Steve Goodman: Nurturing Rhythmic Bugs

interview by Simon Sellars

In England, UK Garage has been sweeping the charts for some time now. But in London, typically, just when a sound breaks through, that’s when newer, virulent variants ferment, creating something totally unexpected from the ordinal ingredients. Kennington-based Steve Goodman splices the sexed-up vibe of UK Garage with something altogether darker. As “kode9”, he used to make “death garage”. Now it’s “hyperdub”, an audio virus tracking the original experiments of dub-wise Jamaica and its sonic mutations right across the matrix of London underground beats.

Goodman’s music has a theoretical grounding: as a member of the brainbusting Ccru posse, he rubs shoulders with Kodwo Eshun and a number of other afrofuturist writers. Goodman’s web site, Hyperdub – a shrine to underground breakbeat – contains a number of his articles, all of them containing rare intelligence and insight. Read them, then listen to some hyperdub and feel the cybernetic spread of breakbeat culture enveloping you in its tentacles…

How important are “accidents” or “glitches” in your music?

“Accidents” and “glitches” mark the onset of turbulence, a rhythmic threshold and the emergence of a vortex. I’m interested in a rhythmic consistency far from equilibrium. It’s a balancing act, rather like a martial art. How far can you break a rhythm and make it unpredictable, but at the same time anticipatable? How far before it loses propulsion?

For me, this is what underpins breakbeat as an experimental science.

What’s the significance of “turbulence” and “torque”?

Totally fundamental.

What’s the value and function of random acts of sonic violence?

Don’t have too much time just now for random acts of sonic violence. I would distinguish violence from war, and stress a war tactics of “fighting without fighting” – camouflage and stealth. Seduction is often a more effective strategy than violence.

Sonically, what’s kode9 up to these days? Are tracks like “Swarmachine” and “Make A Friend of Horror” indicative of where you’re at now? Or is it more akin to the harsher sounds of the tracks you did on the Katasonix 12″?

Neither. Those tracks happened in 1998. They are now dead, or at least ghosted, along with the death garage scene that spawned them. “Katak”, the kode9 track on the Katasonix 12, corresponds to a desert dwelling demon of destruction.The kode9 sound just now is much cleaner, slinkier, warmer…but still dark and dubby.Tell me the ideas behind “death garage”. Besides kode9, who were some other practitioners?

The death garage scene was started by Bobby Diablo, a producer/DJ, in New York in the mid-1990s. The UK version started to emerge around 1997/98, like a hyperbolic premonition of the evolution of UK Garage.

Drum ‘n’ bass around then was sinking into one-dimensional dirge, but death garage applied drum ‘n’ bass’ death drive onto its successor, UK Garage. Death garage was a premonition of the sonic cycles of creation-destruction in the UK underground. It was a passing mirage and a sonic fiction. Aptly, death garage is now dead.

Perhaps it was only ever undead.

How is the state of UK Garage at the moment?

UK Garage covers a pretty full spectrum of sound, from cheesy pop songs, to dark 4/4, to jump-up-style breakbeat. My preference is for producers like Dem2, Ghost, Oris Jay and Horsepower. The rhythms of this style can be disjointed but always have swing. Sometimes its like a Timbaland dub techno thing, sometimes a dark, speeded-up dancehall/soca flavour.

Tell me about your studio set up.

Two computers connected together running lots of software that keeps glitching.

As a DJ, are you “Hitchcockian”, where the crowd is merely cattle, dumb and easily manipulated? Or are you “utopian”, where you take the crowd “on a journey”? Perhaps you’re something wholly other?

Depends on my mood and what’s going on out on the floor. As you imply, both are inadequate approaches, suggesting a blockage of feedback from the floor. While I do think DJing is about some kind of “navigation” through acoustic cyberspace, I prefer the idea of the DJ as transducer or valve in a circuit, with the dance floor literally modulating tones and frequencies.

What’s your attitude towards the free trading and distribution of MP3s?

I see the internet as a big, mutating sample bank. The implications of this will manifest itself as something like an “idoru”, a Japanese virtual pop star. There’ll be a self-propagating epidemic of digitalised audio, rather like a computer worm, with bits of itself distributed across many network computers. With the infinite replicability of digital code, the media itself is remixed.

And your take on Lars Ulrich’s Napster crusade?

Someone was always going to say what he said. He was merely the auto-immune response of a system forced to change its lumbering ways. Ice T and Chuck D are much more intelligent, focusing on the tactical use – “viral” and “sound bombing” – of the MP3 format against economic protectorates.
Do you have any upcoming releases?

“Tales from the Basside” has just been released and Hyperdub, the record label, will be launched towards the end of the year. Apart from that, I have some remixes in the pipeline. And there is plenty of half-finished stuff bubbling round the system just now.

In some of your articles you mention “London microscenes”, in terms of electronic music development. Please explain.

London is such a compressed sonic environment, it can sustain a scene for practically every speed and texture of sound. These mini-scenes, or speed tribes, tend to cluster around a speed of sound, due to the tendency of DJs to beat mix. This is mapped to the bpm metric. So drum ‘n’ bass occupies the 165–180bpm zone and UK garage 135–140bpm.

You can be a member of several different speed tribes to varying degrees, but the point is that collectives come together over a frequency or pattern of rhythms and speeds. In areas of dense clustering, such as 120–140 bpm, there can be more crossbreeding of sound from beat-driven DJs – house, techno, garage, breakbeat, broken beat, and so on.

Do these microscenes “talk” to each other? Would that be desirable, or does fragmentation make it increasingly difficult to get your music heard by a larger audience?

I’m very positive about proliferating genre concepts. I think “tunnel vision” and specialisation corresponds to the overriding logic of “scenius” – collective intelligence – as opposed to “genius”, which is operative in London in particular. Sonic intelligence exists in the population in modular form. My music taste is very eclectic, but I hate eclecticism in clubs. I think the hypnotic aspect of maintaining a speed all night is really important. I think it is more interesting to be occupying several consistent speed planes, rather than merely juxtaposing speeds.

It’s a positive mode of schizophrenia to participate in several micro-scenes either as a listener, dancer, DJ or producer. We are definitely anticipating an incoming revolution in the sonic landscape. It will be totally unpredictable, but until then I think we must be content with lots of medium-sized strains of sound.

How does theory inform your music? Are both springing from the same impulse?

Music generates concepts and vice versa. It’s the swing between the virtual and the actual.

You are strongly associated with Brixton: your mixes appear on Brixtonian web radio stations and you DJ at various Brixton venues. How important is this community to your work?

Brixton is a particularly virulent sonic incubator. With its legacy of Afro-Caribbean bass culture, the air just feels heavier there. But I don’t live in Brixton anymore – I’m now in Kennington.

Does your music reflect your environment, similar to how Kraftwerk and the Detroit producers supposedly mirrored a harsh industrialism?

There are several pockets of sonic production in London that can become active on you. They have their own flavour. South London has a strong hyperdub vibe, which accelerates the big dub soundsystems – like Jah Shakka – through jungle, drum’n’bass, garage and beyond. These musics tend to be hybrids of several produced elsewhere on the planet: R&B, techno, hip hop, reggae etc.

Can you explain a little about “hyperdub”?

It’s an audio virus.

OK, but surely as breakbeat culture gets absorbed into the mainstream through TV, ads and video games, doesn’t it get watered down? What’s your program for reinvigorating the sonic potency of hyperdub and all its offshoots?

I don’t have a program or plan as such. I see what you describe as a kind of “recuperation”, completely the other way round. Breakbeat culture spreads virally. Just when you think fatal defusion has occured, that’s when the musics mutate, rejuvenate, spread into new territories, unpick old codes and institute new ones.

If kode9 has an operating logic, then it is “nurturing rhythmic bugs”.

This magazine is publishing a discussion with the Afrofuturist listserv, relating to the concepts of UFO and UFO myths as metaphors for cultural displacement, specifically the Middle Passage. What’s your take on the themes of displacement, alien-ation and cosmic energy that re-occur in black music and writing?

I’m very interested in the convergence between the watery abyss in the I-ching, the biological concept of hypersea and the black Atlanticism of Drexciya and others. I’m interested in “afrovorticism”, which we otherwise know as “breakbeat science”, and “sinovorticism” – cosmic martial systems. I think the convergence of these cultural drifts provides deep insights into navigation through acoustic cyberspace.

I call the convergence a kind of “tao of turbulence”.

Is there a particularly British strand of afrofuturism?

Sonically it is the mutation of the hardcore continuum. I think Kodwo Eshun is deeply influenced by this continuum, giving his version of afrofuturism a distinctly British flavour. This for me is much more inspiring than his US contemporaries.

Can you explain the function of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit: its origin and goals, and your involvement in it?

The Ccru is an autonomous collective of researchers and producers, with a core of 4 or 5 agents currently spread between London and Toronto. The Ccru entity’s relation to its agents is one of possession. This makes elucidation of its function, origin and goals extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Would your linked notions of London “speed tribes” and London’s cultural economy be an example of the “sinovorticist” tendency replicating throughout the Occident?

Certainly the most potent cultural phenomena in London come from extra-European influences. The “speed tribes” concept was originally applied to biker gangs in Tokyo, so I wouldn’t term it sinovorticist as such. And the way we use it in the Hyperdub Softwar agency is not purely about “speed” (as in faster and faster). Rather, we see population groups as swarming around particular velocities.

This is an important distinction. What is interesting about London speed tribes is their collective intelligence, sustainability and adaptability. This enables them to avoid high-speed burn out, or to at least mutate and avoid death. Now, this I would contend exhibits sinovorticist traits, as it is a mode of warfare close to that of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War“, for example.

Tell me about your “Darkcore” and “Hyper-C” writings, with their mapping out of breakbeat’s “parallel universe”.

Well, instead of rising above the music to judge it, I’m more interested in diving into it and sending reports back, using some kind of sub-bass materialist semiotics…

LINKS

Kode9 [ mp3s here ]
Hyperdub[ streaming audio here ]
Dubplate [ mp3s here ]
Afrofuturism