Thank you all for joining us this evening. I'm very excited to welcome Steve Goodman, aka Code9, who you will be hearing play the closing DJ set tonight for the festival. And he's a man of many projects. First of all, hyper dub records, big in the dubstep scene from London, Breaking Burial and other amazing artists I'm sure you've all heard at some points. He also is a working artist, working with sound, with philosophy, speculative fiction, as part of Audent and other collaborative projects
coming out of the CCRU legacy. And today he's presenting a new grand work, which he's going to tell you about. and speaking with him today is Yasha Boujinelle, who is a journalist writing for The Quietest magazine, a music publication in London, and is a local music aficionado. So please take it away. Okay. Thanks for joining us, everyone. Well, I guess that most of you are already aware of Steve's background background and origins, but nevertheless, I guess since this is a big project to dive into, I guess we should first set the context. So I'd like to begin by asking you about your musical
origins, but mostly like this, how did your musical foundations develop and where? And I'm mostly interested in this because I'm the 92 generation so it's 2022 now it's been like 30 years since the birth of UK hardcore and then the development of jungle and so on so how do you like look at this period of 30 years now basically um well thanks for having me here very very happy to to be back in Ljubljana. Well, I started DJing in the early 90s in Edinburgh. I grew up in Glasgow in Scotland, then moved to Edinburgh.
And I really, I suppose I started playing psychedelic music from the 70s, in late 60s and 70s. and right about 1992 or 93 I got into kind of rave music in the late 80s and about 92 93 I started hearing signals from London of jungle music which kind of changed changed my musical rewired my musical brain for a long time and I was kind of interested in how that music had integrated all the music I was interested in previous to hearing that
and kind of riveted into a new tempo and a new kind of rhythmic template. And since then, I've really just been dealing with the consequences of that kind of musical epiphany via a whole series of genres after jungle uk garage after uk garage grime and dubstep and and that kind of evolution of british dance music at the same time maybe 10 15 years ago getting kind of abducted by certain strains of american dance music particularly footwork and juke from chicago so it's felt to me like a full cycle because what footwork and juke brought to me was exactly what
jungle brought to me in the early 90s which was a tempo in which all of the different musics I was interested in in other words everything could be fastened together at a single tempo, but with a degree of speed and intensity that I was not necessarily feeling in any other dance musics. Since you mentioned this, basically this development of the UK dance music heritage, I maybe wanted to ask you about the Simon Reynolds concept of the hardcore continuum. For those who don't know, I guess it's an early concept from the mid-90s. He wrote an article about this continuity of UK dance music genres
and how they developed like theologically, I don't know the exact word, like a straight line and just spread into diverse subgenres. I wanted to ask you about this concept like maybe 25 years later. Is it still relevant in terms of describing all the new subgenres and innovations that happened in the past decade? Maybe I can answer that by not really answering it. When we came up for the name Hyperdub as a music magazine before it was a label around about 2000, it was an attempt to have another word for this thing called the Harko Continuum that wasn't just British-based,
but took that lineage back a further 20, 30 years, not just the Jamaican dub music, but it was more a way of placing the hardcore continuum in a much broader lineage of Afrofuturist electronic music. So in a way, Hyperdub, I've always seen Hyperdub not as a genre, but as a much broader umbrella, part of which corresponds to the hardcore continuum. Whether or not that applies, it does to a certain extent. If you think about... You could argue in the contemporary music world in Britain,
whether it applies to UK drill, for example, but that also has as much to do with rap music. it does with UK legacies. So Hyperdub is a way of thinking about the Black Atlantic musically generally, of which the hardcore continuum is just one subsystem. And you would have to think about different musical genealogies that mark different continuums in this broader Black Atlantean musical world. and I think the sense in which the hardcore continuum doesn't necessarily work so well as a concept in the UK anymore is in a very positive way that the hardcore continuum had a lot to do with
the influence of Afro-Caribbean and US American, Afro-American music alongside kind of northern European kind of Belgian techno and so on but I think in the UK now there's a very strong and more generally in dance music it's a very strong influence of African dance music not filtered through Britain or America but kind of directly coming from the continent of Africa and and changing things and I think that has a slightly different that's another continuum within the Black Atlantic of which the Harcol Continuum is just one of those, one UK-centric version.
But I think things are a bit more decentralized now and things aren't just about Britain and America being the main, if they ever were, the main centers of dance music innovation. Since you were involved personally in the early 90s scene, mainly I mean like UK Hardcore and Jungle. I was wondering maybe what's your take on why exactly it was the 90s that this real acceleration in terms of development and like musical invention in a way happened exactly like between say 92 and then maybe 99. In comparison with say you started HyperDap after Dubstep came around.
and I guess I came at when like post-dub step was like a thing so if I look like at the past decade there was like much less innovation and like this huge cultural events in a sense so why would you say that it was this case with the 90s? It's probably some kind of combination of economics, technology and drugs you know so So economically, it's like the tail end of Thatcherism and the repercussions of Thatcherism and the impact of post-Thatcherist neoliberalism in the UK and how that changed with new labour. and various economic bubbles that took place in the late 90s,
various exercises of state control in the UK which banned repetitive rhythm, for example, and then obviously the advent of the internet, democratisation of music technology, and ecstasy, a combination of ecstasy, acid, and marijuana getting stronger and stronger, and the ups and downs of this kind of collective drug culture, the euphoria and the paranoid depression, the emotional boom and bust of these drug cycles
that you can hear, literally hear through the music. So I think a confluence of these forces, economic, technological and narcotic, are what caused this acceleration in the 90s. Okay, I think the next one is also related to this question. but I was thinking how you look at the adjective futuristic and how you also contemplate the relationship between dance music and futurity. Because in the 90s, especially with jungle, it was the sound of the future. But if you look at music now, do you still consider these two terms or concepts interrelated?
of like is electronic music necessarily futuristic per se or how has this relationship changed in your opinion well i'm not sure that time goes forward so the minute you don't think that time necessarily goes forward then your notion of the future has to change because no longer is like past present future and you know certainly technological innovation goes in a certain direction but one of the benefits of the hardcore continuum idea was that there might be technological progress in terms of music technology for example but there's there's a constant generational waves like human generations intersecting with that and with each new
generation they almost start from scratch and learn the past and reprocess the past and also there's a dimension of a temporality whereby you know the minute you have digital sampling and the internet the whole history the whole musical past is no longer behind you but it's all contemporaneous with itself. So the minute, so from that, there isn't a clear notion of going from the past to the future. I think old notions of musical futurism have a problem of this kind of Italian futurism, for example,
or certain aspects of modernism have a problem when they have this linear notion of history. And I think one of the interesting things about the Haracle continuum was that it was, it was always roots and future. It was always almost like a spiraling motion. So some sense of going forward, but some sense of constantly reprocessing the past simultaneously. And I suppose one thing I was always interested in with the CCRU and beyond was the extent to which the future is already latent in the present. And I think this is something you see in certain strands of science fiction that move from kind of far future science fiction
into cyberpunk in the 90s, in the 80s and 90s, and thinking about the near future. And the idea of science fiction not being about predicting the future, but thinking differently about, or alienating the present, thinking differently about potential futures that are already here, somehow occulted or in latent potential in front of you. Well, since you mentioned sci-fi, maybe I'd like to discuss a bit your take on the contemporary state of affairs in the sci-fi sphere because if you look like the big blockbusters and stuff like that,
also in the technosphere, a lot of stuff is really just basically recycling old ideas from the 80s and 90s. And there's like little really futuristic sci-fi in the sense that it doesn't really just recycle stuff. So I mean, why do you think like so many like big blockbuster movies are basically just recycled ideas from the 80s and 90s and know there's little sci-fi which actually addresses the here and now, which is, for example, the case with your project. I'm not sure I have a good overview. I know what you mean about particularly science fiction cinema. It's still in a postmodern phase where it's pastiching earlier modes.
I don't feel I've got a particularly strong overview of the field. I think there's so much interesting stuff going on in science. And there's plenty of interesting literature that's trying to come to terms with developments in AI and so on. I don't know. I don't have a bird's eye view of the field of science fiction. Would you say that maybe it's because also both cinema and music, as well as literature, maybe aren't the most popular media per se, because you also have gaming and virtual reality? Maybe it's there that this topic...
I think that's right. I think video games are developing much more extreme, interesting worlds than maybe cinema in terms of science fiction. So what's your relationship with video games? Because I know that during the lockdown you've been into gaming, and I guess it also influenced your current project, Astrodarian. So can you tell us a little about this? I've always been interested in video games from afar. Like, I never really was a big player. I never felt I had time or the luxury of time to play video games.
I always loved the music. I like watching people play video games. They always would stress me out if I was playing them, though. but the one thing you know say many things about covid it gave me a luxury of time to play some video games and um i i mean we i've done various projects before covid like we around about 2018 we released a compilation of kind of early japanese video game music on Hyperdub. So the interest has always been there, but I've never had a chance to literally immerse myself. But during the pandemic, I played a few games,
but the one that struck me the most, and it just felt very, it felt perfect for the situation, was this game Death Stranding by Hideo Kojima. It's a post-apocalyptic America, and ultimately you're a courier or a postman delivering packages. And while you're delivering packages, you're trying to re-network America because it's no longer got any communication device. So you're using some quantum network to reconnect the various parts of the country. But the game involved, apart from fighting occasionally, not that often
fighting kind of Cthulhu-like monsters. There's actually very little violence in it at all and you spend most of your time hiking and delivering packages. And this was very therapeutic during... Because you had to stay at home. In the game you could move. It was literally an escape pod. Okay, so did it directly influence also this concept of escapology and your project astrodarian partly i mean i had a really interesting hyperstitional role because i've never i've never really been someone who's done a lot of spent a lot of time in the countryside or i've been hiking and i enjoyed virtual hiking so much
that that i i went to like climb a mountain and go hiking and that's part of what led to this project of like the Astrodirium project. So maybe we can now set, I guess we've warmed up our audience. So yeah, maybe I guess just start with like how it all came together, the whole concept and then also the structure because it's quite complicated maybe for outsiders. So maybe you can. Well, the simplest way of putting it is Astro Diaryon is a 26-minute audio essay, or a sonic fiction, which tells the story, kind of loosely tells the story of the breakup of Britain
and the becoming independent of Scotland as a science fiction story in which Scotland there's a mass exodus from from Scotland to an orbital space habitat this is an animation made by the artist Lawrence Leck and it was so the idea for it was kind of triggered by being Scottish and living in London during the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and the Brexit referendum a few years later and the pandemic. That's the impetus for the need, the feeling of need to escape.
So it's called Astrodarian because originally I was asked in about 2018 or 19 to do a performance or a playback in a GRM in Paris, which on a sound system called the Accusmonium, which was devised by Francois Bale, who was a music concrete composer. Actually, I had the pleasure to experience it in Graz as part of Elevate Festival, and it was really one of the most amazing sonic experiences ever. It's quite intense. is like 50 different speakers of all different shapes and sizes. So I was asked to make a new piece of work for that. And I thought, well, most of the things that would be on that would be instrumental without voice.
So let me just be annoying and do something with voice and some kind of narrative. So I started producing some sound and music that I thought would work on a sound system with 50 speakers, so lots of detail that would kind of move around and kind of insectoid sounds. I was also interested in developing this story and around about that time I found out that, never mind science fiction, in reality there was a space race going on in the north of Scotland. there's actually kind of a quite a strong satellite industry in Scotland which I never heard anything
about and I find out there was a kind of space race between these two sites in the highlands to be the first British I think maybe first northern European I'm not sure but the first British vertical launch sites for satellites. And my imagination kind of ran away with me and I was like, you know, I was supposed to do this performance in March 2020, the month that the pandemic hit. So I had plenty of time on my hands. It got postponed and I had more time to develop it.
and you know being literally being locked in is a good time to think about escaping so I started thinking about well what if it's not in a way it's not even a science fiction story it's more like a documentary like just imagining Scottish independence as you know almost like a quasi-utopian story not completely utopian but certainly more utopian than the kind of stuff I usually do. So imagining this, you know, starting from scratch, a clean slate in an orbital space habitat.
And I've been reading this book called Space Settlements by Fred Sharman, which talked about these NASA conferences in the 70s where artists and engineers and space scientists got together to imagine, you know, thinking about climate change and ecological catastrophe and population growth and just imagining escape pods or ways in which humanity might survive in the future. And one of the models for that was called the Stanford Taurus. And this is like inside a Stanford Taurus, which is a kind of ring that would occupy a gravitational well between the Earth and the moon. so that's one axis of it and then at the same time again with everything that was going on
during the pandemic I started getting interested in why the UK even existed like how did Scotland and England enter into union with each other in the first place and I came across this this historical data on what's called the Darien scheme, which was in the 1690s, the late 17th century, when, you know, Scotland was quite impoverished and someone came up with the idea of colonising Panama and, you know, almost like a premonition of the Panama Canal
where if you colonise Panama you'll control the trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific. So the Darien scheme was a massive disaster. Lots of people in the country invested in it, and they hadn't planned for the fact that it was a kind of tropical, swampy area. Lots of people that went died of malaria. lots of people died in the journey from scotland across the atlantic to panama and to cut a long story short the country almost bankrupted because of the darien scheme
and because because it was broke it entered into had to enter into union with england to i mean another side of this story is the another reason why it failed is because it was sabotaged by the English and the Spanish empires. So Scotland attempted to have an empire. It completely fucked up. That's how Scotland ended up in the UK with England. And then the more research I did, I looked, well, Scotland actually ended up having a very central role in colonialism, imperialism, slavery, the British Empire. So there's this other side to what happened because of this catastrophic failure.
So I was basically interested in the beginning and the end of the UK. The Darien scheme was a very important event that led to the birth of the UK and this kind of movement towards Scottish independence over the last 20 or 30 years, but particularly in the last 10 years, looked like it was signalling at some point in the near future the end of the UK. So the escapology dimension, I suppose, it's thinking about the need to escape from that combination of British and English nationalism
that led to Brexit and I suppose that combination of neoliberalism and British and English nationalism which is why Astrodarian has a slightly maybe utopian dimension. Yeah. And how did you come to this segmentation or like the whole structure? Because you started with Escapology, which I had the honor to review, and it's basically a dance music record, but it's also much more because it's also like a video game experience in a sense. And how did this whole, yeah, the big scheme come together?
Because the next step is the audiobook, so to say, which is coming out like in a month. I suppose the thing I forgot to say there is this is all framed as a video game. So it's a simulation game in which you play escaping the UK. So like I said, that performance on the Akismonium got cancelled. At the end of the pandemic, in this club space in London called Corsica Studios, where we'd been running these events called Zero since 2017, which made the main dance floor of the club into an installation every month, and then the club night would be in a small room. At the end of the pandemic, the venue was kind of allowed to semi-open up,
not as a club, but as a potential gallery space, I suppose. And they asked me if I had any ideas to do an installation. And so I think that's what crystallized this as an installation. So during the pandemic, I'd been up to these proposed sites of the spaceports and kind of filmed these empty fields. I'd asked Laurence Leck to do some animation to kind of visualize this a microcosm of Scotland as a space habitat. So in maybe June 2021, it became like a three screen audio visual installation.
and then October 2021 it eventually became this the Astro Diary and Audio Essay was performed in Paris on the Accusmonium and then I suppose I was like well this this is kind of slightly weirder sound than I'm used to making I bet I could do some interesting club tracks with some of these sounds so and I also thought this is a bit of a weird project for most people who might be interested in my music so maybe it makes sense to do an intermediary step so that's what Escapology was the album I released this summer which was an instrumental and slightly more upbeat
version of Astro Diary and then next month the 26 minute the kind of narrated version of the story comes out. And the story is narrated by AI voices trained on Scottish accents. So it's kind of Scottish text-to-speech voices. So the Escapology album that came out in the summer, the CD of it is framed like a PlayStation game. Yeah. The cover is basically this image. Yeah. Okay. Maybe I wanted to ask you about this new format in a way,
but not so new, the audio essay, which your first release on Flatlines was On Vanishing Land by Mark Fisher and Justin Barton. And I really enjoyed this audio essay during COVID. I wanted to ask you about the potentials maybe of this format of kind of bringing together theory, literature, hyperstitional fiction, and also sound? Maybe how do you see this medium? Yeah, I mean, it's a medium that kind of suits me because it occupies some kind of diagonal between two extremes of kind of theory and music. And I mean, in the CCRU, we did a lot of kind of theory to jungle back in the 90s
with another project I was involved in called Audent. We did a release maybe five or six years ago, which is kind of audio fiction. And I've always been interested in essay film, like Chris Barker and things like this. So it's just a way of, and also sonic fiction, what the writer Kojo Eshin describes as sonic fiction in the work of kind of for example Drexia where science fiction is conveyed through sound before it's conveyed through text or image so this kind of audio essay sonic fiction format is a way of joining all these things together for me I've been playing around with the with various things various kind of models of putting text over
ambient sound for quite a few years but like you said just before the pandemic we started a label called flat lines specifically for spoken word either audio essay or fiction I mean the whole point and this is where the SE film dimension comes in is kind of a mode of doing documentary fiction of like an interzone between fact and fiction historical archive science fictional speculation so it's a kind of useful method for bringing all of these different dimensions together Okay, next week you have your worldwide premiere at Unsound Festival of the Astridarium project
and I wanted to ask you how are you planning to bring it all together in terms of sound visuals and also how did you decide for this kind of visuals in terms of like the a bit retro 90s aesthetical, also you mentioned like PlayStation 2 video games, in comparison with say the old trendy 3D renders which are, which mostly adorn like contemporary experimental electronic music these days. Why did you take the other way? What kind of stuff are you referring to? You know these days a lot of releases have this relatively abstract
translucent, shiny covers, but usually without any concept behind them or something. While on the other hand, you actually developed everything in a really concrete and conceptually defined way. I mean, I like a lot of the stuff I think you're referring to, kind of shiny, but I mean, when I was chatting with Lawrence about this animation apart from sampling bits of the scottish landscape like this thing here is from the isle of sky which appears at the beginning of the alien prometheus film and it's like an amazing bit of landscape but it also just looks like death stranding like this kind of pristine
digitally rendered landscapes. But the... And I've worked with Lawrence in the past. My last album, he created this virtual, fully automated luxury hotel called the Notel, which he would navigate around while I was performing the music. And again, kind of made with Unreal Engine, made with video game software. and all of his work is like cinema using video game software. So I suppose I'm quite influenced by Lawrence's work and collaborating with him as opposed to this slightly more eye candy model. I really like his cinematographic approach
to video game software. But the live set I'm doing next week, it's a real mess of different types of visual material from digitally rendered stuff like this and digitally rendered like fake playstation logos that have like canine instead of ps and things like that to footage i filmed in the highlands on my mobile phone stuff I've stolen off YouTube all with like digital overlays to make it look like it's all from the same game you know I'm not it's the first time I've VJ'd and it's certainly
I've never done the visuals while doing the music at the same time so it's a bit of an experiment and learning experience but unlike the stuff I've done with Lawrence before which is all in the digital realm I kind of wanted that that contrast of kind of very poor quality image and pristine digitally designed image all in the same format because I think having all of that whole spectrum analog to digital it's all digital but that whole spectrum of quality I think tells a bit of us conveys a bit of the story in itself and does some of the work of the story
that's not just an excuse for not having digital animation for the whole thing so because Escapology was slightly more upbeat I had the upbeat version of Astrodari and I had the idea that again this is kind of an imaginary video game so I was imagining actually after I made the tracks that these would be somehow the action scenes from the game so in a sense and music has come before the narrative and the visuals, you know, so I'm interested, which again is a kind of sonic fictional approach to it, that the sound comes first and the
linguistic dimension, the narrative and the visualization of that comes afterwards, which obviously is completely the opposite, that's very much the opposite way from how the video games and film industries work, where often the score is an afterthought with a tiny budget that happens with like four minutes to go before the deadline of the release. So it's nice to kind of turn that upside down and start from the sound and build something from the bottom up like that. So in terms of the next step, the audio essay is going to be released soon,
but are there any other medium media which you'd like to connect with the Astrid Aerion project, or maybe a book or an actual video game perhaps? I don't know if it would ever become an actual video game, but I think it needs to become an installation again in Scotland. so I'm plotting an installation in Glasgow hopefully sometime next year ideally to correspond with another referendum the idea being that even if the referendum goes wrong again at least there'll be this kind of mythic virtual realm in which these ideas can continue to exist and develop you said before our conversation that there's actually talks about a referendum next year
What's that? An airframe that's going to be held next year? It's supposed to be. It's controversial because the Scottish government wanted to be one in a year's time and both Labour and Conservatives in England are hostile to that. was one of the very striking aspects of this whole political dimension that both left and right in England are hostile to Scottish independence so it kind of scrambles your political radar a little bit so I'd like to become an installation in Scotland at some kind of book at some point
and with the right amount of time. And I would like it to become fully an animation and then ideally some kind of game. But in a way, the game thing is just a device for holding all the ideas together. I don't think it has to become a video game. It's just, you know, again, like Lawrence Leck's work, the video game world design software is a really amazing way of telling stories whether they're interactive or not Okay maybe we're going to come back to Estradarian later but I'd also like to touch upon Hyperdub especially
your approach to curation because you've managed to remain one of the most relevant dance music or electronic music label since you started and which isn't really the case usually also if you look at the history of electronic music labels they also always have these like ups and downs but you manage to stay relevant so how do you approach or maybe how do you approach curation but also how do you look at the contemporary like music landscape in terms of what we discussed before, you know, the scenes in China, Africa and stuff like that, you also release music from the whole world these days. So yeah, how do you think and how do you consider these problems, so to say?
Well, I suppose we stopped being a genre-specific label after a few years, but I mean, I don't really think we ever were a genre-specific label. it just so happened that we, the birth of the label coincided with the birth and the kind of explosion of dubstep. But I suppose by 2008 or 2009, we'd kind of start drifting away from that particular scene. And I mean, really just a bit of a drifter. You know, if you keep your ears open and you have some kind of thirst to be surprised and stimulated by new music, then you find yourself just getting led somewhere
that you never could have dreamt or intended. And that's how I see the last maybe 15 years of the label, just getting sent music by friends of friends or meeting people and them sending me music that I didn't know existed or didn't know I liked, maybe didn't like initially, but somehow grew on me, got under my skin. And then you ask yourself the question, well, why wouldn't this be on this label? And so we've gone through a few waves of suddenly there's a new influx of a different sound. and occasionally there's like a continuity release
that has marked some kind of consistent thread with what we've done before in the mess of all of the new stuff we've put out. But it's like feeling around in the dark. Not really planned. I'd say I'm pretty passive as an A&R person in the sense that I look for new music for my DJ sets, but I'm not looking for new music for the label. I'm listening to what people send me, but I'm not like, oh, we need to do this, or we need to move over there. It's just a slow process of drifting.
So since you mentioned your preparations for DJ sets, I'd like to hear maybe how you, because we also have like three minutes left. Maybe I'd like to conclude with your process. How do you approach DJing these days and how do you select music from this huge variety of stuff that's good from all around the world? I mean, I have like 80 or 90 gigs of music on my USB sticks. and so my playlists have been incrementally evolving over a long period of time and so I suppose I'm constantly updating
it's a slow moving evolution of the different kinds of DJ sets I'm doing for example in the next week I'm doing like four or five different kinds of DJ sets um i know what i enjoy the most right now which is hopefully what i'll do later which is um some kind of combination of like weird footwork and juke and a bit of jungle influence still that's like in the 90s when i'm doing those kind of sets and and it's working it's the the greatest pleasure I could imagine from music because it has a kind of intensity to it that I don't get from other kinds of dance music.
So... I don't know if I can be more specific than that. But you like to stay in the around 160 BPM zone? If I have a choice, if the environment seems right for it. But on Tuesday night, I'm doing a set mostly of arpeggios with no beats. To a company. Lorenzo Senni style. Sorry? Lorenzo Senni style. This arpeggio, every kind of arpeggio, like pontalistic music. Because I'm playing a DJ set to some generative visuals
that are very pointillistic. At the Sime Festival, after I play live, I'm doing a jungle back-to-back with Tim Reaper. On Friday now I'm doing a back-to-back with Sherelle. So again, there'll be some jungle footwork combinations. We release a lot of music, 130 BPM, a lot of music influenced by GOM, South African GOM and Amapiano. Just now I'm happy to do sets like that, but I'm not really making music like that. And I do find it a little bit slow after being in the fast lane for a few years.
So have you decided where are you gonna take us tonight yet? No. Okay, so I guess you're gonna see. Thanks to you for this pleasant conversation and thank you all for coming. Thanks.