Kode9: Unedited Transcript

K: I remember something happening when I made the Find My Way track, and Quantum, and the remix of Skeng. And it was using certain bleepy synth sounds. Just the way of adding… any music which starts so minimal, as it develops it’s going to explore how to fill in some of the gaps in different ways. Different spaces and different colours and so on. It wasn’t that I was particularly into video games in the 80s, or anything to do with that really…. It’s just certain sounds, the frequency of those sounds has a weird effect on me, it kind of gives me a bit of a tingle which I’ve started to actively pursue the sounds which gave me that shiver. It was after the Skeng remix, we did what was the crucial turning point for the label in a way, the Quarta 330 track. It’s something like the purity of those synthesized sounds, really crystalline, they’ve not been fucked with too much, you can hear the sound of the circuitry in such a pure but amusing way. Fun, but brain tingling sounds. So I think that was the turning point record, and there was a wave of stuff that came after that that was using more of those frequencies, that was colouring in the black and white of sub bass and drums. The combination of melodies and hearing circuitry crying, hearing circuitry singing.

D: Although those 8 bit sounds are less pure than the waves you get off the Roland keyboard or whatever.

K: It’s not raw in that sense, in the sense of unprosesed, I suppose I mean the texture. I’m not even talking about the crunchiness of 8 bit, which is not necessarily the most interesting thing about ht at Sunset Dub tune, it’s those singing synths sounds which play the melody. And when you get a number of them coming in at the same time they begin to vibrate together, tremelo together. That I thought was cool the first time I heard it, I was like woah… because it really just did something to my brain. So the keyto that direction that the label is taking is the way those sounds make me feel, the sensation I get from those different kind of synth tones, compared with another instrument playing those melodies. So there was the Quarta 330 and then there was the Ikonika stuff, the Zomby, the Samiyam 12 has got synths in it which just drive me crazy, Darkstar as well.

D: A benign derangement?

K: Clearly I’ve got something about, or I’ve been interested in the last year and a half or so in melancholy synth melodies, so what was quite a melancholy music before, but more in a dubbed out, dready kind of way, which still persists in the LV stuff and the Kind Midas Sound stuff, and some of the stuff I do with Spaceape still in live sets. You know one is this dread feeling of impending doom, almost pre-apocalyptic, and the other one… I supposed what happened is the sound of the label has developed this new side, instead of this sense of doom, which persist in some of the music still, the other stuff is like after the nuclear explosion, where everything is irradiated, and slightly mutant, and glowing in weird colours, and everything is seen through this orange or green lens. So everything is glowing with this toxic colour. So there’s these really sweet melodies, but there’s something a bit toxic about them, because it’s not humans, it sounds slightly weird and alien, but not cold. It’s not got this cold futuristic thing, it’s hot, because it’s fucking glow with radioactivity. That’s the kind of vision, I’m still trying to work this out, I’m putting together this compilation, and putting together some of the old stuff and the new stuff, it’s almost like the dread stuff has got this sense of impending doom, and the other stuff is after the event happened, and everything is like the Ready Brek advert, it’s got this glow of radioactivity. I’m just trying to picture what world this music has come from. Because it’s clearly not come from this world, not in a straightforward sense anyway.

D: Something like the Quarta 330 track, it’s like you’re plugged directly into the circuits. You’re not necessarily in a human space. There’s no sense of ambience there.

K: But it’s not robotic. It’s not that notion… it’s a computer with affects, it’s a joyful computer, a sad computer, it’s not that cold techno futurism. that’s what I always like about Drexciya. Those synth melodies in Drexciya were just really funky, okay some of their stuff was cold and desolate, but not the stuff I liked the most.

D: With Hyperdub itself, you’re releasing loads more. It’s a deluge. Is here a strategy behind that?

K: Really, what it is, is, I thought sometime last hear, really it would be much more productive than me constantly whinging in interviews about how I don’t like this and I don’t like that, and how it’s all gone to shit and how it was much better before, and all these whinging laments that I have a tendency to do, it would be much more constructive from everyone’s point of view, if I just released more music.

D: And the music was out there already?

K: Well it was that sentiment on my behalf alongside simultaneously hearing music which made me think, – because if there wasn’t music which was worth releasing I would just continue to whinge – so it was the fact that I wanted to get rid of these negative feelings, of it had all gone to shit within the music I was interested in.. and also to like purge that fucking boring thing of “I saw the Sex Pistols in my pram in 1977, and everything has gone to shit since then”, you know you don’t want to become that person who is like “I went to a jungle rave in ra-ra-ra”, it’s boring and it’s a sign of getting old when you do that, it’s a sign of being jaded. OK, objectively things are different, and so on, but I really wanted to in myself counter that index of becoming jaded with music, and make more of an effort to, if not keep something boiling, then make something new for me to get excited about. There’s only so far you can take the lament of a time gone by, you can run with this kind of “it used to be so much better” kind of thing.

D: to go back further to when you were interested in music, but before you made music, when did you hook onto the idea of electronic music being a uniquely useful tool for you?

K: Well, I used to go to two clubs in Edinburgh in the early 90s at this place called The Venue, one was called Chocolate City, and the other was called Pure. I didn’t go to Pure that much. I was about 17, 18 or something. Chocolate City was a club who played Rare Groove, JBs, herbie Hancock, pre-disco 70s funk, quite psychedelic… and I remember hearing certain tracks like Fred Wesley’s “Blow Your Head”, and the synth in that, and this was like some of my earliest drug experiences basically. This was kind of my introduction to dance music and Ecstacy. That’s the Thursday night at the venue, and the Friday night was a night called Pure - hardcore techno, and people off their faces. So particularly after an experience at Chocolate City, I started DJing. I can nail a particular experience, after that event, records were bought, decks were bought… Herbie Hancock, Headhunters stuff, my first experience of Ecstacy was to that kind of music, not rave. Pure entered the equation a bit, but never really grabbed me quite as much at that point, even though I went to some of those huge Resurrection raves near Edinburgh. Rave music didn’t grab me fully till jungle. I picked up some hardcore tapes in Edinburgh, and they had early DJ Hype stuff, scratching, maybe 92 or 93. It was totally bizarre music at that point. But, I suppose it was jungle which bought these sides together. …


D: When did you start making music?

K: I lived in London for a summer in 95. I was going to Metalheadz every week, and was here for 4-5 months, and bought equipment, bought a little sampler and so on , and started trying to make stuff then.

D: how did it turn out?

K: It turned out like bad copies of the music I was buying…

D: Where did the notion of Hyperdub enter the equation?

K: I came up with it as a concept for a website, it was a way of trying to have a word that would just describe a lineage of Black Atlantian music particularly coming out of dub and funk. Early 70s Jamaican and afro American music in particular, right through to Jungle and Garage. It was just an attempt to… not an exact word that captures that, but just have a loose sense of the feeling of those musics for about the last 40 or 50 years, and the skeleton of what is it was that held them together … just rhythm and bass.

D: Was there abything about the notion of dub you particularly wanted to latch on… the remixology, or?

K: Bass, remixology and accelerated rhythm. If you want to distill the absense of hyperdub.

D: So the dub relates to the physical side…

K: Yeah, but the dub is also the remixology…. Initally I was thinking of this as this kind of cultural virus that just persists, but it’s constantly changing.

D: Were you at the CCRU at this time?

K: Just before I went to the CCRU. But Hyperdub was much later, it was 2000, that was 1999 when that word emerged as a way of bring a lot of that stuff together.

D: So you were interested in that before you went to the CCRU?

K: Yeah, but I think being involved with the CCRU and meeting Mark [Fisher] and Kodwo [Eshun] definitely made it possible to bring together my musical interests and my theoretical interests in a way that I’d never envisaged. Because I’d never studied music, I’d never written about music, never had a desire to write about music, or think particularly conceptually about music until I met Mark and Kodwo. And not just meeting but reading their stuff.

D: is it possible to sum up what it is about those ideas which made you want to incorporate them? Did it suggests a way of accelerating the music or accelerating the concepts somehow?

K: I suppose part of what it was is the sense that music doesn’t need the help of theory, but music produces theory. And so these very intense musics that were kicking around in the mid-90s were implicitly conceptual.

D: A criticism of a an overly theoretical approach to music is that it puts the cart before the horse.

K: The problem isn’t the concepts. It’s to get away from the idea that the concepts are anathema to experiencing musical intensity. It’s to get away from the clichéd idea that the minute you start conceptualising about music you kill its vibe or energy. Instead of that it’s more that being immersed in music generates its own conceptual tools, immanently. If you immerse yourself in a kind of music, the music will suggest the kind of conceptual tools that are most appropriate for channelling the music into another medium, into discourse. So it’s not that musical intensity is on one plane and the minute you start talking about it it’s like a capture mechanism, it’s more like, what are the most efficient ways of transferring that intensity out of that music and into language. Or even better, intensifying the energy in the music and intensifying it through the way that that energy transfers into language. And that’s what I was getting from Mark and Kodwo. They wrote in such, not just a vivid way… it’s a sonic fiction thing, they were hearing things in the music that were not actually there, but were virtually there. And they were extrapolating them out of the music, hearing the potential sonic worlds that were in the music and then colouring in those sonic worlds, making them explicit … making explicity what’s taken for granted by taking certain combinations of sound and certain combinations of rhythms. And that’s very inspirational in terms of also being a producer because, like listening to good music, it’s just a constant source of ideas, of potential ways of treating sound and potential directions and possibilities. Just like a good music writer is very inspiring, I would have thought, well it is for me, in the same way that a musician might be inspired by a piece of fiction. The writer produces a discursive world that doesn’t have a sound to it, but suggests, implies that it must sound a certain way. And you wanna hear what that sounds like, so you try and make it.

D: Is that still a motivating force these days?

K: I’m finding it harder and harder to find music writing that I find so inspiring.

D: because there’s less future territory to suggest?

K: maybe, I mean this relates to whether dance/electronic music culture is in this terminal entropic state of fragmentation, niching. So you know, obviously writers have to be inspired by the music in a way to be inspiring, and it’s part of this question of entropy, heat death. [heat death explanation]

D: Lets go back to when your music making started interlocking with the pirate stations. When did that happen?

K: Well I’ve been DJing since 91. I was getting pirate tapes from the mid-90s sent from London, both House tapes and Jungle tapes. First pirate I played, I was living in Brixton, it must have been 99, something like that, it was based just off Colharbour Lane in Brixton, South London. A little pirate station, I was playing Garage, most of the other music was bashment and dancehall and reggae. Did a couple of shows there, didn’t really go anywhere, and then 2002 or 2003 the guys at Ammunition, Sarah and Neil, asked me if I wanted to do the FWD>> show on Rinse. They came up with the name, and just asked me if I wanted to host it, to be the radio show in relation to the night, so I was up for that. I’d released Fat Larry’s Skank with Benny Ill of Horsepower the year or two before, and I’d worked really closely with them from the beginning, helping run dubplate.net. When they started Forward I was doing a little night in Brixton called Hyperdub, in the Bug Bar. I was playing two-step and the dubbier sound of two-step, and there was a couple of other guys playing, one of them was Darren, the guy who runs Werk records, and he would play Detroit techno and electro, and there was another guy Gavin playing Broken beat etc.. We used to call it Hyperdub 130, because everything was roundabout 130 bpm, because I was interested in the way BPMs… the way cultures would congregate around speeds. And we all played different musics and we decided we needed something to bring us together, so we decided to be literal about it, it’s a speed. It’s funny because I returned to that speed quite recently.

D: So how did you end up doing stuff which feels slower with Spaceape.

K: No, it’s all dubstep speed, 70/140 bpm. But maybe feels slow. On the half-beat or on the no beat [laughs]

D: Describe how that came about. Spaceape was someone living with you?

K: We shared a flat together and I was playing around the studio, and he was with me, and we thought why don’t try and do something. He was like, what, I haven’t done anything before. I was like pick your favourite record and read the lyrics, and I’ll fuck with your voice. Out came “Sine Of The Times”.

D: Spaceape’s real voice is nothing like that. So obviously it’s an invention, pitching it down, putting on as much effects as possible.

K: Well, not as much as possible, but there’s an element of like making a mask. He’s much more confident now, but when we used to MC from underneath the decks. So it’s part of just masking the voice and experimenting with what you can do without being you. So, pitching the voice fitted how down the music was, it was very down, very catatonic, almost in a trance. Have you seen this Werner Herzog film, Heart Of Glass? The story was that all the actors were hypnotized, so they had this glazed look. And when I listen back to that record, I’m like, fucking hell, how did we get into that zone? Because it’s really catatonic, really zombie eyed. Whereas the stuff we’re doing now, the new stuff, is more awake. We haven’t released any of the new stuff, the track Konfusion we released last year was made that the same time as the album. So the new stuff, his voice isn’t pitched.

D: So the Prince Far I in digital dub thing is constructed?

K: not constructed in a contrived way. . . just constructed as a way of making him feel comfortable doing stuff at the time. OK, if I manipulate your voice, will you be comfortable doing this? And everyone is like, ah, it sounds like Linton Kwesi Johnson, and I mean we know who Linton Kwesi Johnson is, but we had no intention of sounding like him, it was an accident. So really the voice manipulation was to break the embarrassment threshold and just get things rolling.

D: Do you see an analogue with your fear of photography?

K: Well clearly I’m showing more face than I used to. But I draw the line at the eyes.

D: The spaceape stuff has this synthetic feel, and a basic feel, and I don’t mean that in a bad way.

K: Definitely we play with monotone, we see that as a positive value in his voice. And I’m kind of interested in droning synths, and there’s a certain drone in his voice that we try and play with. And again, drone is the sense of nothing changing, or nothing happening, it’s got continuity.

D: A lot of the tracks, Portal and Kingstown have descending melodies. And rhythmically it advances in a non-fluid. The melodies, were you looking for something quite basic?

K: this is my inadequacy as a producer, probably.

D: Where was it produced?

K: Mostly here, aside from Sine Of the Dub and some early tracks which were produced where we used to live in a tower block in Kennington. It was pretty much all done on a computer. Whereas the newer stuff means more external keyboards. I agree, it’s part of the state of trance or coma that that album is in, part of that is that rhythmically it feels quite restrained and rigid, and melodically quite basic. I mean I don’t know if I’m capable of stuff that’s not melodically basic anyway. I suppose more recently … at a certain point you start to notice your limitations and not worry about them anymore, and I’m a lot less worried about things being in tune or not. Because I’ve kind of realised my limitations melodically.

D: I was listening to the album recently, and it was feeling quite masculine. There’s not much fluidity or lyricism there.

K: Mmmmm. I mean you’re probably right. I mean it depends what you mean by femininity. Because there’s the odd appearance from Ms. Haptic. But I think it’s important to be more specific about what you mean by masculinity or femininity in relation to music, because I think it’s used a bit willy-nilly as a way of criticising stuff as being too masculine or… so the sense in which I’d agree with you, but I wouldn’t necessarily use masculine or feminine, it’s not very mobile. It’s a bit inert, it feels weighed down by the world. And often people would use masculine or feminine to denote how rhythmically energised the music is, whether it’s got a libido in it, and there certainly wasn’t in that album, it’s a very tranced out, catatonic album. It’s not an album that makes you want to move, really. … usually the way people use masculine or feminine it’s to do with presence of a female voice, or how sensual the grooves are. And I suppose I can see where you’re getting at, but I think it tends to lead to huge generalisations, I’m thinking particularly of writers like Simon Reynolds… that kind of binary opposition, while I know and kind of agree where it’s coming from, and how it’s applied… it’s using that gender binary and superimposing it on top of what is a much complicated field, because women from different races and different classes really have very different musical preferences. So it’s very difficult to generalise. I’d prefer to think of it in terms of energy levels, and rhythm. And having dancefloors with people on them ,which is a crucial difference between early dubstep and where we are now. Because when we made those tracks, it’s not as if we had people on dancefloors. And if you had people on dancefloors, they didn’t get it. They often didn’t get the more dubbed out side of two-step, even the horsepower stuff, they didn’t know how to move to it, garage was starting to leak out of garage culture, and people outside it didn’t know how to move to it. It wasn’t blocky, it wasn’t simple enough rhythmically. So certainly our early stuff, other more minimal early dubstep stuff, it’s not as if there were dancefloors full of people that we were making it for, we were making it for noone, we were making it for a handful of people. Men or women, it’s not as if that audience existed. Whereas now it’s different.. you can have music that shouts at people and kind of commands people to dance, or try to make music that’s rhythmically interesting and a bit more seductive in how it gets people dancing, and tries to build up a tension and an intensity, as opposed to breaking a beer bottle and smashing it in their face.

D: Knowing your interest in tempo and dance, did you intend the spaceape album for that?

K: no, it’s not as if I wanted to or felt comfortable playing any of the stuff on that album, apart from 9 Samurai, in a DJ set, that wasn’t the agenda.

D: What was the agenda?

K: the agenda was….. what could we do together. We were interested in following this mood that when we got together in the studio, the music seemed to come out with this heavy, almost suffocating mood. So the agenda came after the fact, because we made this always quite oppressive music together.

D: Why do you think this was? Did it feel a very urban environment?