The Subs

Analogue spoke to The Subs ahead of their Halloween performance at Transmission in Dublin next week.

Your sound has been described as “Boys Noize brutality and Wagnerian rave drama” - how appropriate do you think that description is?

Well, we can live with that. I guess the brutality and rave because we simply cannot leave a sound sweet and cosy, but it’s the contrast of emo-kitch with beats that are pounding like a motherfucker that does the trick for us. But we’ll take any influence and rape it. In fact, our sound is called Belga Trance.

Ghent is home to yourselves, Soulwax, The Glimmers, I Love Techno…. What is it in the water there that such a seemingly quiet place is home to such crazy parties and DJs?

Belgium has always been good at beats. Remember Telex, Front 242, Technotronic, the whole new beat period, cult labels like R&S… Why? Because we’re not the best songwriters, English not being a native language? Because we are good at stealing? Belgium, geographically at the heart, played an important role in bringing dance to Europe. And in Ghent The Glimmers started this eclectic way of DJing, followed by 2 many DJ’s…

The video of Fuck that Shit from Pukkelpop is pretty insane - how did you go about getting all the footage together?

On national radio we asked the audience to film us during the show with whatever cam they had, including cellulars, iphones etc… Then they sent the footage to us. It was a very bumpy road, getting all that different footage into one format. And also, I had a camera glued to my microphone, but during the show I got carried away (as usual) and I constantly blocked the view of the cam with my hand. You can catch a few shots of my mouth delivering the screams though…

Since Pukkelpop takes place so close to your home town, is that a special show to play?

It’s one of the best festivals in Belgium, so it’s special. Great line-up cause it’s a good balance between established and upcoming talent. We always try to come up with something special.

What’s been the craziest thing to happen at one of your shows? Apart from getting a few thousand people to scream “Fuck that shit!” of course…

Life is wonderful and magical, but at the same time it’s so dreadfully banal and full of boring patterns. Live we try to break the rules. This gives you momentarily the feeling of breaking free, which is delightful, but it is only a temporary illusion of course. But it can linger on for a while though… The craziest thing is when you realize thousands of people are feeling the same thing at the same time. A collective musical orgasm so to speak. But having literally more then 200 people from the audience on stage is quite crazy as well, with us in de middle of that turbulent frenzy trying to carry on playing…

I noticed some similarities between From Dusk Till Dawn and the music of Joe and Will Ask? - so it’s funny that they remixed the track. Apart from these guys, who do you see as your musical peers, on the same wavelength as yourselves?

That’s difficult to say, because everyone has his own sound. But Fake Blood, Simian Mobile Disco, Yuksek, Justice, Boy 8-Bit, Crookers… Too many to mention… They all have a few tracks we wouldn’t mind if they were made by us, hahaha!

Trance is a dirty word nowadays, yet you made a hit called Kiss My Trance - which found favour with Tiesto of all people. Do you think, with the right people, that style could be given any respectability? Surely it’s no more cheesy than the disco sound that’s rife at the moment…

Oh man, that whole thing about what’s hot and what’s not, I won’t say I couldn’t be bothered, but it’s a bit tiring if it’s about chewing on styles that have been. You know what I mean? The whole fidget thing was in a way interesting because there was something fresh about it, Africa trying to make club music, and at the same time artists like Santigold, MIA, Buraka Som Sistema in the picture. It was/is something that transcended the pure clubbing genre… So we liked what was happening but didn’t participated because it is simply not our thing. Disco on the other hand is the root of dance music, so for me, everything is disco… I mean, we absolutely adore the old Italo Disco, and Disco will always remain an influence, but we’re not intending to make some really disco sounding thing, unless we, there we are again, find a way to rape it with love.

The video for that track was pretty interesting - for example juxtaposing cooking and DJing was a nice touch. How involved are you guys in the videos for your songs?

We always work closely together with the guys from The MKR, who are really good friends (they also made some videos for Das Pop). But all of a sudden the Kiss My Trance video was just lying in our mailbox so to speak. Some young talent from the southern part of Belgium simply gave it to us. This was particularly pleasing since there’s a lot of political nonsense between the north and the south.

But our video for My Punk we practically made ourselves. We drove on three mopeds from Ghent to Paris with three cameras on our head. After like 10 hours or something, we got so bored we started to drive into shopping malls and stuff and eventually got busted… Well, it’s a long story to tell everything, but if you check out the video, you gotta know everything is 100% real. We even still got a lawsuit pending…

You’ve had a lot of releases on Lektroluv’s label - what’s it like working with such an elusive character?

He eats a lot of spinach.

What are you working on right now? Are you concentrating on shows, or is there new material in the background?

Doing a lot of shows (10 years of Fabric, I Love Techno) but spending a lot of time in the studio as well. We’re releasing a new clubber called Mitsubitchi, which will be available first on Fabric’s label.

The Subs play the Transmission Halloween Party at The Button Factory in Dublin on October 31. See here for tickets.

Buraka Som Sistema

illustration by Phil Dunne

Kuduro isn’t a genre known to the vast majority of the Irish populace. In fact, the chances are quite high that you weren’t even aware there was such a thing as kuduro until curiosity inspired you to read this article. Either that or you’re a die-hard fan of the stuff; my sincerest apologies for patronising you if this is the case.

Likewise, Buraka Som Sistema are a band you’ve either never heard of or are madly in love with. Analogue had the chance to sit down and have a chin-wag with these Portuguese beat-meisters at their pre-Christmas DJ set in The Twisted Pepper. Two of the band - L’il John and Riot - producer Conductor is sadly absent - and guest vocalist/pretty-much-member Kalaf have been busy touring Europe.

Riot, guitar in hand, idly strums some tunes as L’il John gives a brief explanation of what exactly kuduro is. “You can describe it as a sound that’s based on […] African DJs’ and producers’ attempts at doing techno and house music. It’s picking up on the different aspects that they created around their own interpretations of these things, and it’s developing that and giving our own European version of it at the same time.”

Fast tempos, frenetic African beats and pounding bass drums under a rapid fire of MCing are typical characteristics of Kuduro. The genre is almost exclusively of Angolan origin, and with a high concentration of Angolan immigrants in certain suburbs in Lisbon it’s no surprise that the city is essentially home to the movement.

L’il John and Riot, making music since their teens, hooked up with kuduro producer Conductor a few years ago and formed Buraka Som Sistema. Describing themselves as “progressive kuduro” (pretty much a meaningless term; “it was a joke in an interview” confesses L’il John) and with a handful of EPs under their belt, they managed to attract the attention of M.I.A., who quickly got in touch. “It got to a point where she knew about us because we met so many mutual DJs and producers,” Riot explains, “so basically one day she called our studio, she talked with Jo?o [Barbosa, a.k.a. L’il John] and that’s how we got together.” Their collaborations resulted in Sound of Kuduro, the most popular single off their debut LP Black Diamond, which was released in November.

The album title reveals a lot about the band’s approach to their craft and origins, according to L’il John. “In South Africa, they had all that apartheid stuff, black people were excluded from experiencing the whole country, they were restricted to areas. What they call a black diamond is… imagine, a son of a couple that lived in apartheid, a son coming up from nowhere and making it for himself. That’s called a black diamond.”

When the genre first began to emerge in the poorest suburbs of Lisbon, kuduro artists were essentially forced to use aging and severely limited equipment to make their music. “It actually comes from production,” L’il John says. “It was never traditional, it was a reaction to traditional music. It was kids with their parents and grandparents playing the same instruments throughout their lives, […] and, even though they can play the same instrument, they broke that link in a way and just grabbed a shitty PC from seven years ago, installed Fruity Loops or some software like that, and started doing beats.”

These days Buraka Som Sistema have managed to accumulate enough of a following to be able to afford a plush studio in Lisbon, complete with de rigeur studio software behemoth Pro Tools. While other dance acts may grow to obsess about analogue synths and vintage compressors, this clearly isn’t in the Buraka/kuduro spirit. “It’s not about having the ultimate kick drum or snare,” L’il John says, “it’s about trying to pass on an idea or a concept.”

When I ask them for their thoughts on illegal downloading and whether I think it’s hurt them or helped them, their response is refreshing. “In Angola, it’s more or less the same process; when you release a track, people buy your albums, but they also [illegally] copy the music,” Kalaf explains, “so if your music is really good, you’ll find bootlegs; if it’s crap, you’ll find bootlegs. Simple as that.”

Future plans for the band include the release of Black Diamond in the United States, though Kalaf is already looking onwards. “We really want to make the biggest show that we can make with our size,” he reveals. “To be able to throw a good show, thats the way you fight the downloading - to be able to make a show that people will like to see and will remember.”