THE DEEP ARK

Everything about this project is longform, so the first question is the most obvious: in these times when people’s attention-span is shorter than ever, what inspired you to do an 8 hour mix?

This was originally intended as a soundtrack to a very particular kind of experience that I won’t elaborate on, but generally consists of at least several hours of wandering of one sort or another – and as the mix is structured to loosely line up with various aspects of that experience, there was a pre-existing arc there that demanded an extended duration. Musically, it tries to trace a very specific strain of electronic music, the hyper-emotional, melancholic variant of electronica typified by the mid 90’s WARP sound and its various descendants, and I wanted to let the tunes breathe as much as possible in the process – so there was a lot of ground to cover, if only in terms of moving between different vibes and tempos – and the tempo ranges from about 80-150 bpm over the course of the mix. Purely on a technical level, that’s not the kind of thing you can do quickly, especially if you want to keep the listener engaged and also do justice to the tunes.

It’s all a bit perverse and virtually guarantees a much smaller audience, but I like longform works in general, and I think it’s nice sometimes to have something to escape into, something that forces you to slow down and take your time over it. Even though the music and the writing is all pretty dense, everything is also structured in such a way that you can dip in and out and still have a pretty engaging experience. It’s also true that this all started out as just a side project really, something to mess around with in my spare time, but things got a little bit out of hand as the project developed.

What led you to that particular brand of 90’s electronica? And what made you want to focus on that sound in the mix?

I was originally sucked into electronic music through the UK’s 90’s electronica sound (particularly Selected Ambient Works 1 and Autechre’s Anti EP), and like a lot of people back in the dark ages I made mixtapes, recording my own compilations from CD, vinyl, radio, even VHS, and I made a series of ambient house tapes that were, looking back, a kind of preliminary sketch of this mix. These became permanent fixtures in my walkman on countless (mis) adventures around the streets of my hometown. This was the early 90’s, and at the time, the likes of Aphex Twin weren’t really household names outside of the scene, certainly not where I lived, and I had no real idea who the artists were or how the music was made (and there was no easy way to find out), so it kind of felt like myself and my mates had exclusive access to this beautiful, mysterious, idiosyncratic music that seemed to have been beamed in from some other realm. Combine this with the emotional aspects of the tunes themselves, the preponderance of ecstatic, plaintive and melancholy melodies, and you end up with something that holds a potent, almost irresistible appeal to a certain type of adolescent mind. As a result I have a deep nostalgic attachment to the music and it still resonates strongly with my memories of the people and places in my life at that time.

The other motivation was that I have always felt that this music was underrepresented by DJs, and even after all these years there’s only a handful of people who have attempted to do it justice in the mix, the likes of Surgeon, Mixmaster Morris and DJ Food. There’s plenty of 90’s sets out there of course, but it’s quite rare to find one that’s competently mixed or even sequenced properly. I had a little bit of experience in the area, so I thought I might give it a try – in that sense it’s both a personal tribute to the artists that soundtracked my youth and an attempt to construct a suitably reverent and cohesive showcase of the sound as a whole.

The Ark, biblically-speaking, was regarded as a repository for sacred or essential things, a kind of safeguard against the future. What’s the significance of the title?

It’s partly a mondegreen of a place name that has great personal significance and a connection, again with my adolescence – hallowed ground of sorts – but your definition is also more or less on the nose. Both kinds of arks are vessels intended to preserve something of critical importance. Many years ago I came across a short essay written by hardcore techno turntablist the DJ Producer, entitled ‘The DJ as cultural historian’. It seems to have been lost to the vagaries of the internet, but it outlined the importance of the role of the DJ in the preservation of music and its surrounding culture through both the contemporaneous recording of sets, and the curation of mixes after the fact – this is an idea that’s been common in hip hop for decades – a naturalistic use of the medium itself as a tool to create and enhance a historical and cultural narrative.

This was about 2005 or so, and it really struck a chord with me as it dovetailed with the approach I was taking to mixing at the time, and also with the presentation of mixes online, adding sleeve art, liner notes, personal reflections, histories and connections, fleshing out the context around the music and using the mix as a springboard for some kind of inquiry. I think, if anything, this role has become even more important over the last decade as we have been subjected to an increasingly relentless torrent of music and other media, and having someone (or something) make sense of it all and present it in a coherent framework becomes a necessity. 

This all seems a bit grandiose I guess, but at some point you have to ask yourself what exactly it is that you’re trying to achieve with your work, what you can add to the culture. My hope is that this will be some kind of worthwhile contribution.

Early Aphex Twin, Mu-Ziq and Autechre seem to be fairly central to this mix. While they had roots in electro (Autechre) or an obvious appreciation for hardcore techno and breakbeat hardcore, all nonetheless marketed themselves as exponents of ‘intelligent’ techno, via the likes of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series.

Do you think that accounts for the lack of a relative ‘scene’ for this style – that, while it maintained the beat-chassis of its roots in rave, it was defiantly non-functional and DJ unfriendly in that it tended not to adhere to the more standard arrangements. Not to say that this shared sound doesn’t have a great many fans – only that the functionality of the dance has a particularly galvanising effect on a scene. Is this music still dance music – in your mind?

I remember chatting to Mike Paradinas after a gig here. I mentioned that his tunes were really tricky in the mix, and he said something like: ‘They aren’t meant to be mixed’. That seems like a pretty deliberate statement, but I think it’s more that mixability just wasn’t something these artists generally considered. It’s true that electronica and/or IDM had solid dancefloor roots. WARP came directly out of the Sheffield club scene and their first 40 or so releases are all club tunes. Bleep & bass and London techno were big parts of the label’s origins, and many of the early WARP artists were consciously trying to emulate or build on the Detroit sound. Whilst the first Artificial Intelligence compilation in ‘92 was a statement of intent, music for ‘long journeys, quiet nights and club drowsy dawns’, the major shift probably came around 93/94 with the first Aphex, Autechre and Seefeel records, and then there was Rephlex, who put out the first U-ziq album in ‘93 after a couple of years of acid and industrial techno releases.

This was part of the wider reconfiguration that came in the wake of the UK rave and hardcore scene which had burned ferociously for 4 or 5 years and then shattered into myriad splinters – jungle, happy hardcore, trance, mainstream dance – and the more experimental minded artists and labels built on the chill-out and ambient techno scenes and sailed off in their own direction. Labels like FAX, Apollo and Rising High headed into more techno and ambient tinged waters, and WARP, who had a more indie, artist oriented approach tapped into a reserve of more diversely idiosyncratic sounds, edging away from the dancefloor in the process. This turned out to appeal to a wide audience that could support the label financially, and the end result was a scene consisting of weirdos and auteurs making music that sat at a distant orbit, an aphelion to dance music proper. Still played in some clubs, but primarily listened to at home or on headphones, taking influence from across the spectrum of dance music in a uniquely promiscuous relationship to other genres. So the traditional role of the DJ and any concerns they may have had just wasn’t really a factor, and over time any extant DJ culture mostly faded away. The downside to all this, as you mention, is that you lose the galvanising effect of the dancefloor, and without that physical and social foundation you end up with a much more diffuse scene that eventually evolves into a decentralised and geographically distributed network with a physically alienated audience – kind of like the internet based genres of the 21st century.

As for the question as to whether or not this can be considered dance music? Despite the seemingly insurmountable schism between the scene and its roots, some atavistic traits persist. We see these tendencies in the music itself – the acid experiments of Aphex’s  Analord series, or the persistence of electro influences in Autechre’s work – but it’s also there in the physical, sweaty reality of the dancefloor. I saw Autechre do a club gig well past the point when their divorce from the dancefloor was supposedly formalised, and it was nothing less than a spectacular example of cybernetic synchronicity between performer and audience, body and machine, a virtuoso display of intelligent dance music. So fundamentally, I think that if people dance to it, then it’s dance music, and I know from extensive personal experience that they do – though that may be coloured by the fact that my city always seemed to have a particular love for the sound, and we were very well served in this regard by local promoters.

There are some obstacles in terms of mixing, but there’s generally still enough of a connection with the dancefloor roots of the genre to allow a suitably motivated and obsessive DJ to put a decent set together, and it’s hardly unique in this respect. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the best tunes are often the trickiest on the decks, but it usually ends up being worth the extra effort it takes to get them into a set.

How do you evaluate the success of a project like this, where you’ve edged closer to Surgeon territory by effectively remixing some tracks in order to make them workable in the mix – but also, crucially, where the narrative of the mix is stretched out over such a long time period?

For me, the mix itself, the moment when two tunes combine and blend and become something new – that’s always been the thing. The mix is the canvas of the DJ, the expressive space of the medium, where the artistic potential lies. You can take two records and create something bigger than the sum of their parts, colour what came before and influence what follows. This has been my guiding principle over the last 25 years or so, and to be honest, I think you could do a lot worse. If you get the mixes right then the rest kinda just falls into place.

Everyone has their own frame of reference, a self-contained universe of subjective interpretation, and this is especially true of music. All anyone can do is attempt to convey their ideas as effectively as possible, something that’s dictated, ultimately by their own responses to the work. So in this sense, my judgement of the ‘success’ of a mix or a project is basically down to how it feels. Whether or not the mixes all hit that sweet spot where the tunes enmesh perfectly and the elements come together in just the right way. If the flow, pacing, density and tension feels right. If it rewards repeated listening and some new property emerges from what is basically just a bunch of tunes being played one after another – that’s success as far as I’m concerned.

In terms of the narrative, I spent a lot of time on structure and flow, figuring out where things needed to happen, the placement of crests and troughs, the warp and weft of it. This was also informed by the tunes themselves of course. There’s a lot of textural and rhythmic variety in the genre – Autechre in particular used to have a penchant for long and achingly lovely ambient outros, and these kinds of features give you opportunities to construct a bunch of stretched out semi-ambient segues before the next beat comes in, which is, coincidentally, exactly the kinda variation and contrast you need if you want to maintain interest over a long period of time. I ended up with this really weird structure; slow, steady increases in tempo and intensity punctuated by these long melodic breakdowns like a sine wave gradually increasing in volume and then flatlining towards the end.

You designed this mix to be an ‘accompaniment’ to a kind of commune with the natural world. I see this employment of music within the romantic tradition, with art designed to enhance the feelings of sublimity offered by Nature, and with its focus on the emotional effect and on the individual’s journey. Where this mix is at odds with the spontaneity of Romanticism is in its construction, which was of course, practised, planned and assembled with meticulous attention to the finest detail. How do you maintain a vision of spontaneous gambolling in a pastoral idyll while writing thousands of words and cut-and-pasting countless Ableton clips?

There is a lot of spontaneous idyll gambolling – but there’s also a ritualistic element to this commune that, despite appearances is very carefully planned – a kind of framework for controlled chaos from which the meaning of the experience emerges. So I don’t necessarily think you need spontaneous execution in order to elicit or convey appreciation of the sublime, and you can see this dichotomy at work in romantic art. You have the raw, extemporaneous genius of Shelley or Blake but there’s also the fastidious and painstaking attention to detail of Delacroix or Doré – and even the most passionate figures have their moments of calculation, and vice versa.

Take Eno – I included a couple of tunes from On Land in the mix, not just because it’s one of my all time favourite records – or because of the beauty of the music and how well it fits into the aesthetic – but because the theme of the album is something I wanted to emulate, to tap into that feeling of being in a certain landscape at a certain time. Now, Eno isn’t someone who would usually be considered a romantic – quite the opposite. His formative years at Ipswich art college took place during the reign of Roy Ascott, who took great pains to try and eliminate romantic tendencies in his students, but I think On Land is a romantic record despite its minimalism. Eno described it as a melodramatic album, and a kind of melancholic portal to his childhood memories. Its mood also touches on the sublime in the original sense; awesome, uncanny, disquieting. These were all aspects of romanticism – Poe was considered a romantic writer after all. The definition of romantic art is fairly nebulous and I’m really thinking in the painterly sense here, but an emotive, individualist representation of landscape and memory that touches on the darker aspects of the sublime – it seems to fit the bill. I also think we see this contradiction at work within this genre as a whole; Aphex Twin, an oneiric visionary in the mould of Blake, instantiating his dream music through sleep deprivation and the induction of hypnopompic and hypnagogic states, and Autechre, with their obsessive relish for intricately detailed sound design and their construction of these deeply evocative, hymnal, hyper-textural sonic sculptures, like scribes solemnly illuminating a testament to human emotion.

Over the years I’ve had a lot of trouble in my own head in figuring out how exactly to define this sound, so it’s apt that you mention the romantics, because I think romantic is the best description of this intensely individualistic and emotional music, full of yearning, sadness and beauty. There’s loads of illustrative examples here – the radiant sadness of Aphex’s Pancake Lizard, the elegiac mechanical symphonics of Cylob’s Bazfoul, or Autechre’s VLetrmx, which sounds like nothing less that a sincere electronic imagining of a mountain’s song. This stuff is just suffused with the sublime. I don’t want to get into the genre wars, but I think these qualities are delineated, thrown into further relief, by what I see as one distinction between the very passionate mid-late 90’s electronica sound and IDM proper. The former is often quite earnest and romantic, characterised by fervent emotion and a mingling of melody and exotic, futurist sounds, whereas the latter tends towards a more abstract, whimsical, cerebral and noodly aesthetic. Even though the two tendencies are often conflated, this difference was paramount when establishing the criteria for the tunes I picked and explains why the tracklist looks the way it does.

So yeah, it seems undeniable that this whole project is a reflection of the romantic impulse. There’s the scale of it, all the interwoven threads that attempt to mythologise various aspects of the music and my experience of it in my youth – and of course the intense nostalgia that comes with all that. The prose and imagery is all intensely romantic of course, and to produce a work that’s intended as a tribute to experiences of community, nature and place, but also to a scene and a sound that has no real tradition of DJng, in a form that’s so lengthy that virtually no-one will ever listen to it, with a load of accompanying texts and material that few people will read – there’s a pathos there, a tragic aspect to it that I think ties in nicely with the tradition. It’s romance all the way down.

Speaking of the audience for this, what are your expectations there? How do you think people will engage with this?

To be honest, I don’t know what people will make of it, or even if all the elements of the project cohere in the way that was intended. The duration of the mix is a big issue of course, and also the fact that it’s designed to be listened to on headphones – there’s loads of tiny touches, little easter eggs that only nerds would notice, field recordings buried deep in the mix, plus some secret stuff hidden away in the book and the website – the ideal listener would be an obsessive WARP fan with an appreciation of mixing, a keen ear for detail, 8 hours to spend listening on headphones – preferably outdoors in some kind natural setting and an appreciation of nostalgia, poetry and pseudo-academic mythopoeia. I imagine there might be a couple of hundred people on the planet who fit the profile, so I guess it’s possible that a few might make it all the way through, and I hope some do.

Can you talk about how you’ve presented this project, the Deep Ark book and the accompanying texts?

In terms of the source material, the book is markedly different from the rest of the project as it was much more of a communal effort. There were about a dozen or so contributors involved in the writing and the pictures – there’s loads of original poems and short pieces of prose, a bunch of holiday snaps and films, some amazing professional photos, a few illustrations, AI tweaked imagery, short cut ups of a bunch of texts, and a lot of references and nods to various things. It’s all been in the works for quite some time and it’s been really exciting to see it all come together into a (hopefully) cohesive package, thanks to Aaron and the lovely people at Broken Sleep books.

I guess I’d say that if the mix is a soundtrack to a particular experience, then this is the closest we could get to expressing what that experience (or the idea of that experience) is actually like – a very personal kind of collective mythmaking. I’m sure it might seem a bit odd to accompany something as prosaic as a DJ mix with a load of impressionistic prose and images, and I guess it is, but I think there’s some value there, that it adds something. I guess if the listener disagrees they can just ignore it and go straight to the music instead, but I hope they’ll give it a glance at least, as in my mind they’re inseparable, and as important a part of this as the music itself.