IOMIX020 // Unspecified Enemies

First off, thanks so much recording the mix! It would be great to know about the scene, setting and intention behind it. 

No problem thanks for the invitation ! 

Recorded the mix on a fine Saturday evening in early April at Monopolated Light and Power in South London. Last month I did a little show for NTS drawing out some of the cinematic influences on the new Numbers album.  This one is more about the sound of the Romance… record, so Detroit and Chicago influences but really it’s about that sample-driven, disco-indebted, tracky Shake / Soundhack / Gemini / Psyche sound that I can’t get past. Plus that ultra-dry texture of Vainqueur’s synths and drum sounds. I knew I wanted to land on that ‘Through You’ track from the first Seefeel album as well. 

Can you tell us about the origins of Unspecified Enemies, Counterattack and that spate of late 90s / 00s records and activity?

It was a number of things really. First, Unspecified Enemies and Counterattack was a function of getting an intense aesthetic education from Black electronic music, cinema, Marxist theory, (post)structuralism, literature and music videos all at the same time, all at the same moment (and all outside the university). The response was wanting to fuse them together and see what happened.  Second, I was totally excited by the idea of working collectively, generating stuff through ensembles (influence here was Underground Resistance, Wu-Tang, Public Enemy, but also Mobb Deep videos, So Solid Crew, Dziga Vertov Group, Black Audio Film Collective) which kinda happened with this young crew based in Bristol ‘The Flow’ – all of  whom were fiends for that Liquid Room mix and Terrence Parker’s DJ style. Third, most important, my good friend CiM (Simon Walley)’s music was/is fantastic, and we wanted to collaborate on a musical project based around UR’s notion of hi-tech funk but using samples. 

It seems like from the early records there were other themes you wanted to communicate with these projects.

I guess the undercurrent was an interest in ‘micropolitics’. If the world is governed by microeconomics — the ideology of the market, competition, the consumer is king, methodological individualism, every relationship has value if and only if it finds a market price, etc.  — then micropolitics maps a space of desire (for the future, for alternatives to the present) that is continuously attacked and repressed by microeconomic systems. Electronic music (particularly music influenced by the Parliament-Funkadelic response to James Brown) is a medium that always seemed to me to be able to track these micropolitical lines of economic stress. So the project was to try and galvanise these stresses through hi-tech funk.

Obviously the UR influence is massive  — we should mark here the work of Mad Mike and Bridgette Annette Banks (Bridgette Banks sadly passed away very recently I learned), both for the music of UR, Red Planet, Happy Soul, SID etc. but also the entire infrastructure behind the Submerge operation.  I don’t think people quite get the influence and the effect of Detroit at a properly material, seriously underground level — the effect of the music tends to be discussed retrospectively (but this was even the case in the late 1990s). But the project isn’t to fortify that desire for your old Red Planet t-shirt and that vinyl collection you sold for an island unit, it’s to mobilise music and sound to engineer confrontation with those psychic and institutional apparatuses which naturalise white racist supremacy, modes of sexual domination, patriarchy and ultimately class war. 

The infrastructure of UR — the  records, music and record labels — demonstrated music as a mode of analysis, of mapping social forces in a medium and form that was fundamentally cultural, absolutely social (dance music, clubs , radio, etc) and deadly serious.  It sounds great, doesn’t it ? And it’s a project that couldn’t be more urgent – given the intensity of the race-class war being waged through culture on behalf of capital today — it’s one that we cannot let go of right now.

The Counterattack and UE releases didn’t go unnoticed at the time, and were picked up by the likes of DJ Bone. Could you tell me a bit about what was happening with the projects during those years?

The main link is the Glasgow connection. We did a live show in Bristol and Rubadub got in touch because a tape of a rehearsal for that show found its way to Glasgow. Martin, Wilba and Barrie at Rubadub apparently were into the Clinamen EP and the We Can Elude Control 7” and told me they were playing the records at 69. This meant A LOT as the chit-chat filtering down to Forest Gate (where Simon and I were living in East London) about what was happening up in Paisley was the stuff of myth.

Then a friend Tom Churchill, who with Raeph Powell was running a great label out of Cardiff called Headspace, moved to Glasgow about the time I did a record on Warp’s little neo-dancefloor operation. From there I got to know the Numbers crew who then suggested re-issuing Multi Ordinal…. So the Numbers and Rubadub connection is really important as I wouldn’t have made the record without the conversations with Richard Chater, Calum Morton and Neil Morton which turned into Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback. 

We did a couple of A/V events at the ICA in the mid 2000s called Diamond Sea (one with Radovan Scasascia’s AM/PM project and Tommi Traum of Traum Inc.) but just the costs and losing money on events put that project to bed. Richard asked about one of the tracks called ‘Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback’, and Calum asked what happened to the new music which was supposed to be coming out under a new label called City of Quartz. There actually wasn’t much in the way of new tracks I was happy with, but some interesting samples and bits and pieces…

Anyway, a lot of the connectivity with Glasgow I think comes from this shared interest in the combinatronic/ dialectic possibilities of Black music, particularly the influence of P-funk, electro-funk , Prince… (Boomkat picked up on this I think in their little write-up). Rubadub did a very sweet little summary of the Romance… record mapping all the influences — DX7 romanticism, Cybotron, UR funk, Shake’s stuff (could go on for days about Shake) and that bone dry early Neptunes production. In many ways this is all just a reflection of what Glasgow, I think unlike many other places, was able to synthesise from the 1990s to the present day. This is what makes that place so crucial, and the reason why building infrastructural capacity is so critical to ensuring the future of electronic music is vibrantly antagonistic to those industrial levels of corporate capital and bro-ey effluent that has, for some reason, become fixated with dance music.

As well as Numbers and Rubadub one inspiration behind the new record was Natalie Davidson’s ENVY project. Even though I’ve only been once to her ENVY night, her DJing and approach as a club night is what I hoped the album could contribute to a little. 

Are you able to tell us any more about the process of making Romance … ? 

It’s difficult to talk about music production, but the theme patching together the record was ‘LA Synthesis’ and how the media image of the city Los Angeles becomes in the 1980s and 1990s a kind of urban synthesizer/cipher for a trans-national species of time-stretching finance capital, and gives our spatial relationship to capital an aesthetically electronic form: particularly in the soundtrack for that brilliant Todd Haynes movie [SAFE].

So when putting the record together, I was thinking about an electronic music that I could bounce all this off. The techno music impetus here is not simply (or not exclusively) science-fiction, but the themes that come out of a fascinating debate (that never quite takes place) between Mike Davis, Fredric Jameson and Fred Moten about a method of cultural study called ‘cognitive mapping’. 

Basically, the debate is how the modern and postmodern culture of the global city becomes a medium to map a social future which is strategically antagonistic to the rationalising cognitions of capital (the market again). It’s not a vision of utopia, more a set of practices found within the culture of the contemporary city that offers tools and concepts to measure the distance between our present state of social domination and, what CLR James called, “the future in the present.” Can you use a format like an album to reset this debate about Los Angeles and Detroit, but foregrounding the transformations of electronic music (using samples) from the 1980s to the present day? That was a question that helped pulled this project together.

That doesn’t say much about the making of the music I know! But I’m doing a conversation and listening session with the artist and theorist Rachael Finney in London at the end of the month at CRiSAP where we’re going to get into the network of elements, samples and sequencing as well as images behind the album, hopefully in conversation with her extraordinary research on background vocalists at Motown. 

Is anything new likely to materialise from this renewed round of activity?  

Let’s see what happens. There’s a new EP I’m working on. Calum at Numbers did some wonderful moving image stuff and I’m thinking we could do something with this. Another new project I’m particularly excited about is called Infra Metropolitan Systems. It’s a collaboration with Janna Graham (from Ultra-red and anti-gentrification campaigns in South London) that I’m hoping can make good on this commitment to infrastructures that connect writing, music, theory and events, and can confront an intensifying attack by real estate on the social space and culture of the city. My friend Sam Fisher calls it sonic cognitive mapping. I like that.

Tracklisting:

1. Unspecified Enemies – Multi Ordinal Bonus Beat (CiM’s factory preset edit)
2. Shake – My Computer is an Optimist
3. Gemini – Perlagonium
4. UE – Bonaventure Effect 
5. Soundstream – Show Off 
6. Vainqueur – Elevation 
7. UE – Opaque Zone
8. Topdown Dialectic – A4
9. UE – Mathematics Parc 
10. Red Planet – Firekeeper 
11. Robert Hood – Psychic 
12. Grain – B1
13. Basic Channel – Inversions 
14. Regis – Thirst 
15. Source Direct – Modem 
16. Population One – Going in Circles 
17. UE – Her Husband is a Lawyer 
18. Vainqueur – Solaris 
19. Urban Culture – The Wonders of Wishing (For You)
20. UE – Glass Skin 
21. Seefeel – Through You 
22. Louis Digital – Ecology of Fear (outro)