So... the connections are coming thick and fast now. In this interview, NikNak – Nicole Raymond – mentions being inspired by Róisín Murphy and still playing Moloko music in her sets. She talks about benefitting from the artist empowerment programme set up by Sherelle and admiring Jamz Supernova. And in more abstract senses, you can hear in her incredible new Ireti album the kind of rave futurism that’s deeply rooted in the music that made up Fabio & Grooverider’s sets of the early 90s and the same anime inspirations as Meemo Comma, and we discuss a lot about the unique possibilities afforded by the smaller cities of the UK that resonate with the stories of David Holmes, Maria Uzor, Jude Rogers and Hifi Sean.
There’s also a fascinating similarity with Philip Hoare, in that Raymond’s speech is a torrent. It’s funny, I didn’t really notice how circuitous her way of speaking was in the moment. Partly because she has a very crisp intonation, complete with poised, directional hand gestures, it makes it seem like she’s talking quite formally - and partly she just makes sense. But looking back at the transcript, just like Hoare, her words come out almost entirely unpunctuated, a constant flow of impressions and reiterations of ideas as she circles her themes. I’ve had to add untold extra full stops for readability, but a lot of her answers genuinely did come out as a 500 word sentence. This might seem odd as her recorded music is ultra focused and finessed, and in the cases of the albums that came before Ireti, positively Spartan in its minimalism. But the more you hear her ideas unfold, the more you realise this makes sense: her core process is all about finding something clear and distinctive in information overload, and she achieves this by a constant process of testing, sifting, honing, and that is as true in her conversation as when she’s preparing her DJ sets or recordings. One of her most commonly used word is “interesting”, which exactly expresses how she is constantly taking interest in and assessing things around her.
I’d met Raymond at We Out Here festival last year, where I saw her play a sterling set of tracks by women rappers in the daytime, then caught the end of her playing a more laid back set of trip hop and street soul in a tiny tea tent before I took over for a weird late night ambient session (I’ll be doing the same this year ahem ahem). I’d got fascinated by her range, making and playing music from good times club sets to the near-total abstraction of her first few albums – but it was Ireti, on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental label, that made us decide we absolutely had to have her on this Substack. It’s a masterpiece, a contender for album of the year, a prog rock-level concept album which creates a sonic future megacity from classic rave, jungle, jazz, Vangelis, Tomita, and much much more, combining Raymond’s sonic manipulations seamlessly with the cream of British jazz and soul talent. Stick it on now, while you read this frankly epic interview, which circles round some truly fundamental questions of creativity, technology, locality and the modern world in general.
OK I’m starting to run out of “what music did you grow up on” opening gambits, so let’s flip it and start with what you’re working on now – your album’s been out a while, right?
Mmm, a month, or nearly a month. And, erm, what am I up to now? Just chilling, really. I am on tour with TC & The Groove Family1… The first bit of the tour has finished now, then we have got festivals and things coming up. [Thinks] And I have also got some DJ sets coming up… and I am doing a workshop with Saffron2, as of this recording next Monday – so yeah, I have got a couple things coming up, just getting ready for summer, whatever that means in the UK because it’s like, I’m in Leeds and it’s sunny right now but as soon as you walk out it’s like “Oh no, need a coat!” ...so I am chilling for now, yeah
And it’s your... I’ve lost track, fourth album? Third?
Fourth
Fourth. And its, quite er dramatic step, sideways? Forward? I don’t know which way… from your previous ones...
Yeah, yeah, it’s err… [pause] Well, I found myself, when I was just making it, I was like, yeah I have not done anything beat-wise in a very long time, and a lot of the ideas I had lend themselves to having beats with them in some way, so its was nice to go back to bringing beats in that respect – because I used to make a little bit of jungle and hip hop and stuff so it was nice how naturally all of that just came back. Like, I like to do ambient stuff – which is not to say there can’t be some drums elements in ambient music, like there can be, depending on how you do it – but generally it’s been nice to naturally find myself going back to some of the old bits and pieces I would make, but with today’s vibes.
But it feels like you have zoomed in on something very specific. I mean its sci-fi: it’s sci-fi in a particular 90s rave way... but expanding from that into something else. There’s real ups and downs and narrative too. How quickly did it come to be a focused thing like that?
I think, during the creation of that album – before people jumped on the tracks as well, so when the main bed of the album was done, that was maybe, about I would say six to eight months of making that and getting inspired by a lot of things around me… and then I had to sit back for a second and go, oh hold on this is connected to… er… [slightly bashful] my partner playing Cyberpunk 2077 and how immersive that is. It’s so immersive that I struggle to play the game because I guess I have ADHD where its like this is too big of an open world and I just can’t, I just need to focus on, like: you give me the story and I will do the quest or whatever it is – but this is like Skyrim levels of immersiveness, so I was like, OK I will watch you play this instead, and he was really into it, like he loved that game so much – I think he’s on his second play through at the moment – and ermm… so that was also happening.
And then there was finding myself watching a lot of anime – certain times of the year around Christmas I am like “Let me watch Ghost in the Shell again” or “Let me watch Cowboy Bebop” or “Let me watch Akira” or whatever. So that was also there, and then also like looking at some other films like I, Robot and stuff and thinking “Why isn’t there black people represented in this?” Then a film came out recently – well recently-ish – called They Cloned Tyrone3 and that was on Netflix and that was really, really good, like a really funny film. Its got like John Boyega and Teyonah Parris and Jamie Foxx in it, really good film, and it’s like OK, well, like that’s probably the most recent example of some sci-fi elements in Afrofuturist, or not quite futurist but you know, dealing with that in the Black community specifically and African-American community, and it’s like “Oh OK” and also you know John Boyega was in Attack the Block, so similar thing there to with all of this stuff.
But there was more questions forming... just like, you know, why in I Robot there’s three Black characters with actual lines and stuff: there’s only three and one of them is a woman and, well, why is that? What’s the other one? Oh yeah, Altered Carbon4 on Netflix was a show I was watching, and the first season er the protagonist was a white guy and then the second season he a Black guy played by Anthony Mackie, but that show is all about being able to transfer your consciousness into different body’s, so like, OK, I get it but like, it’s not really examining... I am not seeing… something on a Black Panther level in scale – being on that level of world building, be as dark as Blade Runner and why is that? And then there are days when I will just randomly put on Blade Runner 2049 and just like get lost in the whole brutalist and seemingly, heh, very depressing world that it’s set in but it’s also really beautiful because it’s like there is so much attention to detail including in the sound design and the colour schemes and how it’s always raining there, you know, all of these things, its really interesting so why not apply that to Black contexts? Why am I not seeing a film or show like that with mostly Black people – that would be really cool! Why haven’t we had that yet?
So all of these thing where floating around at the same time and then, me being a big old sponge it just got got sucked into my head and then came out via these tunes. Parts of it was also just, I have not made hip hop or trip hop or breakbeat in a very long time, and I am not hearing that really in mainstream music today or if it is out there I am just not catching it at all, and I miss that I miss just turning on the radio and hearing a bit of Portishead or Groove Armada or whatever. I just miss that, so that was like a moment of “Well fuck it let me just do that and see what comes out!” If I think with this particular thing in mind and hear you know a snippet of a loop that I did live and it’s like oh OK, that could turn Into what ended up becoming “Never Seen a Miracle” but it’s like, oh what would the drum sound like here and oh shit and it just builds builds builds, its...
Yeah I don’t know, it just was a lot of things both externally and internally that just happened at the same time roughly to build the bed at least and then when I said to myself “OK its done I don’t want to do any more tinkering because I will probably fuck something up” let me send it to some friends and just be like “I guess this is the concept” and, you know, “Is this something you would want to jump on?” Bearing in mind everyone I messaged for the most part I knew they had some nerdiness to them so I was like, “You know this is where I am coming from” and everyone was like “Yep, let’s go!” And I said to everyone, you can chose what track or tracks you want to jump on, I think that would be the best thing because then you will really connect with that material and I want to enforce that... then we all went away, some of us went to a studio in London, others sent me stuff remotely, and it just built again really nicely and naturally to basically what the album ended up being so yeah I feel like that’s a really long answer to your question
Hahah that’s a really good answer. Its really hard for me to unpick as an ageing raver how much I am hearing is nostalgia from my own point of view, and how much is truly new. I have a big thing about the idea of revivalism, that so much of it is based on unfinished business – so if you talk about Afrofuturism or sci-fi within 90s rave music, actually on the scale of things there was quite a small body of work. Obviously what 4Hero did, for example, is an amazing piece of sci-fi world-building, but that’s there, then Future Sound Of London are over here, and the WARP Artificial Intelligence thing over there, A Guy Called Gerald doing this that and the other, and they’re great statements but there’s still infinitely more space to explore there – and I find myself hearing in this album and it feels like it is just picking up where those things left off and going, “Well, there’s so much more to do here.”
Wow that’s really high praise, thank you! Yeah I don’t know, just growing up in like the 90s and even early 2000s there was a lot of music, a lot of different music, and to see that shift over the years to it being very polished and packaged and exactly the same conveyer belt type stuff, it’s very weird. And anyone that makes something different now it’s like you have to… if it doesn’t go viral then it “doesn’t count” in parenthesis and its like, well, er, I couldn’t really care! If it went viral for the right reasons like people actually digged it and were like “Oh we have not heard this vibe in a while” then OK, great. Like even at school it was like you would hear… you would get up and maybe put on MTV Base or something in the morning and you would go to school, you have your mp3 player in your head all day, ifyou’ve got ICT you might go on the internet and see what other students come out and watched, LinkUp TV5 or whatever, or Channel U6 or something, like what’s going on grime wise or whatever, and then you’re going home and then you’re sharing tunes on phones, and, like Top of the Pops would go through a stupid amount of different music and then and then you would go to bed and then you were like “Oh yeah that was my day and I have just absorbed all this different information at once.”
Now it’s so convenient and so instant, like just, I could like just google whatever and it’s just, oh there is all of the things that have been released under this one genre or whatever it is. It’s so instant that it it takes the fun out of just finding gems and you see often like, loads of articles about “Is vinyl digging dead” or “Should you get a cassette player now” because that’s back and that... I have had people come up to me and go “You’re too young to be selling tapes I remember when this and that..” – and I am like “Dude a tape is a tape – this is way cheaper to manufacture than a vinyl!” Like come on man [laughs] That’s not to say I am wouldn’t like a vinyl of Ireti but also realistically speaking its way harder now to do that as an independent artist, so tape it is erm and it’s just… It’s even like some of the movie soundtracks now don’t have like that weird nostalgicness like, there was a Batman that had a Moloko track on the soundtrack, and a Portishead7 I think, and it’s like: “What, when, what, who decided this?” Like who said “yo Beth and Róisín, can you jump on this” like who? Who said that? Like, Batman and Robin was one of the really shit ones but like, that happened, and why not? And its banger too – like I played that many times in DJ sets, like no knows that I am playing a tune off of Batman and Robin. That’s funny. Yeah I don’t know, it’s there is only so much I can relate to in terms of like being a child of the 90s I didn’t go raving, I was way too young to do that, but you know, reading about it later on and going “oh so this was big” and you had Prodigy and you had all of these people, it’s like I am not seeing that really happen now it’s too clean almost and I miss that, erm so it’s nice that Ireti has felt like it’s gone off straight from that time, that’s really... I really appreciate that, because I just want more trip hop man, I miss that! [laughs]
I love that description of the consumption habits of the early 2000s. Chloe Robinson – Barely Legal – described it in Bass, Mids, Tops as “the LimeWire years8”, the 2000s of accessing everything all at once but in this quite chaotic way. I’ve spent a lot of time tracing how the change has gone from that – which led people to making nu rave – you know, all these different influences colliding into each other willy-nilly – through to the subsequent progress through the 2010s where maybe people have learnt to navigate that, and as you say you can zoom in on particular things which becomes a blessing and a curse: yes it makes it too easy in some ways – but then when someone does go down that particular rabbit hole they can come up with very very focused things because of that.
Mmmm... I love that “LimeWire years,” that’s perfect, that’s immediately taken me there, hahah the MSN years too – immediately, like, that’s the name of it forget saying “the noughties” and shit, it’s it’s the Limewire era, that’s what it is, [laughs] that’s what it should be called.
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