I was born into riffage.
When I was in the womb, my mum blew a pair of speakers vacuuming to Led Zeppelin. Before I’d even taken a breath, Page and Bonham were making waves in my amniotic fluid and rocking my world.
As a toddler, my dad played me Deep Purple and The Kinks’ debut album loud and proud through new speakers.
We listened to a lot of Queen as a family.
At ten years old, I ventured out alone, seeking my own riffs.
I used my pocket money to buy Appetite for Destruction by Guns ‘n’ Roses on cassette from a bargain bin in Woolworths. With my thumb over the parental advisory sticker, I snuck it off to the loft where a ghetto blaster waited. No matter how loud I played it, Axl’s screeched swears couldn’t make it downstairs and into my parents’ ears.
****RAGGA AMBUSH****
– orchestrated by Chaka Demus & Pliers and Inner Circle, a stealth attack was launched on me at 11 years old via an entirely riffless 1994 compilation cassette – Raggajam – the effects were not long-lasting –
As a thirteen-year-old, I would play my dad Pantera as he washed up and I dried the dishes. In my room, I listened to Sepultura and Floodgate, Kerbdog and Rage Against the Machine, and required Territorial Pissing at maximum volume in order to leave the house. I read Metal Hammer and Kerrang!. Until I didn’t…
Enter the age of beats.
Fifteen-years-old and Hip Hop landed in my world. Daisy Age. Jurassic 5. Blackalicious. Beastie Boys. Grandmaster Flash. Cyprus Hill. With it came my first forays into jazz and deeper digs into soul and funk.
My mind was also rewired at this time by toxic West Country hashish and the new psychedelia of the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. The Beta Band added samples and beats, and became my heroes.
At the same time, nightclubs woefully lax on ID and rigorous in their promotion of £1 alcopops, heralded in Thursday night “dance anthems”, spanning house, trance, techno, UKG, Big Beat. The dancefloor was sticky and I was stuck there, tongue-in-cheek, but throwing shapes all the same.
The age of bass begins.
Then came university and in rolled drum and bass and jungle. The soundsystems and DJs mattered. Sankey Soaps. Q-Club, Fabric. Raves in haunted Victorian asylums. The Valve Sound System. Chest rattling bass. Andy C. Bryan Gee. Skibadee. Shabba D. UK hip hop: Jehst, Skitz, Skinnyman, Fingathingz, MC Kwasi and the Friends & Family crew. Dub nights with subs stacked floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Irration Steppas the best.
It was a time of complete sacrifice to the joy of the lowest frequencies. The riffs had all but disappeared.
The Eon of Eclecticism.
Things evened out in the mid-noughties. The headfirst rushes into genres were far less intense and increasingly methodical. I found my spirit animal as a gangly magpie, hopping between sounds, collecting, curating.
By the time Suuns released their debut album in 2010, I’d stopped expecting music to surprise me. Yet by bringing together my formative musical loves so viscerally – riffs, beats, and those low low frequencies – Zeroes QC did just that.
The more guitar-based songs on Zeroes QC are really good – the Can-tastic glam stomp of Sweet Nothing and Armed for Peace with its crunchy synth line, tasty riff, and snarling guitars. The urgency and skittish energy of Marauder sounded like post-rock played at 45rpm instead of 33.
I was a sucker for the dark-hearted dystopian disco numbers, though. The wilfully weird album tracks that aped Liverpudlian band Clinic, yet were somehow groovier and bassier. It was these glitchy ones that made my body do weird things.
Pie IX features a thunderous kick drum, the lowest of bass grumbles and a demented distorted vocal that chirrups intensely as it builds slowly, gathering momentum, and locks you in. Arena is bastardised techno with synth and driving bass. It’s heavy as hell, electro with none of the glitz and glamour, all goth energy.
Perhaps best of all is Up Past The Nursery, which builds into a serious groove, adding layers of bassy synth tones. It makes me think of Nosferatu, tip-toeing in the night, clawed hands casting ominous, angular shadows. Creepy.
Zeroes QC sounded fresh and urgent – an amalgam of metronomic Krauty rhythms, heavy bass sounds, electronic pulses and postpunk snarl. It was also dark, really dark. This was nighttime music – it was shadowy and sinister, made for sweaty dancefloors shrouded in gloom. It was watching Suuns live from such a dancefloor that I relived all my past loves through involuntary physical movements, headbanging, raving, contorting, and emerging more whole, more myself.
This piece was originally published in The Lunchtime for the Wild Youth zine Issue 90 – 2010 Special.
Enjoyed this? Check out my review of Jim O’Rourke’s Visitor.
