Ralph Cumbers, the East London based electronic musician who releases a whole host of marvelous sonic arcana under the names Bass Clef, Some Truths and Coseph Jonrad, has a reputation for his hands-on approach to music production. His early releases and live shows featured him playing the trombone, and more recently he’s been experimenting with modular synthesis, chopping the songs of his childhood into pieces and rearranging them in real-time into delay-drenched collages, and, on most recent album Reeling Skullways, building ramshackle and starry-eyed takes on Chicago house. So it’s appropriate that he’s just started a new series of features on his site Magic & Dreams, entitled ‘What’s Your Favourite Waveform?’, that finds him discussing production quirks with some of his favourite electronic musicicans.
The first edition finds him interviewing Bristolian house/techno producer and one third of Livity Sound, Joe ‘Kowton’ Cowton. We’ve long been a fan of Kowton’s productions for labels like Keysound and Idle Hands (he’s a regular fixture in our Hyperspecific electronic music column), but over the past year they’ve taken a real jump upwards in terms of quality and originality, with punishing broken house on the first Livity release and recent Idle Hands 12" ‘Track Mute’, and a pair of stunning, grime-leaning 12"s through Livity and his own label Pale Fire, culminating in the dubbed-out version of latest single ‘Des Bisous’. You can listen and buy his music at Idle Hands.
In this interview, he chats with Cumbers about his approach to production, how his tracks take shape and working with Peverelist and Asusu as Livity Sound – read it here.
In addition to this first instalment, Cumbers has already scheduled in editions of ‘What’s Your Favourite Waveform’ with Bristol’s creator of anarchic analogue dub Ekoplekz, Neil Landstrumm, recent Quietus interviewee Heatsick and Liverpool analogue house prodigy John Heckle. Future instalments can be found at Magic & Dreams.
