No. 4: Grandmixxer

Building a system through The Pseudoscience of Carl Brown

OK, we’re cooking with gas now. We’ve got an absolutely tearing lineup locked in for the next few weeks, spreading out the ground we cover in a way that makes absolute sense (to us, anyway), and before all that we’ve got this heavyweight conversation with a very important artist for our times. This one is long, but we really hope you can carve out some time in your day for it, because it massively reinforces some of the themes we’ve talked about, not just about subcultural connections and networks, but about creative process, independence, commitment, immersion... On that latter front, it’s particularly interesting to hold up the thoughts here about clubs and dancefloors against HiFi Sean’s from the last “chapter” – two very different milieus, but both illuminated by their understanding of soundystems and crowds in the real spaces they occupy.

Grandmixxer (or, often, GRANDMIXXER – like DOOM, all caps) has been around for a bit, but only really come to prominence in the last decade. I first came across him as DJ for the then-teenaged grime prodigy Novelist in the mid 2010s. It was a time when grime was in a state of some disarray, many elders of the scene trying to find their way back from dead-end attempts at commercialisation of the sound, and grime itself jostling with newer scenes and sounds for shares of the attention economy. But “Nov”, Grandmixxer and those around them were absolutely committed to preserving the performance and production values of the first days of grime a decade plus before – and whether playing with MCs or all-instrumental sets at the club night Boxed, Grandmixxer stood out as one of the most technically gifted DJs doing it.

Since then he has put out a slew of tracks that both preserve and subvert the original sonics of grime. As you’ll have seen in the mix we gave away last week, he can remove the beat completely with sublime results, but just as easily he’ll make furious tracks of drums only, or make tracks of terrifyingly hypnotic repetition that last eight, ten and more minutes. He works with MCs who are uncompromising, but equally experimental: his regular collaborator, the Nottingham talent Mez, is likewise a master of hypnotic repetition, turning phrases around and around, creating a kind of lyrical Cubism. The music is often dark and bleak, but every bit as much, it has ambition, excitement, euphoria, and more subtle and tender emotions too flowing through it.

Grandmixxer plays, too, with commercial expectations, sometimes giving music away for free, sometimes charging large sums for digital “dubs” – which fans, and DJs, are happy to pay for a much loved track they recognise from sets. He’s never played the media game particularly, just building reputation set by set, track by track. Indeed, despite knowing and appreciating his tracks, I only really became aware of how much there was to his ouevre and approach when a mutual friend, Alya Al-Sultani – of whom much more later – who was working with him on the South London Space Agency label, waxed lyrical about what he was achieving.

As you’ll see, his commitment to independence is hardcore to a degree that seems almost implausible in this era of capitalist realism and instant assimilation of ideas and sound. Not that he won’t do commercial partnerships or whatever, but there is an inviolable core to the creative endeavour And part of that is to do with that commitment and immersion: you just need to start digging into the hundreds of hours of DJ sets that exist online to understand that this is a craft that can’t simply be bought but has to be understood on its own terms.

I’ve long been obsessed with the visionary William Blake’s “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's” – and later by something that John Balance of Coil said to me, which is that the real artists are the ones that build worlds through the course of their work, into which you have to step to appreciate them properly. Both of those things apply to Grandmixxer’s work: he absolutely does build a system, a world, across his productions, Djing and collaborations.

And he’s very, very conscious of it. In fact, he was already off and talking about this very thing within seconds of me getting him on WhatsApp (Brian took the pics in Waterloo a couple of weeks beforehand) and greeting him with a small-talk “what you been up to?”, and I had to hit record to catch him in mid flow. He talks a mile a minute, frequently with his hands moving as fast, making a complementary rhythm to his speech, as locked into the flow as they are when he’s DJing. But, like his sets, his answers unfold over multiple timescales: ideas recurring, building on one another, being woven into larger structures as they go - often abstract, full of very specific personal terminology like “degradated” and “bookie,” but always anchored in the real. It’s quite a ride...

This is what a pseudoscientist looks like.

OK the recording’s going, carry on.

…So yeah, in November I walked through Burgess Park by accident, looking for a bus that didn't exist, and I thought of an album in that time, and I went to start making the album and then conceptualising it, and it was such a sick idea. So look, I've made probably over 400, 500 tunes and I've got all the original tunes that I made on my first computer, and all the new tunes I've made. My whole production gear is based off two PCs, and they've both got about 250 each of my music. So I thought, my first album has to be made up basically of what I've made that I've held back that I thought was really sick, and then new stuff. And I had the idea around it and then I put it together, made someone listen to it, and it was like, “Right, this is sick.” Because it's all music I've been holding back. It's not really stuff I've been playing too much, so even the old tunes are unheard. But then after a while I thought I didn't like the idea. It was a good idea behind it, but it wasn't true to myself, and then a few weeks ago, I decided my first album had to be something else, so I started-

So wait, what was the original concept?

It was going to be Welcome to Lambeth, because I just thought it's where I've been grown up and raised, and in that moment of thinking of it, I’d thought I could've captured the last moment of it being how it was, how I grew up, the last few sounds of it. And it was going to have a message to it which is about preserving that ... But then I was like, ah, no, that's going to be the second album. So fine – I was like, okay, so I've got a second album wrapped, great. But this one, the current idea is basically The Pseudoscience of Carl Brown. That's what the album's called, and that's my real name. My real name's Carl Brown. And The Pseudoscience of Carl Brown matches where I'm at with everything. Like, I want my album to have a meaning outside of the environment that I grew up in. Like, that's cool, I can tell that story anytime, but for me, the story right now, for me, what's important to me and what I've noticed about what's different about me and some of the things I believe in about music and sound that I utilise, production within my DJing, within how I interact with MCs and who I've worked with and how I've worked with them... all of that is not written down. And when I speak to even people very close to me about my methods, it's... they think I'm crazy, innit? So I've decided that maybe what I'm doing is not a scientific method, but there is a pseudoscientific method, and I want to kind of share some of the things behind what I do. Does that make sense?

Sure. There’s an internal logic to your creativity, a system to it, even if other people can’t grasp how it functions...

And for me, that's a much more truer feeling, more interesting and easier for me to ... Because me saying I'm from Lambeth, alright, that's great. Cool, I'm from Lambeth. Whatever, cool. The pseudoscience of Carl is more the magic of my mind outside of where I'm from, and I think that's more important right now artistically than where I'm actually from, to tell that story. So, yeah: that's what I've been working on. Apart from doing a few radio shows that I've been doing, and whatever bookings I've had, I've just basically been doing that. But it's good because when I look at it, like when I look at what I have already, which gasses me up, I'm like, I get to look at the landscape here and think, “No one ain't doing this. How come there isn't ten of these?” As I said, I've got the second one. I've already got the idea for the second one, Welcome to Lambeth. I’ve got two. So it's like, why is there a lack of albums in what we're doing?

And then I thought it had taken a lot of work. It has taken a lot of mind power. It has taken me to withdraw from life this year. I haven't been a social person as much as .usual – I'm not the most social person normally, but I've become less of a social person. I've really been locked into what I'm doing. I've had to define the hours to make sure I don't go crazy. I've had to work up a calendar. I've had to build a lot of momentum since November to be able to say, okay, this is what I'm going to do; focus and listen to my album, create my album. So I understand why people don't do it, but now that I've done it and I've enjoyed the process, I know that I'm going to be prolific now with being able to put my vision out. Do you know what I mean, man? Now I can mix down tunes, so I'm just gassed now. I'm happy.

That's really good to hear. We'll go a lot more into how you got here and the way that you focus on these things, but to bring it back to a shallow level, can I ask: if you meet someone in a non-music environment who's not familiar with the ins and outs of what's grime and what's bass and what's this, that, and the other, and they say, “What do you do?”, how would you introduce yourself? Do you say DJ, musician?

Of late, I would say that I'm an electronic musician. That's what I say, to provide a basic... I start off there, to begin with. And the reason why is because people have assumptions. Using certain words will give people the wrong impression straight away, just through their own ignorance or their own interpretation or their own understanding of what words mean to them. So I start off with electronic musician and then I go into production. They say, “What do you produce?” Then I say, “Dance music,” and then I go into the story of me being a grime DJ and my journey. Like, if it gets that deep into it. So then I go to make you understand what my sound's based on and where it began, but not actually where I'm at in actual fact. That's what I feel, now. Obviously I come from grime. I play a lot of old grime. I play new grime. I'm a grime DJ, but I feel like you don't... Fans of grime say my name a lot, but in grime itself, in the traditional grime lore, Grandmixxer's name doesn't exist unless I work with MCs. That's the only Grandmixxer that the grime world cares about.

The grime world doesn't necessarily too much care about the Grandmixxer that does the drum mix, the no drum mix, and even my label I think goes over grime, the traditional grime audience, it goes more into a general music audience and people that appreciate independent electronic music or modern music or new underground music or bass music. So I don't like to use the word grime because I'm not really in that world unless I'm working with MCs and I specifically am booked for that moment. Outside of that, I feel like I'm very different. But that's what I say, electronic musician, underground, from grime. Do you know what I'm saying? I might be amazing at manipulating grime and doing grime, if that's what it's said to be, but at this present moment, when I listen to what I'm doing, it's far removed. And I don't get any offers from any grime MCs in generaly anyway. Apart from the ones I work with, I don't get guys saying, “Oh, we want your beats, want your beats, want your beats.” So I feel like that's for a reason.

Was grime the very first thing that you did, though? Is that how you started when it came to something you committed to and participated in?

Yeah. I would say garage, because my friend who was younger than me, he bought these turntables when he was 12, and I was like 13. So I started following him on his little journey and I fell in love with it through his love for it. And he was playing ... This is before grime, innit? So this is like So Solid “Dilemma”, Oxide, Neutrino, and then obviously “Pulse X”¹ came, all the Bingo Beats². And by that point in time, I was into turntables. I wasn't really into any of the music personally. I wasn't really into the music. I was just appreciating the art of mixing two tunes and audio, and I was like an equipment guy. So when I got my decks, I was just mixing hip hop to not be like, oh, I'm taking my best friend's thing, innit. But then… it's just Nasty Crew³, they come along, and hearing Mak 10⁴ made me want to actually play grime records. But yeah, I would say grime is my first, like real thing. Because the hip hop thing only lasted like six months. As soon as I learned how to mix, I was mixing the early Youngstar tunes and “Dilemma” and fully into it. We weren't obviously calling it grime, but I was feening for all the classics which I still have, which are behind me now, luckily. So, I still got my record collection.

One of the best things of my life ever doing was going out and exploring and buying those records and enjoying them and listening to the radio, and I'm very grateful that I had that moment in life where I fully absorbed it, you know? So yeah, it is grime because I'm a person that didn't even listen to – like, garage and drum and bass didn't exist in my house. My mum never used to listen to garage or drum and bass, so that didn't exist in my house. Reggae music, that existed in my house. George Michael, certain singers would exist in my house, but no bass music. So yeah, we have to big up early Nasty Crew and Mak 10 for making me be a real grimehead.

Was there a lot of music at home, though, be that pop, soul, reggae or whatever?

Do you know what? Now that I look at it... And this is me now. I don't have a TV. I got rid of my TV at 16. My mum was a reader. My mum was a reading person. A lot of books existed in my household, and music was not my mum's favourite thing, although my mum was a dancer when she was younger. My mum was part of a band, like a soca band that used to tour the world, and she used to do limbo and all the soca Caribbean things. But my mum never really used to listen to that kind of music in the house either. So, no, music wasn't really a major thing in my house early. My stepdad was into music, but he's not into my life until I'm around 10, 11 years old. And he was like an audiophile. He was mad into amplifiers and speakers and pre-amps, and used to read What Hi-Fi? and some next audio thing every month religiously. And he used to have a room in his house that was like the music room, and that's where I got to absorb my own taste in music in terms of... I'm not buying anything, so I'm going through his tapes, innit. I'm listening to Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Fugees. What was that band? Was it Transworld Underground?

Transglobal Underground⁵.