Kiss My Culture

Interview: SBTRKT

Like unassuming drops from a drizzle, Aaron Jerome’s SBTRKT tidal wave rise in 2011 ensued from his seminal singles and remixes leading to an eponymous album that has been highly praised by artists and the media alike. There’s no other way to put a specific genre tag on his tracks other than knowing that it is a SBTRKT piece. Emotive, minimal and marrying pop sensibilities with distinctively melodic flavours, the sound of the masked crusader has been a much needed breakthrough from electronic music’s years of stagnancy.

I spoke to SBTRKT after his first ever South East Asian gig at Home Club, Singapore where he reveals the ingenuity behind the mask, the division between artist and body, Deadmau5’s brand and Thom Yorke’s interactiveness.

Your maiden stay in Singapore. How has it been so far after tonight?
It has been crazy; we flew in this morning and had a few hours and straight on stage. Home Club was our first ever show in South East Asia. I wasn’t really sure about how busy it was going to be as I’ve never been in the club but the audience have been so great tonight, really receptive.

You know one thing when you are touring around the world, unless you’ve been there before, you have no idea what to expect –crowd-wise, their reaction or whether or not they’ve heard your record. You can get booked for a gig but you won’t know if anyone is ever going to turn up. There were lots of people at the door tonight. There was a queue of people coming in.

That’s really it, you know, and they know all the songs.

You’ve been DJing and producing for almost a decade now, how did SBTRKT come about?
I don’t know. It kind of stems from my love of electronic music I guess; everything from house to techno, garage, broken beat and everything in between, all the sub-genres of electronica and dubstep basically I suppose. I infuse all these styles and my favourite genres and put together my own kind of twist to it I suppose.

The idea of being SBTRKT and the reason for the name is about taking myself away from the music –subtracting myself. And that comes with the idea of the mask and being anonymous and such anyway.

I can basically let the music speak for itself rather than having to go and say, ‘This is me and who I am is the music I put out,’ but the music is the music, I am me, there’s a separation between the two.

When did this realization come about?
Well, it happened a couple of years ago. I felt that I just wanted the music I was releasing to be based purely on the music and not on a biography or some storyline about where it’s coming from or what type of artist this is or some sort of story that makes people sad and go, ‘Oh, this is something I have to listen to,’ or like the other way where you pick yourself up too much.

I just literally wanted DJs and other music fans to appreciate it [the music] for what it was. That was the first thing, and obviously I wanted to do DJ performances and play “live”, so the only way I was going to do that was to basically have some sort of disguise. So the mask was sort of an extension to that; making a kind of design and style which would follow through each releases, “live” shows, DJ sets and everything else.

Perhaps, I might be stating the obvious, but was the mask inspired from your Kenyan roots since you were born there?
Kind of. There were two things –I got an African-Asian heritage, but then I also got a love for tribal culture. Looking at things from the past like that where people from tribes wear masks during spiritual dances to evoke the spirit of an ancestor or to take on a persona. For me that signified how I was taking SBTRKT -it’s about an artist, a persona making music of a certain sound, and building a certain thing which I am kind of doing.

Do you think that creating a level of invisibility has allowed you to become visible?
You can only say that if things go well (laughs). If you have nothing then people will go, ‘Well, you made yourself invisible and you are still invisible,’ but if your record gets played and people start responding to it and research about the kind of anonymity from it, then it becomes a storyline in itself. For me, it should never deflect from the music, I don’t want it to become like a brand like a Deadmau5 where you think about his headgear before you think about his music; it’s music first for me.

Well, your eponymous debut album has been critically acclaimed from traditional media to music websites and the blogosphere. Did you expect the album to garner such a reception?
No, not at all, because the way I’ve been making music, I never had hype researched and I don’t have a record label [Young Turks/XL] that pushes music before it is released. They don’t try to formulate a career for you and get every magazine or blog to talk about your music before you become a launched artist.

For me it was a gradual thing. I was DJing, putting out EPs –instrumental stuff and a few vocal tracks, and then when the album drops it was only after that that people heard it on their own and really got into it.

The funny thing is, before Pitchfork heard that record they never gave me any support. The great thing is that it is based on the music. Whatever the press said about it being critically-acclaimed is based on the album and whatever that comes from it and not based on a brand or you as an artist.

Your production work comes off more as a song rather than a dance number, but sometimes both seem to intertwine.
My first love before electronic music was listening to songs with the traditional verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. And for me, that’s was the conscious thing that I always try to write. Though I love to write electronic music for DJs to play where you elongate the track to 6 to 7 minutes with slow builds, big breakdown in the middle and the drop and stuff, what I try to do is to write songs in that formula.

You know, classic artists who I always love like Björk, Massive Attack, Goldie and Daft Punk came out with albums that combined these two things together. It doesn’t necessarily mean you are writing a pop album just because you put songs into a dance structure; it’s just using the best of everything.

Let’s talk about the wealth of collaborative talent on the album: Yukimi from Little Dragon, Sampha and Jessie Ware; how did you approach production angles with them?
The main thing, you see, is I have a distinct idea of what I want to create as SBTRKT with certain twist of identity and all those sub-genres of music and make my own sound in there. But I know to make the best record you have to use your strengths and find what weaknesses you have and get other people to fulfil those gaps.

Obviously for me writing vocals, lyrical content or singing is not my thing. I write melodic things, big lines, play all the instruments and build up these big atmospheres. So, finding people to work with who are good in these skills was key to making a record which would really work and gel together.

The first person I came across was Sampha. We’ve been hanging out and he’ll be playing me his productions and I was really inspired by his instrumentals. But then he played me one where he was singing on it and I was just blown away by his kind of voice and it was just a fucking demo thing.

So we kind of hooked up and did stuff in the studio. It’s not really something where I ever say, ‘Eh, here’s the finished instrumental, take it away, come back with a vocal.’ It’s more of a joined mixed and match kind of thing where they give you an idea, you take it back, build it in, change the instrumentals and do more stuff; and that’s what I try to keep.

You can’t really make a coherent record as a producer when you are working with these vocalists unless you kind of intertwine it all together. Otherwise it becomes all disjointed.

Sampha was in a trance-like state during the production of “Trials of the Past” in your studio having been inspired by the different masks on the wall.
Exactly, and it comes up in his lyrical content, and that was just a jam session basically. We just build it up and I take all these ideas that he comes up with that he doesn’t even know. It just organically happens versus it being: ‘take this away, come with the song, and I will release it.’

Producing music organically is a rarity among most producers who would rather have a more structured way of doing things. How have letting production flow naturally benefitted you?
Well, like for me, I don’t start to assert a certain kind of sound. I don’t have the same sound in every record. You can’t hear, ‘Oh, that’s a SBTRKT record, that’s another SBTRKT record,’ because it got the same synth line, the same tempo, the same genre. For me it’s more about finding my favourite things and piling it all together, but there’s a certain signifying kind of emotive sense within all of those songs that makes it a SBTRKT thing.

That emotive aspect must have been pretty appealing to Thom Yorke for him to get you to remix “Lotus Flower”.
Initially it was because they were obviously looking for remixes I suppose (laughs) and previous to that he [Thom Yorke] was really into “Hold On” that he heard on Gilles Peterson’s radio show. I remember the label sending me a message about doing the remix. The great thing about XL and Young Turks is that they don’t force music upon people but instead let things happen naturally. So Thom sent me an email through my label saying that he would love me to do my style on his track.

It was really good to know that Thom was being interactive with it. When I finished the mix he sent back an email going what he loved about it and what he thought I could adapt a little bit. You don’t normally get that from an artist of that level who would still be interested in talking about what you could do to a record in editing or saying if they liked it.

The other person who ever did that was surprisingly Mark Ronson (laughs). I did a mix for him and he phoned me up saying how much he loved the track and I only did a remix, I wasn’t even collaborating with the guy (laughs).

Having worked with Thom Yorke must have evolved you as an artist wouldn’t it?
We’ve got more… I don’t think I can say that, I might get into trouble (laughs).

What’s next for SBTRKT after the debut album?
This year I am not going to try and write a second album too fast because I am still trying to make an identity, infuse something original, focusing on what’s next and progressing with the sound.

The “live” shows have added so much into what I do now, because before this I’ve never done anything with “live” drums and working on how I can do more crazy things with that in the studio. I might end up with more “live” textures in the record as well.

Like tonight we [and Sampha] did two freestyle things that we’ve never done before and made it up on the spot, but they sounded so crazy and organic that it would sound like great records if we clean it up and do them well.