Flux – Uncarved Block

I came across this working in [Soho’s] Reckless Records. You know what its like when you’re working in a record shop: you’ve got hours to kill, so you find things to listen to just for the sake of killing time. This was one of those records I put on with no expectations and then as soon as it was on I was like “wow, this is fucking amazing”. It sounded nothing like I expected it to. I only would have heard it about three years ago, but I’ve been listening to it all the time, especially over lockdown. It comes out every couple of weeks.

It takes that whole collage thing that I was talking about with PIL and creates this really interesting intersection between punk, dub and industrial. You can definitely tell it’s part of that anarcho punk world. I think Adrian Sherwood was heavily involved in this record and that definitely comes across in how it sounds.

It’s a very repetitive, rhythmic record. Is that something you’re drawn to when creating music?

It depends on the piece of music I’m making at the time, but I would say that I’m drawn to the idea of working with repeated sounds. There are times where I’ve tried more consciously to make rhythmic music and it hasn’t worked. For some reason making rhythmic music is something I can’t force myself to do. For this new record I was hitting on more of those moments, I suppose. That’s why there are a few more rhythmic parts on this record than on the last one. I don’t really see them as beats. It’s more like loops, which are unquantized so they’re off grid. I guess they have more of a relation to industrial music than they do dance music, which in a way is similar to some of the rhythmic stuff on this Flux record as well. You can definitely link some moments on this record with some of the more rhythmic work that I’ve done in the past. It’s funny because even though this is a recent discovery, it feels like I’ve made a lot of music previously that sounds like it was influenced by it.

I feel like the older you get, especially when you get to the age I am – late 30s – having those musical epiphanies becomes rarer and rarer, so its always nice when it does happen. That’s definitely something I can attach to this record.