Scuba

Gerd Janson

The gentleman to the left of me grew up in London, spent some time in Bristol, then moved to the wonderful city of Berlin in Germany, and goes by the name of Scuba, runs Hotflush Recordings, remixed Wu-Tang Clan, Fever Ray and whatever, so please give him a very warm applause. Welcome! (applause)

Scuba

Hi, how you doing?

Gerd Janson

Good to have you here. So talk to us a little bit about your musical past before we get into the future.

Scuba

Wow! Well, as you said, I grew up in London, somewhere that’s actually quite close to one of the organizers here, we just found out. But yeah, I’m from north London, I started doing music at a really young age, my mum kind of forced me into music classes and stuff, which I didn’t like too much at the time, but it worked out for the best in the end.

Gerd Janson

Which instrument?

Scuba

I was on the piano from like, five, then went through trumpet and guitar and wanted to play the drums but was never allowed to have a drum set. So I’m still a deeply frustrated drummer and I can’t do it, still.

Gerd Janson

Because your parents felt it would be annoying to have a little drummer boy in the house?

Scuba

Yeah, I think that’s basically it. So yeah, I was heavily into the whole thing, sort of indoctrinated from an early age and gradually realized that I wanted to do it seriously. I got into the electronic thing through basically taking drugs, like most people, and it kind of went from there.

Being the mid-’90s, London was quite a cool place to be in terms of going out and clubs and what was going on musically there. I kind of missed the first proper acid house thing but I was there just there in time to have an idea of what the ’90s club scene was like.

Gerd Janson

So maybe some of them are not as old as we are. Before we get into the old man talk, maybe you can shed some light on London during that time.

Scuba

It’s difficult to look back on it without rose-tinted glasses on, but I remember it being quite an open-minded kind of place. I mean, in the mid-’90s certainly, jungle was happening, which was a whole different thing entirely, but I started going out to techno clubs and house clubs which you could get into as a 15- or 16-year-old if you could knock up a fake ID or whatever. It wasn’t strict at all, really.

I think for any young kid going out for the first time to those kind of things, it’s just a new kind of playground really, isn’t it? So there was that side of it and then there was the jungle thing, which I kind of got into. I mean, I wasn’t too fussy about music back then in terms of what was coming out of the speakers, it was more of a kind of “immerse yourself in the whole kind of lifestyle” aspect of it.

But the jungle thing was kind of different, like I said, it had that whole kind of rave culture to it and it had an added kind of violence to it as well. Like you had to avoid getting mugged on the way to clubs, which added excitement to the whole thing. I certainly look back on it as a better period in London clubbing history than I’ve seen since. Although having said that, I think in the last few years London has really improved, too.

Gerd Janson

So was it strange for you, sort of switching those clubs and parties? Going to a jungle rave one night and then a “sophisticated” house club the other night?

Scuba

(laughs) I’m not sure about sophisticated. It wasn’t, but then like I said, I wasn’t so hung up about musical styles in those days. It was more of a lifestyle thing, and immersing yourself in what was going on, and it was still pretty new. I mean acid house was six or seven years old by then but it was still seen as a sort of cutting-edge thing, I think. I certainly remember it as being that anyway. It probably wasn’t.

Gerd Janson

And when did you have the non-drug-related epiphany that made you want to start being part of it all? Whether that was buying records or…?

Scuba

I don’t think I had a non-drug epiphany. Well, I started buying records pretty much as soon as I started going out really. I mean, I didn’t start playing but I did just fully sign up to the whole thing, which involves going to record shops and kind of loitering around and trying not to make any giant faux pas in front of the staff.

Gerd Janson

Have you ever had one of those?

Scuba

I think everyone has had a faux pas in front of record store staff…

Gerd Janson

Which one was yours?

Scuba

I’ve ruined a few records in record shops.

Gerd Janson

And then they made you buy the record?

Scuba

No, no, then I’d stare them out. (laughter) But yeah, I certainly got into buying stuff early on, and I think as soon as you start getting into that thing… I mean, the concept of vinyl, it’s quite an addictive thing, you know? It draws you in and you want to get involved in it and you want to build up your collection and it becomes a kind of status thing. So I was totally in on that, and I think initially, that was totally what gave me the idea of wanting to start a label.

Like I say, ’95-’96 is when it all started kicking off for me. But I didn’t really start playing out until a couple of years later, by which time I had an enormous collection of unplayed vinyl, so it was great to be able to do that, finally. But I think certainly the idea of doing a label was started quite early on.

Gerd Janson

When did you actively start to spin records?

Scuba

My first paid gig was in ’98, which is actually a really long time ago now. I was at uni. And actually, Hotflush started as a club night we were doing in uni. I grew up in London, but I went to uni in Bristol and I was there for three years. And yeah, Hotflush was a thing we cooked up, and there was a room of garage and a room of jungle, and I was playing in the garage room. First gigs are always pretty bad, aren’t they? And mine was no different.

Gerd Janson

When you say it was the first “paid gig,” was it really paid, or was it just kept money?

Scuba

Well, the first one was our night, so I guess it wasn’t really paid. But as a result of doing at your own night, people sort of notice what you’re doing and offer token gestures of wanting you to spin records in their clubs. I mean, getting a few quid to play a gig is sort of a seductive thing as well, isn’t it? Getting paid for doing something that you just do in your bedroom.

Gerd Janson

And you mentioned garage?

Scuba

Yeah, I mentioned that I’d done the house and techno thing, and jungle thing, and I had amassed a huge amount of records from all over, really. I’ve got a massive jungle collection from ’95, and early house stuff as well.

But garage, I guess came around quite quickly, and in London it seemed to be overnight that every single pirate radio station was playing jungle, and literally the next week, every single one was playing garage, and they didn’t stop playing garage until I think, 2001. And then literally, overnight, there was literally no garage anywhere.

But I think garage is slightly misunderstood outside the UK. I think certainly what has happened over the last couple of years is that it’s done a little bit to rectify itself. But it certainly had a bad reputation. It never really kicked off, even outside of London really. It was never really that big in the north of England, it was never really that big even in Bristol, but in London it was just the only music you’d hear, full stop. Well, for a least three or four years.

Gerd Janson

The term is also a little bit misleading.

Scuba

Yeah, technically, you should say “UK” at the start of it.

Gerd Janson

Not “Paradise”.

Scuba

Right. But having said that, the way it started in London was very much from the US stuff. What it was originally was, at the jungle raves, the second room would be garage. It would be UK DJs, but playing the US stuff, and this was from really early on, this was like, ’93-’94.

Gerd Janson

Like Armand van Helden, Todd Edwards...

Scuba

Yeah, and New York Strictly Rhythm-type stuff. But the difference with what the UK guys were doing is that they would pitch it up really fast, which is where the term speed garage came from. I think a lot of it was guys who were disillusioned as jungle was changing from quite an interesting kind of music to a fairly noisy racket. So I think that turned quite a lot of people off, and a lot of them went onto garage. And gradually it becomes this kind of all-encompassing thing. It had a commercial element that jungle never had, and I think that’s ultimately what did for it – people started chasing the money too much, but that kind of happened a little bit later on.

Gerd Janson

When you say “commercial edge” do you mean that it was actually more song-based?

Scuba

Yeah, I mean for some reason when you tend to have vocals on something, that seems to make it more commercial and I’ve never really quite understood why that it is.

Gerd Janson

People like to sing along.

Scuba

Yeah, I guess. It certainly had that in a way that jungle never did. That combined with the fact that it became a really big underground thing – it had that commercial element more than jungle ever had, to the detriment of the scene, I think.

Gerd Janson

And that was part of the menu at your first night at Hotflush?

Scuba

That was the room that I was playing in and it was the kind of music that I had become interested in by then. This was ’98. But having said that, like I was just saying about that commercial side of it, that began to turn me off just as soon as I got into it. There was always interesting sides to garage, even by 2001 when mainstream garage had become terrible, unlistenable.

There was always interesting stuff going on and my trajectory as a DJ was starting with a garage bass but trying to introduce other aspects to it as well, like house and the broken beat stuff that was going on in the late ’90s, like Bugz in the Attic and all that kind of stuff, and breaks, and just trying to construct a slightly different take on the garage scene.

That was how the label came about, it was an attempt to recreate a home for these kinds of different influences – and actually it didn’t work at all. It just became a dubstep label, but that’s another story.

Gerd Janson

But before we come to that, why Hotflush as a name? How did that come about?

Scuba

Someone’s girlfriend thought of it and we’ve been stuck with it ever since.

Gerd Janson

No deeper meaning?

Scuba

No.

Gerd Janson

Do you find that this is often the best way, to find a word for something, and the meaning comes later?

Scuba

Well, a lot of people assume that is an homage to the Red Snapper track, which I’m kind of OK with. I’d rather people think that than knowing that it was just someone’s girlfriend’s brainstorm. I’ve never tried to lie about it.

Gerd Janson

It was in Bristol, right? How much was the city an influence on what you did?

Scuba

Not really. What we tried to do with the club night was do the London thing in Bristol and that’s what we’ve done with the nights in Berlin since moving there. I haven’t really tried to do a Berlin thing, I’ve just tried to do a London thing in Berlin.

Having said that, especially back then, Roni Size had just won the Mercury Music Prize and there was such a hype about Bristol back in those days – I mean, there still is to some extent, but back then, it was the thing. But we didn’t try and engage with it too deeply, it was like, “We’re from London,” in a typically arrogant London way.

Gerd Janson

Sometimes. That’s how Londoners are. How did you go about starting the label? Did you know anything about the music business?

Scuba

No, absolutely nothing. I moved back to London in 2001 when I finished studying and I almost immediately wanted to get something started. But yeah, I had absolutely no clue whatsoever, nothing. And it was a very slow, torturous, expensive process, basically. What was good about that was that we didn’t have any preconceptions about anything – we just wanted to find good music and then find a way to release it. Actually, I think that’s quite a healthy attitude to have, when you’re running a label – one which a lot of labels lose sight of when they get deeper into that whole industry side of it. Having said that it took two years to get a record out. That’s the flipside of not knowing what the hell is going on.

Gerd Janson

Why did it take two years? Getting a demo?

Scuba

No, we were getting tons of new music. The whole thing revolved around and was intertwined with how dubstep developed, and was kind of how it became a dubstep label by accident. There was this club called FWD, which is still going in London, which started the week that I came back from Bristol. It was the first one and we turned up there. It was supposedly a breakbeat garage night at that time – the kind of trendy thing was breakbeat garage, which is like Zinc’s stuff.

Gerd Janson

What is the difference between breakbeat garage and UK garage?

Scuba

Semantics, I guess. No, it’s cut-up breaks, and no swing and less vocals. It was basically an attempt to drive away the women, I think. But at that time that was what the cool thing was. And so that’s what FWD was originally, that’s what it was talked up as anyway, as this cool breakbeat garage night. But there were a lot of different things going on at the edge of garage at the same time and a lot of the same people got drawn into FWD.

Hatcha was one of the first residents there, and Zed Bias, and J Da Flex and a few names that are still around now. But the punters were making tracks, so what it quickly became was that you would go there once a month with a bag of CDs of the tracks that you’d been making and you’d give them to your mates that you saw once a month at FWD.

So people like Digital Mystikz, like Caspa, and plenty of other people who subsequently went on to be quite successful were just kids, swapping tracks. So from very early on we had a lot of music that we wanted to put out, but no way of doing it. So we pressed up some records and tried to distribute it ourselves, and failed miserably. That was probably my worst experiences in record shops, was going in with your record just to be told, “No, this isn’t going to sell, get out.” That wasn’t much fun. And that actually went on up until about the third release. Yeah, I’ve got plenty of bad experiences in record shops, now I remember it – I’d forgotten about them.

Gerd Janson

There must have been a shop that liked your music.

Scuba

There was one or two, yeah. Basically, the other thing that happened around that time was that Rinse FM took on a bunch of new DJs.

Gerd Janson

Rinse FM? Can you explain for people that might not know about that?

Scuba

Rinse FM was at that time one of the bigger pirate stations in London. They had basically broken grime, they had Dizzee Rascal way before he got signed, and they had Wiley and everyone else, it was a grime station. Then they decided to broaden the appeal and get some “cutting edge” new stuff and so I was amongst the bunch of new DJs they got, and one of the things that Rinse FM had was a distribution arm.

So the first distribution that we had was the one that was run by Rinse, which was basically just a guy in a white van who drove around doing the DIY distribution thing, instead of you having to do it, which I was quite happy with.

Gerd Janson

So then he had to take all the beef from shops?

Scuba

Yeah! I was very glad to be out of the side of it anyway. But luckily for us, we actually got a proper distribution deal by release three, which is obviously the most important thing for any label, past the A&R side is the distribution side. So by that time we were happy to be vaguely on our way. That was in 2004 that we got our distribution deal, and we didn’t start selling records until 2008, so it was a long road. There was a lot of waiting around and waiting for stuff to happen.

Gerd Janson

Before we actually listen to some of the stuff that happened on your label, do you have any tips on how to deal with the distribution deal?

Scuba

Well, apart from that Rinse one, I’ve only ever had one deal, which was with ST Holdings. So I’m very happy to say that, fingers crossed, it is a very well-run company at the moment.

Gerd Janson

But there are different distribution deals you can get as a label...

Scuba

There are. There’s just a straight distribution where you have to front the money for pressing the records yourself and you deal with shipping and you give it to a distributor and they pay you per unit. Or there’s the so-called P&D, which is where they take care of the manufacturing side for you, which obviously takes a lot of the work out of it. And they obviously have better deals than you can possibly get with the pressing plant, so there’s a double benefit to it. So that’s actually what we had, from 2004.

Gerd Janson

Do you have an early example of what early Hotflush sounded like?

Scuba

Yeah, we’ve got the third release, which is probably a good place to start. This is a track by Search & Destroy who was one of the guys I mentioned, one of the early punters and CD-swappers. The track’s called “Candyfloss.”

(music: Search & Destroy – “Candyfloss”)

Gerd Janson

So this one has all the ingredients that qualify as dubstep?

Scuba

I don’t think so, no. To be honest, that tune is definitely from the period when dubstep and garage were still almost part of the same thing. I would probably call it dubstep, but I don’t know if that many other people would. I’m not sure.

Gerd Janson

It’s always hard, being a non-Londoner, to catch up with all those genres and the speed of it?

Scuba

Yeah, and actually one of the more contentious parts of the early dubstep thing was splitting it down into the early subgenres, and in various cases it got quite acrimonious. There was definitely a kind of movement against the more breakbeat aspect of the sound, which got a little bit heated at some stages. There were various journalists who shall remain nameless, who probably weighed in more than they should have done. Generally speaking, the early dubstep scene was remarkably friendly and remarkably united. Within the context of that, there was a little bit of cliqueyness that went on, and the cliqueyness did tend to revolve around those subgenres that were picked up.

But the whole thing was so ridiculously small, though, it seems absurd even talking about it like that. I mean, FWD was a tiny club, it was only once a month and you’d be lucky to see 100 people down there. It does seem a bit silly thinking about it like that, but you know, in the context in what it became, maybe it is worth it, but maybe not.

Gerd Janson

What did it become, in your opinion?

Scuba

A really terrible music scene. To be honest. (laughs)

Gerd Janson

Terrible in what way?

Scuba

Terrible music! I mean, dubstep is awful now. It is absolutely terrible. There’s no point lying about it. I’ve spent the last three years trying to disassociate myself from it. But you know, that’s what happens sometimes. There’s so many examples of it happening in the past – the guys that were involved with the jungle scene early on I’m sure would have said exactly the same things about stuff happening in 1998.

Like what I was saying about the exit into garage, it’s part of the same thing. Exactly the same thing happened in the dubstep scene. Everyone just got out because it just got too shit, frankly.

Gerd Janson

Why does something get too shit? Because from the 100 people who were at FWD it is now all of a sudden 1,000 and more and more?

Scuba

I think it’s basically a race to the lowest common denominator, which is usually what is the most popular. That’s a slightly cynical way of looking at it but I think certainly in the context of London-based, bass-orientated music that seems to have been the trend of the last 20 years, it starts off good and ends up shit.

Gerd Janson

Or the “hardcore continuum” like some journalists like to call it?

Scuba

Yeah, I was trying to avoid using that.

Gerd Janson

We obviously, because it is terrible music, don’t want to hear any dubstep from now, but maybe you have something to show how Hotflush sounds.

Scuba

Well, I think it would be useful to go into that breaks angle a little bit because Hotflush got associated with this breaks/dubstep scene – “breakstep” was what it was ridiculously called. And like I say, it was the source of a fair bit of disagreement. But actually, some of the music was great, and this track from Hotflush #7 is one of my favorite releases on the label. It’s called “The Lights” and it’s by Eric H], who is a producer from Chicago actually. I think this is his only ever release, as well.

(music: Eric H – “The Lights” / applause)

Gerd Janson

So how does a guy from Chicago end up on a label from London?

Scuba

Well, the key difference in early dubstep to early jungle was that there was the internet.

Gerd Janson

So was it via a MySpace message?

Scuba

Well, I don’t remember, but yeah, it might have been. I think that is the key difference in how the music was able to spread internationally – it was pirate radio sets being posted online and being available to anyone. And in the early days that was obviously incredibly significant in how people learned about the early sound and interacted themselves; that was a result of that.

Gerd Janson

What does a demo file have to have to get your attention?

Scuba

That’s a really good question. It’s almost impossible to answer, to be honest, because there isn’t a tangible thing that makes a track releasable. It doesn’t have to be particularly well produced, it doesn’t have to be perfect in any way, it’s just an idea that is realized to a good extent. It’s a really impossible question, almost.

For example, the first stuff that Mount Kimbie sent me was pretty much two minutes of silence and then one snare drum in the middle and then another two minutes of silence. So you know, I didn’t listen to that and think, “Yeah, let’s put that out, definitely!” But it was sufficiently interesting to make me want to pursue it.

Gerd Janson

You could have gotten a few remixes...

Scuba

(laughs) Yeah, maybe.

Gerd Janson

Mount Kimbie might be a good example because they’re not really dubstep, are they?

Scuba

Well, as I’ve been trying to say, we’re not really a dubstep label. I think, as I said before, the original aim for the label was for it to be really quite a wide-ranging thing and the only reason it become a dubstep label in the early days is because the producers we were meeting up with had this night every month. That was really the only reason why we got sucked into that whole thing.

It’s only really been in the last four years – coincidentally since I left London, but I don’t think that was a massively significant thing in the history of the label – but it’s only really been since then, for whatever reason, that we’ve been able to branch out and do different things. By the time Mount Kimbie came around, which was in about 2009, whether it was dubstep or not was totally irrelevant. Nowadays, the less dubstep it is, the more likely I am to give it more than 10 seconds of my time.

Gerd Janson

How do you decide which demo you give 10 seconds of your time to? Do you listen to everything you get sent?

Scuba

Someone does, yeah. I listen to most of it. There’s two people that work on the label with me and everything gets listened to at least once.

Gerd Janson

So you have filters installed?

Scuba

Not very good ones, but yeah. I wish I could get some better ones.

Gerd Janson

And you have the last say?

Scuba

Yeah, it’s my decision.

Gerd Janson

Any regrets so far?

Scuba

Good try! No, when I look back on the catalog there are obviously different phases to it, musical stages that it’s gone through, but generally speaking I think we’ve been pretty consistent as a label. I think the quality of what we’ve put out is good; I don’t think there are many other labels that have done what we’ve done in the last six years or so. When I look back on it, I think it’s pretty solid.

Gerd Janson

Shall we listen to something by Mount Kimbie?

Scuba

OK. Like I said, their first demo was slightly avant-garde, but I think the second or third track they sent me was a track called “Maybes” and that was kind of ready for release as soon as I heard it. This is it.

(music: Mount Kimbie – “Maybes”)

Gerd Janson

Could you please talk a little bit about Mount Kimbie? Because their music kind of left the – and this is the last time I’m going to use the word “dubstep” – scene and became something bigger.

Scuba

I guess they’re a band, I suppose. From very early on they wanted to do the whole live thing, and do it properly, as opposed to standing in front of a laptop and pretending to do it live, and musically they’ve always been really willing to experiment and willing to try new things and not worry too much about what people are going to think about it, which is great from an A&R perspective and is something I always try and encourage people to do. We get a lot of demos, which are great but are too slavishly following whatever they perceive to be trendy at any given moment.

Mount Kimbie are the complete opposite of that, they don’t care, they do whatever. With the album, I didn’t A&R it at all, they just gave me an album and I put it out, which is great and probably good from their perspective. One of the reasons I’ve never wanted to release on a different label is because I don’t think I’d be able to deal with being told what to do musically, and I try to not do that as much as possible with people on Hotflush.

Gerd Janson

So you don’t try to coach them?

Scuba

No, there have been instances in the past where I’ve tried to do that and it never works out.

Gerd Janson

Does it make it worse?

Scuba

Yeah, I think so. Maybe it’s because I’m not such a great teacher, but I think people have to work it out for themselves. It’s something that should be worked out in the studio on your own rather than someone telling you, “Put this hi-hat there.”

Gerd Janson

There is this quote by Jeff Mills, who is a techno DJ from Detroit for those who might not have heard of him, and he said, “If you want to send me some music, do 100 tracks and then send me the 101st you do.”

Scuba

Right OK, I’m not completely sure I get what he means by that.

Gerd Janson

Practice.

Scuba

But yeah, I think if there’s something there you can usually tell pretty early on. But not always, people take different amounts of time to develop – I think it took me a long time to develop as a producer. There’s no set formula to any of it.

Gerd Janson

Before we speak about you as a producer, with Mount Kimbie did you have many offers from “major labels” to take them?

Scuba

Yeah, I can’t really talk about specifics, but their second album isn’t going to be on Hotflush, put it that way. Without actually making vocal tracks, they do have a certain amount of commercial potential. I hope they don’t go down the full vocal-track route, which a lot of people seem to do when they sign to majors, with usually pretty terrible results. So I hope they don’t do that.

Gerd Janson

So maybe they should attend some songwriting and arrangement classes?

Scuba

Maybe. Maybe they should be here.

Gerd Janson

And how hard it is for you as a label owner to see people go? Or are you more of a promiscuous kind of guy? Some label owners try to have a certain artist repertoire and always work with them and other people are OK with...

Scuba

Well, it’s gone in stages. With the history of the label there have been different people who have been associated with it at different times. On Friday night we had the launch for the Sepalcure album, which is an album that is coming out… actually it was released today, in fact. They’re two guys from New York and we had George Fitzgerald playing and Sigha playing and Kai from Mount Kimbie was there and there’s a good bunch of guys associated with the label at the moment, and it’s a lot of fun to be around them. But saying that, if people want to go and do different things or go and start their own label or whatever, it’s fine. I’m on good terms with anyone who’s released on the label in the past.

Gerd Janson

They kind of have to keep in tune with what you like as well, right?

Scuba

Yeah, if I don’t like it then it’s not coming out, unfortunately. It’s tough.

Gerd Janson

Let’s talk a little bit about yourself as a producer. Who does the quality control for you?

Scuba

Well, it’s me. I think I do beat myself up about it pretty hard. I just finished a new album and about a month before I finished it I came to the realization that everything I’d done was pretty crap, and I had to pretty much do it all again. And actually that’s happened with both previous albums I’ve released as well. I tend to succumb to bouts of extreme self-doubt and paranoia about my work.

Gerd Janson

Do you show it to other people or is it just your own judgment?

Scuba

No, I play it to people when its finished. I don’t tend to play people unfinished tracks really. Again, I think it’s just a process that I think I have to go through in the studio, and it doesn’t really help playing it to other people. It’s just a sort of self-flagellation thing that has to happen.

Gerd Janson

I mean, if you say it’s crap, that’s just your own judgment.

Scuba

Right. I mean, if you’re not happy with what you’re doing, then what’s the point? For me, making music is a personal thing; if I’m not happy with it then it completely defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.

Gerd Janson

Do you have something we should listen to?

Scuba

Yeah. The first track that I made that I was really 100% happy with was off the first album, and it’s called “Hard Boiled” and I’m going to have to fast-forward the intro because it’s really long.

(music: Scuba – “Hard Boiled” / applause)

Gerd Janson

You mentioned Berlin earlier on. So was this track produced in London or in Berlin?

Scuba

It’s one of the first tracks I made after I moved over actually and it sounds like it, but I don’t really think it was as significant as it maybe sounds like.

Gerd Janson

Why did you make the move?

Scuba

A combination of different things. Like I was saying, I had grown up in London and I had lived there the whole time apart from the three years in Bristol and I just decided to do something else. Obviously, I wanted to do it in some other place where I could be in a creative environment. Berlin is almost kind of clichéd in its creativity, or supposed creativity, but it seemed like the obvious thing to do. I’ve really enjoyed living there, I don’t have any intention of moving back to London. It’s a good place to be based.

Gerd Janson

The weather is roughly the same.

Scuba

Well, it doesn’t get down to -30 in London! It’s completely different to London in the sense that it’s a city of 4 million people but it feels more like Bristol than it feels like London, and maybe that’s because despite the image of it, the creative community is actually pretty small.

Gerd Janson

But the party community...

Scuba

Well, the party community is pretty big, that’s true. The clubs are really what makes it, I suppose. It’s similar to what I was saying about London in the mid-’90s. It’s sort of more similar to there than anywhere else in the world. Which is nice to have on your doorstep, but can also be a bit dangerous. But like I said, I like living there, it’s great.

Gerd Janson

How much did it influence you and your music? Because you said when you were in Bristol, that it had no influence on what you were doing musically.

Scuba

Well, I’ve always been into house and techno, so it’s not like suddenly I woke up one day in Berlin and realized there was this amazing new music called house and techno. I don’t think there’s been as much of a direct influence as maybe some people seem to think, but having said that, you can’t help but be slightly influenced by your surroundings.

When I moved over in 2007, minimal was still quite a big thing. Everywhere was playing minimal, so if all you hear is minimal, it’s going to rub off to a certain extent. But that could make you make minimal or make you hate it completely.

Gerd Janson

So when you say minimal, you don’t mean Daniel Bell, right? You mean the kick drum and the white noise?

Scuba

Yeah, the less said about that the better, probably. But yeah, it died off pretty quickly after I moved over, it was pretty done. So it’s just been house mainly, in Berlin. Regular mainstream house seems to be the thing that gets played most regularly.

Gerd Janson

You have to talk a little bit about a certain club in Berlin that you’re kind of involved in on a regular basis.

Scuba

Yes, the Berghain thing is a privilege to be involved with it. One of the first things I wanted to get going when I moved over was a night, and back then dubstep was still vaguely okay and it hadn’t really taken off so much in Berlin, and so the intention was to do not a mainstream dubstep night, but a slightly leftfield dubstep night. The obvious place to do it was Berghain, but they never had an outside promoter at all before we started doing our night there. So we figured that there was no way that they would even have a meeting with us.

Gerd Janson

Maybe you can describe Berghain a little bit for those who haven’t been there or don’t know about the club.

Scuba

OK, for people who don’t know, it actually started off as a gay fetish club called Snax, I think, and it is predominantly mostly a gay thing. But it’s in a massive old warehouse in the middle of Berlin. It’s an incredible venue, it has massive high ceilings and post-industrial kind of décor, and it’s got amazing sound and an amazing atmosphere and it’s run by a bunch of guys who only really care about music, it seems. I’m sure they do make money, but everything about it is focused on making the experience for clubbers as good as possible. So it’s run in exactly the right way that a club should be run and in a way that I can’t compare to any other club in the world.

Gerd Janson

Not of that size certainly.

Scuba

Definitely not, no. So like I say, we were looking for a venue to do this night in Berlin and the guy who I run it with bumped into one of the guys that works there and he said, “Can we come in for a meeting?” So we came in for a meeting and expected at best to be offered a Thursday or a Sunday or some kind of backwater kind of time, and the first thing they said to us was, “Do you wanna do Friday night?”

So we were desperately trying not to lose our poker faces and we did our first one in July in 2008, and we’ve been doing it every three months and it’s just been a really great thing to be a part of, really. It’s just a proper environment and, like I say, run by a bunch of guys who really take the whole thing incredibly seriously. It’s been great.

Gerd Janson

Berlin seems to like that kind of thing anyway, with Hardwax being a record shop...

Scuba

Well, I think that’s there’s certainly an element there. I mean, dub-techno is a very Berlin thing, and the crossover with leftfield dubstep, which I guess was kind of started by Skull Disco and Villalabos’s involvement with Skull Disco was in 2007, and that whole thing brought the dub-techno Berlin thing and left-field dubstep thing much closer together.

So yeah, there’s definitely a kind of contingent in Berlin that is conducive to that whole thing, but I think it probably gets written about more than it actually exists in a tangible way. There’s a lot of people who are into it, but there’s not a lot of events. There’s not a lot of clubs going on doing that kind of sound at all, really, outside Berghain. But there is also an audience for it as well, to a certain extent – I mean certainly for us, to be able to do Friday nights and regularly get 1,000 people in, in a place where it’s basically just house most of the time. So yeah, there’s certainly an appetite for it to a certain extent.

Gerd Janson

So there is no mutual antipathy? Which was the name of your first album.

Scuba

Yeah, it is, it’s good you got that in there. Impressive.

Gerd Janson

Why [A] Mutual Antipathy?

Scuba

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the title of that album, ever. It was a reference to me in the dubstep scene, actually, which is what that album refers to. I didn’t like it and I didn’t think it liked me very much, which sounds quite a bit emo, really.

Gerd Janson

Sometimes you have to know when it’s time to go, right?

Scuba

Yeah, exactly. The majority of that album was written in the three months after I moved over, so it kind of summed up what was going on with me at that time. The differences between the two cities and the two club scenes and attitudes towards music, and actually the attitudes toward clubbing, which I would completely sum up in the way that Berghain is run versus the way that big clubs in London are run – which is the complete opposite of what I’ve just been saying of how Berghain is taken care of.

It’s difficult not to look at London, when you compare the two of them, in a really bad light, and I don’t want to sit here slagging off London. But as a place for me to be, Berlin is definitely the one.

Gerd Janson

They are also on a different time schedule, right?

Scuba

Yeah, no one goes out until three in the morning in Berlin.

Gerd Janson

Does that influence the way you DJ there compared to London?

Scuba

Yeah, in terms of the way you run a night, anyway, it’s different. Just having the concept of curfews doesn’t exist in Berlin, which immediately takes away a whole constraining element out of the club scene, entirely. That’s what holds a lot of places back, certainly in the UK. Or in places like Ireland, where everything shuts at about 2:30 or 3 – it’s just a completely different experience entirely. Generally speaking with clubs, the more freedom you have the better, and if you don’t have to close, then that’s quite a lot of freedom.

Gerd Janson

So how do you program your Sub:Stance nights there then?

Scuba

Well, we start at 12 and we aim to run until about 9 AM or 10 AM. What I like playing the most is the last set, which tends to start at about 6 or 6:30 and you can go on until as long as you like, or until the night manager wants to go home, which tends to be about 10 AM or 11 AM, maybe. You just have a lot of freedom. The difference between a Sub:Stance and a regular Panorama bar nights is that they tend to have long sets – so it’s usually a four-hour set minimum, and we tend to have them shorter. An hour and a half tends to be the shortest ones we have, which took a lot of getting used to for the Berghain guys, because their whole thing is that DJing is a musical journey. As cliché as that is, there’s definitely an element of truth in it. It’s really nice to have longer sets. But a lot of DJs from the UK aren’t used to that, they’re used to maybe playing one hour.

Gerd Janson

The other cliché is to tell a story.

Scuba

Right, exactly. Exactly. So it’s a different way of programming a night, to the four-hour marathon. The last sets they have at Berghain go on for minimum eight hours, I think, which is excessive for me. I don’t know if I could deal with that. We tend to have five or six acts and the first few hours will be five of them and then the last sets are a bit longer.

Gerd Janson

And does it also influence the way you run Hotflush now, with people in Berlin also being involved in it?

Scuba

When you live somewhere and you become involved in the scene a little bit, obviously you meet people and you become creatively involved with them. But having said that, I don’t really think I’m really a big part of the Berlin scene at all, really. Past running the Sub:Stance thing at Berghain, I don’t go out a hell of a lot socializing. I know a few DJs but I’m not a kind of a mover and shaker on the circuit. I don’t think it’s had a huge influence on the label or myself that much, really.

Gerd Janson

And can you play us something from the recent musical output?

Scuba

I mentioned before the Sepalcure album that comes out today, and I think we’ll play a track of that, because they’ve been quite important over the last couple of years for the label. Their kind of sound is, if you had to sum up the Hotflush thing, then Sepalcure would be it. They’ve got the combination of textures, melodies and rhythm that has really been integral to the label since thestart. If this is the right one, it should be called “Eternally Yrs.” Yes, this is it.

(music: Sepalcure – “Eternally Yrs”)

Gerd Janson

You said early on that you don’t have any regrets. But knowing what you know now, would you start a label again?

Scuba

Yeah, I think for anyone producing, starting a label has got to be a good idea. Controlling your own copyright is pretty important, I think. That obviously undermines the case for people signing to my label.

Gerd Janson

Yes, I was about to say, because it’s not like a Scuba label, right?

Scuba

Right, but if I was giving advice to someone, I would say that it’s something that as a producer, and as a DJ as well, it can just be helpful to the whole thing. If you are thinking along the lines of releasing music, it forces you to focus, and just on a base level, it’s helpful. Also, like I said, in terms of controlling your own art, I think it’s an incredibly rewarding thing to be involved with, definitely.

Gerd Janson

And what does it take for another label to control your art? Because you also release on other labels, right?

Scuba

Lots of money. (laughter) Generally speaking, I haven’t released much at all. I released a single on Aus Music this year, it really was an accident. I said that I would do a track for a compilation, and he liked it enough to put it out as a single, and that was it, really. I’ve only done two or three 12s away from Hotflush.

Gerd Janson

You keep it tight.

Scuba

Yeah.

Gerd Janson

Maybe we should open it up for some questions now.

Audience Member

Hello. You’ve got a few aliases; do you sit down and think, “I’m going to make a Scuba track today,” or an SCB track or a Spectr track? Or do you see how it progresses?

Scuba

It’s often very late in the day, well after the track is finished, that it gets assigned a home. Obviously, the SCB stuff has tended to be more straight, more 4/4. A lot of people thought that the “Adrenaline” tune should have been an SCB tune, but it wasn’t and I can’t really explain why it wasn’t. But it just wasn’t. It’s not something that I think massively deep about; there are obviously slight differences, but it’s not something I try and get too bogged down in.

Gerd Janson

Is it important then, to have monikers, as an artist?

Scuba

I don’t know if it’s important. I think it’s important to have an identity, I think that’s crucial, and a lot of the time having a lot of different pseudonyms can dilute that. So actually it can be counterproductive. But, that said, it’s also sometimes just a bit of fun to start something new and see where it goes. There’s a balance to be drawn with that, I think.

Gerd Janson

So Berlin made you start SCB?

Scuba

No, Berlin didn’t. We’ve already been through this! (laughter)

Gerd Janson

Any more?

Audience Member

Hello, I just wanted to say that I enjoy your label a lot. I’m running a label, too. It’s very young. It’s only into its fourth release, and it’s out of Sweden, so I don’t really have a scene that we’re coming from, it isn’t very strong. I was wondering about what you think of promos and all the charting going on nowadays, and how you relate to it.

Scuba

Do you mean the use of PR?

Audience Member

Yeah, and how it works today, if you think it’s important for your label and how you handle it.

Scuba

I think as a label manager you have to do whatever it takes to get your music out there. If that involves paying a PR company to do it, then I think you have to do it. The sad reality is that a lot of music journalists rely on PR. Like, almost exclusively. So I think if you’re not engaged in that process, then you’re locking yourself out of that system, basically. That is obviously a regrettable development. It’s always been like that to a certain extent. I don’t think you can necessarily say that in the last few years, suddenly that has happened.

I think in terms of what draws people into writing about music is not always for the best reasons, which doesn’t always lead to rigorous journalistic standards. There are certain things that you have to do, and they seem like bullshit things, but I think that you have to engage with it, otherwise it’s very difficult to put your stuff out there. I don’t like it at all, but if you look upon it like your responsibility is to the artist whose music you are putting out, and if someone was putting out your records, what would you expect them to do? You’d expect them to do everything they can to sell it, basically. At a base level that’s what it comes down to, so you have to do.

Audience Member

Hi, I also run a label and make my own music as well. I guess I’m just curious how you find a balance between the creative process of making music and the label management. Because I know some days there are times, weeks even, when it’s just music, but there’s always that other side as well.

Scuba

I’m pretty disorganized. There’s a table in my house, which is just a mass of papers. Generally speaking, it’s a juggling thing for me, between producing, label and also DJing, which is taking up more and more of my time. So what tends to happen is that I go in a cycle. So at any one time, at least one thing is getting badly neglected. Obviously, the best thing to neglect is the admin side of the label, so that tends to be the thing that gets neglected. I mean, you just have to try and do it the best you can, there’s no formula to it.

Audience Member

Are interns the answer?

Scuba

The problem with interns is that you can’t give them actually anything meaningful to do, because you don’t trust them to do it. So yes and no. Obviously, there are certain things they can help with, but it’s not the important stuff you’ve gotta do. It’s tough, man.

Gerd Janson

Do labels make enough money these days to get someone to do the admin for you?

Scuba

Yeah, I think you can do that; it’s still possible to sell music, just about. The end of the music industry hasn’t happened completely yet. It’s still just about possible to make enough cash to pay the bills and stuff. Just about.

Audience Member

From your sets and latest productions, I get some old-school trance influences. What has drawn you to this music? Because for plenty of people, it’s hard to accept this fact. What has drawn you into trance and what do you like about it?

Scuba

Well, actually it might surprise you to learn that I was quite into trance in the mid-’90s. I went to quite a lot of trance clubs. But this was before it became rubbish.

Gerd Janson

Before it became…?

Scuba

Yeah. That might also be a controversial statement. Trance wasn’t always rubbish, guys, it really wasn’t. One upon a time, there was some good stuff. Coming out of Germany, actually. Oliver Lieb made some really good stuff. So I don’t accept the notion that trance is inherently bad. But having said that, when I made those tunes I didn’t even see trance as a major touching point. That wasn’t really in my mind. Obviously I was aware that there was an old-school thing going on, but I thought it was just an old-school house and ’90s vibe, I didn’t see it as a trance thing. But obviously other people do.

Audience Member

There’s a whole movement of acid techno and old-school trance coming back. Where do you think it comes from?

Scuba

That’s a good question, I think people just look for disparate influences and where there’s been interesting things made in the past, there is potential for it to be developed further. You could say the same thing about the garage thing, you know. Garage was dead for at least five years and then suddenly everyone was playing garage again. People are subconsciously influenced by things they have previously listened to anyway and these things have a habit of snowballing.

Audience Member

So you think in club music there is very little place to develop something new and fresh, without taking things from the past?

Scuba

I think it doesn’t happen too often. I think the really interesting thing about dubstep when it was starting was the fact that it was quite genuinely new. It was something that didn’t have too much precedent. Obviously it had influences, but you couldn’t say it was an updated version of something else.

Similar to jungle, when jungle started, obviously jungle had influences, but there was nothing that you could have pointed out – there were 95 pitched snare rolls happening, for example. So it’s definitely rare, but I think taking influences from older stuff should not necessarily be seen as a negative thing. You can learn stuff from things that have gone past and you can make something new out of it.

Audience Member

Hello. I was just curious about what you think. A lot of these smaller labels, that are artist-run, do you think there are walls to the labels? Because a lot of them start with a good idea in a bedroom but then the heads are so creative they are afraid to relinquish control. Is there a limited growth to your label because you can’t bring 20 people and trust them?

If you look at Warner Bros, where there are like, 500 people, there’s a structure. But with all the small labels, it’s one dude, he loves the graphic design, he loves the artist direction, who gets the remix. There’s so much control that if you don’t relinquish, can you take the next step? Would you like it to go farther or do you like it small?

Scuba

I think it’s completely down to the individual label. I think there’s definitely a precedent for it happening. If you look at Warp, for example, that came out of a bedroom-run company and turned into quite a big thing. So I think maybe having a label manager actually being an artist on the label is more of an impediment, just from a pure time-constraint point of view. If you look at Planet Mu, for example, Mike Paradinas hasn’t been active as an artist for a long time, and it’s probably no coincidence that they’ve been releasing a hell of a lot of stuff since he stopped making music so actively.

But I think it shouldn’t necessarily be an obstacle. It’s just up to the individual in question. It’s true for any start-up business that delegating is incredibly hard – when you have personal ownership over something and you care about it deeply, it’s really difficult to give that to someone else to get on with, you know? Especially an intern. It’s easy to work yourself into the ground, just because you love it so much and you want it to be successful. Again, like most things it’s a balance – you’ve just got to try and make it happen without killing yourself doing it.

Gerd Janson

When did you know it was the right time to quit your day job?

Scuba

It felt like the right time every day that I was working, to be honest.

Gerd Janson

I meant in a way that you could afford to.

Scuba

Well, you know, you do the sums every month, and if you can get by, and you don’t have to go in and get told what to do by someone...

Gerd Janson

But you also have to think about the future.

Scuba

Yeah, but not too much. If you want to be a DJ, it’s not really a future thing. No one’s got a pension, have they?

Gerd Janson

You’re going to have to keep working?

Scuba

Yeah, exactly. Let’s not think about that too much, shall we? (laughter)

Gerd Janson

Sorry for that. Health insurance?

Scuba

I’m still a British citizen. I’m still a British taxpayer. We still have the NHS, I’m fine.

Gerd Janson

God save the Queen.

Scuba

Right. Exactly.

Gerd Janson

Thank you very much.

(applause)