I'm certainly more excited about music in the last year than I was maybe two years ago. Just branching out from being in the tunnel vision of a genre has helped my enthusiasm levels. levels. I suppose I was in, you know, mostly playing dubstep, mostly DJing dubstep, the label is mostly dubstep although quite off-center stuff. You know, a small scene that's like a handful of people that's grown from nothing is a self-contained little bubble and it can,
As it grows, people develop different strains of the sound and you have an affinity to certain strains and you are repelled by certain strains. And then you just gravitate towards music that has the same vibe but is in a different genre and then things start to get blurry and muddy and interesting. That's where things are at now, I think. There's a lot of cross-pollination between different cities now.
So there's experimental hip-hop sound in Britain and Glasgow, Rusty Hudson Mohawk in London. It kind of does resonate in an interesting way with what's going on in LA, Flang Lotus, Sam I Am, Gaslamp Killer, Brainfeeder guys. Funky has obviously come through the pirate radio scene in London, has come from American Funky House, but it's also really a continuation of UK Garage, which dropped off about seven or eight years ago. But the fact that he's doing stuff with house suddenly makes accessible the whole world of house music that has been chugging along for 20 years. And also there's a lot of resonance between techno and certain sides of dubstep, between Berlin and Bristol and so on.
I teach at the University of East London, stuff to do with sonic culture. everything to do with sonic culture from film sound, design, through to history of electronic music. I was on Rince FM for about five years, and so I used to finish teaching in the afternoon, and I knew a lot of the students were listeners to Rince FM. So I'd finish teaching in the afternoon, go straight to the studio, do a show, kind of anonymously, the students didn't know that I did that. It was actually the show I did with Flying Lotus on RINCE a couple of years ago. And one of my students, I think, had been listening to the show in the car. She recognised my voice from the radio show. So that was when I first got outed.
It's all been downhill since then. The book is out in November, December on MIT Press. It's called Sonic Warfare. and it's basically about uses and abuses of sound systems, use of sound systems for crowd control. The use of sound is a weapon, it's basically a cultural weapon. I suppose like philosophically one of the things the book does is it draws from this strand of philosophy called rhythm analysis which takes kind of musical concepts, particularly rhythm, and sees and hears the world not in terms of solid objects or things, but in terms of rhythms. So I'm kind of interested in rhythm as a philosophical approach to non-musical phenomena.
Climatic rhythms, physiological rhythms, metabolic rhythms, dancing rhythms. Solar rhythms, planetary rhythms, traffic rhythms, sleep rhythms, broken sleep rhythms. The compilation is coming out in October. So it's a double CD. One CD is old stuff. Tracks from myself, Burial, Iconica, Darkstar, Zombie, Joker, J.K. Mata, LV, LD.
The other CD, which is the main one, which is new tracks from everyone who's released on the label. Musical friends like Flying Lotus, Mala from Digital Mystics and Martin. I think it finally hammers the nail in the coffin of the idea that Hyperdub is a dubstep leaf. I started to label to release my own music, next thing I know I'm a fucking bureaucrat. Filling out forms, going to the bank, going to the post office. That's the dagger in my side really. It's the, you know, I wish I didn't get sent so much shit dubstep. I'll just leave it at that, I think. I'll just send him like a big, big sheet of paper with fail right on it.
Do you have a rubber stand? Fail. That's my A&R technique. Fail. It's like you can leave it by the time. Fail. That was a dub fail. It was a funk fail. It was a wonk fail. Oh my god!