"IF YOU WANT A VISION OF THE FUTURE, IMAGINE CRAP 808 SAMPLES STAMPING ON A HUMAN FACE- FOREVER"
London’s shadowy LHF collective have fully caught my attention since Martin Clark brought them to the world’s wider attention earlier this year. Their series of >’Keepers Of The Light’< mixes and United Vibes show on Sub FM send piercing darts of pirate static skating across the surface of the internet, an unbroken stream of sound that subsumes the importance of individual producers beneath the collective identity ‘LHF’. Their debut EP, Enter In Silence, came out on Clark’s Keysound label earlier this year. A tightly coalesced mass of radio crackle, space-is-the-place jazz exploration and cryptic, looped film samples, it’s a twilight sojourn round the hidden corners of London, heading off on an astral tangent quite distant from their closest dubstep scene contemporaries.
I recently had the chance to send a few questions to group member Amen Ra as part of a feature I wrote on LHF for the latest >DiS Subliminal Transmissions column<. While the gist remains the same, it was impossible to work every interesting snippet of the interview into the original article, so here is the original transcript, exploring the group’s connection to one another, the UK music spectrum, the call of the pirates and John Peel.
(The above picture is by >Nico Hogg<, and I can’t think of a photo that better sums up LHF’s ghostly appeal - a bolt of sheer electricity lanced directly into London’s collective consciousness.)
AE: You all produce independently but feed into a single unit – what drew you together as a group? And was there a particular intent in presenting yourselves as a single entity as opposed to totally separate individuals?
Amen Ra: We wanted to create our own world or system. We wanted to have something for us I guess, it’s a very pirate ethic. Pirates were created as a kind of empowerment, as a way of having something of your own you know, flying your own flag. We all want to feel like we can just be ourselves in a space where there is no judgment or expectation - that’s a beautiful thought for any human being! LHF is like some beautiful dream to us. Now, I don’t know if we’re technically the most gifted producers or make the best music out there, but I do know we don’t get bogged down in trying to be perfect or trying to fit in with the scenes.
It’s like when you’re in love with a girl and she loves you no matter what - you got that support there and you feel free in that. You feel like you can do things and not worry ‘bout whether you’re good at them or get the respect you deserve for them etc, because at the end of it you got that love supporting you and you can always fall back on it. LHF is like a nurturer and a life giver that’s always there, supporting us and allowing us to be ourselves. It doesn’t judge, it’s just there for us. That’s the appeal of it and what brought us together
Operating as a collective, and generally putting your music out in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between each producer’s tracks, gives LHF a real feeling of singularity, despite the fact that there are many of you involved. Do you feel that LHF as an entity stands for something different, or more complex, than the sum of its constituent parts?
It’s good to think of LHF as more of a space where different sounds exist without being “judged” - just a space that holds the parts without changing them or wanting to change them. It sees them as they are, and everything is welcome, because by allowing it all to express itself it allows the elements to learn about themselves quicker and constantly develop in their disciplines. It’s just a blank canvas for elements to fuse, for them to get to know themselves better. Elements come in and jump out again, it’s chaotic, but at the same time it isn’t, because the space expands and contracts along with the elements, so they got more room to play/fuck up/learn. The elements test the limits of the space and find new space; the elements suspect the space is infinite but seek to verify that.
The elements themselves are chaotic and kinda unconscious, but they have these moments where they understand the space better and its possibilities. Sometimes there are more elements and sometimes less. But it’s always me and Double Helix - those are the elements that remain in the space, constantly working more out of the space. The rest come and go as they please, and they’re free to do that, because as I said LHF is just a space, it’s just blank, you give more and you can take more. There’s no real beginning or end to it. So yes, it is something that is greater than the sum of its parts. All these sounds together create this bigger vision, bigger than the individual sounds themselves.
Listening to your music, it’s hard to separate out the differences between each of your productions – there seem to be a lot of shared aspects. Are there musical (and non-musical) influences or inspirations that you all share, or any overarching things that find their way into all of your productions?
That UK underground shit!! The sense of rhythm, the tones and also sometimes the structure of the tunes we make is something we share. We were all sparked strongly by that RZA type rawness and undilutedness, and you’ll find a lot of parallels between all the sounds in that respect, we all got that in us. In general though, it’s just shared experiences - maybe just chilling round my house or Double’s, watching flicks or listening to tunes. We can just feel it when we’ve seen or heard something important that’s blatantly gonna influence our music, coz its changed our perspective, be it a film, Digital Mystikz on the John Peel tribute show, or some radio set on a chewed up old tape. When we part at the end of those link-ups we all know that we experienced something there that is going to change us and our music.
The interesting thing is how that moment gets interpreted and represented by each of us. It’s so exciting to even think of it. The most important thing is that we’ve respected these influences without forcing them or caring too much about how we’re coming across. There’s no pretence in it, we just are what we are. There’s loads of influences in our music man, it’s hard to really get it all down but those that know will know. I could list a few themes off the top of my head: pirate radio culture, esotericism, outer space, skankin’ until dawn, dancehall clashing, love, joy, sadness, light, dark, miracles, criminology…
You’re obviously influenced greatly by London’s nuum sounds, but it’s also harder to tether your music to a specific location because there are so many other elements at play – what other music inspires you all?
I could give you some names of artists new and old that inspire us, but I know I’m gonna screw about it later coz there’s certain guys that won’t get mentioned that I should have mentioned.
I personally listen to a lot of jazz and hip-hop, those are my huge loves and I can go as abstract as those musics get without feeling a way. I’m also really getting into Brazilian and psych rock music recently. Got some much earlier influences too obviously, I grew up on Bollywood films, my folks would bring films every Friday - that’s probably a bigger influence on me than I suspect. For a while it was literally just pirate radio and Bollywood music for me. We love stuff like the BBC Radiophonic guys, that stuff where they’re doing the purest experimentation and ‘accidently’ finding new genres and sounds. I’m into freestyled stuff, like free electronics or jazz, where you really gotta join them in that hypersensitive state to really catch what they’re doing. At the same time we are all really into straight soulful music and golden era hip-hop. It’s impossible to really get into all the stuff we listen to, I’d be here forever. Let’s just say that between us we listen to just about anything and everything.
I’m particularly interested in how your music fits into London’s pirate radio lineage. The way you present it to the world, in mixes and radio shows, with little distinction between tracks, seems to me to be tied to an earlier pre-internet mode of broadcasting – maintaining a level of mystery and intrigue by remaining essentially anonymous. Has that been a conscious decision on your part?
We know no other way of doing music. We were raised with that kind of attitude. I was on pirates before I was producing, Double Helix was going to illegal dances, so it was that renegade attitude that we always connected to this UK sound, that is the backbone of it.
You can be who you wanna be on the outside now, regardless of what you really are inside. You can promote a whole false personality if you want, and pretend you’re someone you’re not, in a much more ‘convincing’ way now. But we’re just gonna continue to ‘do for self’, to free ourselves so we can find ourselves. The mystery and intrigue thing is a natural consequence when you’re not out there pushing yourself in peoples’ faces and doing press shots and all that. Everyone wants to be seen or heard, so when you don’t really want that, when you wanna be left alone to do your experiments, people get interested - either because they have to ‘know’ everything about everything to feel comfortable or coz they feel a certain magnetism that draws them in rather than forcing itself on them.
You said in an interview with FACT, when talking about the idea of ‘Keepers of the Light’, that ‘the light’ is connected to illumination, forgotten wisdom and forgotten attitudes. Is that connected to the anonymity and mystique of pre-internet pirate broadcasting – the element of not knowing who or what you’re listening to, taking the music you’re hearing entirely at face value without the preconceptions that go with it?
Totally, 100%. By taking the form out (names, faces etc) we are left with the essence. That allows people to truly explore the music without their own mind getting in the way, with its pre-conceived judgments and associations. It’s about allowing people to listen freely. We’ve never been for force-feeding people, or introducing music with huge intricate descriptions and our own subjective visions, because we know you experience life differently to us and we absolutely must respect that, so all we can do is allow you to approach the music on your own terms.
I love how Blackdown called us a “transmission” that he’s trying to tune into, that’s hitting the nail on the head. We just provide a constant stream without putting too much of a spin on it or making bare noise about it, so that people can then just tune in, by themselves, for themselves. There’s also this wild element to LHF which can make it difficult to really package anyway, so that makes it easier for us to stay low key!
Your music has quite an ethereal, spiritual feel – is that something you consciously inject into the music, or do you think that’s a product of the way it finds its way out to the listener?
I feel that the process of making music that I go through is essentially unconscious, but certainly I want to feel some things when I produce. As a younger I remember my ‘spiritual experiences’ were always accompanied by music. So there’s this notion that the vibes themselves can cause you to reach places you don’t reach in your everyday existence. There are certain mystics that talk about vibrations as the essence of all life. People are at different levels and plants are different to rocks because of their vibratory rate. So to reach higher places we can change our vibratory rate- maybe music can be a way for directly accessing this principle, or maybe it’s in our minds, I don’t know. Either way, when I produce I want to feel like I’m being taken to a different vibration, where my thoughts and emotions have a different kind of quality to them, you know. I’m not professing to be an expert on the science but from my own experience I know music has the power to change, heal and motivate, so we explore this. It’s not really about talking too much about these principles, but trying to experience them. It’s a private thing and no one can tell you anything about it really, you just gotta go find it, talking about it is empty.
In LHF we’ve all got this strong idea that there’s more out there and that there’s questions that don’t get asked, and I’m sure that must come across in the music and give it that spiritual feel you talk about. We’re not saints though, or some mystical guys, this is just a part of us, and I’m sure everyone’s wondered what it is really all about at some point. The difference between people is in how much time they have spent wondering, maybe [for some] it’s just a fleeting question.
What drew you to put your music out on Keysound?
Blackdown did - he offered us the opportunity of working with the label. I used to read his blog and wished I could put my thoughts on the continuum down as succinctly as he did, he felt like my spokesman. So when he’s asking if we wanna do an album it’s a no brainer. Keysound as a label seem to celebrate the history of the UK whilst looking forward as well, which is exactly what we’re about. It’s a mutual respect that made it happen really, and the fact Double Helix randomly decided to send Blackdown tunes from him and Low Density one day, after reading one of his posts on the forum telling producers to hit him with any beats for his and Dusk’s Rinse FM show. It’s funny, Double found that post the other week - it’s amazing something as ordinary as that can set off this whole spiral of events that changes your whole perspective.
How is work going on collating the album? Is there anything we can expect from it – are you intending to put it together as a coherent piece, or more a collection of tunes from all of you?
It’s a collection of tunes old and new. We’ve got a list of tunes that will definitely be on there and now we’re just getting them sounding right, very different to how we’ve worked so far obviously. We’ve just been banging out tunes for years and not giving them to anyone or doing anything with them, and now it’s time for us to focus on these album tracks, really polish them up and really give them to people, you know, in a real thoughtful way. You’ll have to wait and see if your favourite LHF tunes are on there. One thing I will say is that this is only the beginning, we’ve got many more places we want to reach and many more avenues we want to explore. The foundation is strong, and we can move forward coz a handful of people are putting their own energy into it now too.
LHF’s second EP is due out on Keysound in October, and features Double Helix’s gorgeous ‘Chamber Of Light’.
Rory
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