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Short Attention Spans: Discussing Collaboration With Kowton & The Kelly Twins

A lot of people, myself included, seem to romanticise the South West city of Bristol; and rightly so. Having lived there moved away and then visited it quite regularly since, first and foremost it’s a city that seems to function on its own terms, operating completely on its own axis. In musical terms, a lot of things seem to sprout and incubate themselves there amongst the network of likeminded producers, promoters, DJs and clubbers. Owing a lot to its smaller size the city appears to breed a kind of interconnectivity that the outside world should do well to be jealous of. And that Cheers mentality of everyone knowing your name has helped create a framework of club nights and a network of figures that have since gone on to fly the flag for the BS postcode the world over. At its heart there’s a real openness to the place and the people. As a port city Bristol’s roots were pretty much built on slavery and historically, throughout the music that’s come to define the area, there’s a real sense of mixture; in terms of the sound, race, culture and the culpability that inform it and, from an outsider’s perspective at least, it really feels like Idle Hands is a big part of that. Whilst the physical footprint of the shop lies on Stokes Croft (the city’s shall we say… more cultural quarter) the tendrils of the music they put out on the label and the artists they help push through their association and short-lived agency. Over their 17 releases to date, label owner Chris Farrell has managed to define the kind of open to anything roster that feels like it could’ve only really come from living and working in Bristol. Built on a love of house and techno Farrell’s worked with local talents and international names alike pooling together a discography that really sounds cohesive. Joe Cowton, who makes music as Kowton, is one of those local bodies to release on the label whose uniquely skewed take on 4x4 music has seen him venture far afield purely on the strength of his music. Three releases deep in their partnership he’s since released music on labels like Signal Life, Keysound, Livity Sound and his own Pale Fire and collaborated with another local hero, Peverelist, for a release on Hessle Audio. But even more recently he worked alongside his colleagues at the Idle Hands shop, The Kelly Twins, for a track on Red Bull’s Soft Rockets project. Sean and Dan Kelly are, as their DJ moniker suggests, identical twins, but they’ve risen to local prominence more off the back of their vivacious sets and impossibly deep record collections than any sort of lookalike gimmick. They’ve played all across the board for as long as I can remember, deftly expressing their passion for boogie and disco as much as blunted hip hop, electro or classic techno in clubs or on the radio. They’re just that type of a DJ partnership. Instinctive, they really can strike a mood with whatever selection of music they choose to bring for the occasion. Ahead of all three of them making the journey up the M4 to return to Room Three for the second Idle Hands takeover, we asked them all to huddle around Kowton’s laptop and discuss a few things including their mutual collaboration, rawness in music and life in general... So I noticed that you all did that collaboration track on Red Bull, truth be told that’s what we’ve got you all together. How did that come about? Sean Kelly: Well Dave Harvey who’s involved with Future Boogie here in Bristol, he does a lot of the Red Bull related things here. They were doing the Soft Rockets event on Stokes Croft and he came up with the idea of doing this collaborative project and getting a few up and coming producers and local artists working with people who are a little bit more established. And that was one of the ideas that came up… me and Dan working With Joe… Kowton: I think Chris [Farrell] had a lot to do with it too. Dave went to Idle Hands and asked Chris what he thought might work and we were one of the suggestions for it. It came out alright. Dan Kelly: Yeah, we’re really happy with it. I didn’t know that you guys were even making tunes, Sean and Dan…? SK: Yeah, to be honest we’re generally quite busy people. We both work full time and we’re DJing a lot on the weekends here but it’s been something I’ve been plugging away at for the last year or so. I’m technically a little bit backwards. IT got made compulsory at my school the year after I left. The whole art department didn’t even have a computer; we were all doing oil paintings for our A-levels and shit like that, so computers do generally confuse the hell out of me. It’s weird, coming at it through years of DJing because actually getting that creativity across and actually processing it and putting on a grid is really new to me. I’m not gonna rush it or put a time limit on it. When it’s ready it’s ready… I feel like that’s quite a Bristol mentality though… SK: Yeah. You know, I’m quite aware that once something’s out there, it’s out there and the bit that we did with Joe for Red Bull we’re really happy with. I don’t necessarily think it’s the greatest or the best produced thing in the world; it’s never gonna be because me and Dan are both quite new to it. But it had the vibe that we were after and it stands out. DK: I think it was tough enough as well, which really helped. K: I should say that with the process behind it, was more you boys bringing your ideas to the table and I kinda tried not to do too much and just guide it and be like “this is how to make this type of sound.” SK: It worked nicely because I think a lot of people would’ve expected me and Dan to make something disco or boogie related because we have been tagged with those kinds of sounds in the past, but to make an amazing disco record you need to be Nile Rogers, y’know? Everything I attempt to make just seems to sound a little bit like grime because the roughness is part of the charm of it and generally if you’ve got some OK sounds you can put something together on a grimey sort of tip that does have a real energy. So what we took to Joe was a tune that we’d put together that was a full sounding 8 bar grime tune and we kept going back and forth and working on it together and then me and Joe one day, we sat down and just sort of… K: Deleted it. SK: It was a brutal sort of reduction process. One that I think good old Peverelist would have been proud of, stripping the tune back to its bare bones and keeping the sounds essential. DK: And adding loads of reverb. SK: And helicopter noises and gunshot samples which was a must I think. [All laugh] K: Yeah, it’s not the most serious tune ever is it? SK: But the vibe of it quite is. Like it’s a creeper, the vibe of it is kinda darked out. It was fun. But what I would say about working with Joe is, I was kind of surprised because if I’d have sat down with Joe and he was talking in frequencies and bass curves and shit like that then I’d have just been completely lost really. Seeing Joe’s way of producing, I just find it interesting that people who listen to his productions might assume that every single part of it, every hi-hat, is so considered but it’s more just getting the vibe down. It’s a quick way of working. K: It gets boring otherwise. SK: It’s like anything. Like painting. You reach a point where it’s good and you can keep adding things forever and tweak it to the point where it loses the essence of what it is… DK: …and that initial energy and character can get smoothed out and washed out with overproduction. SK: We really respect that with a lot of people, they have the technical know how to make things sound really polished but they choose not to, which I think could be a particularly tough thing to do. I suppose the natural thing with everyone is to make things sound a nice as they can be and to leave something quite raw must be quite difficult? K: I just think it’s about leaving it with the character really. It’s like using bold brush strokes; that sums it up quite well for me. Like take 7 or 8 sounds, make them loud, rough it up a bit more and you’ve kinda got the elements of a tune in there somewhere. It’s just about doing it quickly; I can’t be fucked spending weeks over one tune, it just seems a bit of a waste of time. SK: I remember speaking to somebody who was like “I’ve been working on this melody for over a year now” [All laugh] K: You’d hope it’s good by the end of that. Do you think that you look for that rawness in the music that you play as well? K: Yeah, a little bit. I was chatting to Funkineven the other week when we were in London about that ‘Beat Crash’ thing he did that was pretty much just one take, him just messing around. But when you play that tune, you just want to rag it in just because it’s so raw and I think when you’re playing out its more fun playing tunes like that. DK: It does present you with more of a challenge as a DJ I think, when you’ve got those sort of different aesthetics to tracks. Like you’ve got some that are a little bit polished and then, even a bit of modern music as well as old techno and house, has got that sort of rough, boxed out, rugged feel to it and trying to combine those elements in a mix, as well as keeping it interesting to yourself, can create these interesting contrasts. SK: With regards to that raw, one take vibe and putting it into our DJ sets, it’s not so much a conscious thing. Me and Dan have never really thought that much about it. We’ve always just bought things that we get a vibe from. So on the one hand we’ll play these raw as fuck sort of box jams, like Joe’s stuff, and on the other hand we love Alexander O’Neal and smoothed out boogie, Smooth FM sort of stuff so it’s all about getting that vibe from it that dictates what we play in our DJ sets. There’s some really, really cool analogue stuff and it’s good going back and working in that hands on way but, like anything, it’s sort of become like ‘a sound’. K: Yeah, yeah. SK: Like just because something’s got a massive analogue ride in it doesn’t mean that it’s gonna be a really, really good tune, y’know? K: Is that idea isn’t it that “oh yeah this is analogue, therefore its good.” That’s just a fraud. It doesn’t matter what you make this shit on its how it actually sounds that’s the important thing. SK: Well, me and Dan, we’re not particularly old or anything but we’ve been DJing for a long time and it’s literally just got to the point where we just buy exactly what we like regardless of what genre it is. DK: Whether we think we’re gonna play it or not even, it doesn’t normally matter. It always surprises you how you always pick up those tunes and you think “oh, it’s too rough, I’m never gonna play that” but we’re fortunate enough that we do really play a lot of those records out. K: I guess you lads play a lot of different kinds of nights too. It’s not like you’re just getting booked to play at house nights or whatever… SK: Yeah and now, because of DJs like Ben UFO and Oneman mixing it up and keeping it eclectic in that way, [playing across genres] is a little bit more common than it used to be. But 6 or 7 years ago when we were playing out, it probably wasn’t as popular, like not many DJs did it and I dunno, it’s never a conscious thing, it’s just part of our nature. We get bored easily. DK: We’ve got short attention spans… SK: We like to keep it interesting for ourselves. And on the other side of it, there’s a whole world of music out there and if you want to go backwards into it then it’s endless… It just seems like it’s a shame not to explore as much of that as possible really. Catch both Kowton and The Kelly Twins in the Idle Hands hosted Room Three on Friday 12th April. Hessle Audio takeover Room One whilst we launch our Houndstooth label proper in Room Two with performance from our 2013 roster. Full lineup/tickets/info here.
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