ALWAYS EVERYTHING

CARAVAN // JOURNEYS IN 4/4

Mention Bristol’s current musical landscape to most people and dubstep tends to crop up pretty quickly. It’s unsurprising really, in the sense that the last few years have seen the city’s profile skyrocket, largely off the back of that genre’s expansion. But they’ve also seen some of its original and most celebrated practitioners take further steps away from the original template: Headhunter’s transformation into Addison Groove smoothed out the bumpier edges in favour of a driving house backbone; Appleblim’s sets and collaborative productions progressively dropped the tempo and upped the groove; Peverelist and Hyetal’s recent joint 12” was characterized by the subtly glowing warmth of early Detroit and Chicago. This transition occurred gradually, mirroring dubstep’s gradual dissolution into a host of new shapes. But throughout the time these shifts have been taking shape, fellow Bristolian Julian Raymond Smith’s own music as October, and the output of his Caravan label, has ploughed a steady path through some of the more outré ends of four-to-the-floor club music.

This Friday sees Caravan take over Timbuk2 for their first club night, featuring Berlin’s analogue fiend Kassem Mosse alongside October himself, Idle Hands label boss Chris Farrell, Kowton and Emptyset. It’s a mark within a period of transition, a musical climate where Commix’s remix album on Metalheadz can feature reimaginings by Mosse and Marcel Dettmann alongside Instra:mental and Pangaea, where broken beats are slipping further into straight 4/4, and where it’s ever easier to mix classic house and techno with modern UK bass mutations. So it seemed appropriate to snag some of those involved for a chat beforehand: here, Smith, Farrell and Joe Cowton chat to AE about plans for the Caravan night, and the state of Bristol’s house and techno scene.

The idea for the night began with a call from Glasgow techno head Marco Bernardi, after he had taken over the running of Timbuk2, begins Smith. “Initially I was quite apprehensive,” he explains, worried about the difficulties of promoting, “ but after some hounding it kind of made sense. And it spiralled from there really.” A few years ago, Farrell muses, they’d look up to Glasgow’s scene with envy, but at this point there’s a sense of change within Bristol’s own community. “Although there hasn’t been such a strong 4/4 tradition in this city, I think in this landscape after dubstep – I’m not saying post-dubstep! – a lot of things are a lot more open. I think more people are open to things like techno.”

And that change is perhaps less a seismic shift than part of an ongoing progression. “All music is evolutionary, very little music is revolutionary,” Farrell continues. “I think there’s now a slightly younger crowd than ourselves that are really receptive to it, which I think probably leads out of the dubstep thing. One of the interesting things about the dubstep scene in Bristol was that every single producer, every single DJ was doing something different. And now it’s settled in the groove of what the mainstream perceives it to be, the more esoteric ends, the people who are striving for something new, I think all come back to techno really.” He pauses to think for a moment. “You’ve got Hyperdub putting out Kyle Hall. Hyperdub, one of the dubstep labels, is putting out what’s essentially Detroit techno. And that’s brought a lot of people round to it.”

Somewhere within all this lies some of Bristol’s most forward thinking music. October’s own tracks cover a fair stylistic range, but the most compulsive – ‘Euro Dance Hit’, ‘Flat Top Muscle’, recent 12” ‘That Placid’ – sound like tense dialogues between sighing analogue equipment and the modern landscape’s digital sheen. The cavernous descent of ‘Memory Man’, meanwhile, takes dubstep’s spacious form and relocates it to Detroit, stretching it into a rattling wormhole through derelict factory spaces and static foreboding. Labelmates Emptyset’s music is stripped back even further, techno reduced to its absolute bare essentials: kick drum, resonant space and acres of sub-bass.



Cowton’s music under his Kowton alias is primarily associated with UK bass thanks to releasing on Keysound and Idle Hands, but his brooding, asymmetrical house jams are something else again. While they share early dubstep’s sense of swing, sub and space, they move in striplit slow motion: ‘Stasis (G Mix)’ is a flickering take on two-step, and upcoming Idle Hands release ‘She Don’t Jack’ is the best thing he’s yet put together, sending scraps of voice skating across a gleaming surface. And then there are also the likes of Addison Groove, Julio Bashmore, and his Velour project with Hyetal, who have sprung far more directly from bass-heavy heritage, leaping into the gaps provided by UK funky and footwork/juke.

“It’s not a huge step from what a lot of people in the funky scene do,” ponders Cowton. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s taking influence from sounds right across the 4/4 landscape and putting a UK twist on them.  Altered Natives is a big example of how to do it – it’s rooted in house, but it’s got a fucking ton of bass under it! You can play it straight after so many old tracks and it doesn’t feel like an awkward transition.” A little later we come back to the same subject. “[It’s] a blurring of the genres,” he continues, “but not in the sense that anything’s watered down. And with labels too, more and more, like Kassem Mosse releasing on [Instra:mental and dBridge’s label] Nonplus+”

Mosse’s debut Bristol appearance has certainly turned our heads here at AE. His music on Workshop, all shattered drum machines and synths that are liable to disintegrate at any moment, remains some of the most compelling to have emerged from Berlin in quite some time. And recent releases on Laid and Nonplus+ have seen him travel in a number of different directions, from bracing 150bpm workouts to sumptuous, shimmering deep house. It’s something all three are very excited about, having been fans of his for quite some time. And alongside his appearance, they are as keen about the club’s second room. “We’re getting into this idea of the experience,” laughs Farrell. “What was it they used to call it in the sixties? A happening. We’re putting on some more esoteric stuff in the back room.” Smith pipes in: “Ambient cinema! We’ve got three friends, [who are] going to work with visuals – all three are going to pick a movie of their choice and do a soundtrack to it.”

Then perhaps inevitably, given the raw, decaying nature of Mosse’s music, conversation turns to the analogue/digital debate: vinyl, the resurgence of cassette tape in US lo-fi circles, and the process of generating unique sounds through analogue synthesis and processing. It’s something October, a self-confessed audiophile, has always focused on for his own tracks. “With digital clipping, you have a bar that’s set at zero dB,” he explains, “and anything that goes over that is going to distort. That can be used to good effect when you’re making your tracks with separate channels on your desk. But tape - being the material that it is - is obviously flexible, and you have tape heads pressing against it. Distortion is basically the amount of pressure the tape head is putting onto the tape. That creates harmonic distortion, this amazing sound that’s not even really there or audible to the ear – it’s boosting it, and layering it on top. With digital though, it just goes straight through. When you process things to tape machines, it sounds infinitely better – and then you master it, and it sounds even better, everything’s level!”

But despite his attitudes towards his own production, Smith still stresses that the Caravan label’s own aesthetic has been the result of natural development rather than conscious choice. “It’s just your own ears,” agrees Cowton. “It’s like when you’re making a mix. You pick the tunes that go together in your own head.”

“We haven’t said ‘we want every record we put out to be made with real gear’,” Smith muses. “It’s called Caravan because you move a caravan around. You don’t want to release one kind of thing specifically. That was the initial ethos of the label, and it’s worked, considering we have no internet presence.” He laughs. “The label’s called Caravan, I’m called October, you type that into Google you get caravan parks that are open in October! I’m quite astonished I’ve managed to get this far with so little…”

Beyond this point our chatter begins to follow slightly more fragmented paths; social networking, Sonic Youth, the trials and tribulations of the music business and post-punk feature heavily. And near the evening’s end, while discussing how musically open-minded many of the Bristol scene’s key players tend to be, Farrell manages to sum up much of its appeal pretty succinctly. “If I’m talking to someone about techno, and they’re like ‘Yeah, I’m into Sonic Youth’, then you know what? We are on a wavelength.” It’s that spirit of hybridization, that process of dissolving boundaries, which forms a great deal of the city’s identity. And if all music is indeed evolutionary, it stands to scientific reason that the odd injection of fresh musical genes from outside sources can only lead to stronger results.

—-

Caravan is this Friday 5th November at Timbuk2, featuring music from Kassem Mosse, October, Kowton, Emptyset and Chris Farrell.

In advance of the night, October has recorded this characteristically excellent mix - a little taster of what to expect on Friday. You can also directly download it here.

October Dj Mix :: Caravan Presents…. Promo by Caravan on Mixcloud

1. Kenny Larkin Presents Dark Comedy Pt 1 - ‘Without Sound’ [Art Of Dance]
2. Octave One - ‘Dema’ [430 West]
3. Terrance McDonald - ‘Mind Over Matter’ [Mos Deep]
4. MCMLXXXVII - ‘Choice’ [Unknown Label]
5. Tazz - ‘Unrestrained’ [Underground Quality]
6. Kraftwerk - ‘Robots - Unknown Acid Rework’ [Unknown Label]
7. Da Sampla - ‘Digital System’ [Puzzlebox]
8. Infiniti - ‘Game On’ [Metroplex]
9. Mike Dehnert - ‘Umlaut 2 Levon Vincent’s NY Basement MIx’ [Clone Basement Series]
10. Incogdo - ‘Simply Just A Ventage’ [Blame America]

—-

Rory