Hi, welcome back, a little late again sorry, but still less than a fortnight since the last one so that’s lovely. Thanks all for the great reactions to Kavus Torabi, it was easily the biggest buzz we’ve got around an entry since the earliest ones - welcome new subscribers too! - and we’re very glad you all liked him as much as we did.
I think knowing that you all enjoyed the rambling, philosophical tone of that one helped this one get off on the right foot. As you know I’ve been trying to find ways to avoid just jumping in with “what music did you listen to as a kid” and doing too many chronological life stories, and Justin Robertson was the perfect person to go a much more circuitous route with. This is a man with a philosophy degree, after all, and also an author of psychedelic folk horror and abstract visual artist as well as DJ, producer and proper dandy of the old school.
Justin had just sent me his new, umpteenth album (a kind of English pastoral dub excursion, a bit like African Head Charge communing with a hedge witch, coming out under the name Five Green Moons just in time for Samhain) and second novel (a Faustian romp called The Trials of Jonah, in which the time-travelling protagonist, “a Son of a Demon God, rips off J G Ballard, robs Kandinsky, sucks out the minds of famous DJs, possesses Rudolf Steiner and resurrects the Beatles… to become the world’s most celebrated DJ, prize winning author, feted artist and arbiter of cultural fashion.” - this should be out in February… so it felt like it was about time to include him here.
I’d been a fan from his first remixes, and watched as like a true craftsman he matured, refined and diversified his creativity - honestly the Five Green Moons album is his best work yet. But beyond passing phone interviews we’d never met until 2020 when we were both called on to celebrate the life of his long time fellow-traveller the great and sadly missed Andrew Weatherall (more on that in the interview). Since that baptism of… tears? we’ve stayed in touch, swapped tunes and jokes, and I will always look to him for inspiration, especially his Rotating Institute and appropriately named Temple of Wonders shows on Soho Radio. Brian went to see him at his gorgeous newly moved-into mid-century house in JG Ballard central aka Shepperton, on the Surrey fringes of Southwest London, and I spoke to him for a very jolly Zoom indeed.
OK Justin, you’ve just sent me a fantastic new album and intriguing novel, you’re painting and designing a lot, you do radio, play in clubs… How do you introduce yourself these days? Say to someone you meet at a soirée?
At a soirée? I describe myself somewhat sarcastically as having a portfolio career, I believe this is the trendy party story now. Which is, shorthand for saying, do anything to avoid doing a hard day's work, I guess. But somehow I am always working. In the current environment, it's quite tricky balancing things out time-wise, but also it's difficult to make a living out of the arts as you probably know. I kind of enjoy flitting between them and it just about makes sense, you know, kind of just sort of adds up when you put it all together. I don't really know how to describe myself… really.
Does one thing take up more of your time than other things?
It sort of flits between them fairly organically. The good thing about, it's when you run out to steam one in one venture, you can usually pick up a paintbrush or start firing weird ideas into your laptop if the music's not coming. And vice versa. Sometimes it's quite nice to just start trying to make music when the words don't come. So it's quite handy because I find it really hard to relax and do nothing. It's a fairly sort of privileged position to be in, even if it's difficult… it's a quite precarious way of making a living, but it is also the privilege of doing something that you love to try ends me, which I think is like in incredible position to be in, even if it is difficult. I'm very grateful for finding myself to be able to find an outlet for all this kind of nonsense I produce, you know.
Are you DJing every week still?
Not every week. I mean, enough… for a man of my increasingly creaking joints. I probably do enough DJing to keep the wolf of the door and keep me excited by it. But it's not like the 90s anymore. No double-ups up the M6, no early morning flights. Weirdly enough, it's finding sort of an audience… All the gigs I've done in the last few years have all been great, brilliant, really up for it, knowledgeable crowds and people who are interested in music and enthusiastic and all different kind of age groups because now we've got like two or three generations of people potentially tapping into whatever it is I do.
It's nice to see people of a more advanced… more advanced years still managing to get out and enjoy themselves and fill the clubs up. So it's been remarkable. You would think there would be some sort of law of entropy where it would drop off, but in fact it just seems to be as exciting as it was before. And also it's good that it's not … although I do occasionally do a few nostalgic events and I don't mind playing old records in midst new stuff, but there is a real appetite for new music amongst all generations, which I think is really heartening.
Have you seen the Balearic Burger1 community buzzing away?
Yes, I have.
It's really interesting to see how many people involved with that are knocking on 60, or certainly over 50 and have had kids leave home, which is what's got them out and about again. And within that, everyone's a DJ - which is not a bad thing! Elijah from Butterz has been banging on this drum for a while on social media2 that “everyone's a DJ” is not a bad thing. He says anyone who cares about music should learn to DJ and I absolutely agree. It gives people the hunger for the new, because they all want to show off. No one wants to parade the same old, “Show Me Love” or whatever it might be over and over - they’ve been digging for yonks, and now’s their moment. So, because an older generation is getting out and DJing and actively participating, it's exactly as you describe.
Exactly. I think the crux of DJing, well, the thing that attracted me to it, was I always described myself as a reluctant exhibitionist. So I kind of like inflicting my taste - no let’s not be too sarcastic… I do like sharing music with people, but I don't like the sort of… the performance aspect. What I thought it was interesting when acid house started off, it was completely opposite to rock’n’roll. It wasn't a kind of preening guitar between your legs kind of posing and posturing. The DJ was important, but more like a sort of part of a circuit involving the entire club or the rave or whatever the event was.
And it was like listening to records speaking. It wasn't about the person playing them. You knew that vaguely who was on the flyer, but a lot of time you couldn't see them. You didn't know who they were as a person. And I thought that was really interesting because it subverted the kind of traditional onstage dynamic. So I find the modern sort of DJ setup a little but uncomfortable. But that's what attracted to me initially was just being able to sort of play records. The something you used to do at a party, sit in the corner quietly play records and everyone had a good time. And then you could sort of go and do that inflict it on ever increasing numbers of people. So that's what I found interesting … it was more the kind of communal side of it and the slight anonymity of it really.
Absolutely. I mean, I think most of all, of all of that era, I loved the chill out room. I had this conversation with Kavus Torabi for the last of these interviews. That was the place where it really was: “Right, here's a record, have a listen to this” and people are actually going to sit on a bean bag and absorb the sound, you know? But like you say, it’s not about an ego or a performance, it’s about creating the entirety of the experience.
It's really interesting that it's not been that theorised or documented all that much somehow, what you described that circuit is a very good way of putting it. I came up with a phrase a few years back, “The artwork is the night.” You know, it's not about one person beaming their ideas at an effectively passive, receptive audience… I've got a megaphone and I'm saying, my artwork, my song, and I'm saying it to you in this kind of … I-say-it-and-you-listen thing. There's this very, very complex circuit of relations between dancers and lights and music and sound and this whole four dimensional thing. And that's the artwork, right?
Absolutely. What's interesting particularly about electronic music, and to a certain extent, all forms of music, is it's the sort of cybernetic organism that's created where you put machines and people together, and you create another being. You know, drum machine 303, turntables, human being, that interface between all those things makes something completely unique. And once it's made, you can't control it. It goes out, and becomes and morphs and changes and is picked up by different people and means things to different people. It's a road to Damascus for some, and a terrible noise for another. It's the gateway to friendships and romance. It's a life of puritanical hatred of acid house. It depends. But once it's out, you can't control it. I think it's kind of interesting, particularly electronic music, how it's kind of created all these different sort of entities that are a morphing of electronics and, and people. I mean, in fact, you know, the human elemen … The DJ's the least interesting part of DJ culture really.
Obviously a vital component, but yeah only one part of the circuit. But that’s exactly the reason that it hasn't been theorised, or maybe it hasn't been theorised by the right people, I don't know. I guess through the 90s it was either your Megadog acid evangelists who would start talking about, the wires behind the circuit board and aliens in the ether and Terence McKenna-related stuff and all that. Or the very dry academic people who wanted to quote Gilles Deleuze and rhizomatic this, that, and the other. But the people with the most insight into it were too busy having fun and being in the thick of it.
Well, it's quite hard to theorise and quantify, isn't it? Because when you're in it, you don't… I mean, I suppose the modern, trendy parlance would be, uh, object orientated ontology: you understand it through the objects. You're creating objects that are outside… they're an amalgamation of all the different elements, including the DJ and the producer, but also the crowd and the sound system and the wires and the mixer. Because it's all very… it's like the kind of moments in history, apocryphal tales of like people in baths. Well, if there wasn't a bath, then they wouldn't have had the idea. Or if there hadn't been a branch or an apple, then the Newtonian physics wouldn't have been the same. If there weren't circuits and dials and electricity, none of these things we do would happen. Or maybe it would happen a different way, but there's always been this kind of interface between objects and person.
Ha, we had this realisation when we were creating Bass, Mids, Tops. It was seeing Brian's picture of that junction box with those XLR sockets. Suddenly, it was like a load of things fell into place. That was our kind of metaphorical touchstone, the junction box, the wires connecting through history and connecting the different bass bins through history.
I think that's right. Actually I think we had that conversation - or we touched a little bit on it - when we were talking in Leeds when we did Andrew's memorial thing3. I think we talked about that. I think you are right. I mean, stuff that you've been writing about the last few years, it really resonates with me. That kind of idea of the speakers and the speakers are as much part of the event as the selector or the MC or the crowd. They're kind of part of that, the whole thing. Because without it, I mean, people will find ways of getting together, but it's like a cyborg kind of event, you know?
Building the cyborg temple!
Exactly.
Which is clearly something the KLF always understood, you know? They’ve always been about temples, monoliths, and as we talk I realise, looking back it was right there with the pyramid ghetto blaster…
Yes. They're kind of new things, new entities that exist in the universe that didn't exist before. I think that's what's interesting about dance music, where you can obviously trace its its origins, serious origins, whether you want to go back disco or go back further and further and further back into history. But now it's kind of splintered into a myriad of uncontrollable different genres and approaches and what it means to people in different ways, and how people connect with the technology and either use it or abuse it and kind of make mistakes. It's sort of uncontrollable now, like a torrent of different entities being spewed out into the world, which I think is, that's what makes it so exciting and makes it continues to be exciting.
My neighbour next door is 21 and he's just obsessed with drum’n’bass. Like, I like it but he’s totally obsessed with it. And I don’t know any of the music's playing, but we have some brilliant chats. We're both talking about music. Neither of us know what the person's really talking about. It’s fascinating because it's just all these different, you know, you've got a handle on something, it defies it, it won't be contained. That's what's good about it.
It won't. I mean, just to that thing of what those entities created… That little bit of writing that I came up with: “The the artwork is the night” phrase. God, this was ages ago - it was just like a little online seminar that I did a presentation for4 with some friends because I thought it was interesting. Not even paid if I remember - it was a very passing thing. I was sleep deprived because I’d just become a parent for the first time, and I jotted down some ideas and kind of riffed on the idea of “what is the underground?” but quite a few things that were crystallised in that one thing have echoed through my head for about the last 14 years or so since then. The main thing that I was actually talking about in that is that like dance culture or underground culture completely pre-empted social media because, whether you're talking about The Loft or whether you're talking about The Haçienda, these became these nodes and these points of connectivity where you could plug straight into a whole city. Like if you knew one person, then you knew “the Manchester lot”. If you knew one person, you knew “the Glasgow lot”, whatever. And you could very quickly become a part of something bigger on that front.
Obviously there was the logistics of acid house where you'd often get orbital raves out in the countryside outside Manchester or Sheffield or Leeds. So there were converging points because they had to avoid the police, so they were often held in places where the police couldn't access it quickly. So did get people physically converging for different parts of the country. I don’t if it was just the age I was. Obviously people travelled to Wigan Casino so it's not like acid house invented traveling to clubs. But it did normalize in an extent. There was the whole guest DJ thing where a troop would get in a van, drive off to Nottingham or Sheffield or down to London and it was really exciting. It was indeed an early form of social media.
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