The Mix 032: Introspekt

You never really look up when you’re DJing. What are you thinking behind the decks?

I tend to be pretty locked in when I’m DJing. These days I spin with four decks, generally, so I’ll have a kick drum on one CDJ, two tracks that I’m blending on another and I’m looking for my next one on the fourth, so it’s a lot of multitasking. I kind of read the room with my ears. If you notice, I never really mix with my headphones on, I usually keep them on my shoulders and monitor like that so I can always hear what’s going on in the room.

I have this new approach when I’m DJing where I’m thinking about three tracks ahead. I used to spin track-to-track, a lot more linear and sequential in that way. These days, it’s more about getting from one point to the other and sometimes back. This weekend, I played the ‘Dick Control Break’ about four times on average in each set.

That’s something I picked up from a lot of the T4T LUV NRG DJs. I noticed that Octo Octa would bring in the same vocal several times in a set. When I first heard her doing it, I was like, ‘am I trippin’ or did I hear this vocal before?’ I thought that was so cool. It’s a weird sorcery to fuck with people’s perception of time like that. It stems from my philosophy about time. I think about time in a nonlinear fashion. When I’m mixing, I don’t want to lose track of time – I want it to feel like time is collapsing in on itself.

When you’re reading with your ears, what’s the best sound you can possibly hear?

I love when I don’t really hear much. If I don’t hear much chatter, I’ll look up to see what that means. Either the dancefloor has cleared, or people are making out and are really locked in and grinding on each other.

Before you, was there much dark dubstep being played in queer nights?

No! Not at all! That’s the thing, I was going to queer nights and it was 4×4 techno, and in LA too, hardcore techno was big. I always loved the energy and ethos and spirit of those spaces, but sonically it wasn’t exactly to my music. So I was like, ‘how can I play this music and contextualise it in a way that makes sense for the kinds of audiences and communities I want to be in?’. That’s really what’s motivated my approach to production and selection, is: how do I contextualise this music that I really love for an audience that historically hasn’t been represented in those scenes?

The level of horniness in your music could lead a Mormon to a bathhouse. Where did you first pick up that dance music could be this sensual?

That reference to sensuality is influenced by East Coast club music, Baltimore club, that sort of thing. But also the queer dance music continuum, I would call it. I’ve intentionally been trying to make my bass music sexy, a lot of themes I’m dealing with when I’m producing revolve around expressing my sexuality and injecting a queer sensual sensibility into the music. That’s something I’ve always enjoyed in types of house music and techno that are popular in queer spaces. It provides a space for people to let loose and express themselves in ways which oftentimes we feel so repressed. I don’t want to make bass music for people to throw up gunfingers to. I want to make bass music for people to move their hips and grind on each other to.

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You’ve got such a knack for adding in a sound bite or sound effect, it reminds me of when Menta added that big cat roar to ‘Snake Charmer’. How do you choose the sounds you work with?

I think a lot about space and atmosphere with the sounds I choose, especially in the last year. It’s been a big part of my search for samples. I also think a lot about what feelings I want to evoke. When I play ‘Snake Charmer’, what always struck me about the different sounds in the track, when I first heard the lion’s roar, I thought, ‘woah, this is fierce’. That’s a really good example of a dubstep garage track that’s so deep and sexy in a very specific type of way. There’s this thing with that specific period with early FWD>>, dubstep and garage sort of stuff where there’s a lot of low-passed moans and moan samples that are dubbed out. It’s real spacious and subtle and sensual, you know?

How does it feel to now be a major part of the relaunch of FWD>>?

It’s honestly surreal to be playing that party and find myself where I’m really being supportive by this group that has played such an integral role in the music that’s influenced me. When I was a teenager, I was growing up reading Blackdown’s blog and reading lore about FWD>> at Velvet Rooms and Plastic People. Working with the FWD>> people has been really heart-warming. It feels full circle.

What’s your favourite recorded FWD>> set?

It would have to be a Hatcha or a Joe Nice set. There’s so many archived sets that are so good.

Mine would be Plastician’s set with Skepta on mic. If you could DJ with any MC live, who would it be and why?

One MC I’ve been interested in recently is Sugur Shane [a ballroom MC, not to be confused with Gypsy Rap Records‘ Sugar Shane]. Ballroom MCing is my favourite style of MCing. I used to be a really big grime head, and a lot of the things I love about grime, I also really love about ballroom. It’s just this raw energy, but grime is often very hyper-masculine, whereas ballroom is often very hyper-feminine. It feels like this inverse world. I would be really interested to play a set with dark, in-your-face bass music with a ballroom MC over it.

You’ve just possibly locked in an album, which is great. What’s next on the horizon?

I’m really excited about it. It’s my first time working on a project of this scale. What’s next for me is integrating all the pieces of me and tying everything together a little bit. For a while, there were two split sonic directions that I was working in: the more house-adjacent, 4×4 garage thing and the darker 2-step stuff. It felt like a dichotomy between the two sounds. What’s next is the convergence of those sounds.

Tell us about this mix.

I’ve done a lot of planning for it. The theme behind the mix is ‘Past, Present, Future’, which is obviously the theme of FWD>>. There’s this idea in my music and a lot of my peer’s music as well where, as opposed to a linear, progressive idea of time, there’s this thread of more recursive or cyclical view of time and temporality. There’s gonna be a lot of deep cuts and classics, but also a lot of new stuff, and new stuff that sounds like old stuff. So that’s the theme of this mix: collapsing past, present and future into one totality.

Introspekt plays FWD>> at FOLD on October 11, get tickets here

Nathan Evans is a freelance music journalist, follow him on Twitter