wAgAwAgA
It was back in May of 2008 that we first became acquainted with wAgAwAgA’s music. At a Planet Mu night at our favourite haunt - Corsica Studios of course - Boxcutter dropped a slice of rolling, Jungle-Dubstep badness the likes of which we’d never heard before. The dancefloor went off, prompting a full rewind and some serious collective skanking. It took us something like 6 months to identify the track’s producer and hunt down the rest of his music, but we’ve not let go of him since.
Since that fateful night, wAgA’s career has taken a meandering path. After an EP release on Subeena’s now-defunct Imminent (formerly Immigrant) imprint in late 2008 people began to take note, stumbling across the excellent Mrepsican LP on Acroplane Recordings. Since then, wAgA’s been all over the UK and abroad - having recently returned from a long sojourn in India - and has continued to add to his digital catalogue, with a further two LPs on Acroplane and a number of free zip files distributed through his myspace.
Favourable comparisons put him up there with Aphex Twin and Venetian Snares in the ‘maverick genius’ stakes; his impeccable productions run the gamut from tongue-in-cheek Breakcore to deep, World Music-inspired ambience - taking in a healthy dose of juddering 2-step on the way - but never cease to bear his inimitable sonic watermark. If it’s virtuosic breaks-processing and earth-quaking bass you’re after, wAgA’s your man.
In conjunction with his mix for the first Mothers Against Noise podcast - a pulsating digi-dub affair which we strongly recommend you check out here. - Angus Second Line met up with the man himself in London, shortly before a flight out to L.A. for his debut U.S. performance. Read on for enlightenment, wAgA style...
ASL: How did you start making music?
W: I met some people when I went to college, a group of musicians. And we started going to a mate’s house every evening after college, everyone packed into a room smoking bongs, and he had a crappy computer with Fruityloops on it. The first time I used it I stayed up all night doing this little tune, and woke my friend up in the morning! That was with the really old Fruityloops, the 14 meg download, version 3.5.6...back in the day!
So it was love at first sight?
Yeah, sure. The same group of people did loads of stuff on Music 2000 as well. I remember going to a party - and usually these parties were really shit - but this one was low-key, not much going on, and in one of the rooms everyone was crowded round Music 2000 writing a little tune. And I was just really impressed that people would do that! I was like, ‘I want to be able to do this’. Armoured Core, that’s the original crew!
Armoured Core?
Yeah it was Will White, Agent Mancuso [laughs], [incomprehensible name]. Who else....Witto Darshi, Expairofmentalists...everyone had names of Star Trek characters and stuff like that, and they made this little compilation where they burnt all these Music 2000 tunes onto a CD. And they were from deepest darkest Hertfordshire, when a UFO had landed and teleported in a crew of musicians called the Armoured Core...
A rural-futurist back-story!
[laughs] Yeah, it’s still kicking along, we’re going to kick it off again eventually; it’s one of those little jokey dreams where nobody’s put any effort into sorting it out.
Are those guys still making music now?
Yeah, Pete’s still doing tunes; he’s had tonnes of names - Littledoll, Agent Mancuso, loads of others. And Dave is still writing as Techdiff.
You’ve been making tunes for a while, but at what point did it become what it is now? Was there a moment when you suddenly thought ‘ah, this is what I want to do’?
No. Well...[thinks]. Nah, I just kept doing it [laughs]. I was so surprised that I could do it, and enjoyed listening to the tunes so much - and because all of us were writing tunes, you’d come to town with a new tune, play them to each other, then go home again and smoke more bongs and write more tunes, and we just kept doing that; definitely with the intention for it to get to a good level, but i didn’t realise it’d take so long to even get to where I am now. But it’s definitely getting there slowly.
I wanted to ask you about your influences...
[laughs] It should be obvious I would’ve thought!
Well, maybe! But when you sit down at the computer to make a tune, what are your reference points - are there any particular producers, sounds or genres?
I won’t say any specific names, but all the Warp crew, for sure; it was their tunes that got me back into listening to dance music after thinking it was all shit. Because you know when you first come across dance music, and you don’t really hear anything except club Trance compilations, and they’re not very good...
And jump-up Drum’n’Bass?
Well no, not even that, just like - I remember really getting into a Happy Hardcore thing [laughs] - or trying to convince myself that I was because I thought it was cool or something. And I bought this Happy Hardcore compilation, and I thought it was all shit - except there was one track at the end that I really liked, which had an Amen break on it. And it was only ages afterwards that I realised it was an Amen, and that was obviously why I liked it!
So Warp was a big influence?
Yeah, definitely. And for other styles of music: I was well into Radiohead and that kind of thing for a time, just for the quality of the tunes; I tried learning guitar but couldn’t. And then obviously as soon as you get into electronic music your tastes change, you move away from guitars and kind of go through phases. Also, I had a really good jazz compilation when I was a kid; Duke Ellington, Louis armstrong and things like that.
You can definitely hear that music as a sample source in your tunes.
Yeah, I just really like it! There was a time - when I ran out of ideas and didn’t have any creative burst to make melodies or anything - when I just downloaded big band music and took little bits and pieces and put breaks to it.
Ah, like Sleepwalker, from Jinjanoon Bus?
Yeah, exactly. There’s another track like that as well which i didn’t put on there, which I kinda wish I had but it’s too long; it’s like 10 minutes of big band jungle chop-up! And I don’t really know what to do with it now, because it fits with all the other tunes [on Jinjanoon], but I wanted to keep that album short, and if I’d put that tune on there it would almost have been too comedy...
Dubstep definitely has its mark on your music. Would you say you are, or were, a big Dubstep head?
No, not at all. I remember Dave Techdiff talking about it, and other friends mentioning it, and all I knew of it was triplets; ‘boom boom boom bap’ [taps out a DMZ-esque kick-snare rhythm]. And my friend asked me to make a CD with some tunes that were good for driving at night. So I put that together, and just before I was burning the CD I thought I’d make a stupid intro for it. So I loaded up the voice thingy on fruity loops and said ‘this is a CD especially for Steve, blah blah,’ and made a quick little track. And that was the first Dubstep tune I wrote, which turned out to be Huautla [from the Goodbye Greens EP]. That’s easily the most heavy, dancefloor-ey, solid one I’ve done - I haven’t really matched it after that, and that was completely by accident anyway!
After that it was just a case of trying to write good bass. I was playing gigs for a while where the tunes didn’t seem to grab people at all; there was something missing. I only realised after 3 or 4 years that it was because I didn’t write any proper basslines; I’ve got loads of these old tunes which are densely melodic in the top end and sound really nice, but they don’t work as dancefloor tunes because they haven’t got any bass at all, apart from maybe a weak kick drum. So after fluking it with Huautla, I decided to concentrate on doing this, and work out what the fuck was going on with bass.
So that led you into Dubstep?
Well, because Huautla came out so well, and I’d heard Dubstep kind of kicking around, I decided to keep doing what I’d been doing before, keeping the Warp flag flying with the trippiness and stuff, and with breakbeats - Jungle breaks - but with lots of bass as well.
I wanted to ask you about your breaks: they’re often highly intricate and detailed, but at sub-Jungle tempos - 120-140bpm. Personally I don’t know of any precedents for that. So where does that approach come from; did it seem natural to you?
Yeah, I don’t know why that is. I did 120bpm stuff for ages; loads of twee, cheeky Acid with square beats. That was to get warmed up again after a long time away from writing tunes. And then - well, shopping through drum samples is a pain in the arse, so if you use breaks everything’s kind of unified by that. And they’re also public access, so they come with all of the history of their use; they give a tune a certain tone and sound. I tried writing that 120 stuff and decided it was too slow, so went to 180 and 160, and nothing really seemed to come of it; i thought that doing some good solid Jungle would get me some gigs and spark things up, but because I didn’t do any self-promotion, it just obviously went nowhere, and stayed in my headphones.
So you dropped tempo?
[laughs] yeah! Also, you can’t swing when it’s going too fast. You can’t shuffle or put in that kind of syncopation, so it has to be a little bit slow, otherwise there are certain kind of beats you can’t do. Although I’ve been getting even slower lately, going down and down all the way to 80bpm; and then you can double it back up again to 160.
That approach has had a big influence on us and the tunes we produce. Particularly Duskky and Hurtdeer; they both produced Dubstep for a while, and then steadily got slower, more breaks-focussed.
I think also, if you keep trying to write in the same genre for too long, you end up almost censoring your creativity because you’re making sure you’re sticking to something; or you just become so mechanical about the process that there’s no soul to your tunes.
You don’t seem to have a base of operations - certainly in the last couple of years, you’ve been all over the UK and abroad. Do you think that rootlessness - not having a scene or a home town - has an effect on your music?
Not having time is more the problem; and not having speakers and a place to write. That’s what I’m really struggling with. And that’s been a problem for a while; I moved to Brighton a couple of years ago with the express intent of getting shit done, but just got so down to work, being busy and whatever else; and playing bass music in a terraced street just pissed people off. I didn’t really write anything for that whole time, definitely not as much as I could or should have done.
Particularly compared to the time before that; because all the stuff on Mrepsican was taken from a year’s worth of writing, from, I don’t know, maybe 2006-2007 - I can’t really remember! But it was all from more or less 1 year. It was supposed to be an EP to begin with, but then...
It just grew?
Well yeah, I put Pitjantatjara and maybe Nagoya - some of the more World music-ey stuff - into my myspace player for a few days, and someone gave me a shout and asked if I was going to put them on the LP. And then I thought - oh actually that’s quite a good idea, just because it means people will hear a broader mix of stuff. Otherwise it would have all been a Breakbeat-ey, Jungle-Dubstep sort of thing. I quite like the idea of doing that, sneaking in tracks people definitely wouldn’t hear otherwise.
When you’re in an urban place - Brighton, London, wherever - what kind of nights do you tend to go to?
I don’t really go out much actually! I can’t remember the last one I went to. [thinks] Nah, I’ve never really been a going out much type of person. I have a blowout every now and then...I suppose it’s nice to go to a Breakcore night once in a while and scream and shout and stomp around! [Laughs]. I went to some funny ones at the Volks. And I went to a Super Dub Pressure night down in Brighton, that was really good, just so fucking loud!
But you’re not a regular club-goer?
No, not regular. I remember going to one Dubstep night and I was really into it for the first hour or two, and then as the night progressed, it gradually went away from danceable spaciousness, into more sort of driving bass, bassline-bassline-bassline; and there wasn’t really any gap in the beats to dance around nicely. I just got bored by about 4 o’ clock. I think that seems to happen a lot - but it’s kind of natural, as everyone gets more and more fucked, all they want to hear by the end of the night is blasting bass.
You mentioned earlier how you’re concerned with getting the bass right for the club. Are your tunes predominantly focussed on the dancefloor?
They’re all intended to be played as loudly as possible, that’s for sure. And I like to dance around in my chair while I’m making them if I’ve got the space! So they’re definitely to be danced to, but it’s a fine line between that and making it too tuneful, not having enough beat and dance in there.
So what are you listening to at the moment? Any artists you’re particularly feeling?
[thinks] Terrence Mckenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham!
I don’t know any of those names...
[laughs] look ‘em up! And Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, I downloaded a torrent of his tunes. He’s a Pakistani singer, really really cool, righteous music. Howlin’ Wolf. Also, I met a guy in India who gave me a load of really great Reggae vinyl recordings - big up Albert! That was really nice, kind of tuneful dub and cheesy electro-dub, with tin-pot sounds, but it still has that goodness because it’s Reggae, they can pull it off.
Not much UK club music then?
No, not at all. I usually listen to a lot of my own tunes; that’s one of the main reasons to write them, is to have something to listen to. But I haven’t even been doing that much recently either.
Do you find your inspiration is generally external to dance music?
Yeah I think so. For a while I got really strict about it, not listening to what anyone else was doing, so I wouldn’t get influence from it - but that’s kind of a bit ridiculous! But I don’t really listen to that much music actually - just little bits and pieces when I’m on the move or whatever. But when I’m at home, and I’ve got access to my computer and some speakers, if I start listening to electronic music I just think ‘I should be writing some tunes!’ so I just end up doing that instead.
I wanted to ask a more specific question, about how you structure your tunes; often they’re quite long, and they go through changes; the beginning may be very different to the end, and you don’t seem to feel the need to reference back or repeat sections...
Well I never really learned any verse-chorus style structuring. Generally speaking, the first part of the tune is the first few minutes of sitting down and writing, and the reason it doesn’t drop until quite a way in is because it takes me a while to get the idea warmed up. And then once I’m settled into the idea, I just want to keep that going, because it’s a fairly infrequent thing to actually write a tune. And smoking as well - you need a fairly decent length track to smoke to! You know - back to the beginning, smoke and review what’s been done.
Over time I’ve kind of cared less and less about the structure, and just let things happen naturally and flow through; when it needs to change it needs to change. But I still forget basic things, like where to bring the bass in.
But do you think of those things as rules you have to follow?
I don’t think it really matters actually; you’ll know when you hear the tune if it’s right or not. But yeah, a lot of my tunes could be broken into lots of chunks and mixed together - because they just go from one thing to another. I think that definitely comes from ages of writing really long tunes where nothing much happened. That was the criticism people gave me for a long long time; ‘I like it, but as soon as I’ve heard the intro I know what’s gonna happen for the rest of the tune’. And I struggled with that for a very long time.
In the music you write now, it seems to be almost the opposite - so much happens, so much detail is crammed into each bar.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that they don’t feel that long, even if you look at the clock and it’s like 11 minutes long or something like that; they’re all just one smoke!
That’s a unit of time in production language...
Yeah definitely!
You seem to have been releasing a lot of your older stuff recently; ph-3.5.6 and Chops’n’Wobbles both as free releases, for example.
Well Chops’n’Wobbles is basically a few of the Dubstep/Dub tunes I’ve had that I’ve been sat on for ages. I did the Wolf tune, and straight afterwards did 382.Moodpreset, but didn’t know what to do with them, and they sat on my harddrive for a year. Then while I was away it seemed really silly to be holding stuff back when I’ve still got tonnes of old tunes. There are some nice old ones that need to get out there, but the easiest and only way to do it seems to be to put them up online for free, so people can just get at them; you don’t have release dates, and you don’t have to ask anyone about it, you can just whack a zip file up online and there you go!
This clearing of the back catalogue - is it because there are other releases coming up?
No, it’s more so I can move on myself, or something like that. I’ve got loads of these tunes that I’ve been listening to for the last few years, and I want them all to be out and about so other people can listen to them too. But I don’t really think they should be shrewdly assessed or paid for or anything like that; they just need to be there for people to listen to. And then I can get on with doing something decent and new!
At the moment I’m gathering together a load of stuff I’ve been thinking about doing. Me and Paul Acroplane have been talking about a 5-track Acid release. There’s this nice time-shift thing I’ve been doing - I can’t describe it, but it’s a way of changing the tempo without changing the tempo, through using quantise...it sort of scrabbles the beat around. There’s 2 or 3 tunes that do that, that are all big acid synths and bass; I need to get 5 or so of them together to put up. And then Paul wants to do Mrepsican as a paid re-release with Wav and Flac downloads, and have another tune on there so it’s not just the same thing again; it doesn’t feel quite right to just put out the same thing from 2 years ago. I also don’t really like the idea that it’s no longer going to be available for free - which is something you can’t really get around!
Finally, could you talk about the mix you’re going to put together for us. What’s the thinking behind it?
I’ve got a drum machine that I’ve been writing some 130bpm dub tunes on, up into blasting bass kicks and some other stuff. I played a gig up in Manchester using that and a sampler and that came off really nice, so that’s what I’m trying to do for live stuff now. For the podcast I’m going to record some of that - rather than just doing a digital laptop mix of tunes people have already heard - but I don’t want to solidify the form of it too much, so people don’t have too many expectations of what to hear when they see me play.
Keep up to date with wAgA and bag lots of free downloadable goodies on his Myspace.
Check out Mothers Against Noise Podcast 01, featuring wAgA’s mix alongside a Jungle mix from Mothers resident Tufrs, here.
And don’t forget to keep an eye out for more MAN podcasts and interviews in the coming months!
Second Line - 7 July 2010
Stormfield
Head of Combat Recordings and a producer, remixer and DJ in his own right, Stormfield has been making waves in the underground since the early 2000s. Combat's take on dark, bass-heavy 2-step draws on Electro, Dubstep, Techno and Garage in a constantly evolving series of hybrids, with releases featuring the likes of Scorn, King Cannibal, Point B and Cursor Miner. Stormfield DJs regularly in the UK and abroad, and hosts the monthly Riddim'n'Bruise show on Sub.fm.
Angus Second Line caught up with him in the run up to his appearance at Mothers Against Noise 3 on 25th March - where he'll be presenting the fledgling Combat AV project alongside VJ Duodroume - to talk about his numerous musical activities, what we can expect on the night, and visions of the apocalypse...
ASL: What motivated you to start up Combat?
SF: Well years ago I used to help out with this other label called Fuel records, which had artists like Tipper and Si Begg, and at one point Radioactive Man. It wasn't a major role; just helping them out on the radio shows and keeping the flag flying during times when the releases were few and far between. Through the course of that, a few demos had piled up which never got released by the label boss for whatever reason.
As things go, in 2004 I had a bit of a shit time with personal life, the death of someone close among various other things, so it felt right to set up Combat as a way of focusing and getting stress out. There was already a bunch of tracks I liked which fit the mood at the time; Every 7th Bullet by ScanOne - 4 tunes which had sat on the hard drive for ages - became the first release. The dark, introspective tracks kinda set the mood for all the label's output. And yeah we've just sort of rolled along haphazardly from then until the present day!
The label's history straddles the Dubstep explosion. How, for you, has that changed the musical landscape?
Quite a lot really. We started off in 2004, at the tail end of this really powerful surge of electro and glitchy electronica - so called IDM stuff; there were people like Outside Recordings, ADJ, Dexorcist, Cultek, Andrea Parker and Tipper, who were mixing a lot of really mad abstract electronic music with their Electro sets and making it work really well on the dancefloor. When all that was tailed off, [labelmate] Blackmass Plastics had started dragging me down to FWD, saying 'check this out', and there was lots of interesting music on Rinse FM. I think Rephlex's ‘Grime’ compilations also helped a lot as well; they brought a lot of electronic heads across.
I liked the energy and the ferocity of Dubstep, though I wasn’t so much into the sometimes cheesy use of samples, hence the sound didn't sit entirely comfortably with me; but I was happy to splice the tracks up, get the beats and the bass out and chop those up for DJing.
Around 2005/6, I happened to share a flat in Brixton with Jamie from Vex'd, and checked out a few DMZs back when it was at 3rd Base; just a dark blue light and heads nodding in the dark, a respectful vibe. There were a few really Electro-sounding Dubstep tracks out at that time, like Ruffage by Loefah - really minimal, just a kick, cracking snare and huge, clean bass (I still think of it as more of an Electro track than anything else), and that was the point when I started to get into it properly. And the Loefah remix of ‘I’ by Skream which still got played in a set in Berlin last Friday.
Then Dubstep Wars happened on Mary Anne's show which really exploded the whole thing worldwide. Listening back you can still feel the freshness and energy of the tunes.
And where does Combat rest now in relation to Dubstep?
In terms of output, we still (unintentionally) overlap with the genre from time to time with certain releases, like Komonazmuk and Whiteboi - especially Komonazmuk's King Cannibal remix, and the forthcoming Machine Code tracks. There's also the Scorn 12"s which are just purely Scorn, his sound is a world and genre unto his own, although it gets lumped in with Dubstep from time to time.
Dubstep as a scene... well personally I've kind of avoided scenes for the past 2 years now; tending instead to turn up and play a set, then disappear again. Excessive elbowing/shoutiness reminds me of why I went off Drum'n'Bass years ago. Although I might pop out to a rave if friends are playing somewhere, usually at more open-minded nights that's not just about wobbles. I tend to stay in, late nights to work on AV stuff, so listening-wise it's gotten me back to a lot of the older, electronic influences like Gescom, Autechre, Brothomstates - that kind of thing. Listening to sounds in a dark room, away from hype which sometimes tries to convince you that something shit is actually good.
Combat's output features a lot of remixes. Is that a conscious creative decision?
It's a way to bring different label artists together a lot more strongly. ScanOne, Blackmass and myself are all DJs as well, so the more weird and wonderful versions of something you have the better - as long as the tracks are good!
Also I think certain artists have certain strengths and it's nice to bring different strengths together. For example, one guy might be really good at making the textures of sound, while another might be more focussed on stuff that moves the dancefloor; so you give him the parts and don't let him listen to the original track, and he comes out with something completely different. The Point B album remixes sound nothing like the original tracks. Likewise the Scorn 12"s have spawned some really interesting and different takes on Mick's music.
I for one get my Combat stuff digitally. How do you view the relationship between digital and vinyl in your releases?
It's a tricky one I think. Certain styles of music seem to place a very high premium on the physical format - like Dubstep, for example, or the diehard old skool Electro heads. Whereas within, say, Electronica, you'll tend to find that it's harder to sell records because the fans will generally go for digital or will find the tracks in some other way - like torrents. Then again, I was out in Asia a couple years ago and almost everyone there was using Serato.
I think that some labels (and probably distros) feel they're in this crossroads period right now, whereby vinyl is a pain in the arse to do, financially and time-wise, but a digital release doesn't feel "special" enough yet - anybody can upload a track and call it a release. And even if an artist plays off a laptop/hardware live, if you ask them what format they would like their stuff released in they'll usually want it on vinyl first.
What's coming up on the Combat release schedule?
There's several remixes of the Scorn 'Gravel Bed' 12", which could have come out earlier but still haven't; they'll come out as three 12"s. A load of Point B remixes have come in as well, by Cloaks, Cursor Miner, Dead Sound, Boxcutter, Blackmass, Kelpe and Noiz. And there's a new duo who've joined the clan - Machine Code (Current Value and Dean Rodell working together). There'll be a digital EP from them in the next couple of months and then a vinyl version later on in the year. Soundwise it reminds me a lot of Ital Tek, melodic and techy but much harder; merciless basically!
Any other plans for the label? Any long term goals?
Not really, just keep plugging away. It's been quite haphazard up 'til now; we're lucky enough that nice music keeps coming in. Financially it's never been easy, but it's nice that some of the artists are getting more gigs and exposure now. King Cannibal went on to Ninja Tune and he's sharing the stage with Plaid in London this weekend! I'm always quite surprised to hear people sending in demos saying 'we've listened to your radio show'; or when you get people sending unexpected emails, that's quite nice; you get a sense that someone gives a shit (other than those people blagging for free tunes). But I do wanna push the AV stuff more, it's interesting and has loads of room to grow.
I wanted to talk about the radio show actually - when did you move to Sub.FM?
In November 2008 I think. We were on Ill FM before that, and although they've got a really nice friendly studio, I thought there could be a lot more control over the output if we could do it from where we lived, which is what we do now; you can set everything up, then when it's time you just log on and do it. And as soon as the show's finished you can fall back into bed, it's nice! Sub FM's pretty diverse at the moment which is nice, it'll outlive whatever flavor-of-the-month genres journalists decide to invent next.
Do you see the show mainly as a platform for the label or do you have a wider agenda?
Well firstly, it's useful for playing stuff out, and to announce new releases and things. But also to connect the label's tracks with other tracks that are influences or that we like. With the release rate being so slow, it's easy for people to get the wrong impression that the record that's just come out is the only thing we ever listen to; that very record might have sat on the hard-drive for a couple of years because there was no money to release it. It's nice to play stuff that we're into, or have been influenced by, to show the connection. There's also new artists that I like but haven't the means to release their stuff; the radio show is a way of helping boost awareness of their tunes which hopefully helps in some way.
The show is good fun as well; last week Monster X performed live in the studio and we attempted to interview him, though his voice got so mangled in Reaktor effects we ended up making lots of mad random noises instead. One listener said it ‘did his head in’ which could be taken as a compliment. Yardcore, Rag & Bone, Starkey and Kiev Bass do regular shows too, and my flatmate Subeena.
What else have you been listening to recently?
The new Phoenecia and Autechre albums. And the Elemental album which is deeeeeep. Also while in Berlin I picked up the forthcoming Roel Funcken album which is next-level mad tech-influenced dubstep, gonna drop it on Sub FM for sure. Some Dubs from Threnody, Noiz, DeadSound. Also, a lot of old abstract electronic stuff - because i do this other soundscapey AV project outside of Combat as well. There's this band called Gridlock - not the Drum'n'Bass gridlock - they're an IDM band, for want of a better word. Their sound is really beautiful pads and then incredibly violent distortion; very Zan Lyons actually. They split up in 05/06, but i still listen back to get inspiration. I've got a lot of new bits from Blackmass Plastics too - he's a proper engine for music, he just keeps churning stuff out!
I thought we could talk a bit about your production. Do you have any particular influences or points of reference?
That's hard to say; I've tried doing tracks to a format before and they end up just being too clinical, too predictable. Whereas there's other times - like the track ‘Inner Silence, Outer Violence’ - I spent a whole afternoon listening to Scorn in the park, completely trolleyed on mushrooms - visions of the apocalypse and all that - then came back and did a track!
But production-wise I've not really done all that much in the past couple of years.
Is that because you prioritise the label or DJing over making music?
No, It's mainly because I've simply not been inspired. I mean, there's enough good music out there to keep me wanting to release stuff and to DJ, but I haven't really heard anything that makes me go ‘yeah let's go make something'.
I did a couple of remixes last year; the first on this label based out in Singapore called Qilin Records; the artist name is Izaak Stern. The request came around the time when Gaza was being smashed to pieces by Israel in 2009, hence the title of the remix. The other remix was for this Techno producer called Gunjack; a remix of his track ‘Diablo’, which will come out on his own label Consume. Dirty 303 and hard Techno-step vibes!
So do you find it takes a remix project to focus you - that stimulus, that material?
Yeah, pretty much. I was basically talked into doing those two; when I suddenly realised there were these deadlines I was like ‘Oh shit!’ and had to get on with it. It took a kick up the arse.
It seems to be the case with the AV stuff as well. I spent most of last year just learning software like VDMX, After Effects and Final Cut, learning how to manipulate visuals and create animations, synching it to audio / midi. Then this year, several AV gigs have suddenly popped up, so rather than tinker around some more I really have to get stuff together and tighten it up. Which is good in a way.
You seem very interested in the AV side of things. When did you first see the potential in it?
Well ScanOne has been doing AV stuff for years, and I've always looked up to that. But I never really had the confidence or the equipment to do it myself; you need a really stable computer to do it properly, and I had this crap desktop PC which broke down all the time. The other machine was a slow little Dell laptop which was sold out the back of a warehouse in Hackney (apparently).
But things reached a point about 2 years ago where I found I was getting bored with music in general, and I hoped that AV stuff might rekindle my interest in production; by going round from that direction rather than just hitting a brick wall all the time.
In 2008 I went out to Latvia for a gig and performed with a couple of VJs there - Voitech and Gaffa - and both of them worked really well with the kind of set that was going on. They had researched the music beforehand and made animations of thunderstorms to go with it. It was nice to see people putting in the effort and really wanting to work closely together.
Back in London, I bumped into this VJ at a gig 2 years ago called Gabi; aka Duodroume. She came up saying she really liked the label, and we stayed in contact. She taught me a few video things and I taught her a few audio things, and we ended up jamming together last year at the Combat and Plex night.
It seems to be more ‘normal’ in Europe for clubs to integrate visuals properly with the music, at least from what I've seen. Out in Czech last year at the Bass Infection party, there was a guy who set up a stall to the side of the stage and rigged up a couple of cameras which focused on a rotating platform, on which he'd put random stuff like newspaper cut-outs, action figures, whatever. The images would be captured and put through effects like delays, kaleidoscopes etc and projected on screen in realtime. Quite impressive!
In clubs or on Youtube and Vimeo you can see a lot of really one-sided performances: really good VJs who are playing along to incredibly crap music, or live sets where people are just jamming around with no connection to what's going on musically. It's nicer when it all works together.
What do you think the role of live visuals is in a club?
Well people go to a club to dance, so the first focus will still be the music no matter what. At one extreme, if the soundsystem is good enough, say a place like Berghain, you could shut your eyes and the visuals are all inside your head already, the sound is so clear and precise. And at a rave, if the visuals suddenly go wrong, people don't leave the dancefloor; or if there's suddenly a blue screen, people just think ‘oh that's part of the visual' - especially if the VJ tries to cover up the mistake by mixing in clips of blue things, which I've seen happen a few times!
But I think the experience can become a lot more powerful if you have the visuals working really closely with the music. The impression and message is much stronger if you combine sound and visuals properly. Much more powerful.
I noticed a new event you're setting up at the Pangea bar in Stoke Newington - the Pulse AV Sessions. Could you talk about that?
It's a Sunday session that Gabi, Jef Yardcore and myself are doing together. It's not connected with Combat AV; it's more like weird electronica tracks or abstract stuff with video. And because it's on Sunday, there's no pressure to keep a dancefloor, so you can play weirder stuff. Si Begg and Robin Mahoney (Ho-Fun) will be previewing their DVD album there on 21st March.
Pulse is kind of an extension of what some of my friends have been doing for quite a few years. There used to be this night in Chalk Farm called Moon Palace, which was headed up by Dan Dancon1 and Phillipe (DJ Prophane); over the course of 5 years in that little pub they had pretty much every interesting local electronic producer coming in to play: we had Andrew Weatherall doing a 3 hour set, Freeform from Skam, Si Begg. That's where I met a lot of the early Combat roster as well; ScanOne, Cursor Miner. So when that reached its end a few years later, Dan carried on at The Foundry; he now runs this night called Disco_r.dance with Pete Stormcrow. And they do quite a lot of visual stuff too; Dan's a bit of a wizard with After Effects - his stuff has been performed at Matter - and he's also a really good DJ. So we thought it might be nice to meet that kind of music halfway with visuals, and do a Sunday thing, with interesting short films being screened in between the sets. I'm hoping it won't take up too much energy...
Let's talk about Combat AV. It seems to exist in several different forms, with different DJs and VJs?
Yeah, it's nice to keep it more fluid. Because pretty much all of the Combat catalogue could work really well with visuals, it would be a shame to exclude an artist just because they don't do their own. Say for example Cursor Miner: if you have his music synched up to clips that are specifically made for that performance - even if they're being jammed by someone else - then it still counts as an AV set. Long nights of preparation go into these things. And at the end of the day regardless of how powerful your computer is, you only have one pair of hands - so unless you automate a lot of it, it's quite hard to do everything on your own while keeping it reasonably fluid and spontaneous.
Finally, what can we expect - both musically and visually - on the 25th?
Visually, it's a load of clips that I've been editing and treating. There's about 20GB of data at the moment to go through, so I'm just gonna spend the next few weeks tightening it all up. Musically, the original Combat AV thing was quite deep, sounds and shapes moving in a black void, but having seen how Monster X banged the shit out of the room last month, think I'll have to beef it up a bit more for the dancefloor!
Mothers Against Noise 3 is on 25th March 2010 at Corsica Studios, London SE17. Stormfield will feature alongside Sam's Myth (Amen-Tal), Idiron Sountrack AV, Team Toothpaste, and Mothers residents Duskky and Slavetothewage. More info can be found at www.mothersagainstnoise.com.
Combat Recordings takes over Resonance FM on Saturday 20th March, 9.30 til 11pm with features from Point B, Machine Code, Scorn and Stormfield. Check it!
Second Line - 6 March 2010