Ben UFO

Lauren Martin

Perfect. Welcome to another one of the Red Bull Music Academy Tokyo lectures. On the couch next to me is people like to use the phrase “a DJ’s DJ” but I like the phrase “a people’s DJ”: It’s Ben UFO.

[applause]

Ben UFO

Hello.

Lauren Martin

I think it’s good that we’re starting to talk today by the fact that we’ve all got to see you play last night, so at least some people have a sense about what Ben’s about as a DJ and it’s not just all a theoretical talk about playing records. But even though last night was a success and everyone really enjoyed themselves I think it’s quite interesting that your very start of your story success was born of a slight failure. Do you mind telling us about how you started DJing and what the story behind that was?

Ben UFO

I had been DJing for quite a long time, went to university and met couple of people there that I started DJing with, and we decided to try and get a radio show. Radio is something that I’ve done pretty much every week for the past seven years but we were turned down for the first show that we applied to which was just like, a tiny student union radio station who more or less told us that what we were doing was completely irrelevant to anything that they were interested in. So we kind of just applied to an Internet station instead and started broadcasting from our bedrooms, and that was kind of the beginning of everything for us.

Lauren Martin

And to give a bit of context, for those who aren’t from the UK, where were you all at the time and how did you all come together musically?

Ben UFO

I grew up in London, all of us met properly in Leeds where we went to university. I met David, Pearson Sound, in the queue for FWD>> in London. It transpired that he was going to come up to the same university as me so we got talking and he started sending me some of his first tracks, which were pretty bad. [laughter] And I ended up living with Kev [McAuley, Pangaea] in the second year, he was the only person that I knew in Leeds that had a pair of turntables, which we’d set up on the floor of his room. So we’d spent a couple of hours mixing terrible... Well, alternately terrible and all-right drum & bass records. He played the bad ones. Kneeling on the floor next to his bed, it was quite strange. We kind of discovered dubstep at a relatively similar time and started going out to nights together, and that was that.

Lauren Martin

I find it interesting that your relationship with the dubstep scene and music... You’re from London but you were staying in Leeds at the time; for the sake of context, the dubstep scene and sound in the UK was borne of a very small pool of people, producers and DJs and club promoters. Very few venues would play it and it was a very kind of narrow geography as a sound in South London. How did you experience that early on by being a London ex-pat in Leeds, as it were?

Ben UFO

Yeah, you’re right, it was a really hyper specific sound that initially was only really played in a few rooms around London, gradually spread a little bit to Bristol, Leeds was one of the other cities that it spread to relatively quickly. But yeah, we very much felt like outsiders not being in London. I would come back home, go to as many nights as possible, and try to meet people, but it still felt like we weren’t really in the heart of what was going on. And certainly, when we started DJing, we were just coming from that perspective of fans and people that really liked the music and wanted to play it. There was no desire to get involved because we didn’t feel like that was possible, really. It was something that was happening somewhere else. So we started to put nights on, we started doing this radio show, but it wasn’t a scene that we were involved with, we weren’t in the middle of it, we were somewhere parallel.

Lauren Martin

And I find it interesting that your first radio show was named after a Loefah tune, “Ruffage.” So it’s all very slavish towards the dubstep sound. But interestingly, once you started the radio show people started sending in tracks. Could you explain a little bit about the relationship between your listeners and the radio show in Leeds once these tracks started to roll in?

Ben UFO

Yeah, well like I said, we were very much fans of this music, so when people started to send us music that they were writing for the show it sort of made me feel as though there were these little pockets of people around the world that felt the same way that we did. That was kind of the first thing that gave me an idea that what we were doing might be slightly broader than I thought, it might have more of a relevance to other people than I thought. I think because we fell slightly outside of the scene at the time we also felt able to draw from a slightly wider pool of music which maybe made what we were doing relevant to more people. I think that’s probably why we developed the regular core of listeners that we did and I think that’s why those listeners started sending us music to play on the show.

Lauren Martin

And once this music started to roll in, I’m interested in how people talk about the Hessle [Audio, Ben UFO’s label] sound and the Ruffage [a club night in Leeds] sound. And once these tracks started to get sent in, did you start to see patterns of what sort of music was coming in that was influenced by dubstep that you thought, “Hang on, this is something completely new that we should pick up on”?

Ben UFO

I mean, do people in the new room know the records that we’ve released? I don’t really know how to answer that question until I know whether or not people have heard the tracks. The stuff that we were playing on the radio at the time was kind of falling between dubstep, garage, and stuff that was maybe a bit house-ier and faster techno that we were hearing that was fitting in with that sound. And the music that our listeners were sending in was very much informed by that, I think. We were being sent quite a lot of predominantly garage- influenced music, which wasn’t particularly big in London at the time. And the first record that we put out is a really good example of that. I think it was coming at a slightly different angle to most of the other stuff that was coming out.

Lauren Martin

I think we should play it, actually. I think we should play the first track on Hessle Audio. It’s TRG, “Put You Down,” yeah?

Ben UFO

That’s right.

Lauren Martin

For the sake of context, this was released in 2007, so this is kind of happening at a very interesting crossroads in the dubstep sound. So yeah, we’ll let you hear it and you can understand what we’re talking about.

(music: TRG – “Put You Down” / applause)

I really like the attention to detail of killing the track, you didn’t just switch it off, that’s a DJ. So that’s TRG, “Put You Down,” which was the first release on Hessle Audio, which was the label that you started with David and Kev, who are Pearson Sound and Pangaea. Pearson Sound then was Ramadanman, early on. A lot of what gets discussed with Hessle Audio as it started out as a sound was that it was a label born of a very interesting time in dubstep and what UK dance music generally was doing, which was the start of the UK funky sound; house music was starting to come into what dubstep was doing; and 2007 was also the year that dubstep start getting put on festival stages. So in terms of UK music, dubstep was at a real crossroads. How do you think Hessle kind of tackled that early on?

Ben UFO

It was very much born of its time. Like you said, 2007 was a time where a lot of different stuff was happening, the music was kind of exploding in a way that it hadn’t before. The sound was changing, it was broadening, getting more festival-friendly, like you said. I think most importantly there was just a lot of momentum behind it, so if you are trying to get involved with a scene that is expanding it’s obviously going to be a little bit easier. There’s going to be infrastructure there to help you out. For us, we were lucky enough to find a distributor that was willing to work with 19-year-olds that had no idea what they were doing. Like we wrote a sort of really innocent-sounding letter to ST Holdings who distributed us for a long time, who recently closed. It was David that took the initiative to do that. But yeah, they just guided us through the whole process, held our hand through the whole thing, which is something that I think wouldn’t happen if you were trying to get involved in something that was already established, already massive, already slightly saturated. So yeah, it wasn’t that we were so much tackling what was going on, we were just fans that wanted to get involved and it so happened that we were in the right place to do it because there was an infrastructure in place to help us.

Lauren Martin

And once the label started to pick up a little bit of momentum as well, what was the chronology of you being in Leeds? Because everybody thinks of dubstep as London and Bristol in the UK as the big cities. But for the sake of the context of dubstep and what you were doing in the diaspora of UK dance music, what was the Leeds scene like and how did you feel that influenced what you were doing?

Ben UFO

I mean the Leeds scene was tiny, the way that it started was in back rooms of bigger raves, a place called the West Indian Center, which was sort of a big culture center in Chapeltown. And you’d have either bigger drum & bass acts or dub reggae soundsystems in the main room, dubstep in the back room. And most importantly, both sound systems, in the main room and in the second room, would be absolutely amazing so you could be confident that you could go and see this music that was produced in a hyper specific way and really feel it the way that it was designed to be felt. From that perspective it was a really great place to go out and listen to the music, but the core community of listeners and fans wasn’t quite there till slightly later. I think the fact that the music was being played in sort of big dub reggae back rooms gave the nights a slightly different feel as well. In London most of the places to listen to this music would be sort of small basement clubs like Plastic People, places like Mass, Third Base, which were all small capacity one-room venues. So yeah, it definitely did have a different feel, and that’s probably impacted on what we’ve done.

Lauren Martin

And in terms of you DJing as well, like the dynamic with Hessle, you’re the non-producer in the two, and you shouldn’t be embarrassed about that at all. Once you started playing this music on the radio I always really liked... I know you’re a fan of Billy, the DJ on 1Xtra, and he has this running phrase that I really like, it’s like: He blocks out what people thinks is cool. Once dubstep started to get cool, as it were, and you were DJing the Hessle records out, how did you feel the relationship changed as a DJ between the radio and the club at this point?

Ben UFO

For me radio was always the way I accessed this music first and foremost so it was always kind of a solitary thing, I suppose. I didn’t start to play out until considerably later, probably around 2006, ‘7 and the places that I was playing were tiny spots for friends. There was a place in London that I think David talked about in his lecture a few years ago called The Red Star in Camberwell, which was a sort of small community event in Camberwell which happened Thursday evenings and it would basically be like friends DJing for each other. So those were my initial experiences of DJing. When the label started to pick up and we started to get busier that was then something I had to come to terms with I guess. Like, I had to figure out what it actually was that I wanted to present to people. Like you said, I’m the only one of the three that doesn’t produce. DJing in and of itself is quite a sort of niche, specific thing so it seems like a strange thing to specialize in. But I do seem to be able to endlessly pick over what I do and sort of own overanalyze it constantly. That’s still something I do too much, I think.

Lauren Martin

I think it works for your benefit. Speaking of the other elements of the trio, do you think we could play a track from Ramadanman?

Ben UFO

Yeah, sure. We picked a tune called “Don’t Change For Me,” didn’t we? This came out in 2010, 2011.

(music: Ramadanman – “Don’t Change For Me”)

[applause]

Lauren Martin

So, that was probably about three years into label, so that’s 2010. A lot of what gets talked about in UK dance music is the idea of it being a continuum. That one genre leads directly into another in some kind of historical lineage, and things have a domino effect. And I think what’s really interesting about a track like that is that I feel that could’ve been made this year or next quite easily. I mean, I’m not a producer but I think there’s nodding faces in the room. It seems to be a really interesting melting down of all these ghosts of UK classic, now-classic, UK electronic music genres in a way that still quite pertinent without sounding too retro. That’s my take on it anyway. What I find interesting about it in turn is how you manage to frame these tracks in such a way that it was speaking to what was happening at the time, but like the DJ Billy idea of trying to block out what’s cool. I’m curious about what you think about this idea of UK dance music and your place within it, being part of a lineage of something.

Ben UFO

Like, both of the tracks that we’ve played so far have been quite explicitly backward looking, I think. Even if they sound contemporary... Like the TRG tune was really explicitly referencing 2-step tracks and records by people like Horsepower, Artwork, and El-B. David’s tune is obviously completely enthralled to sort of classic jungle records, use of the breakbeat, the kind of constant little references to different periods of UK dance music, like you said. We’ve never wanted to release anything that is wholly nostalgic for something else, so I hope that both of those records sound like a slightly more modern spin on those two things. I mean, they’re both getting on a bit now, both of those first two tracks, but hopefully they don’t sound fully retro, if that makes sense. All of us are really interested in the history of UK music so I think that it does have a really big impact on the music that we release. Like you said, there’s this idea of the hardcore continuum, tracing through UK music from the late ’80s to now, through acid house, all of the various brands of garage, jungle, up to dubstep and grime. The lines are little bit more blurred now, it’s slightly less clear what’s going on, and I think that’s actually reflected in the music that we are releasing at the moment. The music we’re releasing now I don’t think is as explicitly backward looking. I don’t exactly know where it fits in, but that’s something that I’m quite interested in; I quite like the idea of releasing music that’s slightly alien, that no one can quite place, but that still fits within existing dance music conventions. I think the value in looking at an idea like the hardcore continuum is that it gives you an idea of what kinds of conventions of the dancefloor might be worth holding onto, and it might also give you an idea of how it might be fun to subvert them, if that’s something that interests you.

Lauren Martin

It does interest us, that’s why were talking about it. When you are talking about what you would like to hold on to and what you would like to subvert, as a DJ, what would you like to do in those regards? What do you think is possible to do?

Ben UFO

It’s definitely not a thing that everyone is fully interested in doing because there is so much music that fits very, very comfortably within existing parameters of genre and stuff like that. I’m not particularly interested in playing sets or releasing music that does fall really comfortably within those parameters, and I think it comes from our perspective as kind of outsiders to the various scenes that we’ve been involved with. Like you said, being in Leeds when dubstep was going on, coming into DJing house and techno with a background that’s more garage and dubstep and blah, blah, blah. So I think we’ve always felt the freedom to play around with whatever genres we might be interested in at the time. I don’t think we’ve really felt the pressure to live up to the expectations of genre because we’ve never been welcomed into any. Yeah, I hope that answers the question.

Lauren Martin

No, no, it’s a difficult idea. I think I should have prefaced that a little bit better; when I say this idea of a hardcore continuum I think one of the preconceptions of it now is that UK dance music lives in a bubble and that it only feeds into and off itself. When actually it was born of US house and techno music, and essentially, if I can boil down quite a complicated idea, is how the UK music diaspora managed to involve themselves in it. I quite like that idea of you challenging is how you manage to fold in the traditions of US house and techno with things like garage and grime and even bassline kind of stuff, like the latter kind of things. Within that idea of what you’d like to subvert and what you’d like to change, when it comes to playing music on the radio and playing music on the dancefloor do you think there is a disparity between the two?

Ben UFO

Possibly. I guess to go back to what you were saying about the hardcore continuum; I think these ideas are super useful in that they do allow you to draw a line through eras and pick out patterns and things like that. But with ideas like that that are essentially really broad generalizations, generalizations that are made because they are useful but they are still generalizations, so there are still tons of exceptions to these ideas and tons of tiny little flaws within the idea. And I find those flaws quite interesting, so if you broadly sum up US house and techno in a certain way I’m quite interested in finding people that don’t comfortably fit within those parameters. And trying to figure out why it is that they’ve managed to make it work despite the fact that they are operating at a tangent, in a way, from things that they should be doing. I’m always interested in finding UK producers that seem to pull in their influences from the States or for somewhere else, because like you said, there is this idea that somehow UK music exists in a bubble and UK producers only look to other UK producers for their inspiration and their ideas. And we know that’s not true, I mean when we listen to garage records you can pick out tons of ideas from US rap and R&B and all that kind of stuff. But for the simplicity of the idea of this continuum it makes sense just to kind of lock it into place. So yeah, I think that does inform my ideas about what I’d like to do as a DJ and what I’d quite like to do with the label. I’m quite interested in trying to be one of those people that can find slightly different ways of doing things and that can subvert the kind of established narratives around the music that we’re involved with.

Lauren Martin

I think another thing that’s really interesting about that, when you say trying to pull in a bank of knowledge as a DJ, I think one of the interesting things with this idea of a continuum is the idea of being eclectic and what that means is a DJ. And I don’t know what other people think of this but I think it’s quite strange how the word “eclectic” as a DJ automatically assumes you’re educated about music. That you have a wealth of knowledge about various things and that implies you’re inherently good at what you do. And I think as a DJ this is quite an interesting dichotomy, because when people say “eclectic” you can see eclectic as knowledgeable, but a DJ in the student union bar can be eclectic, it doesn’t imply quality. And I wonder what you think about the relationship between eclecticism and specializing.

Ben UFO

So again, it’s quite complicated, I think we were having a conversation about this yesterday. I think for emerging scenes that have a newness about them that are kind of unique and fresh and vital in that way that dubstep was, in that way that grime was, in that way that 2-step garage was, specialism is really really important because it’s that specialism that allows the music to unravel and develop. So with a genre like dubstep there was DJs Hatcha and Youngsta who both produced occasional records but were essentially specialist DJs. And they kind of put a lot of initially quite disparate music into context as being one thing, and it was that that really sort of honed the sound and made it what it was. And it helped people identify with it, I think. It made the music less impenetrable or something. I don’t think that I’m that kind of DJ at all, because like I said, I’ve never really been an insider to those kinds of scene workings, but I really admire DJs that do that. Talking about specialism and eclecticism, I think a lot of the time, like you said, that narrative is a massive oversimplification. DJs like Hatcha and Youngsta, they might have done something really hyperspecific but they obviously have a wealth of knowledge to draw on and it’s that that underlies their specialism. So I don’t think anyone should be afraid to really go in on what they’re doing and really hone it and perfect it because there is obviously an enormous amount of value in that, that just kind of wild eclecticism and picking and choosing from a million different areas aimlessly... That’s a completely false binary, but there’s value in both specialism and eclecticism, basically.

Lauren Martin

Speaking of Hatcha and Youngsta, we’ve got a wee bit from a Youngsta set that you found especially inspiring. I’m just going to play a short blend so that people who aren’t familiar with the style of dubstep DJing when Youngsta was basically the god. So yeah, we’re going to play a bit of that. What kind of time period was this one from?

Ben UFO

This was 2005, when I was 19. I don’t know if people are familiar with pirate radio conventional stuff, but there’s MC hosting on this set which… Yeah, you’ll see what it sounds like. There’s a couple of blends in there... You’ll hear the sort of sound of the FM broadcast... Yeah, it is quite evocative of London at the time, I think. Oh, and it’s from a Rinse FM, which is the station that I DJ on as well.

(music: excerpt Youngsta radio show on Rinse FM)

Lauren Martin

A round of applause for Youngsta, I guess, yeah.

[applause]

Now, may seem a little bit strange to play a segment of a DJ set in a talk about a DJ that is not the recording, but I think it’s interesting to listen to a set like Youngsta and try and understand what you mean by a specialist DJ, in the sense that he didn’t actually play that many tracks there but he did a lot with it. Which I think is what you mean by specialism as a DJ, right?

Ben UFO

Yeah, in a sense. I think with Youngsta it was always more about pacing and maintaining a certain atmosphere and vibe. He really did take a specialism to sort of extremes like in those days he was only playing music by four or possibly five producers across two-hour sets. And that was all he was interested in. I think he would really criticize people that would come in and give him music as well and when eventually he did expand the pool of producers whose music he was playing, you could really hear that he’d spent a lot of time grooming them, and speaking to each one of them. So he was very much involved in the music that was being made, people were making music for him and he was presenting it in his specific way. He is definitely a DJ that had a massive community of listeners around him as well. It was quite inward-looking thing, but it was all the better for that.

Lauren Martin

And what about that kind of relationship between the listeners and the fans and the producers with a DJ like Youngsta chimes with you and what you’ve been doing with Hessle, for example, and your radio shows?

Ben UFO

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been doing radio for seven years now... Yeah, pretty much seven years solid, on two separate stations. Initially on Sub FM which was an Internet-based dubstep and garage and assorted UK music station, now on Rinse, which was pirate for 16 years and has had a community license in East London for the last three or four. Yeah, it’s probably the single most valuable thing, I think, in terms of me building up a career as a DJ and someone that plays in clubs. The radio shows absolutely do inform what I do in clubs because, I think that’s... It feels surprising to me but I think it should have been it obvious all along, like, when you’re playing in clubs week in week out you’re playing to very different crowds in very different places and it can I think confuse, and it can make you question, I think, what it is that you’re looking for in the music that you’re playing to people. The responses can be so wildly different that I think it can make you question your own responses to music a little bit. With the radio I’m playing to the same crowd of listeners, more or less, every week. There’s obviously people driving around London listening to the show who don’t write in and stuff and that’s like a thing that I really like about playing on Rinse. But I really like the fact, as well, that the same people write in to the show week in week out, listening to the music that I’m playing, telling me what they think of it, telling me what they like, occasionally what they don’t like. But yeah, it kind of roots what I’m doing, I think it gives me a grounding that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I think if I was just floating around clubs every week playing this music to people I would probably feel a bit lost, to be honest.

Lauren Martin

Yeah, feeling lost and having roots and all those kind words, it really hits home how a specialist DJ with a core group of listeners and a fanbase for clubbing, the kind of people who would follow you around as a DJ as opposed to a producer, it kind of gives electronic music a home, quite literally. And that specialism about having somewhere to have the music that you play live is really interesting. I was actually wondering, on a slight tangent to that as well, if we could play a little bit of something off of your Fabric Live mix CD? And also explain a little bit about how that came around, and the residency.

Ben UFO

Yeah, as a label we have a residency at the club fabric in London, which has just celebrated 15 years of being open. They’re another massive institution that somehow inexplicably decided to give us a slot really, really early on and have kind of built us up over the past few years. As the label has grown they’ve given us slightly more prominent slots at the club, we now take over the main room three times a year, and for the past two – well, we’ve done one of these and we will be doing very soon – takeovers of the entire building which are always really, really fun. Their CD series is, I think probably one of the few remaining relatively successful mix CD series. One of the few that hasn’t decided just to go with Internet podcasts. I’m not really sure what the significance of that is, but for me, at least, it was an opportunity to spent a really, really long time trying to hone something, trying to craft something, I guess. The clip that I’m playing is hopefully representative of the kind of thing that I really like hearing, and that I try and do. The three tracks are from relatively different areas and sonically they’re quite disparate as well, but I think they work really beautifully together. I’m not really sure what it is about the three tunes that work so well together but I think played together they have something that individually they don’t.

(music: excerpt from Ben UFO Fabric Live mix)

Lauren Martin

You can actually clap for Ben UFO for that one because he did mix that one.

[applause]

I think that’s the most meditative I’ve seen the room to date so that’s good. It’s a fantastic mix, we’re in danger of listening to half the thing at that point. But what I find really interesting about the idea of being a DJ’s DJ and you not producing as part of Hessle, but you are representing much more than just your skill by having a label and by being so invested; with the mix series like Fabric Live, most people who do it are producers who also happen to be DJs so it’s a way to promote their own music as well, as well as show off their skill. When you don’t have your own music in there, what do you consider is your work when you’re doing a mix like that?

Ben UFO

I guess just kind of the full package. Like I said, doing a mix CD is an opportunity for a DJ to spend some time honing something and crafting it, away from any of the pressures that might come from generally playing to an audience, which I think just naturally results in you making a different thing. I think the way that I’ve approached recording podcasts and CDs like this is probably much closer to me getting towards the kind of specialism that we were talking about before than I have done on the radio and in clubs. I think, again, it’s because it’s an opportunity to try and really look closely at something and try and achieve a particular feel. Hopefully you agree that those particular tunes work really well together and lend each other something that they wouldn’t have otherwise. I think that’s always what I’ve been interested in about DJing, is how certain DJs can make you feel very particular things that you might not have felt before about certain tunes that you might be familiar with already. DJs like Youngsta definitely did that to me, and DJs like Optimo or DJs that sum up the positive eclecticism that we were talking about before do that to me as well. That’s a slightly more achievable aspiration for me, I think, to aspire to what someone like Optimo or... I’m trying to think of other examples at the moment but they’re not coming to me.

Lauren Martin

Actually, for the sake of context could you explain a little bit about Optimo and why you like them so much and what they mean to you?

Ben UFO

Sure, they are two DJs from Glasgow, Keith and Johnny. Been going for a long time, put out a series of absolutely unbelievable mix CDs, that was my first introduction to them. CDs which are quite often themed around a certain sound but are sonically super disparate. They find ways of putting together loads and loads of different kinds of music under similar stylistic banners, somehow, and it is purely in the way that they do it; their skill as DJs, that’s what makes it achievable for them. That’s something that I really admire.

Lauren Martin

So in the sense of the Fabric Live mix CD being an example of your work it also is about putting yourself out there without your own music to back it up, as it were. But what is interesting is when a producer and a DJ together has a mythological kind of feel to them. There’s this is very innate combination of factors that make somebody really special. And I know that somebody that really represents that for you is a man called Spencer Kinsey. I think it would be really good to have a little bit of the background about why that particular DJ means a lot to you.

Ben UFO

I think I brought him up in conversation when I have done interviews a few times because he really represents what I was talking about before in terms of someone who managed to live within a scene in a certain context whilst also picking apart the established conventions of that scene. He’s actually someone that was really crucial and actually quite reassuring for me as someone that was getting into DJing house and techno. His style of mixing and the sort of adventurousness of his production as well, but mostly his style of mixing gave me reassurance that you could play house and techno with energy; that I could mix records together in a way that came naturally to me, like in a kind of UK style; quickly, with sort of, I don’t know, hands-on feel to the mixer. He means a lot to me for that reason, I guess. There’s one particular mix of his, actually, that made me feel as though I could actually contribute to something something to house and techno just by DJing.

Lauren Martin

And that’s quite a lot for one mix to do.

Ben UFO

Yeah, I mean it’s a long mix, but yeah.

Lauren Martin

Shall we hear a bit of that mix so people get a sense of what you mean?

Ben UFO

Sure, I mean it’s a completely different thing to anything that I’ve played so far. It’s a really bad recording as well, it’s really saturated and, yeah, it sounds like there’s some really weird kind of tape compression stuff going on. And the mixing is not even particularly tight, as well, but as someone from the UK that was interested in garage and dubstep that’s not really been something that’s ever bothered me particularly. Check it out.

(music: excerpt Spencer Kinsey DJ mix)

Lauren Martin

I love that.

[applause]

Just before you say anything, one thing that’s really struck me, apart from your Fabric Live mix, which I have heard, I hadn’t heard those two mixes before enough to remember how they run anyway. And what’s really struck me about playing all three of them in a sequence is that Youngsta’s was for radio, yours was recorded and released, and that was very much like the club recording. I think what all three managed to speak to is that there are different homes for electronic music. There’s no set, I don’t know what you think of this maybe this could be a segue into this, but when people say this is dance music that you can listen to at home, dance music for the club, dance music for the radio, I think bracketing these off, as a listener, isn’t very helpful and it probably isn’t very helpful for you as a DJ. I don’t know what you think about that and in what kind of context you think your work is most applicable to, if that makes sense?

Ben UFO

Yeah, I’m not sure I completely agree. I think boundaries are useful and kind of essential. I mean I definitely agree in part that things like music having very, very specific purposes is sort of... I’d never describe a track that I play as purely a club track or purely a radio track, so in that sense I agree with you. But also, music is contextual, and certain music is designed for certain contexts, certain music functions particularly well in certain contexts. I think it would be a slightly odd as a DJ playing music for people if you didn’t take that into account. When I play really big parties I definitely approach them differently to the thing I did last night with Nobu, which was absolutely tiny. In a context like that where you’ve got people staring right at you, right with you, I think that music is so much more tangible in that kind of context. It’s so much more immediate and you can get away with so much more. On a big stage where, particularly if you’re DJing and not sticking your hand in the air and stuff, what you’re actually doing up there isn’t particularly visually obvious, a lot more gets lost, and I think it would be weird not to take that into account. That’s one side of it, the other side of it is that those kinds of dynamics have led to there being quite established ways of performing from space to space. There are certain sort of tropes and conventions that you hear again and again if you go big room raving. Because there is certain stuff that will trigger thousands of people to put their hands in air and stuff. That kind of thing isn’t particularly something that I’m interested in. I obviously do play into that a little bit because there is something really nice about performing to a lot of people that are sort of simultaneously showing you that they’re having a good time. But I’m quite interested in trying to achieve that sense of unity in a big space by doing something a little bit different and trying to work around those conventions a bit as well. That’s why I continue to play in both kinds of space. It’s not that one thing informs the other, because playing in big rooms doesn’t inform playing in small spaces at all, but continuing to play in small spaces and being inside of the crowd as much as possible, that is something that I think will stay really, really important to what I do. It gives you an idea of how something slightly more specialist might translate when you try and do it to more people.

Lauren Martin

Yeah, and it’s also interesting when you consider how the world of clubbing, and the fact that you even use the phrase “the world of clubbing” is probably quite indicative of what I’m about to say, is that in the past five, six, seven years clubbing has become a recreational thing to do. It’s like eating or exercising, people go clubbing on the weekends whether they particularly like music or not. It’s become a hobby that’s very accepted. Whereas once clubbing was a mix of escapism, a political, sexual, radical space to experience something out with your norm. Now that clubbing is part of millions of peoples’ norms, it is a billion-dollar industry, there are entire islands devoted to the activity pretty much. I’m wondering: You, styled as an underground DJ as it were, you are now presented with all of these different spaces to play with in what is now a billion-dollar industry; how do you see how you’ve played over the last five years in tandem with this enormous growth of what is now clubbing culture?

Ben UFO

It’s difficult to pick my own experience and my own trajectory apart from general trends and stuff like that, but I do think that underground music in particular has been really successfully monetized, basically, and it seems like a much bigger industry to me than it was. And I don’t know if that’s partly to do with me playing different music and finding myself involved with scenes that are more established and have more established means of promoting itself and stuff like that. But I don’t think that’s the whole of it. I mean the festival circuit is a really, really good example of something that’s absolutely just gone completely crazy recently. There is absolutely enormous amounts of money involved in some these bigger organizations as well. I don’t know if that impacts on the way that I approach DJing. It does mean that I’ve found myself playing in spaces to a lot of people, the majority of whom don’t know who I am, so I guess that does have an impact on the way I play and the way I DJ. But equally, it’s something that sort of gives me even more of a reason to try and play some of the weirder stuff as well, because it’s a platform to do that. And I do enjoy working around whatever problem I’m faced with, whether it’s playing bizarre techno records to 2000 people or something, it’s a fun challenge. It’s really fun thinking of ways to try and get away with doing that.

Lauren Martin

Definitely. And then in turn you must have tried to present music in settings that are not conventional dancefloor spaces. It’s quite interesting how this kind of circuit means that you are regularly gigging around the world at a time when, for example, the Youngsta’s of dubstep, just at FWD>> or DMZ and then Spencer Kinsey would’ve been in a very particular time and place, you’re playing very underground music across the world. Are there any particular examples recently where you’ve felt it has and hasn’t worked your benefit?

Ben UFO

Yeah, I mean I’m sure, I’ve had my share of bad gigs as have most DJs. There was one particularly memorable festival set when I wasn’t particularly experienced with them. I’d been on a stage closing after three or four French hip-hop acts... Yeah, a lot of people, about 3000 people, I’ve never seen that amount of people before in my life. I’ve always said I’ve never seen, before or since, as many people walk away from me as quickly. [laughs] It was really awful. I mean two or 300 people stuck around, but that’s like 2500 people leaving all at once, it’s quite a lot.

Lauren Martin

It’s a bit of a knock.

Ben UFO

Yeah, yeah. Totally. But it’s an experience, I think, like I sort of overcame that hurdle eventually. I don’t know, I think traveling, playing in different contexts, it does have a really big impact on the way that you experience the music that you play. I think that was something that affected the trajectory of dubstep and how it developed, the problems that it faced, translating itself to bigger spaces from those small rooms. Yeah, that essentially was the thing that eventually killed my interest in it. Because the things that I had to do or the things that it ended up doing, it became a completely different thing. Yeah, I’m not sure what I’m getting at particularly.

Lauren Martin

It’s all right.

Ben UFO

We were talking about how this music has been sort of monetized really effectively and how there are more massive spaces than ever with which to perform and show your music to people. I think seeing what happened with dubstep, seeing what happened with drum & bass before it, it’s given me a really good idea of what I would like to avoid. And that really informs how we approach the music that we release on Hessle. We want to release music that functions in big spaces but that still manages to have something different, something alien about it. So music that is linked to, I guess, sort of big room dancefloor tropes and stuff but that somehow skirts around it. That manages to kind of work effectively and engage people, but to do it in a slightly different way. And it’s really satisfying when you see a lot of people react in shock to something that they weren’t expecting, I think you end up getting some really interesting moments that way. People start interacting with each other differently, it’s really nice when you see that happen. And the last record that we released is I think the best example of that. I’m really happy with it, it’s the first record that we’ve released in a year, and I think one of the reasons it took us so long is that we’ve been trying really hard to think of ways to approach this kind of problem. Making weird music accessible to lots of people.

Lauren Martin

Well have you got an example of it we could play?

Ben UFO

The last record we released is by a guy called Bruce, we’ve picked a lot of producers that have really straightforward names.

[laughter]

Yeah. His real name is Larry, actually.

[laughter]

Lauren Martin

I just assumed he was called Bruce, but you know…

Ben UFO

I don’t think it’s public knowledge. It is now. So this is “Not Stochastic” off Hessle #27. Yeah, see what you think.

(music: Bruce – “Not Stochastic”)

[applause]

Lauren Martin

And you were speaking about surprises on the dancefloor, that actually did stop me in my tracks, so I guess it served its purpose. What’s really interesting about that track is that we’ve kind of actually managed to bookmark this really nicely because we started with Hessle, we had a little bit more Hessle, and then we’re finishing with the future of Hessle. When we’re talking about dance music presented in all these different contexts, the radio, that club, the official mix CD release, you’re having to play in all these different clubs all over the world, big festival stages, it seems like an endless list of what could and could not work. What is it with that track in particular and what you’d like to do with Hessle going forward that you feel can speak to these different situations and put across your ideas of what you would like to do as a DJ?

Ben UFO

Again, like I said, I guess this tune is something that messes around with established big-room techno tropes. It involves white-noise drops and all these kinds of things that everyone would’ve heard a million times, but structurally it’s all over the place. It’s really bizarre, it’s been put together in a really specifically and purposefully awkward way. Awkward particularly from a DJing perspective, which is something that I’m kind of up for. But yeah, I think it really works, it definitely stops people in their tracks, like you said. This is the kind of thing that I’m interested in releasing on the label, it’s not that we’re being awkward for the sake of it or that we’re taken ourselves away from established dancefloor tropes, that’s not what I want to do it all. With the label and with my DJing, too, I want to work within these conventions because they’re there for a reason. They work and dance music needs to function in a space. But the label for me has always been informed by our perspective initially as being outsiders. And I still feel that way now and I feel like that’s why we continued to be interested in releasing these records that come from a kind of a kind of outsider perspective. And yeah, that fully informs my DJing.

Lauren Martin

I think [looks at desk] that’s gone on for an hour and a half. I would like to ask if anybody has any questions for Ben. Oh good, oh wow, amazing. Lots of people wanting to ask questions. Can we just give a hand for Ben speaking so nicely for us? Great.

[applause]

Audience Member

Last night was amazing, and I’m a DJ too, and listening to the third mixtape, for me is like overwhelming when I hear a DJ that I really, really like. And you said that that made you want to put something there that made you trust that you could add something to a techno scene or whatever. And for me listening to that kind of mixtape just makes me feel the opposite way because what can I add listening to so many good DJs around and trying not to... Because I think I have found a path in two ways, trying to see why I like them and trying to copy some vibe. Or just doing the opposite because, I mean, my question is, how have you found that thing you are trusting that you can do for adding your place in that scene?

Ben UFO

Yeah, it’s a good question. And I definitely sympathize, because back in the day when I was listening to dubstep DJs and jungle DJs I very much did feel that like, “Why would I bother thinking that I could put myself out there when there’s all these guys doing what they do so well?” But I think for me what was different about the Spencer Kinsey mix, which I actually played the wrong clip from, I’d found a really good clip that involved loads of spin backs and UK sounds and stuff but I played the wrong one, but it was my lack of familiarity with the scene at that point that made me feel as though I could contribute something to it. If I’d known more about house and techno, more about the history of the music, I might have felt more cautious, it probably would’ve felt more difficult to approach, just because, like you said, I might have felt more overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that was already there. But at the time I hadn’t heard anyone really mix like him. He’s not active at the moment, hopefully I’m not kind of wholesale ripping him off, but I think being influenced by somebody’s approach, if you don’t hear anyone else with that approach out there at the time, is kind of fine. I guess also something that would probably be more reassuring, I guess, is that I think the longer you do what you do, as long as you’re self-critical and stuff, you just inevitably do just end up progressing in a slightly different direction to most of the people that initially influenced you. I think that can’t help but happen. I think that’s what happened with me anyway, I don’t think you should let it put you off. I’m glad there are some DJs in the audience, I was wondering.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Lauren Martin

Yeah, just pass it along I guess, yeah.

Audience Member

Hello, I had a question that has not been discussed actually today. I’m talking to you as a label owner which releases vinyl, and I have question about the medium that you share your music with. I’m sure you also own quite a few records of yours. So what was the reason back when you created Hessle Audio for this medium, which is vinyl, and what is the reason now to continue doing it?

Ben UFO

I think there’s a few different reasons for that. For me, I find the amount of digital music that’s released now completely overwhelming to the point where if I go on to a digital store and click releases from this week I can’t get through the first page. I’ve barely got through the first half of the As before I stop. So from that perspective I think it’s just a filter, which everyone needs; there’s so much music out there that everyone needs filters. And those filters can be DJs and record labels and stuff as well, but it can also be your choice of format. I don’t limit myself to just buying vinyl, but I do find that it’s released in manageable quantities so that I can actually check out everything that comes out. We started the label as a vinyl label for different reasons though; it was literally just because everyone else was doing it. We were fans of a certain scene and that was how that scene did it so that’s how we wanted to do it as well. Most of the DJs that we were going to see were playing on vinyl and dubplate at the time and we wanted to be able give them our records so that they could listen to them and maybe play them. That was the reason for that. I think we continue to do it just because it’s nice to have an artifact, it’s nice to have a physical reminder of what you’ve done.

Audience Member

Thank you, totally agree.

Ben UFO

It’s not format purism at all, I’m not interested in that. It’s just from a personal perspective we like having records, they’re tangible.

Lauren Martin

Anyone else? [points] At the end?

Audience Member

Hello, you’ve kind of touched on this a little bit with bridging the marketplace or the musical climate with alien music, you know what I mean? How you are trying to spread it. As a person who, I guess, is responsible for spreading music as a label and as a DJ, in the reverse question, do you ever have any conscious dilemmas or make conscious efforts to limit that spread or try and preserve the trajectory of a niche movement that you love or champion?

Ben UFO

Yeah, definitely. It’s something that I’m more conscious of now than I was at this time last year, definitely. There was this whole debacle around outsider house as a thing, which…

Lauren Martin

I actually made a point of not bringing that up, so you brought it up, so... [laughs]

Ben UFO

Yeah, yeah, it’s my own fault. So I guess over the past 18 months or something there’s been a whole wave of really interesting producers that are making house and techno that broadly sounds quite lo-fi and that doesn’t play into a lot of the dancefloor conventions  that have been established around house and techno. The Hard Wax record shop [in Berlin] uses the word “outsider” to describe anything that is slightly kind of other but still fits within that kind of genre boundary, and I made a sort of crack on the radio being the stuff being outside house. And someone wrote an article about it and ever since then that’s been its name and that’s how it’s been described in the media. A lot of people are doing it in a super tongue-in-cheek way, but it’s still something that I think has generally had quite a negative impact on the music and a lot of people’s production careers because they found themselves kind of pigeonholed into this one specific style. That kind of pigeonholing is really convenient if you’re trying to sell music, or if you’re trying to sell an idea, sell a night, sell an event, but I think it’s not particularly helpful a lot of the time when for the producers when they’re 17, 18, 19-years-old and just getting started. So in that respect, yeah, I’ve definitely thought about whether for certain musics, whether or not it’s appropriate to be playing into that kind of hype machine.

Audience Member

Cool, thanks.

Audience Member

Hi Ben, thank you for your inspiring work. I’ve got a question for producers, actually. Speaking of awkward structures, I’m a producer and totally not a DJ, so I often, when I compose my tracks, I like to build a peculiar and strange narrative and still make club music somehow. The question is, when you meet a track that has a really awkward structure, maybe BPM changes or no hints of timing, you can imagine…

Ben UFO

It sounds difficult.

Audience Member

Okay, yeah, that’s the question. If the track is good, you’re still playing it?

Ben UFO

Are you making your music for DJs to play? Is that the idea?

Audience Member

Well, I’d like to.

Ben UFO

I think you shouldn’t let it put you off making the music that you want to make but it might be difficult. I think for me and people that share my background we... Even though I play quite a few different styles of music most of the music that I play comes from a particular scene. And those scenes are defined by people working within quite specific structural guidelines and stuff, I guess, particular time signatures, particular tempos. And there are people who really successfully manage to kind of swerve those and still manage to get their music played. But I think if you’re doing something that is sort of really specifically yours, and that doesn’t have a kind of network of producers and DJs and a scene around it, I think that kind of really intense structural awkwardness might be a bit of a problem.

Audience Member

Okay.

Ben UFO

But I’m not sure, do you have DJs and producers around you? Like a circle of people that you’re making music with?

Audience Member

Yeah, yeah totally. And they actually play my music which is not that awkward like I made you imagine right now. [laughs] I’m totally conscious of what kind of guidelines, let’s say, genres are suggesting. So working around them conceptually but interesting for me, I’m not a DJ, again. It’s like working around rules so that’s inspiring. Okay, well, thank you for this.

Lauren Martin

Is there anyone else? Are we all good? OK, great. Well, thank you so much for probably speaking for the longest on camera you’ve probably ever done, I really appreciate it.

Ben UFO

By far, yeah.

Lauren Martin

Yeah, by far. And thank you for just, all your work. So, Ben UFO everybody.

[applause]