What next?

Today dub is devoloping his new show. First previewed at a two warehouse and club shows in dub’s base in London, and then at a showcase at Club55, Poland (videos here), it’s a live, high-tech combination of VJing and live music composition.

“Coupling visuals and sound, to me, is a pragmatic approach to finding what is pure and authentic in the experience of music in clubs. “A perfect gig” dub says, “is a chance to use humour and drama, in an intimate space. That could be 200 or 2000, but a crowd that wants to be surprised. There’s a real communication, a bond, from which you can be totally in the zone as and take chances, be more creative, tell stories with visuals and music.”

“The spontaneous, live element is just as important as the time spent fine-tuning the decay tail of the kick.”

X Podcast: dub KULT’s love and loss mix

Not the usual techno podcast. Start with Antony and the Johnsons and move outward…

Love and Loss

dub KULT features on Richie Hawtin’s 100th anniversary podcast for Resident Advisor

Richie Hawtin's 100th anniversary RA podcast

Richie Hawtin's 100th anniversary RA podcast

How can you be up and down?

The Fly is very much a party track. It’s really a reference to The Bee by The Scientist from around 1990. The Scientist, more currently known as Phil Pure Science, did 2 classic rave type tracks back then. The Exorcist and The Bee. I love both of them to bits. They were both party tracks and both were kinda up and dark at the same time. A great contradiction! I guess I’m trying to achieve the same with The Fly. The bass line in the Fly is one of the 1st tracks I’m making full use of the idea of not putting the bass notes on the beat of the kick drum. It’s quite interesting as it doesn’t sound like that, to me at least. It can be tricky sometimes to get this to work. If the bass and kick sounds are too different in timbre or loudness it sounds really disjointed and the effect doesn’t work at all.

The AA side is Small and Brave is kinda similar rhythmically the meaning and intent is a bit deeper. The vocals are from a friend of mine Francesca Sciaca. We did a recording session a few years ago, before she went back to native Australia. That afternoon of not managing to get any songs done has nonetheless been an absolute gold mine for vocal snippets, which have been used in everything from On and On to Brave and Afraid.

Small and Brave is abstract, but it’s about how we are so small in the face of the universe, or even just London! But to get the most out of life you have to face it square on. You have to embrace your vulnerability. It takes real bravery to really be IN life without all the false layers of armour we usually protect ourselves with. It is only be stripping the shells of protection (there are many) can we truly experience what it is to be alive.

Why an AV show?

I like my visuals crisp, graphical and, dare I say it, minimalistic. In most clubs, even if the visuals are quite nice they are pretty much never in time to the music, never mind locked to the beat or even individual sounds! The idea of doing visuals that were in time, and in some way, synaesthetic has been at the back of my mind for many years and integrating visuals with my live set has been bugging me for a few years. I discovered a program called Isadora that is amazingly flexible. You can basically get it to do anything, if you scratch your head enough. It’s like a cross between programming and building stuff in Logic’s environment. It’s only recently that laptops have been up to the job of running music and visuals in synchrony – and it’s still pushing what it can handle.

I’ve always thought of music in a kind of visual way and vice versa when I do video editing. Rhythm is very important in both.

It’s also partly just wanting to do something different. Something a bit extra. When doing a live laptop set, there’s always a danger you can look like you’re just checking email or something. So I thought that something that magnifies what you’re doing onto a projector would help. I also changed my live set to be much more improvised and midi orientated rather than just playing loops. This was necessary to drive the visuals program by triggering stuff with midi and gives a much more *live* live show. A lot of the visuals have have a different events triggered for different noises. Some of it is triggered by audio and I even use the iSight camera in certain sections for that real life interaction thing.