““El Oh Ve Ee” is about figuring what love means to ME,” writes West Midlands based Tony Bontana over email, explaining the ideas behind this unreleased track. “It covers how my personal idea of what love is has changed through personal experiences. It’s about navigating through communication/lack thereof in relationships and the need for reflecting on personal flaws when it comes to giving and receiving any form of love.”

As well as regularly releasing solo and collaborative experimental hiphop mixtapes and albums, Bontana also records and produces hardcore punk tracks under his SPEW alias. All of the above is released via Everything Is Perfect, the label he co-founded with Dudley based artist Sink600.

In an interview with Richard Stacey in The Wire 458, Bontana explains his open-minded unfurling approach to the imprint and his music: “We call it Splayed,” he says. “It’s very open. It’s like blown out, blown apart. The samples have been chopped beyond recognition. The rhythms aren’t necessarily straight, in terms of metre and tempo. The processing is destructive. We’ll start from a sample and we’re degrading it. Taking away literally the bitrate quality of it, messing it up more to make something beautiful out of something that isn’t considered beautiful.”

Read more from Tony Bontana in The Wire 458. Wire subscribers can also read the interview via the digital magazine archive.