Interview: SBTRKT

Interview: SBTRKT

5 July, 2011 | 1.19AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: interview, sbtrkt, young turks

After several years of establishing his bass-music bona fides—floating the odd EP, remixing the likes of M.I.A. and Tinie Tempah, and of course recording under the requisite veneer of anonymity, including wearing a mask on stage—SBTRKT finally and officially arrived, last week, with the release of his self-titled debut album on Young Turks (the label behind The XX, John Talabot and El Guincho, among others).

Mixing up elements of UK garage, house, electro-pop, and more, and featuring a range of guest vocalists including Jessie Ware, Little Dragon‘s Yukimi Nagano, and Sampha, it’s nevertheless a remarkably focused, cohesive statement—one that says as much about SBTRKT’s own sensibilities as it does the shifting state of bass music, post-dubstep, or whatever you want to call it. It’s also being tipped as a likely contender for the Mercury Prize, which seems not at all inconceivable, given the album’s range and richness.

We spoke to SBTRKT about the record, his DJ sets, and his roots in the UK’s club-music scene; read on for the full interview.

It’s been about a year now since RA first profiled you—what has the last year been like?

Um… Laughs. Kind of a lot of time in the studio, really, a lot of weekends in clubs and dark spaces, kind of the mixture of the two, really. A lot of ideas bashing out and creating a record, putting out singles and EPs, and working towards my long-term album goal, really. Which I’m about to put out!

Let’s talk about recording the album. How did it come together—was it done in one fell swoop?

Not really, it’s kind of something I’ve done over two years, because I’ve got the benefit of doing stuff on my laptop, doing everything in my living room, sometimes getting ideas sitting on planes and trains and everywhere else, you know? But the majority of the time is sitting up late at night on my computer, just making beats and melodies and soundscapes, just mood-fitting music, really. And then developing those ideas over time, collaborating with people and building up a picture of where I was going with it. Essentially, what I wanted to do with an album is present a fresh body of work, rather than a collection of songs which were already out with some extra bits in there, ‘cause that, for me, is not what writing an album’s about. It’s more about putting out a fluid record which has a beginning and end and a meaningful slant to whoever listens to it.

When it comes to those collaborations, were Jessie and Sampha and Yukimi responsible for the lyrics and melodies?

Lyrically it was [them]; melodically it’s kind of a combination of us, in the sense of top lines. A lot of it was written with a lot of time spent together in the studio. A lot of the songs on the album were written from the start with them being there while I was creating something or writing melodies or being in the studio together for a couple of days and just messing about on ideas. Especially with Sampha, just jamming out tracks, and me pushing and developing those ideas into what I wanted to create. Some things started off nothing like they ended up, but making a whole mood-sound-palette out of them.

I don’t feel like anything on the album is like a feature, just a vocal stuck on top. It’s all very much a process of things gelling together and feeling very much like one album, an artist identity.

Did you find yourself having to massage your sound around their voices?

Not at all. For me, it’s more pulling vocalists into my world, that’s definitely the way I work. I would never—if I find it a struggle to place them, or recontextualize them into a new direction, it’ssomething which never feels finished—it’s a whole world for me. It’s more exciting when I can take a vocalist and push them into a fresh direction they’re slightly less comfortable with, maybe, something not normally in their range. For the vocal tracks, especially, with Sampha, for instance, his sound with me is very different to anything he’d write on his own.

It’s an interesting record, because it’s obviously rooted very much in bass music and club culture, but it’s also very much a pop record.

It’s funny, a lot of people keep saying this to me. But my stance on that is, I’ve always come from a direction where I love listening to songs and tracks that have full arrangements—verses, choruses, bridges and those things; I often get a lot of enjoyment out of listening to that kind of music. And even from dance acts like Massive Attack or anyone else, in the past, who’ve worked within electronic music but still use the traditional song structures. It’s exciting. I don’t think you need to write those big, androgynous dance records that have a robotic vocal over the top to contextualize it as being a song and a pop record. I think we’re trying to hopefully change some of that, I guess. I’m writing electronic music which can be song based, but also is its own thing. Not necessarily have to conform to what pop music is, I suppose, or what mainstream pop music is.

And also not conforming to what club music is.

Exactly. I don’t feel any need to—I love every single scene and culture going on in club culture and electronic music, from all the stuff I DJ and buy, just listening to it, but I don’t feel like I need to conform to those genre rules, or something that’s popular this month, to make a record or an album with my own feel or slant on the music going around. I think my music is much more a concoction of everything, from all genres and scenes, versus it being something like, here’s my take on juke or on garage or post-dubstep or whatever else.

There’s definitely one track that is like the perfect 2-step beat.

Well, for me, that was always a massive influence, obviously—MJ Cole, Groove Chronicles, all of that kind of sound from way back. It was a big influence on me at the time. So having that kind of feel and that kind of minimal-ness of production, but also feeling a certain warmth to it—that’s initially what I was trying to get across in that, it doesn’t have to be something skippy and totally mad and over-vocaled to have that feeling, you know. And I think Groove Chronicles and those kind of people nailed that early on. Within UK garage, anyway.

It’s nice to hear you bringing that back, because it’s an avenue that got forgotten along the way.

I know a lot of people that reference them, even artists like Bullion, I’ve heard him talking about people like Steve Gurley and people like that. And obviously Burial is the main thing where people go, “Oh, UK garage, new frontier.” Then he just got dumped in the dubstep camp, even though he’s doing something uniquely Burial. I don’t know, I just get excited about writing any kind of genre music which fits into the context of everything else on my record.

What are your DJ sets like, what sort of stuff are you playing?

Kind of across the board really, stuff from the Night Slugs crew, the Hessle crew, all of these kind of guys—what Machinedrum does, that Swamp stuff. Just everything, exciting club-culture music, really, is what I like to DJ—and mixing that in with older bits, techno, garage and everything else. I don’t try and purport to play the biggest white labels, upfront dubplate sets, I just play music I really like and appreciate, even if it’s been out for six months or a year, it still works, you know? And it’s about contextualizing it in a mix. Just because one DJ plays it one way doesn’t mean it’s going to sound the same in your set. I have a lot of people who come up to me and go, “What’s that weird remix you played?” I just feel like, if you play two things together in a certain way, you work out different ways of mixing things, people are going to be inspired by that as much as they are—you know, the way I DJ is much more like production, I guess. That’s why I use Ableton and a controller. It’s not like I’m plodding along playing loops or pressing buttons, but as a producer, it’s more the way I blend tracks and the way I think about keys and making momentum build with two elements. I used to DJ traditionally using turntables, but I still think the way I DJed was less about an upfront selection and more this weird, trying to blend a set and build… But the element of the classic, best DJ anyway, I gained my skills from listening to people like Andrew Weatherall and Masters At Work and Derrick May and everyone else, you know, random DJs, but across the board, people who seem to build up sound palettes and textures in a very different way.

What was the influence of Plastic People and the CDR night on you?

Plastic People was just a place, in London, where music is the forefront, really. It’s less about the names, it’s just a place where the sound from any genre of music was giving the space to live and breathe, and not be judgmental about who’s playing it or who’s in the club—it’s just about that space and the darkness and the sound being the primary concern. It can influence you in so many ways, and experience styles of music you wouldn’t normally listen to or appreciate. There’s no box or genre put to it. I really appreciated it at the time, and learned a lot about music from listening to it in that club on the nights I was there, from Balance to Co-Op to FWD to whatever else, you know?

Were you bringing down tracks to CDR?

In the early days I used to head down there, kind of playing songs, but like anything, I think the challenge of writing music and producing music to a finished level is what excited me about that club night. For me, playing stuff in clubs, because of where I am now, doesn’t feel quite so important, being able to hear stuff out on a soundsystem, because it’s something I do so frequently anyway. But it’s something which is not so tangible for most people, to go in and play it on a massive system and hear your song in that environment, it’s a very useful thing, especially in electronic music.

I’ve never been, but I always liked the idea; it felt like an electronic-music knitting bee or something.

My one concern was that it started to breed a sound, kind of like a CDR sound, which is obviously the danger of anything; when something becomes an institution then it starts to breed boundaries of its own. The people who played their music there only did a certain thing because they thought that’s what people wanted to hear when they went there. Like dubstep, I guess, it built its own boundaries, and then people move away and build a new world based on their next non-genre, which then turns into a genre.

How did you hook up with Young Turks?

Initially, Plastic People was one of the links. This guy, Tic at the label, we used to be in the same environment at the same time. Over the years, we haven’t been in contact, but then through putting things out as SBTRKT, he heard about it as well and got back in contact. For me it was the perfect label to work with, because it feels like they put all the effort into the artists themselves. Every artist is able to have their own stance and do what they want to do creatively, with the artwork and everything else. For me, that was the most important thing, that I’ve got a label that would let me develop and have total control over my product. It’s not necessarily anything scene-wise or genre-wise; every artist has a very distinct sound palette. I think the only thing that links myself, maybe The XX or Creep or Holy Fuck is that we’ve all got very distinct artistic identities and visions of where we want to go. It works well when we do club nights together, because we’re all so different and disparate, there’s nothing that’s the same as the next one. For me, it was just about having a home where the label isn’t necessarily A&Ring for themselves, it’s more about A&Ring artists for the artist. Which is very few and far between, label-wise, at the moment. Either you’re trying to sell loads of records and market it, or you’re making a dance label with a certain sound, and that being more important than the actual artists that are on it. You have to be part of a collective to be known. For me, it was more about having my own direction and being able to develop in my own way and not having the fear that I haven’t conformed to the rules that someone set.

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