Kloke – Influences

This track was recorded 40 years ago but sounds like it could’ve been made yesterday or 40 years in the future. It just ticks all the boxes: forward thinking, raw, melodic… I definitely find that whole mid 70s period of German experimental pop a constant source of inspiration.

I’d pretty much given up making & listening to current dance music by the mid 00’s but stumbling across this mix on the ilovefwd website in 2006 totally re-acquainted me with UK underground music, to the point where I scrapped all other projects and started making bad Digital Mystikz rip offs. I was living in New Zealand at the time so unfortunately never made it to FWD or DMZ. The music had that same freshness & excitement that any style of dance music has in its infancy, when it’s more of a concentrated scene and the musical blueprint is still being written.

I probably listen to dub more than any other type of music and soundsystem culture has obviously played such a big role in dance music so I wanted to include this – mainly just cos it’s one of the best clips on youtube.

I remember turning on the radio driving home late one night and being quite freaked out by this. For the uninitiated Blue Jam was a radio show written by Chris Morris that basically combined dark satire with a brilliantly spliced together soundtrack. I don’t think there’s been anything like it before or since.

This was the first club night I ever went to that was properly focused on the music. It was all about hearing the freshest, most experimental tunes on a ridiculous soundsystem…on a Sunday night, in a little jazz club. I don’t really go to clubs much anymore so if I find myself working on a dancefloor track I tend to draw from past experiences like this.

I used to tape these shows every week from about ’94 onwards. I lived too far out of London to get the pirate stations so all those late night Kiss shows in the 90s were my main window into underground music. So many great DJs had their own shows: Colin Dale, Colin Favor, Giles Peterson, Patrick Forge, Paul Thomas, Coldcut.. I suppose a big part of the music I make is an attempt to capture the feeling I had listening to this stuff, back when I didn’t know or care who made what.

One of my all-time favourite pieces of music. There’s so much depth and multiple layers of sound along with the whole underwater sci-fi narrative. I particularly love all the feedback & tape loops that are made to sound like shoals of fish swimming by; even the bass guitar sounds like it was recorded underwater.

I got into metal via rap in my early teens and quickly gravitated towards the heavier stuff, as you do. The Earache label was a favourite & I remember this tape being on heavy rotation. Streetcleaner by Godflesh still sounds amazing.

I’m not much of a gear obsessive but this was the first thing I ever used to make beats on. It’s certainly not the greatest drum machine in the world but I still use it a fair bit.

It’s such a bad film but when I was a kid I absolutely loved it. This scene is a killer though – at the time I had no idea who the music was by and the mystery & other-worldliness of it all sparked something and stayed with me ever since.