10.
Rhythm & Sound – Rhythm & Sound
Again, an album that changed the way I listened to things. It’s minimalism at its more extreme end, but the beauty of it is that everything has been so perfectly executed. That’s the only way, really, that minimal music can work, ’cause you produce so much focus on the little things and the little details. That, I think, is really important to training your ears to listen to stuff properly. When all of a sudden you can focus just on a single snare hit, and it’s like ‘Fuck, that snare’s good, really good’. When you’ve got a busy track with lots of things going on, you probably won’t realise you’ve been listening to a particular snare sound, it can get lost so easily. But Rhythm & Sound is just a world of immersion in absolute space. It’s extreme dub, in my opinion, and that album particularly so, because there were only a couple of vocal tracks, it was a lot more about the instrumental side of what Moritz [von Oswald] and Mark Ernestus were doing at the time, with less focus on the vocalists. To this day, ten years on since that came out I think, one of my absolute favourite albums. For a long time I’d put ‘No Partial’ on [when] I was going to mix a tune down in the studio. I’d listen to that first, because it’s one of the best produced tunes ever, for what I’m into. There’s not a lot of midrange going on, there’s a lot of bass, but it’s all contained and perfectly executed.
I’ve got a good relationship with [a lot of those associated guys in Berlin]. When I go to Hardwax I’ll spend hundreds of euros, with Torsten [Profrock, T++] picking out all sorts of bits and pieces. Whether he’s up-selling me or not I don’t know [laughs], but he’s pulling me out all sorts of rare records from the back, like ‘I’ve had this record for ten years and I think you might be the right person for it’. And Shed remixed Peverelist’s ‘Junktion’, which came out on Tectonic, and I did a remix for him on his Wax imprint, and bringing it back around full circle he’s just done a remix of something of my own which will be forthcoming on Tectonic. With Shackleton being in Berlin, he introduced me to Mark Ernestus. I do think there is a bit of an affinity [between Bristol and Berlin], and especially around that period – 2007, 2008 – there was a sonic affinity. It came from the likes of 2562, who obviously wasn’t based in Bristol but was working with me for Tectonic, and [then] what Pev and Appleblim were doing at the time. There was definitely an overt crossover there.
In a way [those connections] were always there, but they just hadn’t appeared in quite such a way. I think there was always a certain element of that in dubstep music, whether it was overtly pointed out or not. But those were interesting times- it was interesting, ’cause me and Tom [Ford, Peverelist] would go over to Berlin and play a Wax Treatment night or something, and they were all interested in the dubstep in our bags, and we were interested in the techno in their bags. It was like ‘what have you got?’, ‘what have you got?’. I still think there’s a bit of a connection between the cities now.
