Thinking out loud...

[wub]

Kvadrat is a 2013 documentary feature film written, co-produced, and directed by Anatoly Ivanov. The film explores the realities of techno DJing, using the example of Russian DJ Andrey Pushkarev. Filmed as a hybrid between a road-movie and a music video, Kvadrat not only illustrates the festive atmosphere of techno night clubs, but also reveals the lesser known side of this profession. Shot in Switzerland, France, Hungary, Romania and Russia, the film omits the typical documentary elements: no interviews, no explanatory voice-over, no facts, no figures. It gives priority to abundantly sounding techno music, leaving the detailed interpretation to the viewer.

Cinematically, Kvadrat is of note for its distinctive color photography, intricate sound design, attention to details and lack of traditional dramatic structure, achieved on a very low budget.

[thekuku]

Saw him play in Lodz, boring tech house/dub techno DJ

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In The Studio: Break



Break is one of the most revered names in drum & bass, famed for the quality and consistency of his music over the past 15 years. Now the Symmetry Recordings boss is giving other producers the chance to add a bit of Break magic to their tracks by releasing his first ever sample pack, Symmetry Drum & Bass. We spoke to the man himself to find out more about it and how he works in the studio.

At what age did you get into producing and how did you learn?

I got some decks when I was 15, and started with Cubasis and a couple of sound modules. When I got an Emu sampler the manual that came with it taught me a lot, each section explained Compression, EQ, Drive, etc. really simply which you don't often get these days.

When I started working with Silent Witness he showed me Logic 5 and taught me how to use it. I preferred it to Cubase so switched over and felt more creative.

A lot of it was trial and error and teaching yourself a lot, there were no internet tutorials back then.

How did you get your music noticed in the beginning?

My lucky break was when MC Zoobee heard a bootleg remix of Planet Dust I was playing off a minidisc at a record stall in Camden market.

He knew DJ A-Sides and thought my tracks would be up his street. I went up to see A-Sides and he released my first few tracks on Eastside Records and hooked me up with some good people in the scene. I'm eternally grateful.

How do approach starting a new tune? Do you have a standard workflow of building beats/bass first, or focus on another part to begin with?

It's about fifty fifty, if I'm making a musical tune I usually get the melodic elements in first, get the chord structure and leave the bassline till later.

With the more tech/ dancefloor tunes, the drums usually are first - getting the right groove is really important, that will also often influence the groove and pattern of the bassline.

Does your approach differ depending on which genre you are making?

Sort of answered it above, but if it’s a vocal tune when mixing I'll try and make that the focus of the mix. With a lot of tracks in dnb the vocal is lost in the background, which I find really annoying.

When making house or pop stuff I often listen through small cheap computer speakers to get the main elements correctly balanced without being able to hear much bass.

Sub isn't as that important in those genres, so I try and make the mix sound full on small speakers with the vocal and kick being the focus more.

How do you come up with melodies or chord progressions?

I just sit at the piano and play stuff really. If it’s a vocal track or remix I mainly try and find a progression that works around the lead melody that harmonises and complements the vocalist. That’s probably my favourite part of making a track, it’s actually writing music than just engineering, which often ends up as 90% of the job.

Out of the tracks you do start, how many get finished? How many get released?

Probably about 50-60% of dnb tracks get released. It kind of changes depending on the year. Recently I've been trying to get that percentage up by starting tunes less half arsed and committing to dead certs more.

Where is your studio set up and what does is consist of? Do you use any hardware or are you software only?

My studio at the moment is in Motion Club in Bristol. We had some custom rooms built last year, so it’s been great to finally get into a professional space and give the ears some certainty.

I do use some hardware but mainly for vocal and instrument recordings such as 1176 Compressor and Api Pre-amps. I still love my Dbx compressors but mainly it's software for production these days.

The UAD plugs really enabled me to switch over from analogue to digital mixing because they do sound realistic, and the real outboard is all way out of my price range.

What are the best tools for beginners?

I think synths with good presets and simple interfaces such as Absynth or Diva are great for beginners as you can get good sounds out of it without having to program for two hours. Most people want instant gratification.

I've got no problem using a preset if you play something good with it. The Waves One Knobs are quite crude but easy if you want it brighter or fatter etc. I thought it was a good idea for getting something into the ballpark quickly, things can always be refined later.

What are your favourite plugins and synths?

I love the UAD plugs for their real analogue sound, Softube are fantastic on the same front. I'd recommend a real synth any day over soft synths, it’s kinda the difference between cotton or nylon. I also love Airwindows and Waves plugs.

Most of it for me is finding the right plug for the job, I've got about 40 compressor plugins, which one to use is more the problem, getting about favourite plugins you know and like is probably the best bet for consistent results.

What's the coolest bit of kit you own?

My new 12” Eve sub woofer. I've waited my whole life to sit in my studio with proper heavy bass, always had neighbours etc so that gives me a smile every day.

What's the best piece of equipment you've ever used?

I've used some expensive stuff, but I always maintain that the Dbx 266 XL is the best unit for the price I've seen. I was also blessed with some Audeze headphones a while back, they are incredible.

Which sequencer do you use and why?

I still use Logic 9. It’s a total love hate relationship, but it makes sense to me. Terrible shame it’s owned by Apple now and all the original staff left to got to other companies. I never feel I have time to learn another program, after half a day I get fed up and go back to Logic. I use Protools when working with DJ Die, I think it’s great, but still don't know my way round it fully.

What audio interface do you use?

I normally use an Allen & Heath ZedR 16 Firware interface/ desk. I've had a few problems with it so have been using a small Edirol USB soundcard, which has never gone wrong, so I like that.

Any new studio technology or gear you like at the moment?

I'd love to get a high-end sound card, it just seems like such a boring spend of 2-3 grand, there's not even any knobs to twiddle.

I do like the look of the Softube Consol 1. The Harrison mix bus is great, but the routing can be an issue for me... I have no idea why Logic and Protools don't give you the option of analogue desk modelling, it’s the obvious way out of horrible digital mixer sounds.

What’s your monitoring situation like?

I use EveAudio SC208's with and Eve TS112 sub woofer. I have some Adam AX3's as an NS10 equivalent, also some Maplin £10 computer speakers. I have the Audeze LCD2 and LCD3 for headphone monitoring.

How do you go about compression, do you compress each track individually?

It all varies to be honest, usually each drum track will have individual compression but a lot of the heavy lifting is often done on the drum buss to glue the drums together.

I sometimes parallel compress elements nearer the end of the mix if more fullness is still needed, or to get a blend of compression without ruining the original signal.

Any advice you can give us regarding mixdowns and mastering?

My main gripe from doing mastering and going to many of my own mastering sessions is tambourines and hi-hats that are too loud and bright compared to the rest of the mix.

It doesn't really matter if your tune is too bright or dull, it’s more the balance of the sounds within that will result in a good finished master. You can't mix the tune down again in mastering, that's what I always try to remember.

What production technique do you think is really overused / annoying?

Has to be loud over the top build-ups that go on for two minutes and then have a really lame drop.... half of all dance music basically.

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started out?

That after specialising for 15 years your product will get valued at about 30p on the internet. I'd probably have done a sample pack sooner.

What’s key to creating your own sound?

Using the influences you love to define your sound, then it'll be true and you might actually like your own music.

Taken from here - http://www.kmag.co.uk/editorial/musicte ... rview.html

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In The Studio: Matta



Bass music duo Matta have just released a sample pack called Dark Garage & Dubstep on Samplephonics. Read on to discover how they approach working in the studio and how you can win one of three packs we have to give away.

How do approach starting a new tune?

We pretty much always start with the drums in order to get a good groove and a solid foundation for the track. When we first started out producing, as soon as we had the drums working, we would always dive straight into the bassline as that has always been the most enjoyable part for us.

We found that a better approach is to build up some FX sounds, pads, drones, extra percussion - and in some cases a whole intro - to give the track a little bit more depth and a texture before attempting the bassline.

Do you usually wait till you're in the right state of mind before starting a track or do you just sit down and see what comes out?

It would be a luxury to always be in the right state of mind before starting a new track. We always try and get an idea of what we want to make before we start something new but sometimes we just jump in a see what happens.

It will often take longer to get something working but the results can sometimes be more interesting. We have banks and banks of synth presets we have made to use as a starting point too.

Does your approach differ depending on which genre you are making?

Not hugely in terms of the way we would build a track from the ground up. We'd still usually start with a beat but, in the case of a more chilled out track, we would definitely concentrate more on the overall soundscape and get some melodic elements first. In the case of a heavier track we would concentrate more on the bass and variations of it.

Out of the tracks you do start, how many get finished? How many get released?

It's difficult to say but probably around two tracks get started to every one we finish. We have quite a few unfinished tracks on our hard drive and if we are really stuck for inspiration sometimes we go back and have a look at half-finished projects as a starting point.

However, when we go back to tracks we make sure we really strip them down in order not to end up having the same problem of not being able to finish it again.

What do you do when you're not feeling inspired?

Other than going back to half-finished projects, it's mainly simple things like doing anything else, going for a walk, listening to some tracks from other artists we like or even to listen to music outside of the genre to clear the palate.

There is always things we can do like, play around with a synth and see what it is capable of, make some new sounds, organise sample libraries, etc. Days where we lack inspiration is always a good opportunity to catch up on listening to promos we get sent too. There is also Countdown and Deal Or No Deal!

Where is your studio set up and what does is consist of? Do you use any hardware or are you software only?

The studio is set up at home and it consists of a Mac desktop, Focusrite Sapphire, a pair of Behringer controllers (BCR & BCF 2000s) and a Novation Xiosynth. We work pretty much solely in the box. We often record found sounds through a mic or onto a recently purchased Zoom h4n to include in our tracks. We have a few banks of random percussion and sound effects made this way.

What's your most used plugin?

Probably sample delay. We use it a lot on our FX and percussion parts. If you delay the left or right signal by about 600 - 800ms the sound appears a lot wider which helps with bringing things out of the mix.

Another plugin we use a lot is the Tone2 filterbank. It's got some quite unusual filter types and we use it to either completely change the shape of a sound or subtly add movement to it. Also we love the Reaktor Space Master reverb because it can be used to both create space and mangle sounds.

Are you the sort that likes to use old vinyl to get snippets of atmos, FX, melodies, etc or do you use synths mainly for your sounds?

We mainly use synths and try and sculpture things from scratch to try and give it an individual sound. We have been known to get out microphones and sample various things which can be really interesting once you clean them up and apply some crazy effects to them. The only sampling we have ever done from vinyl is from old battle records where you can get some nice snippets of vocals or stabs which can sit in the background of a track and build an atmosphere.

What's the coolest bit of kit you own?

Without doubt it's the Korg Monotron. We've never used it for a bassline but it's quite fun to mess around with and record weird effects and riser sounds into the sequencer. There are other bits of slightly more sophisticated equipment we've had access to but the immediacy and simplicity of the Korg makes it the coolest.

What's the best piece of equipment you've ever used?

A friend of ours had a Novation Bass Station which was a lot of fun to mess around with. We've never used one on a track but for sheer hands-on fun you couldn't beat it.

Which sequencer do you use and why?

We use Logic and have done for some time now, but we rewire it with Ableton to use the time stretching and sampler functions. Ableton handles that stuff so much better than Logic. I actually think the way things are handled in Ableton makes the workflow very good but we still prefer the Logic environment and the standard plugins that come with it.

A lot of producers we know have made the switch to Ableton but we are so comfortable with using Logic that it's hard to justify changing when we can use the best bits of both programs using Rewire.

What’s your monitoring situation like? What speakers and / or headphones do you use?

We have a pair of Genelec 8020's with a Genelec 5040 sub. When we are on the road we just use the headphones we are most familiar with the sound of - which happen to be a pair of cheap Phillips in ear headphones - but we always do the mixdown in the studio as they are nowhere near accurate enough for detailed mixing.

Any advice you can give us regarding mixdowns?

Firstly, we always try and put a bit of time between finishing the track and mixing it down. That really helps us notice things that we may have just got used to when writing. Always low cut things to leave enough room for the sub and hi cut things to make room for things like percussion, hats and rides.

Also, we never mix with any limiters on the master. We also like bussing all our drums together to process. compress and effect as a whole and we usually do the same with bass sounds in order to compress, low & hi cut and make use of sidechain compression.

A general rule would be to try and roughly mix as you go along as this helps at the end to complete the mix down. Don't be afraid to remove FX and processing from things as you go along and don't be afraid to replace things like the kick and snare further down the line .The amazing kick sound you had when you first created the beat might not cut it the further you progress with the track. Also it's always worth A-B'ing to a track you think is similar.

What production technique do you think is really overused / annoying?

Probably overuse of the bitcrusher. We do use it sometimes but more as a compressor or often used subtly to make things a little less clean. The classic crushed to death sound get used way too often in our opinion.

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started out?

In terms of production there are too many things to mention! You don't really have to be the greatest technical producer to make good music. At the moment it's so easy and cheap to start producing music and there are so many great tutorials online that there is huge amount of tracks out there that 'sound' pretty impressive.

The most important thing is to be brave and try and create something original. It will really set you apart from the thousands of other demos that labels get sent and I think in general electronic music fans are always on the lookout to get behind some truly imaginative music.

Taken from here - http://www.kmag.co.uk/editorial/musicte ... matta.html

[wub]

In The Studio: Sleeper

Dubstep producer Sleeper is best known for his heavy tunes on labels like Chestplate but his latest release is a bit different, a sample pack called Dubstep Beats & Bass Volume 1 that does exactly what it says on the tin.

How do you approach starting a new tune?

I spend a lot of time designing sounds and building sample packs so when it comes to starting a new track I have a huge amount to draw from. Sometimes I won’t start a track for a month or so and just build sounds non-stop.

I've been working like this for a while now and find it really pays off when it comes down to putting a track together, ideas can flow much quicker when you don't have to spend too much time on each sound as you go.

Do you usually wait till you're in the right state of mind before starting a track or do you just sit down and see what comes out?

I spend most of my time working on music and that time is usually split into either building a track or designing sounds. When I'm in the right state of mind and feeling creative I'll work on a track and when I'm feeling less inspired I'll be building a library of sounds or making synth patches and effects chains so when that creative state of mind comes, I’ve got loads of fresh sounds to use and I can get my ideas out quickly.

Does your approach differ depending on which genre you are making?

Yeah, kind of, only when it comes to sound selection though really. When I'm making more techno sounding stuff I like to use more distorted, crunched up sounds and dirty textures, so the sound designing beforehand would have also been approached differently in order to get those kind of sounds.

Things like arrangements have to be approached differently too, I've started doing a lot of live arrangements over the past year or so which I got into through writing techno.

Out of the tracks you do start, how many get finished? How many get released?

It's changed a lot over the last few years since changing my approach to production; the sound design stuff helps massively. Years ago the majority of my ideas would never get finished but now most of them get finished properly and released in some way or another and I think it's all down to having my sounds ready to go when I come to make a track.

What do you do when you're not feeling inspired?

I don't believe in writers block. I think that whatever your art is, there's always something that you can be doing. Whether it’s designing sounds, making a sample pack, going to your local record shop and looking for samples or just learning something new, there's always something that you can be doing that can go towards a final product.

Also, I always find that if I'm not feeling inspired enough to start a track, all I do is make some fresh sounds without the pressure of actually writing a track, then before you know it you're buzzing off some new sound you just made and a track ends up coming out of nowhere.

What does your studio consist of?

My set up has always been really basic, I bought a few nice Akai MIDI bits last year for recording live arrangements but other than that it's just my PC running Live 9 and Cubase.

What's your most used plugin and what makes it so essential?

Fab Filters Pro Q EQ plugin gets used on every sound I use so I would have to go with that one. For synths I'd have to say Ableton’s Operator, it's really powerful and also really easy to pick up once you have a decent grasp of frequency modulation. I've been getting my head around it for the last eight months or so and use it for about 90% of my stuff now.

Are you the sort that likes to use old vinyl to get snippets of atmos, FX, melodies, etc or do you use synths mainly for your sounds?

I used to sample a lot of old soul and jazz years ago when I was making drum & bass but I've not sampled a thing for a couple of years now, so at the minute I'm pretty much 95% synths and effects. I do love doing it that way because I know all my sounds are completely original and I like seeing a whole track emerge from the same four oscillators, but at the same time I do miss the digging.

What's the coolest bit of kit you've got and do you actually use it much?

I don't really have much kit but my Akai APC is pretty cool and I use it on every track now. It's basically like having a full size mixing desk for your Ableton projects, which is great for recording live arrangements as well as sound design. I'm definitely getting the new version when it comes out, I might even get two. I'd recommend them to anyone looking to add a more human feel to their arrangements.

What's the best piece of equipment you've ever used?

Technics 1210s.

Which sequencer do you use?

I'm using Ableton and Cubase. I've always used Cubase but after trying Ableton last year I now only use Cubase for the final mix downs and spend most of my time on Ableton. I find it a lot more geared toward creativity, everything from effects chains and routing to sample swapping and editing all seems so much faster and more fluent in Ableton, especially with a good midi set up.

The midi stuff is so easy to use that you can take things to a more complex level with sound design and effects automation on arrangements. Cubase seems so stale and robotic in comparison but I much prefer the sound engine and mixer on it which is why I still use it for my final mixes.

Any new studio technology or gear you like at the moment?

I don't really have much studio gear but I picked up the Korg Monotron Duo and Delay about a month ago and have got a lot of use out of them so far.

What’s your monitoring situation like?

Pretty bad to be honest. I've just got Alesis M1 Actives, they are pretty much the cheapest monitors you can buy and they have recently starting making a very strange high pitched crackling sound so I think I'm due an upgrade.

Any advice you can give us regarding mixdowns?

If I'm honest, I'm not really the best guy to ask about mixdowns, it's easily my weakest area in production and the part I enjoy the least. One thing I would say though is to just try and mixdown as you go, making sure each sound is how you want it before moving on to the next. Also space in the mix is some pretty basic advice, giving each sound its own frequency range and space allows them to really stand out.

What production technique do you think is really overused / annoying?

At the moment it's got to be that percussive hit that all the big 'EDM' guys are using in triplets, you know the one.

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started out?

I think that has to be the sound design thing. Years ago I never realised how beneficial it is to sit and make sounds before you start a track. I think I would have saved a lot of time if I had started doing it from the beginning.

Taken from here - http://www.kmag.co.uk/editorial/musicte ... eeper.html

[wub]

“If I wanted an easy life it wouldn’t have been with music”: The Bug interviewed



Kevin Martin is a master of what he calls “future shock reinventions”.

He’s been musically mutating since the ’90s, spending that decade in experimental groups God, Ice and Techno Animal, the last a duo with Justin Broadrick, before introducing the alias The Bug in 1997. Tapping the Conversation, an abrasive hybrid of dub and hip-hop made in collaboration with DJ Vadim, was the first full length under that name, and was followed by a series of The Bug vs Rootsman singles on Razor X a couple of years later. But it was Pressure, released on Rephlex in 2003, that brought the solo incarnation to wider attention, with vocal collaborations with Daddy Freddy and Roger Robinson that demonstrated beautifully Martin’s knack for incorporating different voices into his blueprint without surrendering his own.

Five years later, Martin released London Zoo on Ninja Tune. Perhaps unfairly, it was lumped in with the wider dubstep trend of the time, although its rhythms drew on grime, dancehall, dub and industrial. More focused on songs than Pressure, it featured vocalists on nearly every track – with two songs in particular that grew ubiquitous in the UK underground, reaching a near-mythical status: ‘Poison Dart’ with Warrior Queen and ‘Skeng’ featuring Flowdan and Killa P. In 2008 too, King Midas Sound, Martin’s group with vocalists Kiki Hitomi and Roger Robinson that fused dub, lovers’ rock and the more aggressive side of shoegaze, released a single on Hyperdub, and Waiting For You the following year.

That Martin is prolific is beyond doubt. But despite more new solo material in the interim between London Zoo and now – a clutch of Acid Ragga 7-inches and the Filthy EP – Angels & Devils is the first Bug LP in nearly six years. It’s also Martin’s most ambitious to date, and not just because he moved from London to Berlin and widened his narrative scope to include not just the megalopolis, but also what lies above and below. Much like its title, the sequencing of Angels & Devils’ at first seems unusually conventional for Martin, with a softer ‘Angels’ half backed with a fearsome ‘Devils’ side. Yet Martin’s aim is not to distort the dualities of good and evil or ascension and decline that constitute much of the album’s thematic material, but, he says, to represent the place “where those polar opposites collide”.

His choice of collaborators, from Justin Broadrick and Miss Red to Grouper and Flowdan, mirrors that ambition. Few would attempt to make an album featuring Roll Deep’s Manga and Warrior Queen alongside Inga Copeland, Death Grips and Gonjasufi, and fewer still could make such an album cohere. But Angels & Devils, which opens with Grouper’s otherworldly vocals and closes with Flowdan’s tirade against politicans and fast food on ‘Dirty’, was written with vocalists in mind. That keen attention to the collaborators’ individual voices, along with a narrative arc that charts decline and decay, give it a solidity unexpected in a record so varied. Though Martin literally corrals the dual aspects of angels and devils onto the two sides of the record, there’s ambiguity at work, too. Tracks like ‘Fat Mac’ and ‘Dirty’, both of which feature Flowdan, may be the height of toughness on the ‘Devils’ side, but ‘Angels’ songs ‘Void’ and the towering ‘Ascension’ instrumental are sweet yet sick at heart – beautiful, but rotten with infection.

After London Zoo and your work with King Midas Sound, what did you feel you wanted to do with The Bug?

I realised recently that there is a sort of overlap in some ways between King Midas Sound and The Bug and the work I’ve done for them both. I didn’t really go into this album thinking I wanted to sweeten up the sound of London Zoo, for instance. It was primarily that I wanted to stretch the parameters of London Zoo in both directions simultaneously. I wanted it to be more beautiful on one hand, and more ugly on the other, and I think it was a case of having to come to a decision whether I wanted to completely jettison my previous sound, or to continue and try and craft what I’d already done.

There was a bit of soul searching because every sentence seemed to be dubstep this or dubstep that for journalists or people I met, and while I have many friends in that area and it helped me, I just never felt comfortable with being perceived as a dubstep artist. So it was like, what do I do here? Do I just say “fuck it” and lose all the work I put into London Zoo? The more I thought about other artists that I liked, the more I realised that it always feels more successful and more honest when artists continue a direction they’ve begun with, rather than completely cancel out the sound they were synonymous with. I felt it would be a bit fraudulent and also just a bit reactionary on my own part to say, “Fuck it, I’m doing something totally different”.

It seems like the increased interest in dubstep at the time was a bit of a happy coincidence for London Zoo.

I was really fortunate to have dropped that album at a time when there were some very, very talented producers suddenly coming into play, and for sure a lot of those producers became very good friends, and I had and have a lot of admiration for them. Any scene or any collection of producers that can include people as varied as Kode9, Burial, Shackleton, Mala, Coki, Jamie Vex’d — that’s crazy in itself. It’s just I always feel like a bit of a lone wolf, I never feel happy in a herd mentality. The artists I have the most respect for probably exist in their own void, too. They come to terms with their own sound, and I can spot the sound that that particular artist will make within seconds. That’s what I admire and what I attempt.

It just felt strange, partly because what dubstep became is pretty hideous anyway, and also because it doesn’t fit me, which anyone who listens to the records will realise. There was a lot of criticism among dubstep fans that there were too many vocals on London Zoo, or too many different tempos, or whatever. For me, that’s just ridiculous. I’m very vocal-oriented and I value freedom of thought and freedom to move.

I’d like to talk a bit about Justin Broadrick. He’s really the epitome of an artist who can move between different projects while retaining a sound that’s definitely his own. You’ve worked with him pretty much from the start. What impact would he say he’s had on your work over the years?

I wouldn’t be producing if it wasn’t for Justin. He was a massive influence on me at the very beginning of our friendship. I even asked him to produce my first band, because I was so impressed by the sound of the first two Godflesh albums. We also just got on like a house on fire, like brothers from another mother. There was a lot in our backgrounds that seemed to culminate in us both needing music as a therapy. If you spoke to him, I’m pretty sure he would say the same thing as me: we didn’t make music to make cash, we didn’t make music to become famous; we did it because we had no other choice. It was about our only escape route, and I think Justin is as free-willed as I am. In all the years I’ve worked with him, I can only remember us having one miniscule argument, which is ridiculous when working with someone for that long. But I think I recognise in him the same need for the shock of the new, the same need to reinvent yourself to keep yourself interested, and just that passionate urge to connect with sound, and to need sound as a catalyst to navigate this fucked up world.

Of course, there’s stuff we don’t agree on. It made me feel nauseous when he was enjoying bands like Oasis, or insisting on watching Headbangers Ball from beginning to end – after about fifteen minutes I would be begging him to turn it over to Yo! MTV Raps or whatever. When I started The Bug, I was just shitting myself, thinking, am I going to be able to do anything worthwhile outside of Justin’s shadow? I thought I really had to find my own voice, and craft my own image. So of course there are divergences, but our instincts, our philosophy and our aesthetic are definitely very similar.

You say music was necessary as a therapy for both you and Justin. Is that the philosophy you share?

Music is a catharsis for release, or a life force. Having faith in music is unfashionable in these days of giveaway, throwaway tracks. But I think we both thought that music was revolutionary in our lives, and we still want to have an impact. We still cherish a record. I’m still hooked on buying reggae 7-inches and I’m still every bit as excited about discovering some new producer who’s got a sound that makes me say “What the fuck?!” Fundamentally, music is still my life. I used to think it was a means to bury myself in the reality of everything, but increasingly I’ve realised it’s really a parallel universe for me that I’ve been constructing, because the real one is just too much.

There’s a real duality to it. In a lot of ways I felt music’s fulfilled all my dreams but it’s also led to lots of other problems along the way. If I wanted an easy life or to make money it wouldn’t have been with music, so there’s the positive and negative, and the collision of the two.

Did that collision between positive and negative inspire the themes of Angels & Devils?

I remember making an almost throwaway comment to Ninja Tune, telling them that I want to bring in more angels and devils in connection to London Zoo. The more I thought about the title, having come from a throwaway idea, the more it made sense for so, so many reasons, even though it’s a very traditional title that goes back to classic literature and painting and so on.

How did the title make more sense as the album developed?

It was never going to be an album sequenced with two opposing sides; that came much later in the making of the record. I think it’s an admission that we all have to struggle with the opposites in ourselves. I’ve been told I’m a classic Gemini, so maybe I’m even more at war with my own personality. The more I probed the idea of how far I could stretch what I’d done before, the more obvious it seemed that this record was about contrast, contradiction, and the points at which polar opposites meet, inasmuch as there are devils in angels, and angels in devils. One person’s heaven is another person’s hell. All those things became very interesting to me over the course of making this record.

Yes, there’s plenty of bleakness and horror in the “Angels” side of the record, too.

We all want to believe in black and white; we all hope that life is black and white because then it’s readily understandable or navigable. But primarily, it’s the kaleidoscopic mess of colour everywhere that fucks everyone up, and the sheer chaos that surrounds us all that makes it hard to determine where the angels are and where the devils are.

The decision to split the album down the middle seems almost counter to that idea.

Ninja weren’t too happy about that decision, they thought it might be the wrong move. But when it came to actually compiling the tracks, it’s always been a case of me trying to find a narrative as I go along, or trying to understand my own narrative ambitions throughout the making of a record. I think my enjoyment of music is totally polarised. I realise it’s the middle mass music that does nothing for me, and that sheer functionality or disposability is the enemy. I have two needs that I want to satisfy with music. On the one hand, I genuinely want music that I can use as sonic warfare, or to go to a club and have my head completely destroyed by an insane frequency assault. On the other hand, I want to listen to shit at home that transports me elsewhere without necessarily being antagonistic.

That goes back to what you were saying about there being a bit of overlap between The Bug and King Midas Sound. Do you see the projects informing one another?

Well, Roger’s forever trying to pinch Bug tunes for King Midas Sound! And King Midas Sound is really a very democratic group; we argue like fuck about everything. That’s the difference: as The Bug, I take collaborations with vocalists very seriously and hold them in the utmost respect, but it’s still very much my world. I still see it as my solo project, and I’m answerable to no one. King Midas Sound is based around songs and songwriting, and The Bug has become much more centred towards songs, but it’s still more deviant than that.

Was it working with King Midas Sound that re-oriented The Bug towards a stronger focus on songs, or something else?

It’s really just been about learning from mistakes. And I’m just being fucking greedy! Just obsessed with wanting everything from music. Why should I limit myself to just freeform analogue noise, or a functional club track? Why can’t I have everything in a track, why can’t I be completely overwhelmed and knocked out, as the best music does to me? That’s the ambition — not to say in any way that I’ve achieved that, but I’d rather have that ambition than settle for something flat in the middle ground.

Given all that, it must have been on some level frustrating when people said your music was dubstep around the time of London Zoo.

To be honest, yeah. And I don’t know where it came from, but the whole “bass music” thing. What the fuck is that? The best music always had shitloads of bass – my first band had three bass players in it! But that’s not enough. I love the idea of bass and space, but I always want more.

That’s the thing; I always hold an album dear even though at the moment there’s a very valid argument for just concentrating on just one smash YouTube tune after another and never giving a fuck about albums. That’s an exhilarating approach as well, but for me personally as The Bug, I like the idea of a strong narrative flow to a record, and everything about the record being connected: the artwork, the thinking behind it, and the choice of who to work with vocally. The artwork was crucial; the choice of vocalists was crucial; song titles are very important. It’s a total package, not settling for some half-arsed, throwaway product, because God knows that’s the problem with the music industry by and large. It’s so easy to make music now, easier than it’s ever been, so how can you do something that has any resonance and justification for its existence. I punish myself by wondering about this shit all the time. I should lay off and chill the fuck out, though I guess if I could I’d be making other forms of music.

“Bass music”, probably. What shaped the narrative as you wrote the tracks and compiled the album? As the album progresses from the ‘Angels’ to the ‘Devils’ side, you get this sense of decay and decline.

Once I decided to sequence in two halves, there was actually discussion of whether or not to start with the intense side and end on a positive note. God knows I’m always fighting my own impulses. I feel personally I’m a very positive person, though most people will listen to my shit and come across me as being very intense. I guess I’m seen as being difficult because I’m trying to be a perfectionist when it’s not fashionable to be so, and I think that I always seem to have alternated between great positivity and misanthropic, nihilistic, everything’s fucked mode. And this record is an acknowledgment of that. Throughout the course of this record, very key things happened. I became a father for the first time while finishing the record, and undoubtedly that had an impact on me psychologically.

And how did that affect what you were doing artistically?

Again, it would be two opposite reactions. On the one hand I was shitting myself with the responsibility of having brought another person to this planet, but on the other hand just saying, wow, this is an incredible thing. Having spent my whole life running away from the idea of being a father to suddenly being in that position has obviously had a massive impact. It’s hard to say creatively how that’s worked, but it made me all the more certain that I wanted some sense of beauty in this record, and some sense of utopian longing.

So the warfare relates to very personal battles really, with yourself.

Undoubtedly. I always think I’ve fucked it up, whichever record really. I remember after London Zoo I literally shed some tears when I got home from mastering and back to the studio where I was living at the time and thought, “Wow, who’s going to give a shit about this, it’s just a flat piece of nothingness.” And I really felt that.

With this record, after I’d done it, I realised that this really doesn’t fit in anywhere. It really doesn’t. Whenever I’m asked what my music sounds like, I’m like, how the fuck do I sum it up? I just know that I’m an enemy of my own lust for creating something as individual as I possibly can, and I know I always want to hear shit that I’ve never heard before. When something I’m doing becomes overly familiar, I’ll scrap it and try again. Many of the tracks on Angels & Devils are rewritten again and again. For instance, the tracks with Liz Grouper: the sketches she was sent are totally different from the tracks that ended up being produced. I had initial sketches which I wrote with her in mind, and when I got her voice back, it made me rethink my initial approach and want to try and better my part of the collaboration. That’s the thing. The people I chose to work with on Angels & Devils are incredible voices in their own right, and it does add to the pressure. I don’t want those people to be ashamed of having collaborated with me.



The collaboration with Liz is one of the most unexpected on the record. How did you decide you wanted to work with her?

I was obsessed by her records, I thought they were incredible, the Alien Observer album in particular — it’s just mindblowingly good. She was realising an emotional area that I wanted to free up for this record. The reviews for the Filthy EP were really mixed. Some were saying that this is the same old Bug shit, basically, and for me that seems strange, because working with Danny Brown on a Bug track, or incorporating elements of corroded brass, seemed very different to me. But I was even more determined that I wanted to come with the fresh shit that people wouldn’t expect on this record.

I think Liz strives for a real spirituality. Her music and how her vocal carries tracks seems to radiate an alien spirituality. It’s elusive but warming at the same time, and she very much has her own voice. Nearly everyone I approached on this album to collaborate with, I felt we’re all fellow freaks. All seemingly following a path of finding and crafting their own artistic voice. And she just really fitted that bill. I wouldn’t know personally where she fits in the bigger scheme of things, but I just knew that emotionally there was something that attracted me to working with her and seeing an amazing potential for the sort of sonic environment I could construct around such an incredible voice.

There’s definitely an outsider quality that unites many of the artists you’ve chosen for the record – a pack of lone wolves, as it were. It’s interesting what you say about Grouper being very spiritual, because having her on the same record as Gonjasufi really brings out the parallels between them that perhaps aren’t obvious.

There are similarities to them both that are very evident to me. I think that with both their voices, some people might find them very beautiful and other people might find them incredibly sad, but that was the attraction to working with voices with that duality. On the other hand, people like Manga and Flowdan are synonymous with grime, though I know Manga’s tried to break out from that, and Flowdan too in a strange way. Much as he continually talks about being a grime artist and grime being what he does, I think he’s already surpassed that in terms of his development as an artist. I feel like Mark [Flowdan] has broken out from the comfort of being in Roll Deep to becoming an incredible solo MC. So as much as I’m fine to be referred to as a freak, if the guests I invited to be on this record weren’t, I would say they’re highly individualistic.

It says a lot for your own sound that tracks featuring such a wide range of artists can all sit alongside one another and the album make sense as a whole.

That’s the challenge; how can this be a Bug album and not be seen as a compilation? That was something in the back of my mind throughout the making of it. It still had to have a feel I felt was personal, even though it was dealing with strangers. It was a challenge I loved. The vocalists that I approached all agreed to be on here because they were supportive of previous records I’d done, which was an amazing thing for me, because these are people I have maximum respect for, and it was very humbling that they wanted to participate just because they trusted me from previous records.

The tracks interrelate lyrically, too: Inga talking about civilisations and relationships disintegrating on ‘Fall’, and then the realisation of that decline on ‘Fat Mac’ and ‘Dirty’.

When Ninja Tune was suggesting which tracks to run into the album, in terms of teasing or streaming, whenever I isolated tracks I thought they were cool, but somehow it made more sense to me inside the whole album. They’re all parts of a whole.

The design of the artwork and atwarwithtime.com seem to tie into the music strongly, too. How did you conceive of the whole visual aesthetic?

It was really working with Simon Fowler that was key to this. He’s an illustrator who’s become a good friend. He’d previously worked with Earth and Sunn O))) and co-founded the Small But Hard label in Berlin. Kiki Hitomi introduced him to me at a Goblin show. He’s sort of sickening, really, because everything he turns his hand to is amazing. He speaks fluent Japanese; I’ve heard he’s an incredible sushi chef; he’s an amazing illustrator and an incredible printmaker. I think illustrators and designers find me hell to work with because of the perfectionism. I feel that the artwork has got to reflect what I feel I’m doing with the music, and once you start straying away from that… He could have said “fuck you”, but there was a vision we both wanted to pursue with this record. There were all sorts of benchmarks I threw at him, from Hieronymus Bosch to extreme Japanese illustrators to books on logos of terrorist organisations, and he managed to reel all that in and just do incredible work, not only on the sleeve itself but on the logo and font too. There are going to be other things following the album that will carry on the visuals.

Such as your collaboration with Dylan Carlson.

I’m madly excited by the collaboration with Dylan. Ninja Tune were the ones who said that the tracks stood really well in their own right, and they might get lost if they were on the album because some people don’t value instrumentals. And it’s a really exciting collaboration because I think it’s going to be ongoing. I think we’re going to do live stuff together, he invited me to do dub mixes of the early Earth recordings, and I’m a great admirer of his work. Weirdly enough, considering I have a sort of love-hate relationship with guitars, it’s fantastic to work with a guitarist I have so much respect for, and vice versa.

Why the love-hate relationship with guitars?

My mother used to have speakers in very room in the house, and she used to pipe Deep Purple, Rainbow, Santana, Led Zeppelin – just a whole host of musical war criminals – into my consciousness, and it meant that guitars for me were just horrible. It seemed like everything that I listened to for years was guitars, and I guess that’s why I gravitated towards post-punk as a kid. I just wanted space in music, because the exhibitionism of all the guitar music she used to play was just repulsive to me. It almost threw me off guitars for a long time. Then that whole explosive post-punk mindfuck – people like PiL, or The Birthday Party, or Joy Division, or Throbbing Gristle, or Crass, or 23 Skidoo, or Cabaret Voltaire – these were all the artists that inspired me to make music as a young kid, and they were sort of anti-rock’n'roll, I suppose.

Post-punk wasn’t just a musical thing. Because that was a difficult time for me in life, it just addressed my relationship to society, to family, to the world. I grew up in a pretty unfashionable town way away from the live circuit, and John Peel was my lifeline. For me, post-punk was as much about the people involved in it. They seemed to promote the idea of questioning everything, believing nothing, and using paranoia as a tool of dissemination of social constructs. To chase every dream you have, to trust no one along the way, and to see the industry as your enemy. Those are just a few things I can think of off the top of my head that I felt were ignited by some of the great thinkers of that scene. Most of them were very heavily inspired by dub and reggae, too.

Dub has been hugely important to all your projects, I think. Why did it initially appeal back in the days when you were listening to John Peel?

I think that my attraction to dub was that you could just open up a track as opposed to closing it with multi-track layers of mid-range guitar. Deep dub was sort of inescapable if I was into the sort of crazy shit I was into. I remember very vividly that a very good friend of mine who was considerably older than me took me to his lecturer from college to smoke weed, and they put on a Prince Far I track called ‘Foggy Road’, which isn’t a dub track, but it’s a deeply smoked-out track which just sounded like some alien transmission from another planet. I grew up in a seaside town that was like a miniature version of Brighton, which was whiter than white, and just to have this unfiltered, deeply psychedelic reggae track played to me had a big, big impact. I remember it very well to this day.

Discovering stuff like On-U Sound, King Tubby and Lee Perry at pretty much at the same time was just mind-warping. I was just, like, wow: tracks can be really turned inside out, upside down and back to front, and still lead you into a real unknowable unknown — a musical void, in the best sense. From then, really, it was just that love of reggae’s constant yearning to renew itself and have future shock reinventions. I became more and more fascinated by dub as a philosophy as much as a musical tool, or as much as a way of helping tracks avoid their sell-by date. I saw echoes of dub in the writings of William Burroughs or in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, with their crazy edits, or in lots of different areas of art, not just music.

Dub is metaphorically a sickness, too.

It’s a means of infection. I did a compilation for Virgin called Macro Dub Infection, because I thought of the viral spread as it infected all different genres and areas, and infected people’s brains and imaginations in a great way — potentially.

Speaking of On-U Sound, wasn’t there going to be a Bug collaboration with Adrian Sherwood?

There was, and that happened during the course of not really knowing what I was going to follow London Zoo up with. My first instinct was to do dub versions of London Zoo, because I’d never done a proper, dedicated dub album, and I’d become very friendly with Adrian, who’d been very supportive of me down the years, so it felt like it would be a great thing to try. ‘Catch a Fire’ was the first track that was ready to be dubbed out by Adrian and me. In the mean time, I spoke to very close friends who I trusted to find out what they wanted to hear. Would they want to hear a follow-up to London Zoo, or would they want to hear London Zoo in dub, and it was just unanimous: people said, I want to hear a new album, not reinterpretations of an old one. I wish I could clone myself into a Dub Bug to just do dub mixes of my tracks all day. I’d love it.

Going back to collaborators on Angels & Devils, you’d obviously worked with Justin before, but how was it working with Warrior Queen and Flowdan again? Did you wonder where you could go with them after ‘Skeng’ and ‘Poison Dart’ had had such a massive impact?

‘Fuck You’ was actually an odd circumstance, because Warrior Queen had recorded that track at my studio for her solo album, and Kode9 had written a rhythm for it. But she and I had sort of fallen out after the making of London Zoo, and we hadn’t been in contact for a long time. She contacted me and said she really wanted to meet, and we just had this big hug and apology session. I said, it’s all cool, but I want to put ‘Fuck You’ on my album. And she very graciously let me work that vocal. It was always my favourite vocal by her. And it was one of the hardest tracks on this album for me to realise because there were so many versions. Kode9 had done a killer version, and I felt her vocal was so good that whatever I did musically was never going to really better what she had done.

With ‘Skeng’, when we were recording it Flowdan didn’t even want to do the track, he didn’t like it. It was Killa P that forced Mark to put some lyrics down on it. Mark did his normal thing and I asked if he could do it half speed style, and we were just laughing our heads off. As soon as Mark went half speed and I heard Killa’s intro it felt special to me, but like everything I ever work on I have no idea if it means anything to anyone else. I can vividly remember at the end of the session him calling Skepta up and playing it down the phone, and Roger Robinson and Spaceape were coming to my studio at various points during the making of London Zoo and just brukking out like madmen to ‘Skeng’ and ‘Poison Dart’. I thought, shit, maybe there’s something here. I wasn’t playing at the time, and gave ‘Poison Dart’ to Kode9 and ‘Skeng’ to Loefah for them to play. And I was getting crazy texts from Steve [Kode9] saying “10,000 people have just gone ballistic to ‘Poison Dart’.” When I make tracks I’m looking for emotional impact and for tools that I can play live, but I have no idea if it’s going to mean anything to anyone.

Death Grips, Grouper and Danny Brown all cited ‘Skeng’ as the reason they wanted to collaborate. When I approached Liz, I was amazed when she got back to me and said she’d been playing ‘Skeng’ to her mum in her car two weeks before, and Death Grips replied to my suggestion to collaborate with the lyrics to ‘Skeng’. Danny Brown was just a massive fan of ‘Skeng’, too. It was a shock to me that London Zoo had the impact it had. And to think that tracks that were made in a shitty hole in Bethnal Green would end up attracting the calibre of artists that have said yes to working with me still never ceases to amaze me.

The Spaceape’s vocal on ‘At War With Time’ didn’t make it onto the album. The instrumental is so spare and open, and its lyrics seems to sum up so many of the themes on Angels & Devils: the idea of “the apocalypse of the mind”, “hope in ugly emotion”, or “beauty in the least expected locations”. Why didn’t you include it?

To be honest, that came after the album and was never meant to be on it. I wrote the poem and wondered who could really verbalise it, and it was down to The Spaceape or Saul Williams. The way Spaceape recited it was just genius to me, and made the words come even more to life. In a way, I wish it was on the record and had been completed prior to the record being finished. But it was actually written after I heard The Spaceape’s voice, after he’d recited the poem. It would have been obvious to try a more rhythmic undertone, but I just wanted something that was deep and resonant.

I want to talk about the extremities of this record, but that’s not to caricature those ideas. If anything, Angels & Devils is about where those polar opposites collide – what happens with the friction of trying to create something both intensely ugly and intensely beautiful, and how to fuck with my own perceptions.

Taken from here - http://www.factmag.com/2014/08/26/the-b ... ls-devils/

[wub]

[wub]

Crate digging is another but that's kinda part of the job I suppose. I love travelling to weird places I've never been to so when I'm performing for the first time I make sure I spend a day like a tourist. The first time I performed in Iceland I found it very usefull production wise so I went back twice to just think and relax. The serenity of the place helped me write a few tracks with pen and paper. Tokyo was the same too. I wrote 'Shinjuku' in my hotel room as Sony put me in this amazing hotel that had a proper 'Blade Runner' view outta my window. So 'Shinkuku' on Paradox Music 001 was born on the 25th floor.

[wub]

[nowaysj]

This dude is banned from 13 carnivals around Europe.

[wub]

This dude is banned from 13 carnivals from around Europe.

No fucking way...why?

[nowaysj]

Haha, perhaps a language barrier, here. Carnival being a place with rides and games where you win stuff. Don't make me explain the joke.

[wub]

Right, gotcha. Lost in translation moment I reckon. Carnivals are generally street party things, I took it from the video he was at a theme park of sorts.

[nowaysj]

Okay, fuck you, you're going to make me explain it. The tnuc won a tun of the games, and they had to pay out prizes to him everywhere he went.

RUINED IT.

[wub]

[wub]

Pinch: Finding the balance



"You've got to not just bend with the times, but hopefully bend the times." The forward-thinking veteran discusses his latest mutation.

Where do you go after dubstep? It was a familiar dilemma for the genre's earliest practitioners, many of whom were left out in the cold when the UK underground turned towards house and techno at the end of the last decade. Some went with the tide, while others resisted, plunging headfirst into a deeper, more purist dubstep sound. Rob Ellis—the Bristol producer and Tectonic label head responsible for both helping establish the genre and pushing it in new and exciting directions—has taken neither fork in the road. Instead, he's finding new ways to channel the "dark rush on the dance floor" that made him fall in love with dubstep in the first place.

It started with "Croydon House," a landmark 2010 release on Swamp 81 that led me to speak with him about dubstep's then-ongoing transformation. "Croydon House" signalled an interest in house and techno, but not in a familiar sense—this was hard-swung, broken-beat stuff inspired by peak-era Metalheadz. From there, Ellis took Tectonic (and Cold Recordings, which started last year to highlight new producers) down an increasingly idiosyncratic path, veering away from the house obsessions of his peers and avoiding classicist tendencies.

In addition to releasing an EP with one of his heroes, Adrian Sherwood, most recently Ellis has found a powerful partner in Jack Adams, AKA Mumdance. The two have produced a bumper crop of tunes together, starting with this year's barreling "Turbo Mitzi." Their music sounds like little else out there, with Pinch's dark and paranoid tones wrapping around Adams' fractured rhythms to create something that feels as claustrophobic as it is funky. Their style was best showcased on this summer's excellent Pinch B2B Mumdance mix CD, which blends dance floor destruction and unbridled experimentation with the same fervor that defined dubstep at its peak.

When we met recently in Bristol, Ellis spoke philosophically about his career over a few pints, frankly discussing his place in dance music, the detribalization of UK scenes and his ongoing search for the balance between extremes.

When did you first decide to move away from straight 140 BPM dubstep stuff?

Historically, I did have a little dabble—there was a 130 [BPM] tune on my album, and I did a couple of bits on Planet Mu that were 176. The first real one was "Croydon House." If I'm gonna backtrack it, just before that, I had this period as a [fabric] Room Three DJ, playing a little bit of all sorts. I'd mix up Basic Channel dub techno records with grime records and garage records. I'd leave one Basic Channel tune running for 15 minutes and mix it in and out.

There was already a little bit of movement of dubstep guys going over to housier things—"Croydon House" was just an attempt to make a Metalheadz sound in a house format. That was my thing. And not long after that, I pretty much stopped making dubstep beats. One of the last ones was called "Blow Out The Candle"—the clue is in the title [laughs]. There was this sort of fresh momentum around then, not necessarily an entirely new sound, but with the likes of Night Slugs and Swamp, it definitely felt like a mutation, which I always assumed was going to come to darker, logical conclusions. And it seemed to go the other way, it got more jolly, more happy and less… different.

I still play a bit of dubstep in my sets. It'll vary from place to place, sometimes it's very little, sometimes it's a bit more. But the tunes I'm getting excited about cutting are all in this 126 to 128 bracket. There's a few 140 bits that slip through the net that are still pretty tasty, but I guess it's a simple case of too much of a good thing. I need a little space from it. I'll probably be sick of house-tempo stuff in three or four years, maybe even making dubstep again, or hopefully something else altogether.

As someone who is often credited with helping to invent dubstep, did you feel ownership over it when it was changing and taking off in the US?

Definitely. I had a very grumpy spell about the whole thing. I think if it just had a different name it wouldn't have bothered me, cause it's kinda polluted the name dubstep. But at the same time, nothing lasts forever. Loefah was quite an inspiration to me on that side of things. I started conversations with him, and he wasn't very happy with dubstep for a little while, probably for longer than I was. There was definitely a bit of a sense of, "I know the Americans have run off with the ball, they're changing the rules without telling us, it's now a different game that we are playing," that sort of thing.

I always felt a degree of separation. It's not the fact it was popular that bothered me—it was just that it was a small aspect of a bigger picture and no one else was interested in looking at the rest of the picture. I think that's been changing in the last year or two. In America there's a new generation of kids making a deeper sound and taking a committed stance to that aesthetic. Which is admirable, but annoying for me because it feels like five or six years too late for my own personal interests [laughs].

I think it's more important to stay inspired and moving, and that's what I'm trying to do. Just keeping myself interested in it all. When you spend several years, every weekend, getting knackered, travelling up and down the country, around the world—it's great, I'm not trying to make it sound like a miserable job, I love it—but you've got to find a way to keep yourself enthused about it, because it's very easy to just fall into: "Alright, these tunes work, I'll keep playing these ones," and you become detached from what you do. So it doesn't really matter to me too much what the form is—it's just different grooves, different tempos. You can find different ways of expressing it.

For me it's about that dark rush on the dance floor, the kind of energizing sensation which you very much got in the early dubstep days. Almost like an ecstasy rush that's a bit too heavy, you know, when it's a bit too much rather than a gentle, flowing thing. I can even remember back in those early days talking with Martin Clark about the early DMZ. I remember very specifically saying to him, "What is it, Martin? This music is so dark but makes me so happy!" I don't think dark music necessarily has to be evil or gloomy, it can still be energizing. And I think that's the chase for me in what I'm trying to release or DJ. I mean, you
obviously have to add some dynamics, you can't just have one idea replicated over and over again.



How do you keep yourself interested in dance music when it's your whole career?

A big part of it is not listening to too much music. After a few years of listening to so many demos, you oversaturate yourself and you realize a lot of producers out there are over-reiterating the same ideas. For example, the half-step beat: I got to a point where I was sick of hearing more and more of the same half-step beats. And that took away the excitement from what was basically a fucking really good beat! It was like that in dubstep for a while.

It's interesting with someone like Mumdance, for example, working with him, because he just listens to music constantly, he's a total sponge for it. He's got a lot of knowledge about a lot of things, but he's also got a lot of gaps that are more in my territories. He's just sort of getting his head around Tresor at the moment and all that stuff. "Why the fuck haven't I checked out Tresor before!" And he's always sending me stuff, too. I find there is a balance between listening to new and interesting things, but also being in the right frame of mind. Things can skew your perspective. If I'm listening to hundreds of demos where people try to sound like Boddika or something, that gets boring but at the same time it doesn't necessarily mean that you should abandon some of those ideas yourself.

I always used to do this thing where I'd be reacting like, "Right, where is my space?" And sometimes that's not the best way to approach things. The exciting thing is when younger kids come through in the scene and they just don't think about these things. They start pulling in influences and sounds that you may have considered cheesy, because they're sitting in a certain context in your own mind. But if you don't have those walls, then what comes out can be a lot more natural. It's a hard balance to achieve.

So you tried to stop worrying about where you belong, so to speak?

I think I've never really sat in a very comfortable place. A lot of my dubstep records were not particularly danceable. But they're also designed to be heard amplified. So it has always been a bit of a contradiction on that side of things. I made a couple of bangers like "Swish" and "The Boxer," but I'm never too worried whether it's sitting in with other stuff. At the moment I'm trying to crystallize some sense of solidarity around sonic ambition.

A lot of the language used in setting the context for this mix with Mumdance recently has been associated with proto-jungle—we've expressed an ambition for it rather than necessarily saying, "Look here's a new genre, call it what you like." It's a movement towards a fresher space that has a slightly different collection of influences. And I think that's an exciting point, where there are no obvious boundaries. There's always a delicate balance between having a sense of definition of a sound—which allows a community to form more easily around it—and the negative consequences of boxing in a sound. So for me it's freewheeling in an interesting direction. And as long as it keeps heading in that direction I'm not too worried about it.

Do you feel like there is a community building around the new stuff you're making?

I do, simply because I can tell from certain tunes that get sent to me. Even with Tectonic, I don't even really get dubstep so much anymore. And I think that's good, cause people understood that things have changed a little bit. Any strong idea in dance music attracts a gravity around it. I feel like there is a sense of attraction and gravity that's starting to build on this. People I've never heard of are coming in, sending me tunes and I'm like, "This fits in." This is just happening organically. And that's the only way it can ever happen, in my opinion.

Obviously the music is changing and you also have a new label, but why does Tectonic keep going? What is Tectonic now?

It's my little baby, and it always will be. We have a massive catalogue of releases, 17 or 18 albums, so it's not something I could say goodbye to. Tectonic is always going to be the mothership for me, the closest to my heart, because it's been on a long journey with me so far already. And for a credible, underground, dark dance music label to move forward you've got to not just bend with the times, but hopefully bend the times. That's the aim of it.

There is definitely a lot of overlap between Cold and Tectonic at the moment. But Tectonic will be increasingly detached from tempo boundaries, if I get my way with it. It's difficult because people still strongly associate that kind of deep, dark dubstep sound with the label, which I don't really intrinsically have a problem with, as long as you're willing to keep your ears open to who else is coming out. I can understand how the label built a loyal fan base, and you can't expect your fan base to just change their taste in music overnight. You've got to kind of try to bend them in the direction.

Do you feel like you've lost some relevance over the course of the larger transition going on in dance music?

Maybe. You've also got to be realistic. The label has been running nearly ten years so a lot of people just get in and out of dance music in general in that period of time. I don't know how relevant it is to some of the younger listeners, for example. I mean, there are some people—Facta, he's only like 21, I was quite impressed when hanging out with him in New York. His knowledge is pretty solid, he knows some really obscure tunes.

Why start a new label and keep on with Tectonic at the same time?

Let me put it like this: every release on Cold (apart from myself) has all been [that artist's] first or second release. And they're all younger; Batu is 19 or 20, Acre is young, Ipman has been doing stuff on a dubstep tip and this is an outlet for his more techno variations. And I felt it would help set a new context for things to grow around that, so things that grow from Cold will also feed back into Tectonic, ultimately. Tectonic is still associated with the deep, dark dubstep thing. It's gonna take a little while to shake that and I don't even necessarily want to, but with Cold there are no boundaries, cause it's a new thing and it can just grow. It might fold into a little box down the line.

Do you find it hard starting a new label without the name recognition of Tectonic?

Yes and no. The absence of that is what makes it exciting, even if you don't really know what you're getting into. It's too easy to slip into certain habits, whether it's the way you make tunes or the way you DJ. For example, this year I did my first live set and I was very nervous about it, but I kind of enjoyed feeling nervous about something again. You know, stepping out to the decks—I've done it so much, I don't ever get nervous. I missed that nervous energy.

Cold is very different from Tectonic—we don't have a distributor, we're trying to mainly sell direct and the simple reason for that is the shrinking vinyl market. But I also think it helps in building a community around the label. I want people to feel attached and part of it. And I don't think that's so easy to do with Tectonic. I'm also trying to encourage direct sales and little things on the side, extra freebies here and there. With Cold we only sell to a few shops direct and these are the shops have we have respect for—your Hard Wax, your Boomkat, your Idle Hands. There's only a few actual record shops where you can get it. And I like that. I wanted it to be more of an effort for people to obtain, to come and interact with the label a bit more directly.

It's almost like a co-op kind of thing.

Not as far as that. I just don't have enough time and resources to do all the things that I'd like to do. But I'd like to build more of a direct community around the label, where producers are linking up as a result. Whether it be through interest in the sound or just a place, a space—I guess that's kind of like a tribalized connection. I think that's something that's missing from dance music at the moment. It's never been so detribalized, ever, and you can hear that in the sonics of generic electronic dance music, EDM—I call it GEDM.

There's a big difference between those people that cherry-pick sounds here and there saying, "OK, that was a massive tune and the bassline sounds like that, I can use that and glue it together and—bang." While I was growing up, kids who were into jungle didn't really hang out with kids who were into techno. Which had its negative aspects as well, but that sense of tribalization, that sense of belonging can also provide a very important backbone to the scene. One of the massively overlooked factors in a dance music scene is its audience. The reason why early dubstep worked is because it had a particular audience that was not just open to new sounds, but really thirsty for something.

Do you feel like there's less community in UK dance music than there was in the early dubstep days?

Oh yeah, definitely. And I think that kind of house-flavored revolution in the UK… I mean it's so funny—it's been in Europe for years, who gives a shit, it's just more house and techno! It was almost like the dubstep generation missed house music entirely. It became a fresh and interesting thing, but it wasn't like that for everyone everywhere. And what I see when I have to go to bigger raves is that it's a very detribalized scene. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just a different thing, whereas something like dubstep, or jungle, had a very core aesthetic which organically extended beyond the music. I don't feel like there's much of a cultural aesthetic that extends from this kind of newer house. But then I'm also getting older, I'm not out at the clubs all the time, so I don't know if that's a true reflection.

But, in some sense, isn't the stuff you're making—especially with Mumdance—taking ideas from different things as well?

I think there's a difference between cherry-picking ideas and bringing in influences. For instance, the "Turbo Mitzi" tune that we did, I think that's a good example of expanding on the jungle aesthetics. There's no breakbeats in there, there's no amen—it captures the mood without actually using the ingredients directly.

How did you meet Mumdance?

First time I met him was a few years ago when we were on different musical paths. There was a rave in a car park in Bristol, part of some festival. He just came up and said hello and my girlfriend bought him a vodka and he downed it and vomited pretty much instantly. That was my first impression of Jack. And I didn't really speak or hang out with him.

Then it was a couple of years later at this Warehouse Project thing in Manchester. He said, "I've got some tunes you might be interested in," and he sent me over that first batch. Then the next batch had "Legion," that was one of my favourite tunes of last year, just a standout, killer thing. And I got chatting with him—he's a very proactive man, he's very sort of "get up and go and do things," and so he just came up to Bristol and we got on from there. The first tune we made together was "Turbo Mitzi," and we've made four or five others since. I find him very refreshing to work with because we've got different ideas about how to put things together. And it's when you meet in the middle in a way that's not a compromise, that's not like, "OK, well you can have that hi-hat if I can have that clap." It's more like, "Is that clap gonna work for both of us?" And, until it is, then it's not working.

What is it about his stuff that you find so inspiring?

Well, I mean, it's not just Mumdance, there's a lot of other stuff as well. Someone who gets left out of the picture way too often is Logos. He was a big influence on Jack. One of the most inspiring things about Jack's perspective is that there is a real genuine enthusiasm driving it and I find that infectious, a really valuable thing, it's not even necessarily about some particular exact sonic thing he's doing, or how he's making his basslines. It's about the whole picture, his whole approach, his thirst for all these different things that he's getting into and feeding off of. I think where we cross over most is the shared love for that dark sort of Metalheadz jungle period in 1992 to 1996—but it's more about his attitude.

Do you find that it rubs off on you?

I do! And I think the sound that him and Logos had on "Legion"—and a lot of other things we'd been doing around at that time—fits so much more closely with my aspiration for what that tempo should be doing. What should be coming out of the post-dubstep production world at that tempo, rather than the more salubrious house sound. You know, the complicated, moodier, disjointed grooves, with space in them as well. He has quite an interesting way of balancing very frantic rhythms with a great sense of space. It's very minimal, but at the same time it can be very frantic and energetic. And I think that's a very difficult aesthetic to get right.

Why did you do a mix to show off your work together rather than an album?

The most honest reason is that I find the album in dance music a bit of a self-contradictory thing. Because it's ultimately a layover from rock and blues and the traditional aspect of the music industry. Dance music is about continuous music presented by DJs, so I think that the more honest document is in the mix format. It's about how you work those tunes together. The idea of just listening to a straight minimal techno album, where you might have eight nine-minute tunes with two-minute intros and two-minute outros from start to finish—it's not meant to be listened to like that.

I could have done the mix myself, but I thought it was important to do it as me and Mumdance together, because when we were making tunes it felt like we were getting closer to the goal of a new, different space. We've had a few shows together, we've been DJing back-to-back and I do feel like it's exciting. I don't know what tunes he's gonna play—he keeps me on my toes! He's had a big part in influencing and creating a context around wherever this new sound might be or become.

This new sound—is it really new or is it just a logical extension of what you've been doing in the past five years?

You have to keep trying different things. You'd be a fool to think that everything you do is gonna work, but if you keep doing different things eventually you find something that does have a bit more functionality. I do think that the sound is different. It's another step in the journey, but the dangerous thing is trying to pinpoint what is the end of that journey. And it's almost a depressing and negative thing to focus on.

Going back to the early days of dubstep, for the first two years of me doing interviews, almost every single interview, you could guarantee at least one of the questions would be "What is dubstep?" or "How do you define it?" And as soon as that stopped being asked, it was a clear indication to me that it already found, maybe not an endpoint, but you know, you're looking at the horizon and you know where it is. That's creatively where it started to get a little more boring and, ironically, more famous and successful. I like the fact there is no name for this sound, there's a sense of uncertainty around it and it's still forming. Hopefully it will continue to form and mutate.

You talked about a lack of tribalism in UK dance music. Do you feel like there's a loss of creativity in the UK scene compared to the peak dubstep era?

No, I don't necessarily think so—but it's more disparate. That also ties into what I was talking about earlier, about having an audience, because that's what helps focus these things. There's a lot of stuff happening around the fringes of things, and these are the same ingredients that led to dubstep forming. There was a sense of boredom coming out of relative scenes at the time. Like, OK—that's house, that's techno, that's drum & bass. They're all fairly safe and you can predict what works and functions within that context.

And it was the lack of unpredictability, the lack of mystery that comes as a result of that, having fine-tuned various genres into their natural conclusions and then just recycling those ideas. I do feel like there's a reinvigorated thirst for something different, but there's no particular thing to act as a gravity point around it. Which I could say is a double-edged sword—it's good for bringing people around a focal point, but then it isolates what else is going around outside that focal point. You get tunnel vision. Tunnel vision is good for focusing and fine-tuning ideas, but it's also bad for kind of losing yourself within that.

You've made the point about not listening to a lot of music anymore, especially promos and demos, and I think that's exactly what happened with people like Youngsta, or even drum & bass as a whole. It's like people only listen to one thing and they only make that one thing. It doesn't go anywhere.

Again, there's also a positive and a purpose in that. Without someone like Youngsta in those early days having that kind of tunnel vision to focus around a particular sound—it's very easy for us to take it for granted now, now that it's over-consumed and everyone's got a piece of it. But it was the likes of Hatcha, who had a vision around what sound worked for him, and he was able to bring together Benga, Skream, Mala, Loefah and Coki. Several years on they've all gone into different directions, but there was common ground. He was able to see that within those productions and bring them together. It's just about knowing when it's the right time and being able to be flexible, and that's not an easy thing to do. It's not easy to be aware of yourself when you're going into that kind of headspace.

There's never an easy answer to these things. The older I get and the more I like to think I've developed my perspective on life, the more I realize that whatever is true in one situation might not be true in another. Dissolving the idea of truth and absolute truth. And I think music is always a reflection of culture and a lot of unspoken understanding as well. We're not really straightforward creatures, we're very complicated creatures living in an increasingly complicated world. So there's a very impermanent sense of what is absolute and what is true.

And I think that can be very much reflected in current trends in dance music. With the internet we have so much instantly accessible content that ten or 15 years ago we didn't have. It was easier to tribalize because part of that was about making the effort to find out more about certain things. That takes a lot of time; that time has been removed from the process, and now in a generation where kids can instantly tap into the heart of various scenes with a click of a mouse button, that's quite incredible. But it has an effect on people's attention, it has an effect on the way that people consume things. And people consume things in a more flippant way. So as much as variation, experimentation and stepping outside of the typical boundaries are a good thing, equally, fine-tuning ideas and providing the context of a safe base around which people can gather, whether it's just in terms of ideas or social media even, that's also a good thing. Both things are good. It's just the balance.

Taken from here - http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?2303

[wub]

“Rashad’s Death Has Brought Everyone Together”: A Rare Interview With Mike Paradinas



When Paradinas put out Bangs & Works Vol 1 in 2010, it sent shock waves through dance music. Planet Mu's landmark compilation introduced the world to a strange new sound coming out of South and West Chicago which, for all intents and purposes, blew minds. That sound was footwork, a descendent of ghettohouse which, as it transpired, had been around for years but had remained largely unknown outside of Chicago. Unknown, that is, until Mike Paradinas sorted through a few thousand tracks and selected his favourite 24 for Bangs & Works. Evolving out of 4/4 juke, footwork producers added manic syncopation and blitzkrieg sample-craft in a bid to create a music reflective of the increasingly intricate, trick-laden and aggressive dance moves displayed at juke battles.

The outcome was avant, abstract and, for the virgin listener, difficult to comprehend. Just for a moment it was as though the future was back, just when we were beginning to think that the "shock of the new" in dance music was a thing of the past.

Five years later, footwork continues to impact the British scene, but it's no longer a darling of dance music journalism. As the Chicago scene faces trying times following the untimely death of DJ Rashad, one of footwork's founding fathers, we talk to the man who brought the genre to Britain to find out where the future lies for the Windy City's very most mind-bending dance invention.

Thump: Have you come across a footwork mini-scene of sorts, or even footwork nights and regular battles, either in London or farther afield in Britain?
Mike Paradinas: Well there’s that Dalston label, We Buy Gold. I DJ’d at one of their nights a while back.

So how does a footwork night in Britain play out then?
Well it was in Dalston, so there was a lot of what you might call "passing trade" - i.e people who weren’t necessarily there for the footwork. But I suppose there was a few confused people and a few people who were totally loving it. But, yeah, it did still go off a bit.

What was the deal, dancing-wise?
Do you mean were people footwork-dancing? No, it more drunk people having a laugh. To tell you the truth I haven’t ever seen Brits footworking, not in the athletic sense, as opposed to just a really good but drunken tribute. In the UK, it’s not like it is in, say, Japan.

How do you mean?
Well over here, footwork the music is catching on, in that increasingly, certain elements of footwork are being spliced with pre-existing UK genres from the "hardcore continuum", in the post-dubstep landscape. But in Japan, where there’s a massive footwork scene, they do things differently. Generally speaking, Japanese culture places a lot of stock in appropriating modes of Western pop culture accurately and in their entirety. So in the case of footwork, rather than stop at merely adopting the music, they’ve also developed a whole scene based around music - i.e with actual dancing.

But not here?
In Britain, it’s a completely different set up. On the one hand, historically we’ve always felt a bit guilty about appropriating or importing whole cultures, preferring to invent our own scenes, do our own thing or take parts of the culture and put our own spin on them. I mean, look at the criticism Hijack received back in 1986 for rapping in American accents. That attitude still persists. Secondly, in Britain. because we’re all so uptight and shit dancers, footwork as a dance just hasn’t caught on. I mean, basically, over here we need to be fucked on drugs to dance, which obviously isn’t exactly conducive to developing a scene around such an athletic dance form.

So what the Japanese are doing, is it pretty much straight footwork?
Well it is in tempo, yeah. But then, the Japanese tend to go a bit mad don’t they? So there’s a lot of really crazy stuff there. I mean it doesn't sound like Chicago footwork and it doesn't sound like the more streamlined stuff that’s coming out of Europe. And they’re really into the history of footwork, so they’re making music that goes right back to ghetto house.



As for Chicago, how has the death of DJ Rashad affected the scene do you feel?
Rashad’s death has brought everyone together, and given them a renewed sense of purpose. The producers want to carry on the footwork because of Rashad. They want to carry on what Rashad started, is the best way of putting it. Apart from that, the producers are still producing, just as they always have since 2006/2007.

Otherwise, what’s happening within the Chicago scene right now?
Well a lot of the producers have moved on to hip hop; artists like Young Smoke, and Nate. Loadsa autotune.

Following Rashad and Spinn’s lead, Traxman and RP Boo are starting to travel outside of Chicago, which is an important next step for the scene. They’ve played Japan a couple of times now, while Tim And Barry brought them to the UK. There’s not a lot of money in doing footwork just in Chicago, but nevertheless, personally I have found it difficult to get the producers to leave the city. It’s hard to get them into the way of thinking that they can escape Chicago, the idea of flying somewhere to DJ is very alien to them.

However, in some cases, it’s simply down to the fact that some of the producers aren’t willing to put work in, or perhaps would prefer to spend their time in the studio, which is something I completely understand; I hate DJing and playing live.

At the same time, it costs a lot to bring these producers over here.



Is there a producer we’re unaware of who might otherwise have come to the attentions of the international press had they travelled out of Chicago?
If there’s one DJ who’s been overlooked it’s probably DJ Diamond. Amazing producer. He comes up with these amazing idea, and concepts and production. But some people just want to sit down and have everything come to them in terms of a career, but it doesn't always work like that.



Any new producers coming through who’ve impressed you this year?
Yeah, we’ve got releases coming out on Planet Mu this year from one lesser known artist, JLin, a female footwork producer. She’s amazing. Her stuff was used to soundtrack Rick Owen’s fashion show in March, so she’s doing really well out of that. She’s been over to Europe since.

Is there anyone you feel is pushing the form forward? Changing footwork?
You’ve got people like Teklife’s Australian producer, Little Jabba - a friend of Rashad's. He’s doing some really interesting things.

In what way?
Well, it’s like he’s introduced a completely different feeling into footwork. He doesn't use the same sort of samples, and his music is synthesiser-based as opposed to sample-based. With synthesiser-based footwork, sometimes the end result can be a bit wishy-washy, but Jabba keeps it interesting and dark.

Can that go too far though? I find some of Traxman and Spinn’s recent stuff a bit like it's defanging the genre. Seems like they're attempting to take footwork more "tasteful", "musical" direction, if you like; what with all the orchestral and jazz samples. It reminds me a bit of what became of D’n’B towards the end of the 90s. What do you think?
I don’t agree. If you mean, like, the “coffee-table jazz-ification” of footwork, the only so-called “gentrified” footwork I can think of is some of the stuff Earl’s being releasing lately, or some of the more streamlined styles coming out of Europe, from producers who don’t know how to make a sample sound tough. But no, Traxman is hardcore. His use of samples is more Dilla than LTJ Bukem.

I found Rashad’s last big release on Hyperdub, Double Cup, really interesting. Because it was kind of a two-way-traffic scenario whereby, for once, here was a Chicago footwork producer taking from the British scene instead of the other way around. There was jungle and Brit acid influences on there.
He was really inspired by his European tour. Actually there’s a lot of Chicago producers very interested in British style. For instance, Young Smoke's been putting dubstep on his tracks. The thing is, though, once the Brit influences are fed through the footwork template, more often than not they’re eaten up beyond recognition. So you can’t always identify the UK element.



And finally, the $64,000 dollar question. What is the difference between footwork and juke?
Juke is what the stuff you bang footwork too. The music grew out of the dance. But at the same time, juke is party music that’s more 4/4, whereas the producers I’ve talked to see footwork as the more syncopated stuff. And juke is the music for the parties, while footwork is for the battles. Also, footwork is footwork but juke can refer to footwork and ghettohouse.

Is there a new Bangs And Work compilation in the pipeline?
Not yet. I mean, we tried but they cost a lot of money to do because all the artists wants paying - like, an advance. We’ve released two of them and lost money on both. I love footwork but when the label loses money it impacts our ability to release stuff from the other artists on the label. I mean, we do have a lot of tracks reserved for another compilation, but not quite enough yet.

Taken from here - http://thump.vice.com/en_uk/words/rasha ... to-britain

[wub]

Werner Herzog on Creativity, Self-Reliance, Making a Living of What You Love, and How to Turn Your Ideas Into Reality

“If your project has real substance, ultimately the money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs.”

Werner Herzog is celebrated as one of the most influential and innovative filmmakers of our time, but his ascent to acclaim was far from a straight trajectory from privilege to power. Abandoned by his father at an early age, Herzog survived a WWII bombing that demolished the house next door to his childhood home and was raised by a single mother in near-poverty. He found his calling in filmmaking after reading an encyclopedia entry on the subject as a teenager and took a job as a welder in a steel factory in his late teens to fund his first films. These building blocks of his character — tenacity, self-reliance, imaginative curiosity — shine with blinding brilliance in the richest and most revealing of Herzog’s interviews. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed (public library) — not to be confused with E.F. Schumacher’s excellent 1978 philosophy book of the same title — presents the director’s extensive, wide-ranging conversation with writer and filmmaker Paul Cronin. His answers are unfiltered and to-the-point, often poignant but always unsentimental, not rude but refusing to infest the garden of honest human communication with the Victorian-seeded, American-sprouted weed of pointless politeness.



Herzog’s insights coalesce into a kind of manifesto for following one’s particular calling, a form of intelligent, irreverent self-help for the modern creative spirit — indeed, even though Herzog is a humanist fully detached from religion, there is a strong spiritual undertone to his wisdom, rooted in what Cronin calls “unadulterated intuition” and spanning everything from what it really means to find your purpose and do what you love to the psychology and practicalities of worrying less about money to the art of living with presence with an age of productivity. As Cronin points out in the introduction, Herzog’s thoughts collected in the book are “a decades-long outpouring, a response to the clarion call, to the fervent requests for guidance.”

And yet in many ways, A Guide for the Perplexed could well have been titled A Guide to the Perplexed, for Herzog is as much a product of his “cumulative humiliations and defeats,” as he himself phrases it, as of his own “chronic perplexity,” to borrow E.B. White’s unforgettable term — Herzog possesses that rare, paradoxical combination of absolute clarity of conviction and wholehearted willingness to inhabit his own inner contradictions, to pursue life’s open-endedness with equal parts focus of vision and nimbleness of navigation.

A certain self-reliance that permeates his films and his mind, a refusal to let the fear of failure inhibit trying — a sensibility the voiceover in the final scene of Herzog’s The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz captures perfectly: “Even a defeat is better than nothing at all.” He tells Cronin:

There is nothing wrong with hardships and obstacles, but everything wrong with not trying.

Herzog reflects on failure as a prerequisite for creative mastery:

The bad films have taught me most about filmmaking. Seek out the negative definition. Sit in front of a film and ask yourself, “Given the chance, is this how I would do it?” It’s a never-ending educational experience, a way of discovering in which direction you need to take your own work and ideas.

He takes this notion of self-reliance — as he does most things he believes — to an almost religious degree:

I did as much as possible myself; it was an article of faith, a matter of simple human decency to do the dirty work as long as I could… Three things — a phone, computer and car — are all you need to produce films. Even today I still do most things myself. Although at times it would be good if I had more support, I would rather put the money up on the screen instead of adding people to the payroll.

Indeed, having grown up without money and earned every penny himself, Herzog considers this self-reliance closely intertwined with the question of financial struggle — a circumstance he always refused to mistake for a fatal roadblock to the creative drive. His wisdom on the subject extends beyond film and applies just as perceptively to almost any field of endeavor in today’s creative landscape:

The best advice I can offer to those heading into the world of film is not to wait for the system to finance your projects and for others to decide your fate. If you can’t afford to make a million-dollar film, raise $10,000 and produce it yourself. That’s all you need to make a feature film these days. Beware of useless, bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies. Instead, so long as you are able-bodied, head out to where the real world is. Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you’ll have enough money to make a film. Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking — like great literature — must have experience of life at its foundation. Read Conrad or Hemingway and you can tell how much real life is in those books. A lot of what you see in my films isn’t invention; it’s very much life itself, my own life. If you have an image in your head, hold on to it because — as remote as it might seem — at some point you might be able to use it in a film. I have always sought to transform my own experiences and fantasies into cinema.

He later revisits the subject even more pointedly:

A natural component of filmmaking is the struggle to find money. It has been an uphill battle my entire working life… If you want to make a film, go make it. I can’t tell you the number of times I have started shooting a film knowing I didn’t have the money to finish it. I meet people everywhere who complain about money; it’s the ingrained nature of too many filmmakers. But it should be clear to everyone that money has always had certain explicit qualities: it’s stupid and cowardly, slow and unimaginative. The circumstances of funding never just appear; you have to create them yourself, then manipulate them for your own ends. This is the very nature and daily toil of filmmaking. If your project has real substance, ultimately the money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs. There is a German proverb: “Der Teufel scheisst immer auf den grössten Haufen” [“The Devil always shits on the biggest heap”]. So start heaping and have faith. Every time you make a film you should be prepared to descend into Hell and wrestle it from the claws of the Devil himself. Prepare yourself: there is never a day without a sucker punch. At the same time, be pragmatic and learn how to develop an understanding of when to abandon an idea. Follow your dreams no matter what, but reconsider if they can’t be realized in certain situations. A project can become a cul-de-sac and your life might slip through your fingers in pursuit of something that can never be realized. Know when to walk away.

This question of money parlays into what’s perhaps Herzog’s most urgent and piercing point — a testament to the idea that anything worthwhile takes a long time:

Perseverance has kept me going over the years. Things rarely happen overnight. Filmmakers should be prepared for many years of hard work. The sheer toil can be healthy and exhilarating.

Although for many years I lived hand to mouth — sometimes in semi-poverty — I have lived like a rich man ever since I started making films. Throughout my life I have been able to do what I truly love, which is more valuable than any cash you could throw at me. At a time when friends were establishing themselves by getting university degrees, going into business, building careers and buying houses, I was making films, investing everything back into my work. Money lost, film gained.

Ultimately, this notion of doing what you love is rooted in defining your own success, which often requires the bravery of not buying into the cultural template. Herzog captures this elegantly:

Even if I went broke, I wouldn’t be able to sell anything to the highest bidder. What makes me rich is that I am welcomed almost everywhere. I can show up with my films and am offered hospitality, something you could never achieve with money alone… For years I have struggled harder than you can imagine for true liberty, and today am privileged in the way the boss of a huge corporation never will be.

Observing that happiness and meaningfulness are not necessarily the same thing — something researchers have since confirmed — Herzog echoes artist Agnes Martin’s assertion that doing what you were born to do is the secret of happiness and tells Cronin:

I find the notion of happiness rather strange… It has never been a goal of mine; I just don’t think in those terms.

[...]

I try to give meaning to my existence through my work. That’s a simplified answer, but whether I’m happy or not really doesn’t count for much. I have always enjoyed my work. Maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word; I love making films, and it means a lot to me that I can work in this profession. I am well aware of the many aspiring filmmakers out there with good ideas who never find a foothold. At the age of fourteen, once I realized filmmaking was an uninvited duty for me, I had no choice but to push on with my projects. Cinema has given me everything, but has also taken everything from me.

(This calls to mind a line Susan Sontag wrote in her diary in March of 1979: “There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.”)

Herzog describes his ideation process in almost violent terms, framing the creative act as an inherently ambivalent one, oscillating between creation, destruction, and purging:

he problem isn’t coming up with ideas, it is how to contain the invasion. My ideas are like uninvited guests. They don’t knock on the door; they climb in through the windows like burglars who show up in the middle of the night and make a racket in the kitchen as they raid the fridge. I don’t sit and ponder which one I should deal with first. The one to be wrestled to the floor before all others is the one coming at me with the most vehemence. I have, over the years, developed methods to deal with the invaders as quickly and efficiently as possible, though the burglars never stop coming. You invite a handful of friends for dinner, but the door bursts open and a hundred people are pushing in. You might manage to get rid of them, but from around the corner another fifty appear almost immediately… Finishing a film is like having a great weight lifted from my shoulders. It’s relief, not necessarily happiness. But you relish dealing with these “burglars.” I am glad to be rid of them after making a film or writing a book. The ideas are uninvited guests, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t welcome

Channeling T.S. Eliot’s notion of the mystical quality of creativity and Bukowski’s assertion that true creative work “comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut,” Herzog — who, like Maira Kalman, sees walking as a creative catalyst — considers how his ideas arise:

My films come to me very much alive, like dreams, without explanation. I never think about what it all means. I think only about telling a story, and however illogical the images, I let them invade me. An idea comes to me, and then, over a period of time — perhaps while driving or walking — this blurred vision becomes clearer in my mind, pulling itself into focus.

[...]

When I write, I sit in front of the computer and pound the keys. I start at the beginning and write fast, leaving out anything that isn’t necessary, aiming at all times for the hard core of the narrative. I can’t write without that urgency. Something is wrong if it takes more than five days to finish a screenplay. A story created this way will always be full of life.

In that creative act, Herzog argues, lies the artist’s broader cultural responsibility to continually reinvent the established forms:

We need images in accordance with our civilization and innermost conditioning, which is why I appreciate any film that searches for novelty, no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells… The struggle to find unprocessed imagery is never-ending, but it’s our duty to dig like archaeologists and search our violated landscapes. We live in an era when established values are no longer valid, when prodigious discoveries are being made every year, when catastrophes of unbelievable proportions occur weekly. In ancient Greek the word “chaos” means “gaping void” or “yawning emptiness.” The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.

And yet being preoccupied with form can be limiting — it should emerge from the story organically rather than seek to shape it:

I don’t consciously reflect on aesthetics before making a film because, for me, the story always dictates such things. Of course, aesthetics do sometimes enter unconsciously through the back door, because whether we like it or not our preferences always somehow influence the decisions we make. If I were to think about my handwriting while writing an important letter, the words would become meaningless. When you write a passionate love letter and focus on making sure your longhand is as beautiful as possible, it isn’t going to be much of a love letter. But if you concentrate on the words and emotions, your particular style of longhand – which has nothing to do with the letter per se — will somehow seep in of its own accord. Aesthetics, if they even exist, are to be discovered only once a film has been completed.

Herzog doesn’t shy away from touching on the existential:

We can never know what truth really is. The best we can do is approximate… Truth can never be definitively captured or described, though the quest to find answers is what gives meaning to our existence.

In one of his most endearingly characteristic proclamations, Herzog tells Cronin why he has never taken vacation:

It would never occur to me… I work steadily and methodically, with great focus. There is never anything frantic about how I do my job; I’m no workaholic. A holiday is a necessity for someone whose work is an unchanged daily routine, but for me everything is constantly fresh and always new. I love what I do, and my life feels like one long vacation.

Above all, however, Herzog reveals himself as a rare master of prioritizing presence over productivity:

I work best under pressure, knee-deep in the mud. It helps me concentrate. The truth is I have never been guided by the kind of strict discipline I see in some people, those who get up at five in the morning and jog for an hour. My priorities are elsewhere. I will rearrange my entire day to have a solid meal with friends.

Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss captures Herzog’s singular spirit in the afterword:

The Werner Herzog I have come to know is not the wild man of his press clippings. He is a caring, thoughtful, playful and essentially gentle human being. Possessing a restless mind, with a fertile and creative imagination, he is a man interested in all aspects of the human experience. Self-taught, he is widely read and deeply knowledgeable. I like to think that one of the reasons we enjoy each other’s company is that we both share a deep excitement in the human experience.

Taken from here - http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/08/18 ... ign=buffer

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Artist Tips: Addison Groove Shares Five of His Production Secrets



Tony Williams' Addison Groove project blasted into the dance music arena in 2010 with the massive "Footcrab," and the Bristol-based producer hasn't really eased off the throttle since. Over the past few years, he's issued two albums, along with a flurry of singles and EPs, the most recent being last month's 'Turn Up the Silence' for 50Weapons. During that time, he's obviously been a key figure in marrying the rhythms of footwork to the bass-heavy traditions of UK dance music, and he's also become renowned for his mastery of the fabled Roland TR-808 drum machine. Curious to find out more about some of the methodology behind his furious work ethic, we've enlisted Williams for the latest edition of 'Artist Tips.'

Mixdowns
These should not take too long really. If you're spending a week to make a hi-hat and a snare sit [together], then I very much doubt an EQ or leveling will fix it. It's usually because the sample or sound you used just isn't working. I try to start with high-quality samples when I start a track; that way, I'm spending less time making them work if they need repairing in the final stages of a tune.

For drums, I'm using mostly an 808 in my tracks; thankfully, this sound pallet is so strong that it requires very little work when mixing down. I own the real thing, but I have it all sampled, so I don't really use the actual machine when making a tune these days. To get it sounding mighty, I record it through a Mackie desk and into a UAD Apollo through a preamp such as the API one. Once that's all in my computer, it makes my music-making time a lot shorter and my mixdowns easier because the original source is of high quality.

If you don't own an 808 or a UAD card and use Ableton but are struggling to make things sound good and loud, then maybe try using it in ReWire mode by using another DAW as a mixing desk. I use Logic and Ableton in ReWire because for me, I can get a decent sound. It's fairly easy to set up and when you do, just make it a template so your workflow is quick.

Quality Control
Imagine you made a tune that was so good, every DJ out there needed it to play this weekend. Now imagine that for the last year or three, you've been busy learning to make your beats, and when you made a tune, because of your impatient excitement (yes, I used to have this too, I understand), you've been sending the tunes to the right people, but they are simply getting pissed off with seeing your name in their inbox because you send out every thing you make. Now, that huge tune you made will be unlikely to get picked up because you have given yourself a reputation as a serial emailer.

It's important to control the quality of what you send out. If you have 10 amazing tracks, then they deserve to be heard, but the best way to get 10 tracks listened to is by sending out just one or two. With MP3s, it's so easy to get music around the world now, but it's also easier to not get noticed. Often I get sent demos and inside the ZIP file are 20 tracks. After 10, it all becomes a bit of a blur to listen to.

So my message here is: send out the best stuff you have. Even if you have a bunch of bangers, just send out a few. It will have a much higher strike rate of someone getting back to you with feedback or it being played in the clubs. I'm guilty of not giving feedback, but if the tunes are good, I'm sure I'd go out there and play them as much as I can if it's fitting in my DJ sets.

Hardware
Although not necessary, it's usually a good idea to own some kind of hardware equipment. Drum machines, mixing desks, guitar pedals, and just random sound generators give you a better idea of how music can work outside of the computer. One thing I like is to have my 808 and Juno always set up for a jam session. For some reason, having the freedom to move around when crafting something is quite liberating and you hear the music a little differently rather than being fixated on your monitor. Even a decent MIDI controller can give you this.

EQ
The most used processor in any of my tracks is the EQ. I'm forever trying to find the best one. But there are different ones for different purposes. Rather than explain in too much detail what my favorite ones do, below I'm going list my top three EQs to use.

1. UAD Pultec

Adds amazing color and character to any sound.

2. Waves Q4

Most transparent EQ I've heard in the box.

3. FabFilter Pro Q

Can be used as a regular filter as well as an EQ; very quick and this was my go-to before the Waves one replaced it.

Other Music
I spend 90% of my time listening to music that's not easily found. On a usual day when we listen to the radio, we hear trap, R&B, house, hip-hop, etc., but radio stations don't really dig much deeper unless you're listening to BBC Radio 6 or some obscure student station, which we all can't most of the time. I go through phases; one week I'll be listening to some Angolan stuff from the '60s, then the week after some jazz from '20s. I do that because I genuinely like that music, but it's also a way to not copy other people. I believe it's important to keep up with what's new, that's part of my job as a DJ and as a music lover, but if I did that all the time, I'd find myself copying other people's music. Take inspiration from other music and don't make exact copies. Through your influences and tastes, your music will have its own character.

Taken from here - http://www.xlr8r.com/gear/2014/09/artis ... oove-share

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The Bug: Sonic warfare



Aggression, masochism, intensity and tension—Ryan Keeling profiles the uncompromising UK artist.

Around the middle of last year, Kevin Martin, the UK artist known as The Bug, snapped his Achilles tendon playing basketball with his girlfriend. The injury left him in a wheelchair for two months. He told me this story during a live Exchange interview at Unsound festival in Kraków (the interview was never released due to issues with the recording). Around this time, Martin had left London after living there for over 20 years. His girlfriend, who is Japanese, could no longer get a visa after changes to the UK's immigration policy, and so they were forced to leave. Martin was also trying to finish Angels & Devils, the long-awaited follow up to London Zoo, and by now Ninja Tune were breathing down his neck. To further complicate things, Martin had recently found out that his girlfriend was pregnant. "This has been one of the most intense times of my life," he said.

When I met up with Martin again in Berlin last month, he'd gained some clarity on just how intense things can get. During the birth of his son a couple months back, his girlfriend lost two litres of blood and was in intensive care for two days. Then one week after he was born, their son was rushed back to hospital and had two life-threatening operations within a month. He was eventually released, but was back in hospital a week later due to a serious bacterial infection. The new family spent 12 days together in intensive care, sleeping among the machines. "It was a life-changing six weeks," Martin said.

In a sense, the preceding 12 months of Martin's life had become a metaphor for his music. He's been recording since the late '80s, playing in groups like Techno Animal, God and Ice, eventually starting projects like The Bug and King Midas Sound, and producing everything from noise to dub. Martin's music is rarely explicitly conceptual, but on a deeper level it deals with eternal themes—love and loss, life and death. "When I made the decision to concentrate totally on music it wasn't a decision, it wasn't really a choice," he said. "I didn't have anything else I could fall back on: I didn't have rich parents, I dropped out of college. It was almost out of terror I made music, and to try and use music as a catalyst to somehow understand or explain to me the fucked-up nature of the world we live in."



When he was young, Martin had two experiences that shaped his musical identity. He grew up in Weymouth, a small seaside town on the south coast of England, and he frequently travelled to London to see gigs. One time, he and a friend hitchhiked into the city and wound up seeing the experimental rock band Swans, who at the time they knew nothing about. "It mentioned some sadomasochistic, hurtful experience and we were like, 'Wow, that sounds different,'" Martin said. "I think if I remember rightly I was deaf in one ear for a week afterwards, and I'd just never seen a show like that. I think they had a group of bodybuilders as their support act. It was the most relentless experience I'd had, and just seeing as many people exit the venue as came in was pretty intriguing."

The other came later, after Martin had moved to London. He went to a reggae soundclash between a soundsystem run by Iration Steppas and another system run by The Disciples called Boomshakalak. "It was a small room with a huge soundsystem at one side and another one facing it at the other," he recalled. "There was no lighting, there was no stage, there was a lightbulb hanging on top of the mixing desk at either end, and they just proceeded to declare war on each other. Every song became more and more intense, every mix became more and more intense, and it just literally felt like my ears were going to explode. It felt like my throat was being pushed into the back of my neck. And I loved it."

This idea of musical provocation can be traced through all of Martin's work, right up to his latest album. Angels & Devils is, loosely speaking, a concept record. It takes the template he established on London Zoo and stretches it at either end—more aggressive on one side, and deeper on the other. The softer "Angels" half, which opens the record, is a wash of hazy downtempo tracks; the much tougher "Devils" half includes some of the most belligerent music Martin has ever recorded.

"The point where polar opposites meet" has always been of interest to Martin. He links the idea behind Angels & Devils back to the bible and man's unending struggle with positive and negative impulses. The record is also a reflection of how he listens to music. On the one hand, he wants to go to a club and get "annihilated" by the "most insane" soundsystem; on the other, he wants the quiet zone, a place in his everyday life within his own headspace. The challenge with the album was to see if these things could exist in the same place.

Before Martin had even written a note of Angels & Devils, he had to overcome an overpowering urge to rip up the blueprint of the last Bug album and start again. When it was released in 2008, London Zoo became one of Martin's most successful records. The album, his third as The Bug, was critically acclaimed, receiving a Best New Music stamp from Pitchfork, a 5/5 from UK broadsheet The Observer, and a 9/10 from Drowned In Sound (among countless other glowing reviews). Its standout tracks, "Skeng" and "Poison Dart," got over a million plays each on YouTube. But Martin was torn. He was grateful for the chance to spread his message, but he also thought he was being creatively pigeonholed, lumped in with a dubstep scene he had nothing to do with, and forced to operate at a level within the music industry he was uncomfortable with. Martin had always thought he was destined to eke out a living in the underground. In the years following London Zoo, he distanced himself from the album and the accolades that came with it.



But eventually, after years of soul searching, he decided that completely changing course was a bad idea. "It was within the last couple of years," Martin said. "Basically I thought, 'Well that's unfair on myself, and on the people who have actually believed in me and shown support for what I do.' I think it's very easy to be very tangential and to be sort of arrogant—'You know what? Fuck off'—and just turn the tables totally."

In fact, Martin had already started a project to combat the response to London Zoo. King Midas Sound, as he explained to me last year, was his attempt to make an album that was "so melancholy it would almost reduce you to tears." He said that the media would always try to reduce an artist to a singular entity—in the case of The Bug, "agro ragga shit"—and that King Midas Sound, with its deeply melancholic take on dub and lovers rock, was his reaction to this. "I was being increasingly hustled into a corner," he said, "and whenever I feel I am being pushed into a corner I just lash out. Not in a violent way, just in a way so I can find a new direction."

King Midas Sound was originally a duo with Roger Robinson, a vocalist with a distinctive, buttery flow who Martin had worked with on Techno Animal. They wrote about two thirds of what would become the album Waiting For You… before hitting a creative brick wall. Martin proposed they bring Kiki Hitomi, a vocalist he had recently befriended, on board. Robinson strongly disagreed and threatened to leave the band, saying he could carry the album by himself. Martin eventually got his way, and Hitomi ended up playing what Martin describes as a "very crucial role" in King Midas Sound. The dispute set the tone for a tumultuous working dynamic within the group.

"For me it's been an incredible trip with King Midas Sound," said Martin. "Because we argue like hell, we are three very distinct personalities, but luckily we all respect each other very much. There is a fine line between arguing for ego's sake and arguing in a constructive manner, and I feel very fortunate to work with both of them, because I have real respect for both of them as artists."

In his "enthusiasm, passion and positive energy," Martin likens Robinson to Justin Broadrick, his most frequent collaborator. Although Martin and Broadrick haven't worked together for a number of years, during the '90s they were prolific. Techno Animal, a channel for the pair's electronic experiments, became their main collaboration, releasing around five albums in ten years. In addition to various other short-lived projects, they also recorded together as part of God. (Broadrick is a founding member of Godflesh, the long-running industrial metal band who recently returned after a 13-year hiatus.) In a recent interview with FACT, Martin said that he "wouldn't be producing if it wasn't for Justin… I think I recognise in him the same need for the shock of the new, the same need to reinvent yourself to keep yourself interested, and just that passionate urge to connect with sound, and to need sound as a catalyst to navigate this fucked up world."



In November 2009, King Midas Sound played their first gig together at London's Corsica Studios. Waiting For You…, their debut album, which was released on Hyperdub, was being well received, and they had offers to perform it live. They decided to play a faithful reproduction of the record, which went down extremely well with the crowd. But the group themselves hated it, and fought bitterly in the dressing room after the show. Kode9 and Spaceape were also on the bill that night, and the energy and edginess of their performance sparked something in Martin.

King Midas Sound were booked to play Mutek festival in Montreal the following year, and by that point the band had decided to try and shake things up. Martin didn't specify exactly what they did that day, but apparently half the audience (and the organisers) hated the show, and half loved it. They unanimously agreed that they'd found their new direction. At Unsound, I saw how powerful (and potentially divisive) the group's live show could be. Where King Midas Sound's recorded music is based on smooth but portentous atmospheres and a deep sense of melancholy, in their live performances they go on the attack. Noise and bass become central to their sound. Melodic and lyrical content of tracks like "Lost" and "Outta Space" were trace element in the chaos, while Robinson's usually gentle delivery is inverted. The extreme disconnect between King Midas Sound's records and live shows makes their performances all the more potent—and all the more frustrating for those who come expecting serene tones.

In order to deliver this sonic onslaught, Martin insists on strict standards from the venues he plays. The sound and lighting must meet a set of non-negotiable criteria, and he has cancelled shows before (one time in London, on the day of the gig) when aspects of the production have not been up to scratch. At Unsound, the set was delayed by around 30 minutes as Martin tried to ascertain why the strobes on his tech rider were not on stage. "I have a very bad reputation," Martin said. "You are perceived to be difficult if you stick to your guns and if you don't just accept the low con de nom, and you are honest with people. We want an experience even more so now that music isn't selling, so the live arena has become a critical battle as far as I see it. As far as I'm concerned my perfectionism, or attempted perfectionism, in what we are trying to do live isn't just selfish ego, it's as much—more, actually—about me wanting to give an audience the best possible scenario, and to give them the most intense experience I can possibly deliver."

"Kevin Martin is the loveliest and most pleasantly uncompromising bastard to work with," said Jeff Waye, A&R at Ninja Tune, via email. "He's secure in his ideas and vision, but always open to suggestions for pushing it all further and conceptualising how to present The Bug to the public. That we both think Swans are one of the most important bands in the history of music is telling for the shared common-ground love of beautiful brutality and mutual respect from which we share ideas."



Martin will return to Unsound next month with a revised show that, like the album itself, will stretch the parameters of The Bug's live sound. It will also feature an extensive cast of vocalists—copeland, Flowdan, Liz Harris, Manga, Miss Red—who all appeared on Angels & Devils. Martin was particularly pleased with the guests he secured for the album. He said no one had to be paid for his or her time because everyone he approached already believed in his work, something he described as "humbling, flattering and shocking." Martin told me that he loves recording with vocalists and MCs. He tends to write with someone in mind, and then send that person the track in the hope that they'll work with him.

On Angels & Devils this tactic yielded impressive results. The album opens with Liz Harris (AKA Grouper) drifting through "Void" with the type of delivery that makes her voice feel like an instrumental, rather than vocal, component. (Martin was particularly blown away by Harris's willingness to work with him; she told him she'd been playing "Skeng" to her mom just a few weeks before he approached her.) Elsewhere, Death Grips' MC Ride, copeland (formerly of Hype Williams) and Warp artist Gonjasufi all slip seamlessly into Martin's sound world. There are also appearances from Flowdan and Warrior Queen, artists Martin has collaborated with in the past with considerable success—they were the voices of "Skeng" and "Poison Dart" respectively.

Perhaps the biggest challenge Martin faces in the coming months is striking a balance between touring the new album and his responsibilities back at home. "I'd spent my life running away from children," he told me in Berlin. "It was just with my present partner, neither of us had planned it, absolutely not, but both of us just smiled and laughed when we looked at the pregnancy test, and it made sense for the first time in my life.

"I'll be honest with you," he went on, "the irony is that most people when they meet me, if they hear my music they think I'm just going to be this miserable fucker—you know, full stop. I am pretty intense in my approach to music, and what I expect from it and what I try to achieve with it. So therefore in the music industry, most of the time you are expected to just say yes and follow whichever line is in vogue at that particular time, and that's never me. And for me, it's a case of having to question now, as a father, all those things that I kicked against, seeing if any of them are now valid, which lines I now have to go down, and obviously you very much start thinking not as 'I' but as 'we.'"

Back in 2012, Martin started a 7-inch series called Acid Ragga, and in the coming months he hopes to get a live version of the project off the ground. He believes that the style, which, as the name suggests, melds ragga vocals with the Roland 303, is ripe for exploration. He also hopes to use his own soundsystem, a hefty reggae rig that he's had in storage for a number of years, for the shows. There are also plans to release music from the series as a compilation. Martin says that King Midas Sound will return in the near future, but with a different direction ("we may piss some people off in the process, but that's cool"). They plan to record a series of collaborations called The King Midas Sound Tape Archive, in which they work with instrumentalists from various areas, take their material, and put a King Midas Sound spin on it with dubs and vocals.

Martin is now in his third decade of making music, but he doesn't view maintaining an interest in his art as a challenge. In any case, he says there's enough going on outside of music to his fuel creativity. "It's like, the fire isn't just from making music, it's how you are inspired by your surroundings or despair at the global shifts," he said at the end of our conversation in Berlin. "Of course, anyone that's passionate about life, there's got to still be fire—what's the alternative? For me it's passion that's at the core, and I'm still every bit as passionate now as I've always been, and more, I think. It's never ceased—anyone that comes to my shows or listens to my records is obviously aware of that, too. I'm not jaded in any way, otherwise I'd give up as there's just no point."

When I stopped the tape, Martin asked me what I'd been listening to recently. It was the first time I could remember an artist I'd interviewed doing so.

Taken from here - http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?2146