Kode9: Unedited Transcript

D: Can you expand on your ideas of collective rhythm cultures rather than straight Noise?

K: Yeah… I’m just fascinated by rhythmic collectivity, whether it’s pleasurable or not – just people moving together, differently, in time. I just think there’s something very fundamental or basic that comes before any political affiliation, ideaological affiliation, almost underneath social categories, a basic model of what a collective is. Which is people coming together, joined by one thing, rhythm. And rhythm is a very abstract thing, it’s not just something that makes you move. The way I see it rhythm is something that joins things together.

D: And to do that, it tends to be rhythms which are simple, or less simple?

K: Yeah, that’s a more aesthetic or tactical question… to do with specific music scenes, and how far you can go before a collective falls apart, how much can you fuck up a rhthm before it loses it groove, and these are very pertinent questions in the history of electronic music, aren’t they. How self-indulgent and obsessed can you get about unquantised beats before you make them completely dysfunctional. How asymmetric and disjointed can rhythms go while staying completely 4/4 and completely quantised. This is like a tactical aesthetic question that’s crucial to all electronic dance music cultures. Every single genre has different issues about how you experiment within the genre. At what point does it become a music which is purely for the producers, and the critics, and what point does it lose a dancefloor and so on.

D: How do you feel about the lowest common denominator argument with rhythm, whereby if rhyth is a value in itself, then surely Fat Boy Slim is the best music overall, because more people would dance together on Brighton Beach than anything else…?

K: Rhythmic collectives are never just an issue of size, are they. Never just an issue of quantity. Otherwise, trance, Fat Boy Slim and whatever utter bullshit you care to mention would be the ideal… so I think it’s really about quality rather than quantity. And quality is a very difficult thing to define.

D: Was your jungle set at BLOC, where you only had a certain number of people dancing, but people were really into it, is that the kind of experience which seems more meaningful somehow?

K: No, that was just me pissed off [laughs] And just wanting to do something to make myself feel a bit happier. But I do find myself turning my back on the audience quite a lot, metaphorically. In other words just doing what I think I need to play because that’s what I want to hear And dealing with the consequences of that after the fact.