Continued from Part 1
OK well that’s the downsides of the garage scene there, but what about the positives?
The club nights were amazing. Proper made clubland friendly again – in certain cases, of course; I can’t generalise because as with everything it varies so much from place to place.
I won’t do a long intro on this, because this time I can let the story, and the music, do the talking. Dave Jones – aka Zed Bias, Maddslinky, Phuturistix, ES Dubs, etc etc – is someone whose own journey through the music world is an excellent illustration of the inseparability of mainstream and underground, of the long and deep traditions that run through even the most ephemeral of club genres, and of the power of sheer tenacity combined with obsessive love of music.
© Brian David Stevens
Continued from Part 1
…And what about the fact you’ve done a lot of stuff with vocalists? That’s not really standard in dubstep, was it conscious on your part to give a particular appeal?
I am in some respects a bit of a weird music listener.
© Brian David Stevens
Kamal Joory is exactly the sort of artist I wish there were more of. I had known, and owned, the intricate electronica records he made as Geiom for some while
© Brian David Stevens
Continued from Part 1
OK so – bar the occasional release for DJs via Snork, and the occasional gig, your involvement in techno is now via this live cut method. What about your other music? Are you doing any rock music like you have with your Night Of The Brain band, or any of the complete abstracted and freed-from-the-beat kind of sound that you were doing with the Trurl & Klaupacius album back in Brighton days?
© Brian David Stevens
I met Cristian Vogel at university some time around 1993. My friends and I used to go to his Acid Box club nights, which played the most uncompromising techno of any in Brighton, usually in a brilliantly back-to-basics setup with relentless strobe light and fog machine providing the only visual element.
© Brian David Stevens
Continued from Part 1
And when that change was happening, how did you feel about the change in atmosphere in the raves?
Right, right, yep, now we can start talking.
© Brian David Stevens
This is a greatly extended version of an interview that originally appeared in Woofah magazine, with some snippets up here. Since I conducted this interview I’ve been lucky enough to work more with Tony Thorpe, including one of his recent tracks on my Adventures In Dubstep And Beyond mixed compilation for Ministry Of Sound, and getting him onto a discussion panel for the Are We Here? arts festival in November, which celebrates and examines the contribution of the much-under-appreciated London suburb of Croydon to the cultural fabric. This latter I’m greatly looking forward to - as you can see, Tony has a good deal to say…
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Tony Thorpe was, literally, a very bad influence on me. I’m not really one for epiphanies, but one of the clearest moments of musical realisation I remember in my life came in 1990 at the age of sixteen, just after going to my first rave club. The club experience itself and the music played there was great, exciting, disorienting, all the rest of it – but it was as we carried on at some friends’ house afterwards that I first heard the KLF vs The Moody Boys version of ‘What Time Is Love’. Its combination of a complete re-wiring of the instantly recognisable riffs of the original with sonar bleeps, soundscapes, synthesiser sounds the likes of which I’d never heard before and what I would later discover was a sample of Misty In Roots: “When we tread this land we walk for one reason, to try to help another man think for himself. The music of our heart is roots music, music which recalls history because without the knowledge of history you can’t determine your own destiny. Music about the present because if you’re not conscious of your present, you’re like a cabbage in this society.” It tore the top of my head off and made soup with the contents.
Well a delayed link roundup this week, as I continue to learn exactly how much time babies extract from a routine no matter how much time you try to allocate to them, especially once the health scares kick in. All fine now, though.
This week I have been busy dealing with DMZ/Digital Mystikz’s Mala. I am midway through transcribing a pretty inspiring interview I did with him for FACT, which will be done and online hopefully early this week.
