstellar Fugitives collective. How did a young twenty something South Detroit youth get to tour throughout the Netherlands and Norway with one of the most influential techno collectives on the planet? Fittingly enough, it all resulted from a house party and a connection Gonzales formed through the arts program at DHDC. “I had (local Detroit DJ and Urban Arts Academy teacher) DJ Sicari teach me a lot of stuff, how to scratch, basically.” he recalls. “I mean, I knew how to DJ before, but my mixing and blending weren’t as tight until I met this guy. So I’m hanging out with this guy and he thinks I’m a cool dude or whatever, so we’re going to parties and stuff, and he brings me to a house party where some members of Underground Resistance were. Y’know, Mike Banks and those guys were hanging out, and I was talking to those guys, Cornelius, I was talking to him, and we kinda just hit it off. I demonstrated some of my skills and I had enough of them to get the party going at least, so I worked stuff out with them and y’know, toured with them overseas.” His voice still has an element of disbelief and amusement in it as he recounts it. “It was like a regular little house party, just going’ around, making rounds basically.”

You could call Manuel’s “eye opening” touring experience a testament to the close-knit artistic community of Detroit, where he speaks casually about future emerging collaborations with Kyle Hall, and how he’s interested in linking up with FXHE house juggernaut Big Strick at some point “if we run into each other.” Gonzales speaks about working together in Detroit as a casual inevitability, as if he’ll run into Omar-S at the pizza shop down the block sooner or later. His first collaboration with Kyle Hall certainly formed organically, their interconnected social circle eventually leading Hall to casually ring up Gonzales and enquire about collaborating. The resulting Laygo My Faygo EP has the kind of unhinged, raw creativity that only a giddy jam session could generate – twisted whistling patterns reverberating amongst murky mixture of claps and haywire synth lines. It’s the sound of paint thrown on a blank canvas, what Kyle Hall calls “taking concepts from things that seem like nothing, and making it our own.” Gonzales describes NTST as “obscure music, real synthy. We were just going completely into left field, it’s still dance music I guess, but we were just trying to stretch it out as thin as it’d possibly go”.

The idea of a concept stretched can also be applied to the way Detroit techno has been interpreted and repackaged by the rest of the globe. In the midst of vinyl’s resurgent popularity, the city holds a revered position as worldwide shrine to the dusty, soulful analogue funk. Detroit veterans like Theo Parrish and Moodymann have objected to the constant commodification of Detroit music in the past, so what does Gonzales make of the rapid consumption and replication of Detroit’s musical output? His eyes light up without a trace of spitefulness. “I mean, I think it’s kind of fucking funny man” he says casually. “I mean, there were guys here before me… they might feel a bit differently than me. I feel like, hmm… maybe if they like it that much that’s just how it is. They just feel like they owe us something, they get something out of Detroit, like a homage. In a 2007 interview with the Wire magazine, Underground Resistance’s Mike Banks echoes the sentiment Gonzales speaks of, comparing world-wide adoption of techno to the state of Detroit’s automotive industry: “What used to be your territory only, now is shared by many.”

Underground Resistance’s ethos to music-making was always conceptually connected to ideas of militancy. Simon Reynolds called them a “techno Public Enemy” fostering their own sonic autonomy. Is this true for Gonzales’ output as well? Does his music explicitly or implicitly tackle politics? “Not in the least bit” he assuredly replies. “I just make it to express something that’s on my mind in the moment. It’s dance oriented, so it’s mostly for parties… and thinking, and creating an atmosphere. But it’s not too political; I don’t focus on anything like that.” If not politics, where do the ideas for Gonzales’ work come from? “It’s really different all the time, definitely. It’s all about how I’m feeling that day, or maybe something just happened, sometimes maybe some shit went down, I might go right into producing with the idea of making something distinctly related to my mood, that emotion might go directly into the track. It definitely depends on what’s going on that day.” As for whether DJing informs his production ethic, Gonzalez is conflicted. “Maybe not really, I don’t think so – well… I guess maybe I’m thinking ‘this could work for a dancefloor, or this could be something just for listening’, but not too much.”

MGUN’s Upstairs Apartment EP for London’s Don’t Be Afraid imprint is a perfect example of this bi-polar creativity in effect. “Gas Chamber” merges rapid-fire percussion, hectic high-hats, a frenetic stomp full of grimy urgency which Gonzales says was “trying to go back to those days where it was like fucking, warehouses and strobe lights”. In contrast, “Westerns” sounds like it exists in a different Universe, as if someone hooked an episode of “Bonanza” up to a sentient fleshy computer. When pressed for specifics about how these tracks were created, Gonzales spills a bit of his production routine. “I think my whole idea of the main synth sound in “Westerns” was based around a mouth harp thing, so I was kinda thinking of a caravan wagon- somebody playing one of those mouth harps like you’ve got in Westerns. It just came to me all of a sudden, I was messing around with a wa-wa pedal, and a few synthesizers and echo effects, or delay, and that was the result.”

His track titles are often also creations of his subconscious. After combing the internet unsuccessfully attempting to find out what track name “Flutter’s Brother” from his most recent EP on The Trilogy Tapes, The Near Future, is referencing, I confront MGUN about where the esoteric title is from. He laughs in response. “It’s not a reference to anything man, I was just sitting around being weird, that’s how the tracks get named. Someone might call me on the phone and I’m talking to them, and they say one little word and I’ll be like, ‘OK, that’ll be the name of what I’m working on right now.’ That’s how it goes.” And what about the weird, unsettling vocal sample buried within the track? “That wasn’t a sample at all, that was me, talking into whatever the hell I was talking into.” He pauses, remembering. “I think I had a flanger pedal that was going dead, or I had a voltage that was too low and wasn’t the correct voltage, so it actually turned the flange into a weird kinda delay with a high pitched frequency thing on it. Sometimes these things come from a specific inspiration, sometimes it’s just jam sessions though, where the final product ends up sounding completely different from where I started.”



One thing’s certain though, Gonzales is straightforward about his love of analogue sounds. “I definitely prefer hardware man, the software shit confuses me, I kinda stay away from it.” This seems in line with the Harmnear EP press release, which proclaims, “this piece is intended for the TRUE Music Translators and NOT the fly by night laptop jock.” Asking Gonzales about his thoughts on digital vs. vinyl, and whether or not he was responsible for the catchphrase “laptop jock”, he smiles. “I dunno who wrote that, but it was funny.” He pauses briefly. “I’m thinking records will always be here, right now, as you can see”, gesturing to the mountain of stacked boxes of records adorning the room behind him. “I’m amongst thousands of records. I think those will be here for a long time. And y’know, I’ve seen too many laptops crash when people are doing their live shows, or if someone’s using Serato, I’ve seen it stop mid-set. But the only thing that stops the record is skipping. It’ll keep rolling and the party will keep going no matter what.

When prompted for his thoughts on dance music in 2012, Gonzales remains honest but optimistic. “I feel like it’s gone a lot of different ways. Even if I don’t like it, it’s definitely going different places, it’s getting really poppy… I don’t know man, I guess it’s like there’s a little bit of electronic dance music for everybody now.” Whereas others might take the opportunity to insert a few snide remarks about EDM, there’s nothing judgmental about Gonzales. He’s equally unflinchingly polite about the weekend influx of Detroit Electronic Music Festival-goers that pour in, and abruptly out, of Detroit. “I definitely have positive feelings about DEMF, I’ve been going ever since the second one, and yeah, you get a certain feeling when you go there, and it’s genuinely great. I see that a lot of the people that come down, they’re definitely not around here the other parts of the year, they’re just down here to enjoy themselves… and that’s what it is, y’know, like, ‘party it up man!’ Even if it’s just that one time of year, it’s still worth coming down.”

For Gonzales, Detroit is still buzzing the remainder of the year. “It’s definitely creative around here, there’s always these little intimate parties now, like, little house party scenes. For example Fundamentals (Kyle Hall and Jay Daniel’s new monthly night) is a Motor City Wine event, it’s a pretty low key spot, it’s real mellow, but they pack the house, real intimate. I think it’s real good like that, you don’t need a big venue to do this shit, you get people close together and people start knowing each other too. There’s always a group of people around, that it’s good to be around them basically.”

Concepts of community and daily life feel prevalent on The Near Future, a brilliant eclectic six-track release that shows off an astonishing range of creative impulses: one moment moody and ambient, the next deep, dark and unrelentingly danceable. Immediately striking is the photograph on the front cover, a worn-down scraggly brick convenience store, the words “Ode to summer…” tagged in graffiti on the front. On the flip side, three young men are standing on a rain soaked sidewalk mid-pose, answering a cell phone, looking tough, holding a beer in a paper bag. It feels like it was pulled directly from Gonzales’ community, and it turns out it was.



“I definitely took the picture” he states. “That was kind of a side project at school. I had an art teacher who was also a photographer, and I was telling him about this camera I had, this old Japanese thing, maybe my grandfather brought it back from when he was in the war or something… so it was hanging around the house, I was like, ‘check this thing out’, and he was like, ‘hey, I’ve got some film for that’ and he gave me this film, loaded it and showed me how to use it, and I just ran around taking pictures of stuff I thought was pretty cool. So the whole summer I was doing this, and my boy tagged on that store, and I was like, ‘yeah, I’ve gotta get a picture of that’. And then the flip side is some friends and my brother, in front of the local party store, which is on the street we still live on.”

Is there a thread that ties The Near Future together? “They kinda don’t have anything in common; I think it’s just like a little taste, a collection of the stuff that I’m capable of doing production wise.” Becoming serious, Gonzales states: “Like, this selection is the near future, this is what you can expect in our work.” Then, lightening up again: “and the artwork really didn’t have anything to do with it otherwise than that it looked cool.” Nowadays MGUN’s sound is influenced by “industrial, new wave, and German minimalist stuff. Lately it’s been the 70s, and earlier, definitely a lot of earlier stuff these days.”

What does the near future hold for Manuel Gonzales? Exuding an easygoing confidence, he’s hesitant to make promises, stating instead that “I’d rather wait and see how things develop”. We talk briefly about how walking into a record store and finding new releases that arrive with no forewarning is its own unique euphoric rush. “I kinda like that spontaneity” he says reflectively. “like, bam – there it is. I’m trying not to hype it up too much.” Like the stack of records eclipsing Manuel, the future is looming.

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Acid reflux: An interview with Truss



It’s been a long time since the word rave has held any real relevance. The only ones who can honestly say they are still doing it properly are the Dutch and eastern bloc forest dwellers seen by most on the internet. So is it with a post-ironic grin that rave – minus the glowing and chromatic regalia – finds itself edging its way back on to the dance floor?

Long gone are the days of M25 missions en route to a soggy Midlands paddock or rave-induced legislations banning “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. But British techno’s bounce back brings with it rave-y influences and reference, some of which could have be classed as “new-rave” had it not been for a misjudged NME soundbite regarding the Klaxons and all that followed them.

Based in rural Wales and too young for muddy marshes and flashing lights, Tom Russell aka Truss was drip fed filtered aspects of rave culture from the older kids who had access to cars, returning with narrative accounts of countryside hedonism and promotional flyer packs for Russell and his mates to plaster all over their walls. It was this and devouring mix tapes by the likes of Stu Allan and Carl Cox or old firm Tresor residents like Tanith, that ushered Russell into the strange and new age world of rave, the inspiration behind his acid warped MPIA3 alias.

“Castlemorton wasn’t too far away actually,” Russell states, recounting the infamous, free and nomadic week-long rave at Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire, England; the biggest festival of its kind since the Stonehenge Free Festival in the mid ‘80s. “We were really young, but we were able to get our hands on the tapes and it was everything from UK hardcore, to some more housey sort of stuff like Danny Rampling was playing, but what really caught my ear was the harder techno,” Russell continues.

Fast forward to 2012 and it’s not acid house or rave that Russell feels in debt to, but late 2000s Ostgut Ton and Berghain techno, a sentiment echoed by many a UK techno head. “They (Ostgut Ton and Berghain) really kick-started a renaissance in the harder edge sound of techno, which was popular in the ‘90s,” Russell explains. “For me at least it really replaced the minimal thing throughout the 2000s…I don’t know how to describe it really; ket minimal?” Russell adds with a friendly touch of smart-aleck.

Add to this mix the frog hop of erstwhile post-dubstep producers into techno, and the UK has quickly become a hotbed of techno-creativity. “I think initially here in the UK people were looking to Berlin and to Berghain as the centre of what was going on. I think in the last couple of years (British) people have started to look inwards at what is going on in the UK for inspiration,” Russell explains. “They (Ostgut Ton and Berghain) made the harder, classic sound of techno popular again and that had a knock on effect throughout Europe and the rest of the world”.

So as Blawan, Pariah and Untold don their techno-colour dream coats; AnD, Perc, and Forward Strategy Group power up phase two of the British industrial tip; Shifted, Sigha and Tommy Four Seven fly the British flag in Berlin and Regis, Surgeon, Luke Slater and James Ruskin et al continue to steer their own distinct courses, it’s no surprise that Russell talks of a community feel among English techno producers at the moment.

“From people who are promoting parties, to people who are running labels, to people like me who are producing and DJing; it feels like everyone is aware of each other and happy to work with each other,” Russell says. With so many different sounds funnelled into a homogeneous realm of music – techno – it’s also exciting to think that little-to-no clashes in style have any artist sounding the same. “At least from my ears, it’s a very fresh prospective and it’s added this extra dimension to the sound (of techno) which is going on here (UK), it helps differentiate itself from what’s going on elsewhere.” Russell says.



It is likely Tom Russell will look back on 2012 as a catalytic year for his solo productions; in previous years, the Truss name was regularly paired with Donor, aka Greg Schappert. Donor provided Truss with his first ever release in 2006, a remix of his own track “Broken Concept” via his free net label Miniscule. “He (Donor) put some parts online for his net label years ago, basically encouraging anyone to submit a remix, I did and he liked it,” Russell explains.

From there a slew of other remixes on Minuscule followed, as did Truss’ debut EP Forge, a four track digital missive for the labels seventh release. “We ended up getting along really well. At that point he was living in Barcelona, when he came to London we met up and realised we came from very similar backgrounds on what we liked techno-wise, in fact we were almost identical,” Russell explains.

In 2008 both Donor and Truss saw their music pressed to vinyl for the first time thanks to Jeremy P. Caulfield’s Dumb-Unit imprint, with the release of their collaborative EP Perception. Since then, the two have collaboratively released for Perc Trax and Synewave, with each of them also individually recording for Stroboscopic Artefacts. Donor contributed to the label’s conceptual Monad series while Truss remixed Lucy’s “Eon” from his stellar Wordplay For Working Bees album, commissioned alongside James Ruskin, Tommy Four Seven and Peter Van Hoesen.

“We (Donor & Truss) are going to keep carrying on working on projects, but it is quite difficult because we are both on different continents and the route I’m going down now is much more jamming on hardware in a studio.” says Russell. “I need that spontaneity, it’s becoming more and more difficult to make that collaboration work at the moment, but it’s something we definitely plan to continue in some sense,” Russell explains.

The Welshman considers his new sound, spawned by his MPIA3 alias, more a devolution than outright transformation, and like many producers who have experienced a similar production reflection, Russell enjoys the limitations digital production doesn’t have. “At the moment, at least, I am very interested in extremely basic and raw sounding techno, very primal stuff, basically stuff that has the bare minimum going on to work in a club.”

He expands: “To be able to strip something down to its absolute bare minimum and have people absolutely loose their shit to has always fascinated me. So from a listener’s point of view – when you are in a techno club and only a hi-hat comes in and that hi-hat is the best thing in the world and the whole club erupts, that’s always amazed me – but baffles most people.”



The stars seemed to have aligned in Tom Russell’s favour, allowing him to amalgamate the Berghain influences of the late 2000s with his rave inspired upbringings, British techno’s renaissance and his love of minimalist strength. As MPIA3, Russell has so far only released music through Shifted’s Avian imprint and the aptly suited R&S Records, but it has swiftly taken the UK, the world and Dettmann and Klock by storm. “I really had no idea it was going to be picked up like it has done. I wrote a couple of tracks and played a couple of them out and they got a really good response, next thing I know they got into the hands of Dettmann and Klock and it kind of snowballed from there,” Russell explains.

Russell admits that prior to a successful 2012, he endured around 12 months of frustrated studio time, making music he wasn’t sure he even wanted to make, so much so, time in the lab wasn’t enjoyable. The MPIA3 production ethic however, is fun, basic to embrace and quick to produce results; little more than a drum synth, a TB-303, a little compression and a mixing desk. “I was making these tracks and most of them take me about an hour, if it takes me more than a couple of hours then it’s probably not working, I’m probably forcing the idea,” he says.

“To be able to strip something down to its absolute bare minimum and have people absolutely loose their shit to has always fascinated me.”

Comparable to other Russell productions from last year, the Ganymede EP for Perc Trax suggests that his new sonic and production process is starting to take over. “The more I have been doing the MPIA3 stuff, the more I have been thinking ‘this is more of the general route I want to go down’ which is more spontaneous, jamming with machines and a ‘see what happens type of vibe’,” he says. “I listened back to my (Truss) productions from a few years ago and thought ‘fuck, there is just too much going on in them’, there are all these unnecessary sounds and effects squiggles,” he adds.

So what draws Truss apart from his new MPIA3 project? “I think the general Truss sound will be going in a similar route to MPIA3,” he says, adding “Of course I don’t want them both to be sounding exactly the same, because it defeats the object of having the second alias, but what does distinguish MPIA3 from Truss at the moment is every MPIA3 track has a 303 in it – it’s an acid track – even if people may not necessarily be able to hear it, that is the thing that really separates the two.”

“Finding production processes that have just a kick drum, a hi-hat, a 303 and nothing else, and to be able to turn that into a 6 minute track that actually works, I’ve always found fascinating, I’ve always found minimalist music fascinating,” Russell says.

Collaborations however remain a big part of the Truss moniker and Russell’s learning curve. “Usually when you collaborate on something, for me personally, I always end up learning a lot. Whether it’s a production technique from another person or I’ll learn something about my sound, because you can really start to pick up on your own sound when you mix it with someone else’s,” he says.

“It’s almost like a reflection, because if you are always working by yourself, I find it hard to stand back and be objective about it, but when you are working with someone else it is quite an easy exercise to be able to have more perspective on what you’re bringing to the table, what your skills are and what you’re into,” Russell explains.



Other Truss collaborations to date include a one off joint with Sigha, with their disgustingly danceable rework to Perc’s downtempo “You Saw Me”, taken from the Wicker & Steel LP. Through Perc, Russell met Sigha when he was still living in London and working at the BM Soho record store – a stone’s throw from Russell’s studio. “I ended up going to the record shop every week to get my records from James (Sigha), so we became good friends, he signed me to his label and that’s why we worked together on the remix,” Russell says. Another collaborative effort which may come as a surprise is his work with Tessela, who is in fact Tom’s brother Ed. The two first crossed musical paths when Tessela remixed Truss’ “Osbasten” from his debut EP of the same name on Perc Trax. The two then directly worked together for the Multiple Visions EP released this year, which also features a track from Tom Dicicco as TD and AnD as AD for the suggestively titled Brothers imprint.

“We’ve been planning on doing it for quite a while,” Russell says about this brotherly collaboration, “We wrote some tracks a few years ago and we never really sent them out, and listening back to them I’m kind of glad we didn’t,” Russell says. “We’ve been working on some stuff which is more techno and we mixed a track last week which will be coming out on a vinyl only label.”

“This project is quite interesting as he (Tessela) uses a lot of hardware and at the moment it has been us bouncing loops back and forth and processing them and adding our own sounds over the top, it all sounds quite raw and analogue, but there’s also lots of sampling going on as well,” Russell adds.

Regardless of whether it’s as Truss or MPIA3, Tom Russell is now making music for himself, be it industrial-leaning, rave-referencing or hardened techno, it’s the way it should be, as he explains. “I just thought I’m going to try and make something for myself and I don’t really care if anyone likes it or not, it took me to do that to realise I should be making music like that all of the time, because that is the way I am going to make my best music.”

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Renegade Of A New Age: An Interview with Legowelt



The Hague can do strange things to a man’s soul. Just ask Danny Wolfers, who comes from the west coast of Holland. For the past 15 years, the Dutch producer has been releasing his individualistic take on electronic dance music, mainly as Legowelt, but also under an almost schizophrenic range of guises like Gladio, Venom 18, Raheem Hershel, Jackmaster Corky and Smackos. Wolfers is among the second wave of artists from Holland’s West Coast/Hague environs. It’s tempting to posit that the grey skyline and relentless churn of the North Sea have had an effect on Wolfers, but it is certainly true that musical developments in Holland’s administrative capital played an even greater role, including the warped interpretation of US dance music articulated by I-F’s Unit Moebius band and Bunker Records. As Wolfers explains: “I came a little bit later than those guys you mention, in the early 90s. I was also listening to the usual stuff from Chicago, Detroit and Aphex Twin and other artists from the UK. I don’t know why other people started to make techno, but I was 14 and I just wanted to make music in a certain way – I started with just an Amiga. At the time most adolescent kids were playing in bands, so what I was doing was considered pretty weird.”

It wasn’t just Wolfers’ approach that was unusual; what came from his early experiments was also pretty freaky. Releases like Reports from the Backseat Pimp, Klaus Kinski or Slave of Rome (as Gladio) merged the shuffling 808s of US electro with tear-jerking Italo melodies and Chicago-inspired primal jack, and laid the basis for future Wolfers releases. These early records also inspired a wave of inferior copycat electroclash records, a scene that Legowelt inadvertently got caught up in when he released Disco Rout on Sven Vath’s Cocoon label in 2002. Disco Rout became one of that year’s biggest releases thanks to Vath’s patronage and opened up a whole new world to the then naïve Hague producer. “It was very nice that it happened at that time. I didn’t know a lot about the dance music industry and in The Hague we felt unsure about it,” he admits. “I only met him once, but Sven Vath seemed like a nice guy. After the record came out, I was booked for a lot of money to play these big shows in Germany. They would expect me to play the Sven Vath style of techno, but I would bring the Bunker crew with me and they would play Italo, electro and Chicago house. The only guy who could mix vinyl at the time was DJ TLR and of course the audience reaction was one of surprise. This type of music didn’t go down well at all and pretty quickly we burned our bridges and disappeared back into obscurity,” he recalls.

Not that obscurity seems to bother Wolfers. After all, if he were seeking attention, he probably would have kept the focus on one project instead of embarking on creative flights of fancy. Yet despite his tendency to release music under a wide range of names and guises, it sounds like fashions tend to follow Wolfers about. In the same way that the great electroclash swindle took inspiration from I-F, Bunker and Legowelt, the more recent wave of Chicago house comes in the wake of Wolfers productions for Crème Organization/Crème Jak and M<O<S Deep. How does he feel about this latest development? “I am responsible for it to a certain extent because I did some of these records,” is his honest reply. “Sure, it is nice to get some recognition, but the problem is that a lot of these tracks are too close to the originals; everything sounds like a Mr Fingers track. I would be great if some of these producers could use a cheesy sampler instead of a Juno. I mean, a TR-707 sounds good, but it’s all in the way that you use it.” At the same time, Wolfers believes that there is ‘a lot of cool stuff coming out’ and does not have a wide-eyed view that the 90s was a golden age when every release was a classic – “there was a lot of crap coming out then too”, he states matter-of-factly.

So what about the polemic on Legowelt’s website against characterless contemporary techno that accompanied the release of last year’s The Teac Life album? In one of the most strongly-worded and amusing rants this writer has seen, Wolfers railed against “boooooooooooring contemporary shit they call techno nowadays with overrated talent less pretentious douche bag tnuc DJs playing a few half-assed dumb mongo beats and being all arty fartsy about it”. Does he stand by his words? “Sure, there is a lot of music that just ambles along with no character and I don’t really care for it. I’m not fighting it. With a computer everyone can make music. I don’t mind computers because I use one to play live, but anyone can download loops and use them to make tracks – but I just don’t care”. By contrast, he cares deeply about his own music-making and right from the get-go – on the eerie synth pulses of opening track “Danger In The Air” – his latest album The Paranormal Soul, is full of warm basslines and gloriously evocative melodies. As Danny explains, there is no theme or discernible narrative behind The Paranormal Soul, and “it’s more just a collection of tracks; Serge chose them with me”.



Despite this claim, The Paranormal Soul does marks a departure for Wolfers: “Clap Yo Hands” mines Chicago house but also looks to contemporary artists like Portable thanks to its rumbling vocal and eerie organ riffs, while there are references to 90s techno and hardcore via tracks like the Red-sounding chord stabs and tumbling breakbeats on “Rave Till Dawn”, the mysterious, Network-esque “Elements of Houz Music” and the sweet, warbling melodies of “On the Tiger Train”. Danny does not feel the temptation to make more stripped back music to reflect the headwinds of austerity that inhabit contemporary techno; in short, don’t expect him to be making a bleak, broken beat industrial track with a picture of Myra Hindley on the cover anytime soon. “For me, it’s difficult to make something very minimal. I would like to do something more sparse and laid back, but people like melodies, so why not make them?”

This response has a lot to do with Wolfers’ disenchantment with modern techno, which according to his infamous TEAC Life rant, is devoid of character and soul. Does he still feel the same way? “I don’t know techno these days,” he replies. “From what I can hear it sounds the same but with boring chords. I listen to stuff like Actress, that’s futuristic and advanced. Is it techno? I don’t know. There are still bits coming from all corners, some from Detroit. I listen to Andy Stott, I am a big fan of Terrence Dixon, I guess that’s techno too – he’s got a very different sound – so I listen carefully to these artists and it’s not like I am completely shut off.”

Wolfers feels that the other key difference between The Paranormal Soul and his previous albums is that it sounds more “professional”. By that he means that after the producing the tracks, he mixed them down with a friend so that the overall sound is more advanced. “A lot of the tracks have been produced so that people can play them in clubs,” he says – a good example being the dense groove of “Sketches From Another Century”- before adding that “some of my records are hard to play out, only DJs who are very skilful and know how to work the EQs properly are able to play them,” he feels.

“I don’t know techno these days – from what I can hear it sounds the same as it always has but with boring chords”

The Paranormal Soul arrived a year after The Teac Life and is Legowelt’s ninth album since the mid-90s. Coupled with his other projects (five albums as Smackos and two as Nacho Patrol), does he ever get concerned that he is releasing too much music? “For me it’s not a problem, for the fans, I don’t know if people get upset by it. In the 1980s it was normal to release under a load of names – the whole New Beat sound was just three guys who made 100 records each in a year,” Danny says. Talk of New Beat brings us back to Italo, that other musical reference point in Wolfers’ music. Though less pronounced on his latest album, it remains an influence on tracks like “Transformation Of The Universe”. During the late 80s, Belgium had New Beat and on Holland’s West Coast, Italo was popular. It laid the basis for the subsequent dance scene that emerged in The Hague, led by I-F and Guy Tavares from Bunker. Danny explains that “with Italo, a lot of people came together and the music has historical interest. Italo was the most commercial music of the 80s in Holland and around The Hague. It was very big here because there were a lot of pirate radio stations, but in the 90s, it completely disappeared from the airwaves.”

Despite this, Italo left enough of an impression for emerging DJs like I-F and labels like Bunker to create their own version of electronic dance music. Despite this, Danny feels that other parts of Holland have produced more artists than The Hague. “A lot of the artists on Hague labels aren’t from here apart from Syncom Data and Unit Moebius, and Amsterdam has more producers per smile than anywhere else,” he laughs, adding that “Holland is pretty well off per capita, so in the 90s this was a factor because it allowed people access to equipment.” There’s also the public perception that producing and releasing music is a valid career choice. It’s something that Wolfers views as his job and he treats it as such, working all week in the studio and gigging each weekend.



There is some crossover into his personal life and his relationship with American artist Xosar – whom he met a few years ago through a friend in San Francisco – has led him into some new creative paths. “We share a lot of the same interests,” he remarks, before explaining that the Trackman Lafonte & Bonquiqui releases on Crème and L.I.E.S. are “good time party music” and that following the release of their excellent Xamiga record on Rush Hour, their next shared project will be a “Latin freestyle record and it’ll be out on Signals. The way we work is random – sometimes we’ll do music under a totally different name. Maybe it’s a Legowelt record or maybe it’s something totally different, like a Nacho Patrol release, it just depends on what kind of music we make”.

But back to his current album – what was the thinking behind it? “Do I have to make something up or can I just say it’s an album title,” he asks. I ask that he should explain the meaning. “OK, well the music itself sounds mysterious, it’s something strange, and it’s ghostly music. It has something about it, a mystery that hasn’t been solved yet, it has paranormal qualities,” Danny continues, moving from the album to a more general theme. “In the future, people will discover this about music, what we don’t know yet. This is hard to describe in words, but music is a series of tones and it affects the mind in ways we don’t know yet. There are frequencies that we don’t know about that hypnotise people and inspire them. Music does a lot of things, it’s very weird,” he adds.

Wolfers has done a lot of thinking about the future and, having explained the concept behind his new album, is keen to talk more about his general theories. “In the future, music will be perceived and used in a different way to how it is now,” he believes. “Once the secrets are discovered, once the magical frequencies are discovered, it will change the way that people make music and how the music industry operates. Then new players will be made, we’ll have implants in our brain and even speakers systems that can play those frequencies. I’m not sure, but there are probably other people in the know who can tell you more. I see all of this as a good thing; maybe some people will try to exploit it and try to rob a bank.”

At this stage the conversation is veering into related topics. Danny says he also subscribes to the theory that certain sub-bass notes don’t work on sound systems before switching topic to talk about John Carpenter. He feels that his film soundtrack work has influenced Legowelt and “has always been a big influence on the Hague sound. “Generally, he [Carpenter] is a big hero in all kinds of scenes; in Carpenter’s day, he was working with synths and he didn’t know exactly what they did or how they worked, but that’s what made the music so exciting,” he claims. “Returning to the subject of ‘paranormal’, there is a whole theory about film soundtracks, that they evoke emotions, scare people.”

Having explained the theory behind The Paranormal Soul, he is also keen to talk about the rationale for releasing The Teac Life first as a free download and then later in physical format. This approach, Wolfers believes means that he has already made a step towards the future – and it was based on simple logic. “I wanted to release it for free because people would download it anyway, so it was cool to just give it away,” he says. “I don’t really care much for vinyl anyway,” Danny adds, claiming that although “it’s part of the culture, some clubs don’t even have decks anymore. Ten years ago, I was pro vinyl, but when you get older you release that it’s just a historical format. A lot of people growing up now don’t even have a record player and in the deep time of the universe, probably in the next 20-50 years, vinyl will die off,” he predicts. Irrespective of whether Danny’s prediction proves to be right, let’s hope that Legowelt’s strange but wonderful soul exists in perpetuity.

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Luke Hess on arcade games, dub techno and the restoration of Detroit



There’s short video clip on YouTube that follows Theo Parrish as he wanders the streets of Detroit in baggy acid wash jeans and Adidas shell toe shoes, armed with a recorder, boom pole, mic and windsock. The revered producer records raw sound – hanging out the window of a speeding car, banging on rusted and paint chipped playgrounds, shuffling around sparring boxers and setting up under a damp archway to collect natural reverb, collecting the natural sounds of his city, part archivist, part musician.

Several years later Luke Hess too was combing the streets of Detroit for found sounds when he came across something – actually, someone – that eclipsed Parrish’s efforts. He found Papa Smurf, a spoken work artist. “It seemed like he needed to get some things off his chest… I just let him go on for about 30 minutes,” Hess says. The result was “Humility (Renew Your Mind)”, one of the highlights of Hess’s latest album Keep On, which begins as a lone analogue beat and is slowly caressed by what sounds like crackly rain but is in fact a processed field recording of something else he captured that day. Enter mellow chord stabs, a filtered bass riff and Smurf’s vocoder-assisted “Renew Your Mind” vocal loop, and the result is a prototypical juncture into the world of dub house.

“I’m pretty sure Omar S can beat anyone in the world in the Defenders arcade game”

Whereas Parrish’s eminently musical, sample-based approach fits neatly into the canon of house music with which Detroit is synonymous, Hess’s dub-infused techno follows a lineage set by minimal pioneer Robert Hood, and, later, Richie Hawtin. As Euro-centric as dub techno may be these days, the cutting edge can still be found in Detroit – Hess and his compatriot Rod Modell are two of the finest practitioners pushing the supposedly frozen genre into exciting and inventive new realms. But as dub-focused as Hess’ productions may seem, it would be unfair to paint him with dub techno’s hued brush. His productions consistently fall somewhere between chordal techno and resonate house music (dub house for those brave enough), but it’s his approach to minimalism that gives his music a distinctive voice.

Hood and Hawtin steered Hess toward minimalism, sonically indoctrinating him with a “less is more” musical disposition. “I think when I focus on shaping each individual sound and focus on the groove and use fewer channels, my music always seems to have more depth and character,” he reveals. His debut LP Light In The Dark was an album about “discovery and finding a voice”. Keep On, however, released via Omar S’ FXHE imprint last month, represents “perseverance through life’s storms”. “It’s about running the race when things become difficult and building character and growing as a person through these struggles,” he says.



So what is it that separates Hess, an electrical engineer for research and development in the US Army, from other producers associated with delay, reverb and processed saw waves? “I think I’ve been able to strip my sound down much more than when I completed my first album. I have the ability to do this now because I have more analogue gear and analogue effects to create unique and constantly changing characteristics in each individual sound,” Hess explains. “My goal in the second album was to have a completely analogue signal path. I recorded my instruments and drum machines for 64 to 128 bars. Once I had the groove, I recorded variations into an analogue mixing console. Then I mixed all the tracks by hand on a desk, with no overproduced sequencing tricks or techniques.”

“Keep On is about persevering through life’s storms, running the race when things become difficult and building character and growing as a person”

Omar S lent use of his mixing desk to Hess for the album and added his personal touch to the LP by mixing down “Overtime”, a track Luke produced with his brother Jeff which is characterised by downtempo Basic Channel-esque sketches and moody reggae riddims. The influence of Omar S stretches beyond analogue mixing consoles; it also involves video games. “I’m pretty sure Omar S can beat anyone in the world in the Defenders arcade game,” Hess says with a laugh, something which he acknowledges on “Briefing Defenders”, a 30 second interlude halfway through Keep On. Schoolyard chatter and spiralling Atari synths create the backdrop for a voice to explain “that saving humans in mid air gives extra points” as well as imparting a hint on how to use the “hyperspace” button effectively. “I thought it would be fitting to add some sounds from Defenders – it helps breaks things up a bit.” Although releasing his album on FXHE exposed Keep On to a larger – and wider – audience, Hess’s own DeepLabs label remains a trusted bastion for his own sonic experiments. “Dub techno is not very big in Detroit,” Hess says, “there isn’t the fan base to support it. Even classic Detroit techno is less desired in Detroit than more commercial genres like tech house and dubstep”.

Hess says the DeepLab imprint will continue to grow, with further releases planned for 2013. “Sure, the feel of Detroit is evident in some of my sound, but it’s nice to be able to experiment and grow,” he says. “I have a 12″ series (on DeepLabs), which is focused on personal themed releases – either solo or guest artists are welcome. I also have a 10″ series focused on a collaboration with my friend Mike Z, who works with Chez Damier and Balance Alliance.” So far the label has only released twice; DeepLabs debut 2010 EP Soundmind by Luke Hess, which was later followed up in 2011 by the split four track Community EP with Motorcitysoul.



Another relationship unique to Hess is his link to Christianity and ‘90s warehouse raves. “I’m thankful I was able to experience some of the underground warehouse parties in Detroit in the mid ‘90s. I think these parties and experiences shaped my interest in electronic music, from collecting records, to finding the right analogue equipment for my studio, to even how I engineer my sound”. And although it happens more than the secular sort probably realise, it’s not uncommon to see a Christian caught up in the assumed debauchery of nightclubs and warehouse raves. “You can find the same things happening at a techno party than you can on any city street. To stay away from the people at a warehouse party would mean that I would be passing judgement, and this would be completely hypocritical,” he explains.

Detroit in 2012 is a shell of what was once a great city, an archetypal example of urban decay. Through his music, Hess says he hopes to reflect the darkness of what the city has become, while shedding light and hope on what the city can be. “I hope that my music and my message spreads awareness of the deeper issues that humanity in general – not just Detroit – is facing. I hope it proposes solutions through the medium, and I hope in turn it inspires others to focus on restoration as a community.”

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Solving life’s luxury problems: An interview with Andy Stott



Andy Stott is a free man. With his latest, greatest work, Luxury Problems, now on the shelves, providing the perfect winter soundtrack, the Mancunian producer has given up his day job working for Mercedes to concentrate full-time on music.

“I jacked it in a few weeks ago, but I’ve already noticed the difference,” he says, speaking to Juno Plus during a short sojourn in Manchester between bouts of transatlantic travel to perform in the US. ”I have so much free time, and I’m not coming home from a day’s work and forcing myself to make music. I’m getting used to getting up and going to the studio - it still feels like I’m on holiday.” Stott made the decision to leave his job after he saved up for a year. Having this financial cushion ensures that he has enough money to support the transition. As he sees it, he is taking a short-term, calculated risk to pursue his dreams.

“In the past I saw that the money I was getting from music was almost like disposable income, which was really dangerous, but I started to save and I’ve got myself covered for about a year, so there is minimum risk involved,” he explains. ”My manager at work is hardcore, but even he supported me. When I said to him that I was jacking it in, I expected him to tell me to pack my gear and get lost, but he felt I was right, and the job is there if I ever decide to go back.” It doesn’t appear that Stott is likely to be in the market for a new job for the forseeable future. Stott’s new album is the latest departure for an artist who in the past has been responsible for beguiling deep techno (“Replace”), chord-heavy Basic Channel hypnosis (“Hostile”), grimy warehouse acid (“Demon In The Attic”), sublime minimal house (“Bad Landing”) and the raucous hardcore-themed Millie & Andrea side project. Yet like all of his music-making endeavours, the recording of Luxury Problems was shoehorned into a busy, hectic life.

Andy explains: “When We Stay Together came out, I was making bits of this album. My partner and I had a baby a few months ago and I was gigging, working, recording, having a kid and making music all at the same time. On top of that I was getting my visa sorted for the US, jumping through bureaucratic hoops. It was nuts, I was digging through old press shots at mad o’clock in the morning for promo interviews and then when we went on tour and did nine gigs in two weeks. I’m sure that I’ll look back on it in the not too distant future and wonder how I did it all, but it was necessary at the time.”

The reference to We Stay Together is important because like sections of this 2011 release, Luxury Problems sees him further slow down the tempo and embrace more textured, reflective sounds, an approach that he also explored on last year’s other release, Passed Me By. Apart from an absence of stompers like “Posers” one of the other key differences between We Stay Together/Passed Me By and Luxury Problems is the change in his personal life.



Being awake at all hours and the lack of guarantee about when a day will end and begin lends his latest work an uncertainty, where time becomes a fluid notion: 4am flows into dawn and morning quickly eases into early afternoon. This change in lifestyle has impacted on Luxury Problems, which sounds woozy and indistinct, rough around the edges compared to the sometimes clinical precision of his dance floor music.

Given that Stott has worn his influences visibly in the past, inspired at various turns by Chicago house, Berlin techno, dubstep and hardcore, it would appear that Luxury Problems, which largely eschews the dance floor, is also a direct product of its environment. Has he, like many of his techno peers, consciously decided to embrace abstract arrangements and slower tempos? ”I never really follow what other people are doing and I haven’t bought any tunes for ages. I was never a massive vinyl buyer anyway,” he says. “The tunes I made sound right, correct at that tempo – the album is just me being self-indulgent,” he laughs.

He also refutes the suggestion that his closest musical associates influence his work. When we speak, Stott had just shared the same bill in the US as Demdike Stare. Andy is quick to point out that the association with that has more to do with friendship than a common musical bond. “I spend a lot of time with them and I’d say I’m more influenced by the conversations I have with Miles (Whittaker) than the music itself,” he believes. Certainly, Demdike Stare have never collaborated with a vocalist and Alison Skidmore’s contributions help to set Luxury Problems apart from every other techno album in 2012. By turns operatic, kooky or dreamy, her contributions have echoes of the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser or Dead Can Dance at their most funereal. How did the collaboration come about?

“Someone asked me if I had ever thought of working with a vocalist and I thought it would be too messy and that I’d make a hash of it,” he says, but adds that he did not dismiss the idea out of hand. “Then I spoke to Modern Love and they thought it was a great idea and asked if I had anyone in mind. Alison is my old piano teacher and she was easy enough to track down as she’s a family friend. I did credit her on Merciless, but the last time that I saw her was in the mid-90s when I was 15,” Andy explains.

“I knew that she would be on my wavelength and the first email I sent, I asked ‘do you fancy doing something wrong?’ and she replied saying ‘I’m in’.” As Stott was used to working predominantly on his own, this new situation brought with it some surprises. “Alison threw me a curve ball by asking how I wanted the vocals. I had no idea so I just told her to do what she wanted – she sent a load of acapellas and I built tracks around them,” he explains. The other main departure on Luxury Problems is the decoupling with his techno past. Passed Me By, while slower and more abstract, still made nods to European techno on the chord-heavy “New Ground” or with the mushy interpretation of minimalism that is “North To South”.

“There is a certain quality about acts from Manchester, there are no bells and whistles to them”

Luxury Problems is a long way off his initial forays as a producer, from his early days releasing killer techno tracks like “Ceramics” or “Demon In The Attic”. “Ceramics” was made after I was introduced to “Phylps Trak” and back then my sound was much cleaner,” he recalls, adding that “techno has really changed , and I can’t recall a better time for it in recent years.” Despite this claim, Stott is adamant that outside influences played a smaller part during his recording process than on work released before We Stay Together. This is primarily because he did not have time to find new music, but also because he has become more selective with age and is “more careful about what I am getting introduced to”.

He says that while he’s ‘standoffish’ when others try to introduce him to new music, he has learnt to appreciate different sounds and that “it’s not all just crazy 909s. Maybe the influence on this album was from Alison. Some of the vocals she sent were already layered. I’d get a lead from the way she had layered them, it gave me an avenue to go down. Some of the versions didn’t work because all the vocals were presented as the final versions, so there was no other way to write it, this was probably something subconscious.” So while he has become more cautious and questioning with age, Stott has also opened up to other, less predictable musical influences. One of the unintended auras that this writer feels is pervasive on Luxury Problems is Stott’s hometown, Manchester. It’s an intangible quality, and difficult to explain, but it feels that Stott has somehow distilled the essence of smoggy back streets into tracks like “Sleepless”.

The producer’s response to this is revealing: “There is a certain quality about acts from Manchester, there are no bells and whistles to them, they are very straightforward and that’s the link to all the acts from the city. I’ve got a love of Joy Division even though they are a million miles away from what I am like as a producer and also The Cure and I was listening to that kind of music a lot when I made the album. I was also introduced to John Maus and he tries to emulate The Cure’s basslines, that’s probably why I like his work.”

Yet despite his contention that Luxury Problems was influenced by wider, less obvious sounds and concepts, some more familiar elements are never too far from its soupy ether. “Numb” sees Skidmore’s layered vocals framed against a shifting sea of droning noise and a lumbering rhythm, like Loveless-era MBV getting cosy with Kassem Mosse, “Lost And Found” features Skidmore hitting high operatic notes as her vocal emerges from a mangled bass and skittish techno percussion, her dreamy vocals are couched in the distant boom of a jungle sub-bass on “Sleepless”, while “Hatch The Plan” harks back to abstract techno as Skidmore’s angelic tones view with the sound of screeching percussion and a lumbering rhythm.



In the main, Luxury Problems is sludgy and slow-moving, but there’s also a reference to the Millie & Andrea project on the raw break beats of “Up The Box”. These sounds aren’t a long way away from the music that shaped Stott’s formative years, when as a teenager he stayed up late to tape jungle shows on the radio. “I’d listen to it on the way to school the next day. I also got into Autechre and Aphex Twin and a load of different tunes through people whose opinion I valued,” he recalls. Indeed it’s the interplay between Stott’s menacing basslines, rave motifs and intricate percussion and Skidmore’s ethereal vocals, coupled with the underlying sense of foreboding and menace that make Luxury Problems so memorable.

“It’s great that it comes across like that,” Andy says, clearly pleased. When it was suggested that I use a vocalist, I was worried that it would sound different to the normal way that I write tunes, but when I heard that bass coming from the speakers, that visceral bass, I knew that I still wanted that undertone as a counterpoint to her vocals. In the back of my mind I was saying what can we do to submerge it in sound, to brutalise it, but to leave it there - that was the task that I set myself.” Ahead of his work with Alison, Stott did a remix for Warp and followed a similar path, which involved him “doing something nasty underneath - one reviewer said it sounded like beauty meets the beast!” While vocals loom large on Luxury Problems, it would be incorrect to relegate Stott’s role to that or mere technician, a lab operator who did Skidmore’s bidding. He built the tracks around her voice, but a lot of his own life and experiences helped to shape the album.

“Me and my missus were expecting our child at the time, that’s what that track (“Expecting”) was inspired by. It may seem corny but it was a joyous time for us,” he says. Andy adds that rather than reflecting that he has ‘grown up’, the album, like previous releases, makes reference to his own life. Given that he had become a father , “Sleepless’ is self-explanatory, while “Leaving” marks his departure from full-time employment at Mercedes. So where did the album title itself come from? “I stole it,” he admits. “I was doing a gig in Paris and there was another producer there that I got chatting to. He said he had to go back to Berlin after the gig and complete two big projects for major artists. He said ‘I have luxury problems’ and I said, ‘I’m having that!’”

Call it serendipity or just coincidence, but during the recording process the album title proved relevant to events in Stott’s private life. “Around the time that I heard the phrase, I had decided to leave work, which was a nice problem to have and I had moved all my gear from my house into a proper studio. There were so many similarities and references to what was happening in my own life,” he explains.

“I was worried that using a vocalist would sound different to the normal way that I write tunes, but when I heard that bass coming from the speakers, that visceral bass, I knew that I still wanted that undertone as a counterpoint to her vocals”

Unsurprisingly then, Luxury Problems is a largely autobiographical work. At times, the references are obvious – “Sleepless” and “Expecting” referring to Andy and his partner’s imminent parenthood and them dealing with the exhausting first few weeks after the birth - while in other places they are more oblique; “Lost & Found” is about Andy getting lost one night before a gig in Austria. “I like to name the track titles after events in my life so that I can look back years from now and say that’s where I was at the time,” he explains. Thanks to the inclusion of vocals, Luxury Problems is likely to boost Stott’s profile in the States. He has already started to perform more and more live there - including high-profile dates at New York’s MoMA – but he says that performing tracks from the album may prove problematic.

“It would be difficult because I have taken so many little loops from Alison’s vocal and I don’t know how we’d do it live. At the same time, if someone proposed it, we have to make it work, but God knows what would come from it. Alison is very shy and doesn’t wear glasses when she plays live so she doesn’t have to see the first five rows.” While we joke that pretty soon Andy will be riding in stretch limos and won’t have time to take our calls, he is keen to remind Juno Plus of the role that Modern Love played in his life and his development as an artist. Unusually for an electronic music producer, he has stayed loyal to the label, and hasn’t released original material for any other imprint. He attributes the long-lasting relationship to Modern Love’s open-ended approach to A&Ring and their support for his artistic whims, like his decision to work with Skidmore.

“You can do what you want, just hand in anything you like,” he says, adding that when he came to them with the Millie & Andrea project that “an avenue was created” for it in the form of the Daphne sub-label. “I’m in the best possible hands and they are super switched on. It’s the first and only label that I have ever released on; I can’t imagine it being so easy and straightforward with anyone else. It’s not like working with a label, more like releasing music with your mates.” There was only one stipulation from Stott about the album: it could only appear during the later stages of 2012. “I said to them that it was very autumnal and wintry and should be released towards the end of the year. It’s the kind of music you listen to when it’s getting dark at five o’clock.” As the winter creeps in, every home should be subjected to this luxurious set of problems.

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Back to the raw: An interview with Parassela



When it was announced last year that Blawan and The Analogue Cops had collaborated for a pair of releases, it didn’t seem like the most obvious of unisons. At the time, Blawan – otherwise known as Jamie Roberts – had just released “Getting Me Down”, the Brandy-sampling white label that was already one of the summer’s biggest underground club tracks. The Analogue Cops – otherwise known as Lucretio and Marieu – had on the other hand been pushing their own brand of militant, hardware-only techno and house since 2007. The music that came out of those first two releases – the A-side of Restoration 013 and the first 12” on Vae Victis Records – was like nothing anyone had heard from Roberts, and although weighted more towards the Analogue Cops’ sound, somehow had an unmistakable heft and energy that the Italian pair couldn’t have managed alone. Looking deeper however, the three have more in common than may be immediately apparent. Roberts’ early productions, a combination of garage, techno and dubstep, were as sparse as the Cops threadbare brand of techno and house; he himself revealed in one interview that “Fram” was made using only four tracks – synth, bass, drums and vocal. They also seemed to have a shared ear for grit; the gnarled acid line of Roberts’ “Bohla” for example is as crud-encrusted as the bottom end of most of the Cops’ productions. Speaking to the trio over the phone, who, along with Roberts’ Karenn partner Arthur Cayzer – better known as Pariah – had gathered in Restoration’s Berlin HQ to make use of the Cops’ well equipped studio, I enquired how the union first came about, amid blasts of machine-made rhythms and squealing analogue noise escaping occasionally from behind the studio door.

“Jamie and Marieu were booked together in Venice a few years ago,” explains Lucretio, who says trio hit it off immediately. “There was a good feeling between us,” he says warmly. A studio session followed which generated ten tracks, forming the basis for their first two releases as The Analogue Cops & Blawan, all made, according to the Cops’ strict rules, entirely with hardware, and without computers. Another session followed, and a new name for the trio was born – Parassela. The results were quickly pressed up on limited white label vinyl, something that led to dissent in the Resident Advisor forums. But the trio are quick to dismiss any accusations of elitism. “We didn’t want to send the tracks to anybody or wait for a reply, we just wanted to press the records,” Lucretio says. “At the beginning Parassela was a project for DJs,” Marieu adds. “We wanted to press just 400 copies for people who really like techno, and then see what happened. It was not in our minds to press just a few copies to be exclusive or to be cool – it’s not our style”.

Their attitude to releasing records mirrors their production ethos – fast, to the point, and pointedly for DJs. The trio’s set-up changes slightly from session to session, but today they are using a Tempest drum machine, a Roland 909, a Vermona synthesiser, effects pedals and a sampler – a spartan set-up, but as Roberts explains, the idea is to keep things simple. “We’ll just jam for a little bit, have a quick run through how we want the track to be structured, and we’ll just go for it – that’s it, on the tape, no mixdowns, just raw audio”. Although the fast, brutal techno of Jeff Mills’ Waveform Transmission Vol 1 is a clear reference for what both camps have in common, Roberts also cites Robert Hood and Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir as influences, while Lucretio is quick to cite Regis and Surgeon.



These influences are reflected in their productions – a unique mix of different elements that combine the warmth of deep house with industrial noise, pounding kick drums pushed into the red and a tongue-in-cheek loop driven quality with nods to disco; “Sickle” for example, from the Cursory EP on Vae Victis, meshed oven-fresh chords with gritty drums. “I think it’s down to how we all work as individuals,” Roberts explains. “Marieu writes a lot of deep house, Lucretio writes fucking mad techno, and then I do my thing – when it all comes together you’ve got these different influences permeating the music”. But he’s keen to downplay any notion that the trio are simply trying to revive past sounds for the sake of retro pastiche. “It’s kind of looking back, but you don’t have to look at it that way,” he says, impassioned. “We’re not just trying to be old school about things, it’s a different way of writing music y’know? It kind of annoys me when people bring up the whole “it’s pretty old school” thing. Well no, not really, because the guys believe it’s the only way to write techno music, and I kind of feel the same.”

Their new EP for Vae Victis reflects this, with the reference points becoming decidedly blurred. “Never A Night Rest” sees drum machines urged into a burnt-out rattle, and the melodic elements splintered into prismatic fragments, almost as if the three are more interested with exploring abstraction than genre. “We’re not just trying to do something that somebody’s already done,” says Roberts. “It’s quite hard to do when you’re writing techno, because it’s been around for 20 plus years. A lot’s been done in that time, and I think that being a bit abstract is just a way of testing new ideas.” Lucretio and Marieu’s wide ranging DJ sets also seem to play a part in their sound. “We like a lot of bass music,” Marieu explains, “dubstep and UK garage especially – like old Horsepower Productions. I think this kind of bass music, especially the early music that references the sound of Detroit, fits a lot with techno. At 140bpm you can play it with fast techno – we like to mix four to the floor with more broken stuff”. “The Berlin Experiment” on their recent Vae Victis release seems to be most representative of this meeting point, a sparse piece of 140bpm techno which eschews pounding Mills-style power for abstract shuffling percussion and distorted bass, a broken, lopsided creation that feels more like the bastard child of dubstep and techno than any of the current crop of tracks in the 120-130 zone that seem closer to tech-house than anything else.

However, although the Cops are well-versed in these production methods, Roberts himself was somewhat inexperienced in hardware techniques until he met the duo. “I’ve always been a big fan of analogue music and how it relates to techno,” he says, “but growing up I never really had the opportunity to build myself a collection of machines, really just because of money”. Although it may not have been readily apparent at the time, Roberts’ collaboration with the Cops offered the impetus he needed to change his own production processes. “When I met the guys it was a breath of fresh air – they took me on board and let me see how they do things. It was a switch-up I needed to feel more inspired about music. Writing stuff with these guys on analogue gear feels more personal and hands-on than being sat down at a computer”.

“Marieu writes a lot of deep house, Lucretio writes fucking mad techno, and then I do my thing – when it all comes together you’ve got these different influences permeating the music” – Blawan

As he has bought more analogue gear of his own, these processes have manifested themselves throughout Roberts’ solo productions. The shift in texture from his R&S releases became most apparent with his release for Black Sun earlier this year. Loopy, gnarled, grubby – it had all the hallmarks of some of his first tentative steps into analogue solo production, while his Hinge Finger release – something that L.I.E.S. boss Ron Morelli recently compared to the nightmarish sound of Green Velvet – was mired in a sludge that could only have come from the unpredictability of analogue circuitry. “That’s what I kind of like – as I’ve changed my process of working, my records have changed. I wouldn’t say massively, but the character of the sound is a lot different because I’m using analogue equipment. I’m really happy about that actually. I’d like my sound to continue developing and changing.”

Although the Cops’ influence on Roberts is obvious, it’s their influence on Cayzer that comes as more of a surprise. As he explains, he previously collaborated with the Cops on a few tracks which may or may not see the light of day, while today’s studio session sees all four together in a project Lucretio jokingly refers to as “Parasseliah”. “I guess I first started buying their records about two years ago” Cayzer explains. “Out of everyone that’s kind of influenced me in the past couple of years I’d say it’s them the most”. Like Roberts, Cayzer has also invested heavily in hardware items – a Tempest, Prophet and Octatrak sampler to name a few. “After buying machines I feel a lot more free,” he says. “I just make whatever the fuck I feel like”. I ask if, like Roberts, his move away from the garage influenced sounds of his Safehouses EP on R&S can at least partly be attributed to his change in methods. “I’d say it’s affected it in quite a big way,” he responds, “more and more I seem to be gravitating towards making more techno orientated stuff – this year I’ve just spent the year either doing Karenn stuff or concentrating on learning how to make the most of the equipment that I’ve got – far more than I ever bothered to do with Logic.”

Both Roberts and Cayzer’s interest in hardware-driven techno led to the formation of the Karenn moniker, and their own label, Works The Long Nights, last year. The dense, foreboding, industrial clatter of “Chaste Down” felt like a major step in the careers of both, but in comparison to their recently released follow up, it was obvious the collaboration was a work in progress. Now the duo’s sound is more raw, scuzzy and loop driven – something that can also be partly attributed to the Cops’ influence, as Roberts explains. “Karenn’s definitely been massively influenced by these guys – but it wasn’t just about learning, it’s coming here, writing, and being refreshed by an approach to doing things in a way that we never really had access to. So once me and Arthur decided we were going to go down the analogue route – I mean that was the idea with the project in the first place really – it took us quite a long time to amass what we needed”. Karenn’s new EP goes further than just utilising similar hardware methods to the Cops, – it also adopts their approach to recording tracks, with the material recorded live in one take with no computers.



Of course, their various projects seem to be tying in with a wider trend in techno – that of the resurgence of interest in raw, industrial sounds that eschew minimalism for brute force. Britain’s axis seems well represented by producers like Truss, AnD and Perc; in London, parties like Plex and Machine are pushing these kind of artists while engaging with new producers on the scene, joining the dots between techno and the bass world by booking acts like Untold and Livity Sound to play alongside Regis and Surgeon. But what are Roberts’ thoughts on why this sound seems to be currently bubbling to the surface in the UK? “I’m not sure”, he admits, “I’m not really sure I’m qualified enough to judge. But from my experience, and the producers I’ve been talking to, I think it’s because there’s a lot of young guys coming up now who are interested in techno, and the harder industrial stuff is a lot more appealing to the young producer because there’s a lot more energy to it”. However, Roberts can’t deny that his arrival at techno came from a different path – that of a time when the phrase “post-dubstep” was still widely thrown around. Was his gradual move to techno a reaction against that? “I think from the outside you could very much say that,” he says cautiously, “and there’s probably some truth in that. I’m not trying to judge a scene or offend anyone, but I very much think that in a short space of time, a lot of people jumped on other peoples’ sounds. It’s always good to have this cross pollination – but I think the whole thing that happened after dubstep got watered down really fast. It was amazing that these new ideas came out – but I think for the people who felt like their sound was getting ripped off a little bit, the obvious reaction was to find something else.”

I ask Lucretio if he thinks Roberts’ popularity among younger people has helped spread the gospel of techno.“Yeah, I think so”, he says. “When Arthur and Jamie play somewhere they’re not scared to play techno – and actually the crowd like it a lot”. It would also seem that Roberts’ youthful energy has had an impact on the Cops themselves. Their earlier work as Xenogears saw them go above 135bpm regularly – a harder side that was curtailed due to what Lucretio describes as “a prejudice against techno in the clubs” during the past decade. With the Analogue Cops project and their work as Third Side with Panorama bar resident Steffi that followed, their music took a direction closer to house, along with a drop in tempo to match. But it was Roberts’ influence that brought them back to their earlier way of thinking. “I think working with Jamie has been influential for us because we’ve come back to making proper techno,” says Marieu, who offers some insight into the differences between their work with Roberts and Steffi. “It’s different with Jamie because we can experiment more. With Steffi it’s more schematic – we generally do house tracks with a hi-hat, clap – all those things without distortion. It’s a cleaner sound than with Jamie”.

The relationship between Roberts, Lucretio and Marieu may still be in its relative infancy, but it’s clearly showing no signs of slowing down. Live sets for the trio are planned, supposedly combining hardware and turntables, while Lucretio tentatively indicates that the tracks made today between Parassela and Pariah may see a release on a Parassela white label early next year “if we do something good”. But what is perhaps most interesting is how much they’ve brushed off on one another; although the Cops have been embedded within the scene for a good while, it’s clear that working with Roberts has set them back on their original path towards quick-paced, analogue techno. “Now that people are more open to it, we always try to play as much techno as possible, even if the club is a house club or whatever, because that’s the sound we come from,” says Lucretio. But it’s the Cops’ role as mentors that provides the most interesting insight. Roberts has played a significant role in galvanising interest in techno among younger UK auidences, but it’s obvious that without the influence of a pair of Italians living in Berlin, things could have been quite different. And most importantly, they’ve helped two of the UK’s most promising young producers to reach their full potential. As Cayzer tells me, “I finally feel like I’m enjoying making music again”.

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Dreaming Of Wires: The Return Of Modular Synths

Once considered virtually obsolete, modular synths have been one of the most surprising growth areas in music technology over the last decade. We speak to a group of top producers and module designers to discover why modular synthesis has risen from the dead, and to ask whether you’re missing out if you don’t get involved.



Since the birth of experimental electronic music, the history of music technology has been one of constant progression, relentless development and lightning-quick evolution.

For proof, look back 15 years and consider how primitive music software was in comparison to what’s on offer today. Consider the explosion in mobile music-making tools sparked by Apple’s iOS. Consider how hardware and software have plummeted in price over the course of the last few decades as manufacturers have developed newer, more powerful products at an alarming rate.

This unstoppable upward trend is interrupted by one significant anomaly: one of the biggest growth areas in electronic music equipment over the last decade has been the modular synthesiser market – a sector which had previously been on the decline since the late 1960s.

“I’ve been very much obsessed with electronic music and synthesisers for most of my life.”

For those who are unclear on the terminology, let’s first clarify what we mean here by modular synth. Broadly speaking, the term refers to any synthesis method which allows discrete modules – oscillators, filters, modulation sources – to be connected together in flexible, customisable ways. That includes software synths like Native Instruments’ Reaktor and U-He’s ACE, or digital hardware like the Clavia Nord Modular.

But, to the purists, software and semi-modular synths don’t even register on the modular radar. The classic modular synth is a mess of patch cables, sockets and knobs. It’s about control voltages, trigger signals and audio routed haphazardly around a bank of equipment which could fill an entire room. To many, a modular synth is an exclusively analogue affair, with a distinctly, unashamedly, retro flavour – although, as we’ll see, that’s now changing thanks to forward-thinking manufacturers introducing digital modules and systems to integrate modular equipment with modern, software-based studios.

Modular synthesis is still a niche market. Chances are you won’t have seen one in your local music shop – unless you happen to live near a specialist like Schneiders Buero in Berlin (or its diminutive east London offshoot at Rough Trade), Switched On in Austin, Texas, or Analogue Haven in Pomona, California.

Statistically speaking, chances are your favourite artist doesn’t use a modular synth either. But the climate is gradually changing as musicians and producers begin to realise that modular synths don’t have to be overwhelmingly complex or expensive, and that the synthesis and signal processing options offered by modular systems are virtually impossible to achieve through any other means.



I Dream Of Wires

Jason Amm has been releasing music as Solvent since 1997 on labels including Ghostly International, Morr Music and his own Suction Records. But for the last three years Amm has been working on a very different project.

“I’ve been very much obsessed with electronic music and synthesisers for most of my life,” Amm explains. “So much so that I actually avoided getting into modular synthesisers for a long time, for fear that the obsession would lead to more tinkering and less producing. When the filmmaker Robert Fantinatto told me about his idea for a modular synth documentary, we had a discussion about my apprehension towards getting into modulars. Of course, I had been wanting to get into them all along, so he asked if I’d be interested in hosting the film, where it would be centred around my journey. Soon enough it really became a full-on collaboration.”

The result of Fantinatto and Amm’s efforts is I Dream Of Wires, a comprehensive history of the modular synthesiser. The film will be released as a special edition four-hour ‘hardcore edition’ cut on Blu-Ray and DVD in June, to be followed by an 85-minute theatrical release later in the year.

The documentary, named after the 1980 Gary Numan track, tells the story of the exponential growth of modular synthesis over the last decade and investigates the unique appeal of modular gear, with contributions from a host of well-known modular synth enthusiasts including Carl Craig, John Tejada, Legowelt, Vince Clarke, Deadmau5, James Holden and, of course, Numan himself.



Like Taking Up Crack

To anyone thinking of taking the leap into modular synthesis, James Holden immediately offers a clear warning: “It can be moreish… like taking up crack.” Holden’s move into modular hardware stemmed from his first experiments with electronic music, working with the free Jeskola Buzz software. ”Buzz was pretty modular in how it worked,” he recalls. “And that way of visualising my audio chain just stuck. I got into the habit of only working with wonky, unreliably patched messes. The modular addiction comes about when you’re half way through patching something and realise you need one more oscillator. I’ve reached the end of that now as my studio has run out of shelves for racks to go on…”

Jeremy Greenspan of Canadian electronic duo Junior Boys tells a similar story of the irresistible lure of modular gear: “I started using them sparingly, and now I would say that I don’t go a day in the studio without using my modular in some capacity. Sometimes for almost every element of a track.”

Soundcloud

Greenspan first discovered modulars through a chance visit to Analogue Haven in 2007. “We were touring the second Junior Boys album and we thought we’d go in and buy some Vermona equipment,” Greenspan remembers. “When we got there we were completely swept away by the possibilities of Eurorack, which we’d only just heard small things about. Both Matt and I walked out with full cases that day. At the time there were only a few companies making stuff, so my excitement level grew with the amount of new companies making more and more stuff. I was especially excited by companies who were designing modules that were influenced by companies like Buchla and Serge, insofar as they were slightly leftfield of more traditional synthesis.”



Dominic Butler of London-based DFA signees Factory Floor explains how he gradually moved into modulars through vintage analogue synths: “A friend of mine had an SH-101 in his bedsit and we used to get completely absorbed in playing about with it. The arpeggio function seemed to fit well with the amount of weed we were smoking! I guess I was always looking for a way to open it up and push it some more.

“I was aware of modular synths through listening to artists like Morton Subotnick and Chris Carter. There was one record that I couldn’t stop playing called ‘Her Blade’ by Eazy Teeth. I knew it was done on a Serge modular but I just saw them as unobtainable, financially out of my league.

“The first module I bought was a Doepfer A-111-5, which was fun but I soon sold it and started buying individual modules. I think when I discovered Make Noise and 4ms was when things started getting really interesting. Their design and usability fitted perfectly with the way I approach making music.”



Back From The Dead

Modular synths predate their compact, fixed-architecture cousins by over a decade, having first been commercially manufactured by Bob Moog and Don Buchla in 1963, seven years before the release of the Minimoog. Even Roland, who entered the synth market a few years after the introduction of the Minimoog, produced the wonderful System 700 and System 100m modulars before switching their attention solely to fixed-architecture synths.

Moog and Roland’s withdrawal from modular synth production – in 1981 and 1984 respectively – was emblematic of a larger shift in electronic music trends which could be traced back to the introduction of the Minimoog in 1970: musicians were increasingly turning to smaller, more compact and cheaper fixed-architecture synths. By the 90s, modular synths were widely considered an archaic relic of a bygone era, esoteric and interesting but barely relevant to modern musicians.

Amm explains that the modular synth resurgence began as a vintage revival targeted at a very small niche market: “Vintage modular systems started becoming more scarce and sought-after, so companies like Modcan and Doepfer introduced new modular systems in the 90s to meet the demand. To start they were mainly catering to older people who had probably lusted after Moog modulars in the 70s, so what they were offering were basically recreations of classic subtractive analogue synthesis modular systems.”



Modcan’s Bruce Duncan began building modular synth equipment as a hobby in 1994 when he experienced a slow-down in his day job building prototype models for industrial designers. “I had always been fascinated with synthesisers and had owned many of the early polyphonic models from the late 70s onward,” he explains. “My first modular was a Serge, circa 1980, which I bought locally second-hand. It had been assembled from a kit. What got me started building was a need to expand the Serge. The filters and envelopes were lacking in my system and the cost for new Serge panels was beyond my financial capabilities at the time. I built a few prototypes and enjoyed the process so much I decided that it could become a fun secondary job for me when regular day job was slow.

“I met a guy who was a fellow synth nerd at a party and he knew a bit about HTML and helped me put together a very basic website which became modcan.com. I posted some of the early modules and started promoting my work on the Analogue Haven forum. Before long people were buying modules to augment their Serges and as free-standing systems once I had enough modules to cover all the basics. I had a friend that had some under-employed buddies and they built the modules for me in their bedrooms. I would drive over to their place and drop off the parts, boards and panels every time I received an order.

“It was very low production from about 1996 to 2004. Maybe 100 modules a year, maximum. I was still working in the model business and was happy to keep it all small scale as it really was more of a hobby at that time. In 2004 I received a large commission for a very big system and I was fed up with my job so I decided it was time to see if I could make synth building a full-time occupation. I rented a warehouse space near my home in the east end of Toronto and away I went. Since that time it’s been a six-day-a-week job with barely a break.”

“Electronic music is so common now, and people are burned out on hearing run-of-the-mill synth sounds.”

Modulars go indie

While larger companies like Modcan and Doepfer led the way in revitalising the modular synth market during the late 1990s, they’ve since been joined by a vast cottage industry of independent manufacturers. Amm takes up the story: “The real resurgence started about six or seven years ago and has really ramped up in the last couple of years – that’s basically when a lot of new, one-person start-up companies began popping up with their own modules, mainly in Doepfer-style Eurorack format. This Eurorack format is smaller and typically cheaper than modular systems of the past, so it really caught on.

“I think this is when it started to get really interesting, because it’s no longer all about vintage recreations – there’s that, but everything else has been thrown in too – digital, analogue, valves, sampling, complex sequencing, interfacing between the modular and the computer DAW environment, just about anything you can think of. The increase in modular activity is really a result of the reciprocal relationship between the modular synthesiser manufacturers and their users; the users crave more and more innovative sounds and approaches to synthesis, and there seems to be no shortage of new manufacturers who thrive on the challenge to contribute something unique to the pot. So I think a huge factor for the modular resurgence is fuelled by the fact that the internet allows this exchange of ideas and information.

“I think another significant reason has to do with the fact that electronic music is so common now, and people are burned out on hearing run-of-the-mill synth sounds, because they’re everywhere. The modular offers a sonic alternative to run-of-the-mill!”



Danjel van Tijn runs Intellijel Designs, one of a new breed of modular synth companies creating highly original, forward-thinking modules. For van Tijn, the urge to create something new was spurred by an early discovery of Richard D James: ”When I was about 12 or 13 I started listening to a lot of electronic music, including AFX, and I heard all these wild stories about him building his own samplers and synths. It just seemed so impressive that not only was he making this incredible music but he was also creating his own unique tools to help do so.”



Years later, having enrolled in university to study electronic engineering with a view to pursuing a career in music technology, he realised that maybe he’d been misled all along. “Once I was in university and buried in what felt like purely theoretical studies I realised that AFX must have been exaggerating, because it was all way too complex – especially something like a sampler – to do on your own without a lot of disciplined study.”

Following his studies, van Tijn briefly worked for IVL, a company which manufactured products for Digitech and owned the Electrix and TC-Helicon brands. Returning to college to study recording, he spent a few years working in various music tech jobs. Like so many manufacturers, van Tijn began building modules for himself as a hobby, having been introduced to modulars by his friend (and future Intellijel employee) Haven Siguenza. ”I really had no intention to start my own modular company. The first product I put out was supposed to be a DIY kit, but so many people wanted a fully built module instead of a kit that I had to look at ways to get things manufactured and ended up doing a small batch of proper modules. Eurorack really started to explode and things just seemed to really click for me. If you had asked me as a teenager what my dream job would be it would have been what I am doing now.”



Benefits of modular

The main appeal of modular synths to artists is obvious: their unrivalled flexibility makes them the most versatile form of synthesiser imaginable. Not happy with the tone of your filter? Change it for another one. Need more modulation sources? No problem – there are hundreds of different LFOs and envelope generators available and you can have as many as you like in one system.

What’s more easily overlooked is the way that modular equipment forces you to work differently to a traditional fixed-architecture synth. Of course, there are no presets; recalling all but the most basic patches is a laborious and inaccurate process. But more importantly there are implications for the way you use the synth, the way you make music and the results you get.

“I want that experience of playing something unreliable and prone to unpleasant squeals and squeaks.”

Amm suggests that this unique characteristic is one of the most appealing features of modulars: ”I think that most, if not all, modular users enjoy the fact that the instrument is constantly challenging them to think about every aspect of the sound. That’s something you don’t get out of most self-contained synths, especially ones that have patch storage and presets.”

James Holden agrees: “Back when I was using modular software I came up with this method of making feedback systems – trying to breathe chaos and unpredictability into the instruments I built – and the modular is even more perfect for that. I use it alongside Max/MSP and Expert Sleepers’ CV plugins now so that the computer-modular system is just one thing, designed to be expressive like a real instrument – I learned violin so I want that experience of playing something unreliable and prone to unpleasant squeals and squeaks. Mostly Max For Live now handles generative and chance-based MIDI stuff, wonky sequencers and a few extra LFOs and envelopes. Everything else happens in the modular. My favourite modules are the Make Noise QMMG and a pair of Maths, by a long way, then I guess the Analogue Systems RS95E oscillators and the Metasonix tube bandpass are totally indispensable to me.

“Quite often I’m actually just patching a polysynth with one or two minor deliberate errors – wonky voice allocation or random cross-modulation.” But that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s a random process of taking wild shots in the dark until something works. “It usually starts from an idea of what I want to try rather than serendipitous experimentation,” he adds.



For Jeremy Greenspan, there are numerous ways in which modular synths aid his creative process: “For me the appeal is that there are fewer decisions being made for you by the instrument maker. There are no presets. No two modular systems are the same. The sounds are often unique but, more importantly for me, using a modular synth often takes your preconceived planning out of the equation. Modular synths are usually unpredictable, the results of patching are also unpredictable, so you usually get a pattern, a sound, a sequence or rhythm that you didn’t predict. Writing with modulars is usually more about capturing a moment. A sort of synchronistic moment happens when you write. It’s totally unique. Modular synths can take your ego out of the equation – which, in music, is a blessing.”

“I was a musician before I was an electronics designer, and always will be.”

One of the most important factors in determining why modular synths are so highly praised by artists and producers is that most of the companies creating modular equipment are owned, run and staffed by musicians. Since modular synth manufacturers tend to make music themselves, it’s only logical that they should focus on musicians’ needs when designing new products.

“I was a musician before I was an electronics designer, and always will be,” says Stacy Gaudreau of hexinverter.net. “Generally speaking, my module creations arise from personal needs. I’m usually coming up with the most ideas for new modules when I’m spending a lot of time with my own modular system and discovering needs for new modules. sympleSEQ, for example was thought of because I was once a beginner DIYer and wanted to build a sequencer, but was intimidated by the parts count and wiring complexity. So, I developed sympleSEQ so that other beginners could have an easier time of things.”

The design process for Intellijel is similar. “For many years I’ve been producing electronic music, mainly deep techno and ambient stuff,” says van Tijn. “I’m always considering what I would personally want to use to create music that has a lot of rhythmic structure and melody. As the company has been growing I’ve had the good fortune to connect directly with quite a few musicians I really admire and am influenced by and I carefully listen to any feedback they give us on our designs.”

Cottage industry

Stacy Gaudreau’s one-man business, hexinverter.net, is his primary source of income. Entirely self-taught when he started the company, he now uses the profits from sales of modules and DIY kits to fund his electronics studies at college in Manitoba, Canada. “I have always been incredibly fascinated with electronics,” he explains. “As a child, I would spend a lot of time taking apart electronics and examining inside of them. Music – and especially electronic music – has always been an enormous part of my life, so it was no surprise that my interests eventually collided. As soon as I was able to have enough of my own space to build a small lab, I began to experiment with electronics and learn how to design circuits for musical synthesis. I’m a devoted do-it-yourselfer.”



Gaudreau’s experience is similar to dozens of other small-scale designers and manufacturers. At present, modular synth manufacturing isn’t generally a cut-throat industry of money-motivated businessmen looking for ways to crush the competition. ”Generally speaking, the modular synth industry is full of incredibly creative people. The community is also very tight-knit and so there are a lot of warm fuzzy feelings all around,” says Gaudreau. “Just go to any muffwiggler.com DIY forum thread where someone’s developing a project and you’ll see just how appreciative the consumers of DIY projects are to have designers selling circuit boards and kits for their designs. The modular synthesis industry is incredibly inviting of new ideas and start-ups. I find that there’s a lot less aggression in this market, but there are exceptions to that rule. Any time there’s money to be made, you’ll always have some crooked individual trying to spoil the fun for everyone else. Thankfully the community is so tight-knit and supportive of one another that cruel people are generally weeded out fairly quickly.”

“Right now there are about 80 companies and over 700 Eurorack modules, so you definitely need some way to stand out.”

Modcan’s Bruce Duncan welcomes the increased competition from small companies, which he attributes to the rise of Eurorack and increased interest in electronic music in America. “The scene has definitely transformed from being a very esoteric hobby populated by a few well-heeled ‘in the know’ participants into a much more popular and wide spread phenomenon,” he tells us. “The new makers definitely keep me on my toes. Especially now that I’m also doing Eurorack modules. It is still a relatively small niche market, though. While the community’s still growing, nobody building modulars is doing it at a level compared with the early electric guitar manufacturers, for example.”

With so much choice on offer, Daniel van Tijn explains that from a manufacturer’s point of view it’s important to offer something different to the competition: ”Right now there are about 80 companies and over 700 Eurorack modules, so you definitely need some way to stand out. At Intellijel we like the idea of modules that have a foundation capable of clean and precise sound but can be manipulated to go well beyond that state. You can always make a clean sound dirty but it’s difficult to do the opposite. Our modules cover a very broad range of synthesis techniques and sounds. We have some modules that are clearly influenced by classic designs but we always try to modernise and improve on what’s already been done. We’re also always looking at new things we can do but at the end of the day it’s extremely important that the resultant module is highly musical and useful and not just a novelty.”



Modular personalities

The inherent challenge of modular synths makes them a very different proposition to a conventional compact synth, with fixed signal routing and a limited number of options. Is there a certain personality type that gets drawn to that kind of approach? Through his role as producer of I Dream Of Wires, Jason Amm has met hundreds of modular synth enthusiasts. He suggests that there are a handful of different characteristics which might draw musicians to modular gear, but that there is one common theme: “Across the board, I would say that modular synthesisers attract obsessive – or at least very passionate – people. You have to understand something about synthesis to even get a sound out of a modular synth, and they demand a lot of knowledge to get the best out of them, so I think it’s also fair to say that all modular synthesiser users possess a lot of intelligence.”

“Across the board, I would say that modular synthesisers attract obsessive people.”

Modular synths reward users who think outside the box. What if I patched that signal over there? What if I hooked this module up to that one? Jeremy Greenspan suggests that musicians who take a methodical, almost analytical approach to making music might be best suited to working with modulars: “I think the tendency is to want to use everything right away. But you often get the most out of it if you learn modules one at a time. Get excited by each module’s capabilities. Figure out its surplus, what it can achieve above and beyond what it was intended to do. This is often easier with modular than with traditional synths, because often the designers themselves don’t have fixed ideas about a module’s specific applications.”
In the box

Modular synths can be entirely self-contained affairs, with sequencers and effects built into the setup alongside synth elements, but not everyone wants to work in such a resolutely analogue, hardware-focussed way. But that retro approach isn’t the only option. Thanks to a handful of companies developing hybrid systems which combine analogue hardware with modern software control, it’s now relatively easy to integrate modular equipment with more contemporary, computer-based music-making methods.



Andrew Ostler runs Expert Sleepers, a small company pioneering ground-breaking DAW control of analogue equipment with its Silent Way software and a range of interface modules. Both Holden and Butler cite Silent Way as a key element in their setup. Ostler explains the concept: “Modulars can be huge fun on their own, but if you want to combine them with a DAW at any level, from basic tempo sync to full-blown two-way integration, I believe the software approach that Silent Way offers is the way forward. The goal of Silent Way, and the Expert Sleepers modules, is to provide a much tighter level of integration between DAW and synth than has ever been possible using, say, a traditional MIDI/CV converter.”

Ostler explains that the Silent Way approach offers more accurate timing than MIDI and allows the DAW to become a perfectly integrated element of the synth itself: “You can create tempo-synced LFOs, envelopes, sequencers – all in perfect time and under familiar software control via parameter automation. Of course, you can take it further. Why limit the DAW to producing CVs? It can receive them too – just as it can receive audio – for recording, slicing, looping or applying effects. So you can use a software module as just another module in the synth, and so you can control software instruments – and indeed the DAW itself – with CVs from the modular.”

Dominic Butler agrees with Ostler’s assessment of the benefits of this approach: “The ES-3 module has opened up the live possibilities of modular synths massively. I used to have to drag a Doepfer MAQ16 around with me on stage. Whilst playing one song I’d be figuring out how to program the next one, which could be a complete nightmare. Most of the stuff I do in Factory Floor is based around a heavy arp or bassline, so Silent Way plus Ableton is like having the world’s biggest slash smallest sequencer!”
Modular music

For all their clearly apparent sonic versatility, one of the biggest criticisms of modular synths is that users spend so much time tweaking sounds and experimenting with different patches that they end up forgetting the main point of the synth: to make music.

Soundcloud

“Tinkering on the modular is a bit like a drug for me. It's like a trance or meditation.”

Perhaps the ultimate rebuttal of this criticism comes from Amm himself, who set himself the challenge of creating the soundtrack for I Dream Of Wires from scratch using nothing but modular synths. “When it was decided that I was to become a part of the film, I suggested that my goal should be to come out of this with an all-modular soundtrack for the film,” he recalls. “My music is very melodic and structured so I wanted to make sure that the soundtrack was true to that, while also showcasing some new sounds and synthesis methods that only the modular can offer.

“I was definitely worried that my obsessive nature could lead to me becoming a full-time fiddler if I were to get a modular, so completing this album was an important point to my story in the film. Honestly it is a bit of a challenge; I get a lot of satisfaction out of completing a song, but it does usually feel like work getting it to that finished song stage. On the other hand, tinkering on the modular is a bit like a drug for me, it’s like a trance or meditation, and sometimes I want to just disappear into that hole for days and not have to think about turning any of it into a song. In a way I sometimes feel jealous of all of those modular users whose only aspiration is to make weird noises and maybe upload that to YouTube – for anyone who is obsessed with the sound of synthesisers, the tinkering is usually the most exciting part.”



Buyer beware

Dominic Butler understands the challenge of staying focussed when using modular equipment better than most thanks to his live performances with Factory Floor. His use of modular gear in a real-world situation, interacting with the other members of the band, has taught him the best approach to getting the most from it. “I think if people have a tendency to noodle they will noodle,” he explains. “Whether that’s with a modular or a guitar and a stack of pedals. Don’t blame the tools! With Factory Floor, the modular is always underpinned with a strong arpeggio and rhythm. I’m loving the Tiptop Audio 808 and 909 modules driven by the 4ms and Rebel Tech stuff then processed with an Optomix and an Echophon. Unlimited fun! Even when the sets drift off into hectic chaotic territories they always seem to get pulled back into something comprehensible. It’s always good to go with instinct in a live situation and leave the indulgent side at home.”

Similar warnings are reiterated by almost all of the artists who contributed to this feature. The near-unanimous consensus is that modular synthesis isn’t for everyone, and that anyone with an interest in dipping a toe into the waters of modular gear should think long and hard before taking the plunge. James Holden is the most forthright: “I’d have a careful think about whether it’s for you. Modulars suit whacked-out music. If you want it for fat dubstep bass I’d honestly just stick to NI plugins. I had a friend of a friend email me: ‘So I’ve got this oscillator and this filter but I can’t make a noise. What am I meant to do?’ The answer? ‘Sell it on eBay, mate…’”

Soundcloud

Jeremy Greenspan explains why fixed-architecture synths still retain so much appeal despite the versatility of modulars: “They work. The best of them – the ‘big boy synths’ like the ARP Odyssey, Minimoog and Jupiter-8 – are very flexible, but you can rely on them to function in a specific way. And if you’re after a sound that you know how to get, or if you’re working on a track where you want to get something happening quick, or be able to save, then you’re going to want to use a fixed-architecture synth.”

The lone voice of dissent comes from techno stalwart Kirk Degiorgio, who espoused the benefits of modular synths at length when we interviewed him last month. Degiorgio insists that a modular setup is the absolute best way to learn about analogue synthesis, and encourages anyone and everyone to give it a go. “I think it’s a golden age for analogue synths right now,” he tells us. “And most of it’s in the modular world. I think once anyone’s used a small modular system with the basic building blocks, you can give them any analogue synth, no matter how complex the routing, and they’ll find their way around it really quickly. I get asked a lot by up-and-coming artists what keyboard they should get. Don’t. Just buy a modular system. Once you learn it you’ll be able to use any analogue synthesiser out there.”



Where next?

So, if modular synths are back for good, that leaves only one question: where do they go from here? With so many manufacturers competing to invent innovative new products, the signs are good for future development of all modular synth formats.

“My hope is that buyer fatigue doesn’t set in. I think the market could become saturated with all the product that’s now available.”

Modcan’s Bruce Duncan believes that the modular market is stronger than ever, but warns that progression is necessary to avoid stagnation: “I see a lot of cool innovation coming from the new crop of builders and while I think a lot of them are simply polishing old concepts a lot of them are also doing new things that I never would have thought of myself. I still see some room for new ideas but it’s getting harder to be completely original with such a populated field. My hope is that buyer fatigue doesn’t set in because I think the market could become saturated with all the product that’s now available. Hopefully not for a while yet, though.”

For hexinverter.net’s Stacy Gaudreau, predicting the future of the modular synth scene is virtually impossible: “Module technologies are evolving constantly and at an alarming rate – it seems designers are inventing new ways to create sounds all the time. I feel like predicting what will happen is almost impossible since it’s such a limitless platform for new creative inventions. I’m very interested to see what new technologies in the electronics world will add to modulars – things like carbon nanotubes and atomic computing could mean very different creative tools for musicians and I’m anxious to see where these technological advancements carry us.

“I feel like modulars are already the ultimate sound design machine. The fact that they’re now becoming so popular is awesome. I hope it stays around for a long time.”



James Holden, Jeremy Greenspan, Dominic Butler, Bruce Duncan, Stacy Gaudreau and Danjel van Tijn all appear in I Dream Of Wires. The Hardcore Edition Blu-Ray/2-DVD of the film is available to pre-order until April 30th, priced from $35.

[wub]

Nightclubbing: Metalheadz at Blue Note

Nightclubbing is a series on RBMA where we tell the story of the spaces that have forever changed the world of music. In this edition, Todd L. Burns interviews the likes of Goldie, Grooverider, Photek and many more to stitch together an oral history of Metalheadz’s seminal residency at London’s Blue Note.

The Metalheadz night at Blue Note was a party that will go down in history as one of drum & bass’ most important. Alongside Rage and Speed, it’s the one that is most frequently cited by the genre’s luminaries in spreading the sound worldwide. Like most nights that eventually take on a historical significance, its success is a combination of factors. Drum & bass was in its beginning stages and Metalheadz, the label, had gathered together some of its finest, young producers. It was held on a Sunday, a day that lured out the rave-shy beatmakers. And heading it all up was this irrepressible, Goldie, a producer who was just about ready to take the whole thing global.

There are other, vitally important things to mention. A lack of traditional MCs. A fierce dubplate rivalry. A DJ who put together one of the best DJ sets ever – after not spinning records in public for more than a year. But instead of listing all of them, we’ll simply let the people that were there tell the story. Over the past few months we interviewed a majority of the night’s major players. Here is their take on Metalheadz at Blue Note.



Doc Scott: We were very much in the minority in drum & bass in ’94. This was around the time that the ragga jungle scene was really big.

DJ Lee: To be honest, we all hated the ragga jungle sound at the time.

Loxy: There was a lot of mainstream stuff that was getting the attention.

Doc Scott: I had some horrendous times playing out as a DJ earlier that year.

Loxy: There was other stuff out there that was more experimental. I was playing on the same radio station as Kemistry and Storm.

Storm: We started to get a hold of the producers making that kind of music and we said, “Look, your music’s not being played on the dancefloors.” So we got hold of Photek, Source Direct, Digital, Wax Doctor, Alex Reece… those kinds of people that were making the stuff at the time and we all formed a friendship from that.

Goldie: I wanted a place where the music makers could listen to music.



Storm: Kemistry and myself had started running the label in early ’95. Goldie had gotten signed, and he was just too busy. Our dream had always been to have a club. So we were looking, and Blue Note approached us. They had a five-week trial slot on a Sunday night.

Dillinja: I thought, “Sunday, isn’t that a bit weird?”

Storm: Kemistry and I, when we were first raving, our m.o. was that we’d go to Rage on a Thursday, then on Friday we’d go up to Coventry to Amnesia House, we’d take the night off on Saturday and then we’d have this last little bump on Sunday at a club called Solaris on Gray’s Inn Road.

Bailey: I thought that a Sunday club was a bit risky because, well, everyone’s got work the next day.

Ink: There was a bit of fear about what might happen. I remember there not being a lot of people the first ten times or so. Goldie was breakdancing on the floor, and he had the room to be able to do that.

Justyce: I popped in and there were, like, five people there. [laughs]

Goldie: The first 12, 15 sessions were empty. There was hardly anyone there. Then you think, “Oh, we’ve made the wrong decision.”



Storm: We nearly killed Fabio on the first night. There was this pipe above the DJ booth, and we didn’t understand how sweaty it was going to get. There was so much water on the decks it was ridiculous. After that first week we covered up the pipe. We didn’t want to kill Fabio, would’ve been a terrible shame! [laughs]

Fabio: It was a bit of a shithole really. [laughs] It leaked, it had cracks in the wall. You felt like you were in a cave.

DJ Lee: I’m surprised I didn’t get sick more after I played at Blue Note.

Fabio: You used to get so much sweat on your records that at times it became quite difficult to DJ.

Ink: The infamous sweat pipe. That was one of the most annoying things. It was almost like having a shower when you were on the decks.

Fabio: I had started a night called Speed about four months prior to Metalheadz doing their first night. The two clubs couldn’t be more different. Speed was a cross between a West End club and a drum & bass night, whereas Blue Note was in Hoxton. It was grimy, underground. The lighting was gloomy, oppressive. In Speed it was bright. They were completely different things.



Photek: At the time Hoxton was a really run down part of London. Someone recently ran a feature saying how posh that area is now and used a photo of me and Goldie trying to illustrate what it used to be like. [laughs]

Grooverider: I had never heard of Hoxton Square until Metalheadz. [laughs]

Ink: This was way before the Shoreditch upsurge.

Goldie: It was fucking desolate there. Blue Note, the square, there's nothing really there. It was a club in the middle of fucking nowhere. But there was just something about it. There was just something about the feel of it.

Storm: It had a very intimate feel. It had this very low ceiling, so the bass travelled really well and didn’t escape very far, so you were completely hit by it.

Doc Scott: When Goldie would have his batshit moments where he’d jump up and down, he’d almost hit the ceiling.

DJ Lee: The DJ booth was so small. Especially when Groove[rider] came in with 16 record boxes. There was no room to move. The crowd was literally on you.



Storm: You could touch the DJ and you could stand right next to the MC.

Cleveland Watkiss: Everything was on the same level.

Storm: There was no “Oh, I’m a DJ.” You could literally just come up to me in the club and say, “Oh, hi, you’re Storm, right?” We were accessible to everybody. We were just trying to create a vibe that people felt very comfortable in.

Bailey: But it was never abused. There were never any lunatics leaning over to get rewinds.

Photek: Goldie would reach over the decks and rewind tunes, regardless of what the DJ was trying to do. [laughs] I think half the people that came through came just to see that happen.

Fabio: It ended up being a massive coup to do it on a Sunday. It started early and ended early.

Loxy: The approach was to have it be a Sunday night wind-down. If you can call it a wind-down. It started at 7 and finished up by midnight. There was nothing going on of that nature on Sunday. It was always considered a family thing for like-minded people.

Fabio: You don’t really get random ravers when you do a Sunday night thing. You get people that really love music.

Hidden Agenda - Pressing On

Doc Scott: There was no external pressure to tone down your set, which you might feel on a Friday or a Saturday when you were playing somewhere else in the UK.

DJ Lee: It would start on the Thursday with Speed, then Fridays and Saturdays we would play four or five gigs. So by the time it got to Sunday, we would have played five or six gigs and it’d be so natural for us to want to play all the things that we hadn’t – or couldn’t – at other parties. You could really delve in.

Cleveland Watkiss: I used to call it a church session.

Fabio: It feels like going to church.

DJ Lee: When I wasn’t playing, I’d come pretty much every week anyway. They had really great Jamaican food.

Randall: The food was great for people who had been out all day on Saturday and Sunday.

Storm: Goldie brought in a guy to make West Indian food.

Justyce: Sunday is a yard food day if you’re Jamaican.

Storm: Curry, goat, rice and peas.

Goldie: And we had board games upstairs – chess, backgammon.

Storm: When he said it, we were like, “Oh come on, Goldie! People from drum & bass are not going to play games!” But they really did! And then, of course, if you wanted to go inside, you would go downstairs.



Doc Scott: I think one of my most special memories of Metalheadz at Blue Note, from a DJ point of view, was hearing Grooverider be reborn. I don’t think it’s any secret that he’d lost his way – at least from our perspective. We had all looked up to him so much, and he’d gone down the road of playing some more commercial stuff. When he played his first set at the Blue Note, it was a really big deal.

Grooverider: The first time that I played was pretty special.

Doc Scott: I’m sure he was enjoying what he was doing at the time but to hear him play, to me, a proper set of drum & bass and find himself again…

DJ Lee: Grooverider’s first set at Blue Note was unbelievable. I had some of those tunes, but the way that he put them together…

Fabio: It was Groove’s house.

Photek: Grooverider was like the Prime Minister, presiding over everything.

Doc Scott: He played some of the best sets that I’ve ever heard him play at the Blue Note.

Fabio: We were all bit-part players, really. Groove used to own that place. He would smash it every week.

Adam F - Metropolis

Doc Scott: I remember vividly when Grooverider came in and he had “Metropolis” by Adam F. He had this look on his face. I knew he had something special.

Fabio: The night that Groove played “Metropolis” for the first time…

Doc Scott: He played it as his first tune and it got rewound maybe seven or eight times.

Bailey: You always knew it was going to be a good night when Doc Scott and Grooverider were on the same bill. You knew they’d try to outdo one another. They’d really start pulling tunes.

Fabio: Everyone played for Goldie, to impress him. You couldn’t go in there without the freshest music. You couldn’t fuck up. The crowd would let you know.

Goldie: I'd phone the DJs up, I'd wind 'em all up. I'm going, “I better hear some fucking good shit,” you know? I’d phone them and play them 16 bars of something and people would go, “What the fuck’s going on?” And you’d put the phone down, and they’re like... “Are you playing fucking games again?” I’m like “Wait ’til fucking Sunday!” “Have you spoke to Scotty?” “No.” “Have you spoke to Lee?” “Nah, nah, he's got something dangerous.” “Really? What's going on? Tell me more!” “Nah, nah, nah. Wait ’til fucking Sunday!” I heard so many tunes in that place my brain nearly exploded.

Photek - The Rain (remix)

Storm: We would always have a little bet between us and the DJs: “Who would play the weirdest track tonight? Who would play the track that everybody would just rush over to the DJ and ask, ‘Who is it? Who is it?’”

Marley Marl: The night got so successful that you’d have to get there earlier and earlier to get in.

Storm: The club was pretty much full by 7:15 or 7:30, and we opened at 7.

DJ Lee: Because ragga jungle was so big, we’d be headlining these second rooms. So to get to Blue Note with a crowd that was so receptive... I mean, they were all like internet nerds are today. I still don’t know how half of the people knew about these tunes. I was like, “Either you’ve been hacking my phone and listening to my conversations with Ed Rush or...” They were so educated that they’d know by the 30-second intro who had produced it.

Goldie: You’d be in a conversation, talking to Photek about a certain snare in a kung-fu film, and then you’d a hear tune coming in and you'd just fucking stop mid-conversation. But it wasn’t deemed as rude. It was like, “Yep, that’s it. Just gotta hear it.”

Lemon D - Universal Soldier

Grooverider: It was a completely different vibe from Speed or Rage. Don’t get me wrong about those places, there was always music appreciation. But they didn’t hit the heights that Metalheadz hit. The whole night was about music. It wasn’t about any one person. It was about music.

Marley Marl: People from all around the world would come to Metalheadz. Internationally, they thought it was some enormous rave. They thought it was 3000 people or something.

Grooverider: It only held 200 people, maximum.

Dillinja: It was a long, narrow room basically. 15 meters wide? 50 meters deep? It wasn’t big at all.

Marley Marl: The amount of bodies in there and the low ceilings made for a really compact sound. That was very important: The music was quite technical, so you needed to hear it properly.

Loxy: It was a wall of sound. Eskimo Noise did the system. You couldn’t get better sound at the time.

Cleveland Watkiss: As someone who came up in the sound system era in the ’70s when it was all about the science of sound, it was the closest I had ever heard to that. The dimensions of the place were perfect for the system.

Bailey: From the outset it was an experimental thing. That was Goldie bringing in the heritage, sound-wise, of Reinforced Records into Metalheadz. That was what was so special about the crowd. They were very attentive. Any little change to the music, they’d hear it and roar for it. It was a great listening crowd. It wasn’t about the biggest drop. It was about building a really deep soundscape.



Dillinja: There also weren’t many MCs, just strictly music. Which was brilliant. There were millions of MCs at all of the other events, smothering the music all night.

DJ Lee: That was always the problem: You’d get some idiot MC chatting while you were trying to mix.

Dillinja: When there was an MC, he’d complement the music. Cleveland Watkiss used to do a bit of singing.

Cleveland Watkiss: About a half-hour into the first night I said to Goldie, “Look, I have my microphone in my car if you want me to get it.” And he said, “Nah, nah.” So then an hour went by, and he said, “Go and get your mic.” And the rest was history. [laughs]

Grooverider: It was a different style of MCing. They were more hosting. They weren’t firing off a million and one lyrics. The focus was more on the music.

Storm: It was funny because Cleveland was a bit wary, he was like, “Well, I don’t know what to say, I’ve never done this kind of thing.” So I suppose it was Cleveland developing his style. He just wore a head mic, so he was standing in the crowd. You could just talk to Cleveland, he was there right in front of you. He told stories, he made little jokes.

Justyce: Cleveland was different. He came on a singing tip, a totally different angle than anyone else.



Loxy: Cleveland was a jazz singer, and so you had never really heard someone like him on those beats.

Goldie: When jungle came in, it revived reggae and revived all this stuff, but it was still MC-driven. So it was all about giving the MCs a platform. And I'm like, “Eh, whoa, whoa, whoa. This music has its own body and soul. It doesn't need an MC to fucking tell us what it is. It speaks for itself.”

Peshay: He always complemented the music, never got in the way.

Cleveland Watkiss: Justyce was also a brilliant MC with his own style. He would often do the early session and I would do the later one.

Photek: It wasn’t like we all hated MCs. It was just that there had to be one place that were no MCs. I mean, everyone was listening so close to the music. We didn’t need hyping up or [someone] to tell us what was going on. It was the sanctuary for producers to hear their music played by the best DJs.

Justyce: The music was so good that I wanted to get hit by it as well.

Cleveland Watkiss: I loved that surprise, that moment where I didn’t know what was happening.

Justyce: The night was never about MCs. It was about the music.

Source Direct - A Made Up Sound / Jungle

Dillinja: The whole place was full of producers, people that wanted to hear the cutting edge of drum & bass. Source Direct were in there.

Goldie: Oh fuckin' hell, yeah. Source Direct. They'd always be there, in some corner, lurking.

Dillinja: Photek is one of my favourite producers of all time.

Fabio: Photek was the scientist, a genius at building breaks.

Doc Scott: I was inspired to go back to the studio and work on stuff after going to Blue Note. I figured people could maybe get a tune from Photek, but if I made something only I would have it. That was part of the inspiration behind “Shadow Boxing.”

Photek: I think the first time that someone used a filter on a breakbeat was witnessed down there. I think it was Dillinja. It was mindblowing to hear a lowpass filter on a breakbeat. There were several key moments in the history of electronic music that happened in that nightclub.

Dillinja - The Angels Fell

Justyce: Dillinja was probably the most talked about. Lemon D. Photek. But I feel like Dillinja had the edge. He had that sound, he made them speakers move. He had that bass. Nobody came close to the bass that he brought.

Ink: Dillinja was making beats that would tear your head off.

Doc Scott: There was no greater feeling than having a new Dillinja tune and knowing that the audience wanted to hear it.

Dillinja: I’d make tunes all week, give them to Grooverider and Fabio and I’d go down and listen to them. And I’d hear other people’s tunes and get inspiration. It was like a battle. I liked the competition. It was brilliant.

Photek: We knew each other’s music so well that if there was a slightly different edit of someone’s stuff, you’d catch it.

Peshay: If you wanted to hear the darkest, the baddest, the funkiest tunes, you heard [them] there first.

Loxy: It turned into a place to break tunes. All the early Prototype, early Virus, Good Looking. Everything you wanted to hear from that deeper, more experimental side of things you heard it there first.

Goldie: You could smell acetate in that place. They should have made it a fucking fragrance. [in a French accent] “Ah Blue Note. Ze fragrance of acetate.” [laughs]



Ink: If you’re going to talk about cutting dubs at that time, there’s only one place to talk about, and that’s Music House.

Randall: It was like a local for DJs, people would come from all over. We would hang out, chat about music, get our dubs cut, hear new music.

Ink: It was the central nervous system of the scene.

Fabio: The Holy Grail of cutting.

Grooverider: Music House was the ultimate meeting place. It was like a social club. There were people there just to be there. You’d get ravers turning up just to see DJs.

Photek: There’d be a line out the door of all these producers at Music House. If you were a fan from the scene, it’d be like the Grammys.

Bailey: A typical scenario would be you’d wait ages for someone to give you a tune. You’d get the DAT and go to Music House where these other DJs that might have more stature would overhear it, and they’d call the producer and say, “Why are you cutting this plate?” And the next thing you know they’d be running a plate of it too.



Ink: There’d be people constantly on their phones as the music was playing, trying to get a piece of it.

Storm: I always got to Music House early, which no other people did! [laughs] When there are two of you, Kemistry and Storm, you can keep somebody outside talking while the other one’s cutting. So we played a very careful game with that. [laughs]

Doc Scott: I remember asking Paul at Music House to cut something right at the end of the day after everyone had gone. I’d tell him to do it last, and I’d come down the next morning and pick it up, just so no one else would hear it. [laughs] We were so childish.

Photek: It was a secret society. It was a serious business. There was this illuminati consensus about who was allowed... appropriate... to participate. No one was rubbish. [laughs]

Fabio: Music House became a place where DJs would go not to cut things, but to poach things basically. So the trick was that people would come late at night when no one was around. People would go down there at 3 AM.



Photek: Everyone that was producing music was trying to cut a plate at Music House, so everyone would hear everyone else’s music. I pretty quickly started cutting at Metropolis where I could drop the DATs off and Stuart Hawkes would do the cut and you’d pick them up. Or if you had a lot of stuff, you’d stay there, but you’d have a room to yourself. You’d pay for the privilege, but it was worth it.

Goldie: I'd go to Metropolis with Stuart and cut at really odd times.

Fabio: We found out who the engineers were at Copymasters, the house that was doing all the pop tunes of the day, and we gave them money to do late-night cutting sessions. They were doing it late at night, off the books. It was absolutely crazy.

Doc Scott: I’m pretty sure when Groove had “Metropolis,” it was cut at Masterpiece or Copymasters or something. I remember when he put it on the decks thinking to myself, “Oh, it’s one of those ones.”

Grooverider: It’s part of the job, innit? You gotta put your hours in.



Justyce: The Peshay return night was ridiculous.

Photek: Peshay was ill for a long time.

Peshay: I was laid up for about a year-and-a-half in total, but towards ’95 I got better and Goldie asked me if I wanted to do a comeback set.

Fabio: The night that Peshay came back was incredible.

Peshay: At the time I was speaking to Photek quite a lot, and we became quite good friends. He made about eight tunes in two weeks and they were all bloody fantastic.

Photek: Everyone did a special track for him.

Fabio: Peshay had been away for a long time, and he was coming into the cauldron that was Metalheadz. Groove’s house. And he came down there and had a whole bunch of dubs from Photek and other people that weren’t as well known. At that time it was pretty hard to play an hour-and-a-half of stuff that no one knew. Groove could do it, but that was expected of him.

Doc Scott: That night was a special one.

DJ Lee: The night that Peshay came back everybody came out. Everybody.

Photek: It was the most incredible DJ set I’ve ever heard.

Fabio: One of the best sets I’ve ever heard. One of the best sets anyone had ever heard. We all went away thinking, “Wow, we need to reassess our game.” I think that was the moment that everyone thought, “Right, we’re not going to let anyone know what we’re doing. We’re going to go find different places to cut stuff.”



Ink: There was also the night that Loxy ended up playing the entire night.

DJ Lee: There were three, maybe four tiers of DJs at the night. There were the warm-up DJs like Loxy...

Ink: We were considered the new breed, and we had set slots at the beginning usually. Occasionally we would be rewarded with a middle set. [laughs]

Loxy: I went down there and played an opening set and every DJ was either ill or couldn’t make it, so I think I’m the only one that ever played Blue Note the entire night.

Storm: I think, for me, the really special night was when Goldie got his gold discs for Timeless. He got one made for me and Kemi and Doc Scott and Grooverider and he gave them out to us. That was really special for me because, you know, our boy had arrived.

Fabio: Goldie, at that time, was the rising star of dance music. Everyone on the underground knew that he was a star.



Photek: It was at a point when drum & bass was very en vogue, and so there were people there from all over the world. I remember meeting Carl Craig there for the first time. Renaat from R&S Records. Real founders of the electronic music scene. And then you’d have Björk and David Bowie.

Cleveland Watkiss: There were celebrities down there like you wouldn’t believe.

Loxy: Lauryn Hill.

Fabio: Boy George.

Loxy: Kate Moss.

Grooverider: Robbie Williams.

Doc Scott: Noel Gallagher.

Bailey: Scary Spice.

Grooverider: I was playing and looked up and saw Mel B shocking out.

Storm: Obviously Goldie was seeing Björk, and she’d come down and have her dinner and then enjoy the club.



Goldie: It wasn't a celebrity thing. But at a certain point you did get people coming down there. But they just looked like they were normalized when they came there. People would look at them like, "Yeah? And?"

Storm: I remember the first time Dillinja came down this guy got on the floor and started bowing to him and, you know, Karl was just like, “Listen, man. Get up.” [laughs] And I remember David Bowie’s people were like, “Oh, we can’t let David go into the crowd,” and we were like, “Nobody’s bothered about David Bowie.” People will most probably say, “Yeah, I was dancing next to Bowie last night,” but now if Dillinja walked in, they would be like, “Oh my God, it’s Dillinja!” or “Oh my God, it’s Photek!” We had our own stars.

Bailey: It was the epitome of UK underground music. There was nothing like it. It was incomparable. It was the edgiest music, the most experimental.

Fabio: If you look at Metalheadz’s back catalogue, all of the tracks that made the label what it is come from that Blue Note era.

ED Rush Skylab Original Mix

Cleveland Watkiss: All of the elements came together. The right club, the fact that drum & bass was defining itself, you had these DJs that were becoming quite popular.

Fabio: It felt new. You can’t underestimate how exciting that is – coming across something that had never been done or heard before.

Photek: There are clubs where people come and play their new tracks and it’s a community. In LA, you have SMOG or Low End Theory and that’s a hotbed of creativity. But it’s harder to come up with something new today than it was then. We were really breaking some new ground. It was a good balance of the technology being advanced, but the barrier of entry was high enough that it kept a standard of creativity. I don’t know how that will happen again. I’m sure it will. But I can’t picture what that will look like.

Goldie: My biggest problems in my life have always been about being misunderstood – abandonment issues and being misunderstood. And I think Blue Note, for me, was about a family, first and foremost, that I wanted to see every week.

Storm: You’re just standing there smiling every week, thinking, “Wow, look what we’ve done, this is amazing. It’s becoming this awesome family that Goldie wanted.”



Fabio: It was very intense, probably the most intense club I’ve ever played at in my 27 years of DJing. You came out of there at 12 AM and you felt like the world had ended. Battered, bruised.

Storm: It just… you didn’t want it to end.

Goldie: At a certain point Eddie Piller, the owner of Blue Note, had to sell the place. He said that the council was shutting it down. We didn't really have an option to fight.

DJ Lee: It was probably for the best. If it had kept going there, it probably would have petered out a bit. You couldn’t have kept that intensity going for that much longer. That’s what made it legendary.

Storm: I just think it was the most phenomenal feeling you’ll ever get. I mean, we’ve obviously recreated that kind of thing in other places, and we kept the night going for years in London, but it was never quite the same. I think it was the first time that Kemi and I really shed a little tear, you know what I mean?

Justyce: When you listen to the tapes, you can catch a certain part of it, but not all of it. You just had to be there.

DJ Lee: I hate the cliché, but it is one of those things where you just had to be there.

Soundcloud

Goldie: You know, I smell that place sometimes. I can actually fucking smell it. It's like a salty blue, like cobalt. It's almost like a singed wood. You know what I mean? [laughs] Like a slightly burned wood.

Doc Scott: Blue Note was one of the main reasons that drum & bass went international. So many people went there from overseas, from Europe, America, Japan. Some of these people may have never heard drum & bass before that, but they heard that this was the club to go to. To this day I meet people in my travels that say either they went there or went to a night that was inspired by it.

Storm: I still travel around the world and people will say, “Oh my god, I came to Blue Note.”

Marley Marl: I went all over the world because of that night.

Doc Scott: I was booked by so many people from San Diego or Auckland or wherever that went to Blue Note. It exposed drum & bass to so many different people. Along with other nights, of course, it helped to make drum & bass not just a London or UK thing.



Goldie: You know, when I was there, I’d think, “What’s it gonna be like in 20 years, someone looking back on this?” Sometimes the room would go completely quiet, and the sound would go “ssssshhhhppp.” And I’d think, “What’s it gonna be like when you’re lookin’ back on it?” I’d always think that. It was almost like a parallax. Does that make any sense? I’d have these parallax thoughts of being here now, talking about what this place was like.

[wub]

RBQMA: Blackdown

There are a jumble of prefixes that you could attach to Blackdown’s name. Journalist, blogger, DJ, producer and label owner are the usual ones. But while he was often best known for his writing a few years ago, nowadays you might need to change the order in which you recite those words. His label – Keysound – has become one of the most vital in UK music, and his latest album – 2012’s Dasaflex, alongside production partner Dusk – was a similarly potent collection of hybrid tunes that gleefully took from every corner of the dance music spectrum.

Perhaps most important in his subtle transformation from journalist/DJ to DJ/journalist, though, is the label’s Rinse FM show. It’s here that he’s premiered many of the tracks that comprise Keysound’s This Is How We Roll, one of the most exciting compilations of new music to emerge this year – a collection of tracks that properly introduce the growing family around the imprint. We caught up with Blackdown to chat about the label, finding his own flex and why “landfill tech house” has taken over as the sound of the UK.

Dusk + Blackdown "Dasaflex (video: remixed in HD)" [Keysound Recordings]

To borrow a question from some of your own interviews, I'd like to start by asking where your head is at musically right now.

Haha, using my own shoddy lines against me! I see: It’s like that, is it? Well, my head is trying to find rich seams of music that do it for me and, if people are unfamiliar with Keysound or our Rinse sets, that’s music that relates to jungle, UK garage, early dubstep, grime, synthy-ish or UK funky but isn’t quite exactly all of those things. It’s stuff that you can dance to but also listen to, that might make you screwface or skank, zone out or explode with love. All of the aforementioned, preferably!

The context to that is that there haven’t been many interesting things about in London in recent years that sounded like that collection of influences. People have been making tech house or what they call “bass” (actually mostly grey techno), or wobble brostep or whatever trap fad of the week. There’s been some cool grime via the Butterz camp and the interesting 80/160bpm paradox, but broadly what we’ve been trying to find is our own flex. It won’t be for everyone: but that’s cool.

Dusk & Blackdown feat. Burial - High Road (2012)

Why do you think London went down those less interesting routes at the time it did?

“Why” is always a really difficult issue to address properly. I think, stepping back, there are cycles to these scenes (incubate -> grow -> commercialise/stagnate -> fragment -> incubate…), and that change is the only constant. In other words, despite all our best efforts, dubstep, once it got over its tipping point (beyond the point where it was unclear if it would survive), at that rate of growth and crowd sizes, perhaps was always inevitably going to end up in brostep and halfstep stagnation.

The questions then are: Why are some of these cycles in-sync (i.e. they happened at similar times) and why have two different routes (post-dubstep, post-UK funky) ended up in remarkably similar places (variants of techy house)?

You can see the correlation between trap and brostep: dubstep makes a decent foothold into America, the one-trick-pony variant takes a lead role (because it panders to dynamics large audiences already know, i.e. rock dynamics) but in a relatively short time that trick gets a little dull, so it’s swapped with another similar dynamic large audiences already know ((t)rap). So the timings there are a causation of the growth of dubstep.



Why London’s working class/multi-cultural/pirate/urban crowd started raving to quite similar techy house and why fugitive post-dubsteppers started making it is a double mystery. (Tech house purists sometimes argue they’re wildly different, but musically we’re talking about really similar things: 4x4 kicks, pads, hats on the onbeats 8ths and offbeat 8ths…) Because it’s worth pointing out that five years ago there were MCs saying “bun out funky house” and now there are MCs shuffling (Doller Da Dustman, to name one…). The minimal tech scene and the grime/UK funky/UK garage crowds were very separate, and had been culturally separated for quite some time. Arguably since rave. People might be able to point to exceptions (early FWD>> and Metalheadz were vibrant, cultural crossroads, for example) but, honestly, if you’d asked a producer in Bow in ’05 if they made “minimal tech” they’d have looked at you funny.

So I’ve watched both strands (post-dubstep and house post-UK funky) evolve in the last five years. On one hand you’ve got producers like Appleblim, 2562, etc. introducing Basic Channel aesthetics into dubstep to make this hybrid, to the balance shifting from being inter-disciplinary to being predominantly techy house, which fitted the bigger rooms of the European club circuit and met with crowds already-established expectations. On the other hand you had UK funky, which seemed like the vibey successor to UK garage, yet somehow prematurely faded away in place of the minimal tech scene. Circle were the first guys I noticed doing it, now Mark Radford’s on every flyer tied to every traffic light in London. There’s shuffling videos on YouTube, and anti-shuffling campaigns on Facebook that bear all the cultural friction hallmarks of the UK garage wars of 1998. It kinda all feels upside down: the culture and the crowd feels very ‘nuum, but the music to my ears at least could be in any Euro tech house superclub.

#iGOTSHAPES #1 Edward Scissor Hands [House Shuffle] [S-StarTV]

You’ve been calling what you've been playing of late “dark 130” and you’ve already said that you’re getting sent too many “dull dark” beats. I suppose this is what happens when things get a name, but did you expect it to happen so fast?

So, I haven’t really called it anything, I just have tried to use the least constrictive placeholder possible to point to a bunch of things evolving, and “130” [a reference to the tempo a lot of stuff is clustering around] was as shorn of context as I could manage. My 2012 review did mention “dark 130” but only really as a subset of what’s going on, because there are a bunch of producers making interesting dark music around this tempo (Beneath, Wen, Visionist, Logos, Etch, Brunks, Hagan, etc. – though Beneath is going his own way). But I do see them as part of a wider spectrum of sounds and flavas.

There were quite a few dull dark tracks last month ’tis true, but I’d put that down to enthusiasm amongst newer producers. There’s a little momentum around all this, and people are keen to get involved – it’s the natural cycle of things. Two months before we seemed to be flooded by rebore eski. Dark I like, eski I like, but the devil’s in the details with these tunes. Only a few stand on their own, and those are the ones we try and dig up and rep for.

Mumdance & Logos - In Reverse

In your 2012 round-up you cut off possible “this isn't futurist” critiques of “dark 130” before I feel they were even leveled. Why did it feel so important to do so?

Eek, panic! Musicians actually thinking about their music. What’s next: journalists simply feeling a beat? Haha, preconception malfunction, it’s all so circular, I think I’m going to implode in a singularity.

Haha, seriously though I dunno… I guess having seen UK garage, then dubstep, grime and then UK funky come around, I have a sense of the cycles and – with that – what certain people will always say. Over time though, I’ve developed a thicker skin. All those different camps who said dubstep would never work, and there were many (UK garage, broken beat, breaks and drum & bass headz), they were all wrong. So the most important thing is just to keep believing in your values and go your own way with the people who share your vista.

For example, recently there was a minor online kafuffle around the use of the placeholder term “130” on account of there being related music at 140 or elsewhere, which I accept to a degree because we do play some stuff at 135, 140 and 160 BPM. But stepping back from the discussion I think the guy involved (the mighty Tom Lea, if you’re asking…) was sorta observing things as a journalist, which is to say, “this is how things are.” Whereas I think these days I’m less interested in how things are and more interested in “how things could be.” I’m trying to curate rather than report now, if that makes sense.

Wen - Commotion VIP

Part of that comes from set selection, the power of the “selecta” when DJing, but here’s a stronger example: at least three of the tracks (Double Helix’s “LDN VIP,” Gremino’s “Monster 130 VIP” and Wen’s “Commotion VIP”) for This Is How We Roll were commissioned by me for our sets. None of the originals were 130 BPM to start with. Yet I see the connections between, say, Wen’s spacious take on grime and Gremino’s rude 8bar flex, or Double Helix’s noir Metalheadz edge and Wen’s darkness, so I am keen to give them a place where they can creatively interact without contamination from their older – and often calcified – parent scenes. And I am keen to give them a place where we can mix and blend them with more swung percussive, tracky stuff like Mista Men’s bumpy 4x4 or Funkystepz’s insane UK funky to keep things vibrant and preserve the number of healthy possibilities.

It’s like the “filter” role in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. Maybe all this stuff has been out there for a while: Wen making strange dread grime, E.m.m.a. pursuing mournful sour synth jams, Visionist re-imagining his grime – but it was getting lost in all the hype around big room landfill tech house, rebore dubstep and jump up brostep. So what Dusk and I have been trying to do for several years now is find these people, show them we have common cause, give their music a wider platform on our Rinse FM show and bring them together at FWD>> or at the Keysound Nights at fabric. And, from that, others can see where we’re heading and if they’re on that, they can come, hear the sounds, make connections and begin to participate too. And that’s already happened, since lots of the producers on Keysound were just people who listened to the show and got in touch. Now we’re trying to help them get their voices heard, to help them build their own aesthetics, often across bigger canvasses like albums or double packs.

Kuedo - Truth Flood

So with regard to “dark 130,” that was just a subheading in a blog post, that’s only a part of what we’re trying to do. I’m really trying to avoid names. If this thing, whatever this thing is, was just “dark” I think it would be mono-dimensional. But as for “this isn’t futurist,” I don’t overtly aspire to futurism. I’ve never really got my head around what that is to be honest: for example, I interviewed Kuedo around the time of his (wonderful) album and he used that term, but then Severant looked back to the ’80s (Blade Runner, Vangelis) as much as it looked forward.

So, on one hand, I’m not concerned about futurism per se. I think the concept makes more sense to others. The reality is that I’m interested in the present more than the future, and so much of the music being made at the moment has none of the values Dusk and I care about, so we’re trying to give them a place – something Kuedo, amongst others, has been very supportive of.

But if the real issue isn’t “this isn’t futuristic” but “this isn’t original” because it’s beholden to parent genres, then what we’ve been trying to is find unique combinations and mutations, such that it’s harder to quickly define what the artists are doing. Take Visionist’s style: is it grime? Or is it closer to Actress? Or juke? The fact that it’s sorta informed by all these yet also is none of these makes it interesting. And I’m confident, having observed these cycles with the birth of dubstep and grime, that if these kinds of mutations are given a place and space to incubate, then new forms will emerge.

Buck & Bury - El-B Ft Juiceman - Roots Of Dubstep

Take for example all the refixes of grime classics at the moment. I was arguing with Elijah Butterz about them recently, something I enjoy doing with the mighty Elijah regularly. Perhaps understandably he’s pretty resistant to people refixing grime’s “standards,” even though, as I pointed out, grime has a strong tradition of mutation through irreverent refixing and bootlegging (MoS “Hungry Tiger” v Eskimo, Skepta’s “Gunshot Riddim” etc). He pointed out I might not take well to someone massacring “Anti War Dub,” and certainly what Nero did to MJ Cole’s “Sincere” was an international war crime against music, but equally we’ve been playing Caski’s remix of El-B’s “Buck & Bury.” The original was a Velvet Rooms anthem that I will always be very attached to. I extracted the DAT from Ghost’s studio in Streatham, and was part of saving it from obscurity via Tempa’s The Roots of Dubstep comp. A remix shouldn’t work but it does, taking it to another tempo and vibe.

So while I know where Elijah’s coming from, my take is that I’m enjoying all these new producers (Slackk, Sublo, Moleskin, Goon Club Allstars, Samename, Strict Face, etc.) discovering the wild Wiley Kat Records experiments from a decade ago and making their own twists. After a while they’ll omit the original they’re refixing and what will be left behind is a unique form. It’s like they’re sculptors using a cast with imperfections and those mutation imperfections coupled with the original mould can help grow a new form. Well, that’s what I’m hoping anyway and in the hands of the right producers it should: it seemed to work fine for UK producers’ take on US garage back in the early ’90s. Getting it “wrong” but actually so right.



The active curation that you describe sounds really interesting. Did you hold back from doing that before? Why?

Well, to an extent everyone’s a curator: everyone curates what they choose to listen to. Some of us just get a bit more into it – and share the results. Equally, to use the “Long Tail” terminology again, music blogging is filtering sounds, which is curation; so is DJing and A&Ring, in part. So I always had that in me and I’ve always felt very strongly about music. But the deeper I’ve got into it, the stronger the sense of purpose I’ve had. Especially when so many of the flavours and styles I’ve loved in music have become sidelined in recent years.

I chose to see that as an opportunity, not a disaster. All this has coincided with increased ability to present that style to people: through Rinse FM, through Keysound, through DJ sets and YouTube playlists and other social media. The democratisation of publishing and narrowcasting through social media means I’ve really stopped caring about what’s in the charts or whether something’s going to “blow.” I just care if it’s both good and for me, musically.

[wub]

Musical Debt



Music is in many ways an artistic representation of culture and expression. It is also a record of heritage, a translation of influence and that which came before. A musical debt.

Musical themes have a funny way of coming round. Almost like a cycle, themes and motifs will fade away and reappear. Often splintered across generations of musicians, certain sounds find their place at the fore, amongst the contemporary outside of their own time, outside of their own place.

Listening to today’s innovators within 170 BPM music it is not always easy to find a musical predecessor. Stray, Synkro, Indigo, Synth Sense, Sam KDC… ASC, Consequence, Silent Dust… It would not be unimaginable to believe that these artists are of a style unto their own.

But look back. Hidden in a lost and almost forgotten cavern of drum & bass history, in the period between 1996 and 1999. Poised beats, emotive pads, ethereal synth work and expression of self. Sound familiar? Is today’s cutting edge an echo of the then mighty Good Looking Records?

I know what you are thinking… Good Looking Records? Maybe you are more familiar with the earlier classics of the jungle period? “Music”? “Horizons”? “The Piano Tune”? “19.5”? “Travelling Pt 2”? It may be true that Bukem et al broke the mould when they took jungle into new levels of jazzy sophistication, but it certainly didn’t stop there. Good Looking and it’s various subsidiaries bridged the gap between ambient, techno and drum & bass creating something altogether more refined.

When you consider modern labels like R&S’ Apollo Records, there is a recognizable aesthetic and ethos, stylistically akin to the GLR of 1998. Had the likes of Stray, Indigo and Synkro been making music in these years would they have naturally gravitated towards this sound?

The Blu Mar Ten, Pariah, Blame, PHD, PFM, Intense and Odyssey’s of yesteryear are the Sam KDC, Synkro and ASC’s of now. The agenda isn’t dissimilar and the level of creativity is enduring.

I’ve recently found myself revisiting this corner of my record collection. I remember maybe 7 or 8 years ago remarking that it was hard to see this sound making a return given the then dance floor intensive nature of drum & bass. But I am happy to say I have been proved wrong. Labels like Auxiliary, Mjazz, Non Plus and Exit have cultivated a fertile breeding ground where almost anything can occur. The genre if you believe it to be drum & bass or not is alive. It breathes and it has a soul.

It does however have a debt to that which came before. In today’s disposable culture it is easy to forget what came before. It isn’t always regressive to look back and acknowledge the past, so long as we are still moving forward.

Recommended Listening

Blame - Binary Sunset
Seba & Lotek - So Long
PHD - Contrast
Voyager - Apollo
Pariah - The Arrival
Big Bud - State Of Mind
Artemis - Sun Stars
Motiv One - Cosmik
Odyssey - Object
PFM - For All Of Us

[wub]

Tempo Trouble



What is in a number? When it comes the magic number 170, apparently quite alot. But there is a whole other world outside of 170 BPM drum & bass even if the junglists don't want you to go there...

As I write this article, I ask myself, am I covering old ground here? Am I expanding on what everyone already knows? Am I wasting your time by asking you to read this and my time by writing it? Still there seems to be a knee jerk reaction to drum & bass artists moving into over tempo ranges, both from their peers and listeners. How come?

Listening to Consequence’s forthcoming lower tempo single “Atrium”/ “Box Rituals” on Pushing Red, I am immediately struck by the departure from his usual output, both stylistically and in tempo. Also the existence of an obvious melody is something I would never have expected. Public perception of an artist’s work is often exactly that– perception. What makes it into the public domain is the selected works, a condensed version of everything that is made. Where an artist may make a much wider range of music, only that which meets a desired aesthetic, furthering the modern need for musical consistency makes the cut.

Soundcloud

In the past, genre has been a fairly rigid criteria for classifying music, especially when separating music by tempo or BPM. Now more than ever, this system of cataloguing seems redundant. More ambiguous characteristics seem to be appropriate. From consistent sound palettes, to a musical ideology, to something as vague and clichéd as vibe. Drum & bass is and always has been a magpie genre, borrowing and reappropriating source material as well as structural and musical concepts. Surely with such an apparently open attitude to creativity, departure from tempo is natural?

One of our writers recently told me about a conversation they had read on Facebook about the lack of good drum & bass being made at the moment, and we both agreed that maybe those concerned had completely missed the point… The criteria for the genre is all wrong. Having to limit a genre to a BPM with no room to manoeuvre is massively restrictive. Artists like ASC, Breakage, dBridge, and the previously mentioned Consequence have opted to maintain dynamic, style and ideology while exploring potentially less restrictive tempos.

The question needs to be asked, moving forward, is drum & bass a legitimate genre? Does our existing system for classification of genre by tempo need to be rethought?