Image via Aleksandra Wojcińska
Son Raw witnessed the fitness.
Kevin Martin, the man behind The Bug and a half-dozen other projects and aliases, knows his music. Whether championing Dub and Dancehall for The Wire, Muzik and Melody Maker, writing liner notes for experimental music compilations, or collaborating with an incredibly diverse roster of vocalists, the London Zookeeper (get it?) zags where most artists would zig, always landing upon a fresh new take on the concept of musical intensity.
First emerging as part of the industrial-Noise band/collective GOD with Justin Broackrick, Martin’s work immediately stood apart from his heavy music peers’ thanks to his affinity for Dub and Free Jazz, influences that complimented GOD’s fuzzed out intensity while allowing the group to thumb its nose at metalhead orthodoxy.
This disregard for ’90s genre purism and Martin’s fruitful collaboration with Broadrick continued via Techno Animal, which was all Illbient bass and bombed out Dub, rocketing past the limits of the subdued tip-hop dominating the mid ’90s. This aesthetic dovetailed with an interest in the darker strains of independent hip-hop and Breakcore developing on either side of the Atlantic, leading to work with iconoclasts such as El-P and Alec Empire and further experiments combining electronic rhythms to the wild frontiers of free jazz.
Martin’s work as The Bug that has drawn the most acclaim. Breaking through with 2003’s Pressure, the moniker became a shorthand for Martin’s work at the margins of Dancehall, combining roughneck Ragga vocals to rhythms that retained all of Jamaican music’s swing and groove, only alloyed to Industrial’s dirt and distortion.
This musical marriage proved prescient, as emerging London communities of grime and dubstep experimented with similar fusions, leading The Bug’s London Zoo to be informally adopted by a younger generation of producers and emcees.
Ever since, Martin has continued to defy expectations, releasing music at a dizzying pace, covering ground that’s mournfully seductive, crushingly experimental, and fine tuned to reduce ravers’ knees to jelly (just about anything he’s done with an emcee). Ahead of the release of “Burials/Mud,” his latest single with Grime trendsetter Logan and African emcee Magugu, as well as an upcoming collaboration with at Mat Ball from Canadian metal band Big Brave, I linked up with Kev for a wide-ranging discussion on his musical influences, and how he’s navigated an extraordinary, uncompromising career in underground music.
Beyond that, King Tubby productions are a massive influence in every way on so much of what I’ve done, and just the core of the Dub music that I got hooked on as a kid. It was sort of impossible to avoid Dub because of [legendary UK radio DJ] John Peel: he’d be playing the Fall Next to Misty In Roots or Prince Far I next to The Undertones, like it was the same thing. And because I grew up in a tiny town, pre internet, I sound like a dinosaur saying you didn’t have access to music unless you went into a shit record store or unless a good one happened to open, which it did in my town. So for me, when I heard Dub for the first time, it literally sounded chaotic, messed up. I didn’t understand the logic, but knew that there was a heavy baseline at the core of it. And I was really into punk music, as a kid, that was my first port of call. A lot of post punk music was led by bass lines, so for me to find out that a lot of those bass players were massively into reggae, it’s no coincidence. And when you hear King Tubby productions and that attention to texture, tonality, the heavy filtering, all of that is totally at the core of what I do.
I played this festival before, it’s an incredible event in the Netherlands, but I’d done it the first time with Dylan Carlson of [luminary experimental band] Earth. So I got away with it that time. Then, this year, I went down to play the main stage in front of 3000 people, without any emcees, without any guitarists, without any other musicians, just me and that sound. By the end, people went off, and it was crazy. But then walking around the festival, I noticed that the demographic was, on average, 30- to 60-year-old white dudes dressed in black. And that one of the main reasons [Justin and I] split Techno Animal: I was bored of white dudes dressed in black who looked like me. It wasn’t representative of what I wanted in my life, what I wanted in my face, and just the struggle we were going through.
So then two weeks later, I’d been booked to play the Machine set at this very commercial Dance Festival in Belgium. To the point I almost didn’t take the booking with no emcees. I get there and the crowd is like 2000 young ravers, and I’m saying to friends, even at the sound check: “I’m going to clear this stage so quickly you’re going to laugh”. Not that I’d wanted to, there was a time in my life I would happily have done that, but just because I thought that I’m playing this slow, relentlessly heavy, twisted, futuristic dog shit that’s going to make all these kids puke. So, all I could see, because this stage was so weird, all I could see was 10 people in front of me, because everyone else below was in a pit. It was so dark that I couldn’t see shit. Plus I had loads of technical problems. It wasn’t till the very end, when I ended with this wall of “fuck you” noise, and then stopped it dramatically, that there’s just this huge roar. And later on, through videos, clips, messages, I realized that people fucking loved it, which for me, was just absolute, total relief. Because it was a really young audience, a really mixed audience, loads of women, not a sausage fest.
Now, knowing that suddenly the same set could knock out a room full of metal heads and a field full of ravers was crazy. You’d have to pinch me. I’m still surprised and getting too used to the dynamic of this type of set, because it is really alien. I’m trying to create a futuristic form of Dub that I’m not hearing anywhere else, because so much Dub music I hear sounds really retro, and I’m drawn, really, to a future shock. I want to hear shit I’ve never heard before, where my jaw hits the floor, or I can’t quite get my head around it. That’s really important to me.
And that’s how we ended up recording a track together. But Witness, that bass line is just so irresistible. Bass lines are my bloodstream. In a way, it’s what I crave most, and those two artists, they’ve both got that swing where your hips will just move side to side. They don’t sound like the disgusting thing where Dubstep went when America grabbed it, particularly where it sounded like nu-metal and every every change had to happen, every 20 seconds. Coki’s sound, I felt, was the one that was pilfered, was bastardized in such a horrible way. Whereas the beauty of Coki beats for me, was the swing and the groove. Women would dig them as much as guys. It wasn’t just testosterone, macho rhythms.
Roots Manuva, I would put him up there as high as any rapper. From any country and certainly any American rapper. I don’t really give a fuck about national boundaries, to any degree. But I just love the fact that Roots Manuva’s lyricism is incredible. And his choice of beats, particularly on the first two albums, was just stunning. Both for me… London is, or was, at the core of my inspiration for three decades. Haunted and Witness the Fitness are so London to me. I remember cycling through London all the time, listening to them. Just hypnotic and druggie in a good way.
So instead of doing London Zoo MK II, I jumped to the opposite and went full steam into King Midas Sound. I spent three years working on a King Midas sound album, which is commercial suicide, of course, but I had to keep that feeling of inspiration in me, because any time that I feel I have to do something, I fuck it up. I have to feel excited about something I’m working on because that’s going to get the best results from me as opposed to “I have to do this because of the cash”. We all have to accept the fact that money pays the bills but at the same time, somehow I’ve managed to keep going without releasing stuff I would regret. And every time I feel I’ve gone one way, there’s a temptation to go the opposite way. It’s quite weird, I’m sure some psychiatrist would have some smart idea, description for me.
Speaking of which, I’ll mention another two singles together: Schooly D’s “PSK” and Clipse’s “Grindin’.” For me, both tracks are pivotal and just irresistible. I actually ripped the Schooly D tune on London Zoo’s Warning. That’s my version of PSK.
The track is not a million miles away from Schooly D as well, although honestly that track wasn’t directly inspired by him: the idea was just some sci-fi rhythm, a beat that doesn’t sound like anything else where people will still be aware that it’s me. That’s the challenge as a producer: wow you can make electronic music reflect you? How can you give electronic instrumentation your signature? That’s always been my challenge.
Then, Logan, he relates to another single that you asked about, which is “When I’m Here” by Roll Deep. I still drop the Wiley mix of that one in my Bug sets. Virtually every show that Flowdan has done, he begs me to drop in the set because he loves it so much.
The vibrancy of working with Flowdan, then being able to work with [fellow Roll Deep veterans] Riko, with Manga, knowing how much that track meant to me when it dropped and how much I was completely besotted by it – it means a lot. I went out looking for Flowdan and Riko, very early on because I happened to be in the right place at the right time, in London, when Roll Deep began. I was there watching fights break out on stage and off stage; seeing 13 dudes trying to grab a mic but each one would have a different voice and identity, same as Wu-Tang. For me, Logan and Magugu were the new generation of grime emcees. Whereas a lot of grime emcees tend to sound a bit similar, I feel that Magugu and Logan are very singular and original in their deliveries and that was really important to me.
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