Joel Martin

Gerd Janson

I am very pleased to have an avid record collector to my left. He is one half of the dreamy pop, whatever you want to call it, project Quiet Village, and one of the worldwide experts on library music. Please give him a very warm welcome, Joel Martin from London.

Joel Martin

Thank you.

Gerd Janson

So before we start to talk about what library music actually is, and if it is played in a library or whatever, tell us a little bit about your musical diet.

Joel Martin

At the moment, or growing up?

Gerd Janson

Growing up.

Joel Martin

I suppose I was quite privileged to come from a household that was musically rich. My parents played music when we were driving along in the car and I was exposed to music constantly, really. We were always listening to the charts, and back in the ‘70s there was such a great cross-section of pop music – reggae, punk, electronic – and it was all presented to you every week. It wasn’t like now, where it’s manufactured pop groups. Great music was a great pop song. So I was exposed to all these genres without realizing it. Quite early on, probably due to my parents’ tastes, it affected the way I would listen to music. I was very into harmony, I was really into The Beach Boys and I was really into David Bowie and things like that, Electric Light Orchestra, purely because that is what I was being played. My mum told me that she took me to see the Abba movie when I was probably two years old, and she had to go and grab me from the aisle because I was running and dancing and singing in the aisle. So music played a big part in my life from day one.

Gerd Janson

So did you go and watch the remake [Mamma Mia!] of the Abba movie as well?

Joel Martin

Funnily enough, no. But I wouldn’t be quick to say bad things about it. I was watching [BBC television program] The Culture Show and one of the critics I particularly like, Mark Kermode, said he found it very difficult to criticize the film because it was so saccharine and so schmaltzy and lovely. You couldn’t help but be swept up by it. But then again, I didn’t go and see it.

Gerd Janson

You weren’t only listening to music but also learning an instrument, right?

Joel Martin

I went to a private school, and once you get to a certain age it is pretty standard for your parents to be sent a letter saying, “We feel your child should learn a musical instrument. What would you like to learn?” Piano, guitar, drums, whatever. Normally it’s something like the violin. So I chose the violin. Didn’t particularly want to learn the violin, but it was the done thing, I suppose. So I learned the violin for maybe five or six years and I think I got up to grade three – I forget how many grades there are – but I did pretty well. But I always remember that my violin teacher used to get very, very angry with me because I was quite lazy so I didn’t read the music, I used to follow music by ear and I would remember what she had played for me and I would just copy it. She could see that I wasn’t reading music and used to give me a clip round the ear. I didn’t particularly like practising. Once I turned 15, and I started going out with friends and stuff, the violin went down the toilet, as they say. I think I sold it.

Gerd Janson

So you don’t play the violin today?

Joel Martin

No, I don’t. We had a keyboard, a family keyboard, that was also a trend during the ‘80s. And I would play along with records I liked, play riffs and stuff. I couldn’t play classically but I could remember a riff and reinterpret it quite quickly.

Gerd Janson

And you mentioned going out? You grew up in London?

Joel Martin

I was born in the center of London, Hammersmith, but I was brought up in Kent most of my life and that is where I went to school. But I spent a lot of time, especially at weekends, in the West End of London. I was always going to museums and restaurants, that type of thing, and concerts. I was always in town. When I got older I spent all my time in town once I discovered record shops, clubs, clothes shops. I wanted to get as far away from the suburbs as I could.

Gerd Janson

What were the clubs that you went to? Would you say it was very important to what you are doing now, having a club history?

Joel Martin

I think so, yes. Obviously, because I was very into music from an early age and I was someone who chose my own music. Whether I was influenced by older friends from a younger age, or whether I heard it on the radio, I used to go and pick my music. Whereas most of my friends at school would just listen to the latest chart music. Once I got to a certain age, probably about 13, I got out of the realms of pop music and I discovered hip-hop and that became my obsession. I heard all these fantastic records and got into labels like Def Jam, which then went totally overground and by then I wasn’t so interested. Through that I discovered record shops, legendary record shops in London. I used to save up my pocket money every month and maybe once or twice a year, I would go up to shops like Groove Records in London and buy one or two 12”s and an album. And other shops like Tower Records, which was a legendary shop because it used to have cut-outs.

We don’t really have cut-out culture anymore, it is very collectable, but shops like Virgin Megastore, which sadly doesn’t exist anymore, and Tower Records, apart from selling brand new records, there was this abundance of old stock from American warehouses and English warehouses – sealed original records, which now go for a lot of money. You would walk into the soul section and you would find sealed copies of James Brown records, and if you looked a bit deeper, and if you knew a bit more, you would find records by groups like the Wild Magnolias or Mandrill and people like that, the sources of samples of hip-hop artists.

You walk up to the jazz section and find original records by people like Bob James, and I was learning about these people through my love of hip-hop and buying records like the Ultimate Breaks & Beats, which were a pure history lesson for me. I learned so much from those records. These were basically records designed for producers, hip-hop producers, and they contained all the classic break and beat sources from back in the old days. You would have funk tracks, movie soundtracks, heavy metal, jazz, all on the same record. You didn’t really understand it at the beginning and then you got where it was coming from. And eventually, instead of listening to the one break part of the track, you would listen to the whole track and realize the music was pretty good. That was a big thing to me and I used to go out to thrift stores, or charity shops as we call them in England, and buy any records that looked interesting.

Gerd Janson

And it evolved into a real obsession. Maybe anyone in here would say they are obsessed with music, but being a real record collector, maybe can you talk about this crazy world?

Joel Martin

I suppose, it has become a cliché now being a record collector or a crate-digger. I really don't like that term at all.

Gerd Janson

Why?

Joel Martin

Generally, there aren’t any crates. The guy before was saying he doesn’t like terms or genres that are just invented, and it is kind of the way it has happened with it. It is just a lazy way of saying someone who collects records. A bastardized way of being into music, I think. And the reason I say I am a record collector is that first and foremost I have a love for music, and I find it very difficult to operate without having to go and discover new music on a daily basis. Literally it is the air that I breathe. Unfortunate, I know. I crave looking for new and interesting music that I haven’t heard before.

Gerd Janson

How can it be that a record collector like you doesn’t have an amp at home?

Joel Martin

Because I spend more time looking for music than thinking about buying a hi- fi. I get by on listening to CDs, making CDs occasionally, being given CDs, listening to the radio. I always dream of this one day I’m going to have this amazing hi-fi in a warehouse space and I’ll finally be able to listen to them. I’ll have all my records filed properly, because at the moment they are mostly in boxes, and I’ll be able to enjoy it, in my twilight years or whatever.

Gerd Janson

So you have a house full of records but are waiting to play them.

Joel Martin

Kind of, yeah. It’s quite sad, really.

Gerd Janson

You mentioned hip-hop being a big influence on you. You actually did a compilation of hip-hop as well.

Joel Martin

In 2001 I did a compilation [Uptown Sounds] with my music partner Matt Edwards, who also did a Red Bull Academy with you.

Gerd Janson

He’s also known as Radio Slave.

Joel Martin

He is the famous half, the other half. Back in 2001, we had wanted to start a record label for a long time and we got involved with a company called Beechwood. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with a label called Mastercuts? Mastercuts released the best of hip-hop, the best of jazz-funk, and they released about 30 or 40 records all compiled by one or two people, the cream of every genre, a primer. If you don’t know anything about jazz fusion, you go and buy a Mastercuts record and it will pretty much be all the best tracks.

We got involved with this label and started our own label called Heroes & Villains, and we were going to put out a whole series of compilations. The first of which was done. Matt and I conceived the project, and a very good friend of mine called Mark B, who is an underground London hip-hop producer and is also someone who inspired me from when I used to go out looking for records, he compiled an album – pretty much the first album – of disco rap. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the rap that came before the likes of the Beastie Boys, Big Daddy Kane, LL Cool J and all the others, Jay-Z and everyone, but this is stuff that came out on very small labels back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s and is very funky. It is kind of like disco, but with a rap – and that music was a big influence on me when I heard it.

I was a very big fan of disco rap and we came up with the idea of putting a compilation together of this stuff, because Mark B was on this stuff for many years when no one cared. And it has since become this very, very collectable genre. The records can achieve over $1,000 on eBay and people go crazy for it. But it was a forgotten genre. No one really cared about it at all. And we put this compilation together and the label basically screwed us. They didn’t do any promotion, they didn’t sell it into the shops correctly, and I found that in the end they did the worst thing, which was not releasing it on vinyl. There was this CD that we spent a fortune making, we got a photographer from New York called Jamel Shabazz, the guy who did a book called Back In The Day, one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met in my life. We saw some of his photos and read about an exhibition of his in New York, read about him in a magazine, I think, and we asked him if he would be interested in doing the artwork for the album because he was about to release this book. He had never done a show outside of America before. We invited him to come and do a show at a gallery in London run by the magazine Dazed & Confused. And he came over, it was fantastic, we had a great launch party, and we had a CD that came out on the magazine. He had a show, we did another show with him in Hollywood, and just hanging out with him was worthwhile for the whole project. But unfortunately, the album completely sunk into obscurity. They ended up in one of those cheap £3 CD stores in London, like a bulkload of them, the last thousand. It was very expensive to make and I think I have one copy.

Gerd Janson

What a tragedy. But maybe we could listen to one of the tracks from the compilation?

Joel Martin

Yeah, just to give you an idea of what disco rap is and how different it is from what hip-hop is today. This is a track by one of the legends of hip-hop, a guy who is meant to be the creator of the scratch, a guy called Grand Wizard Theodore and the Fantastic Five – the Fabulous Five? I am probably completely wrong. Anyway, the track is called "Can I Get A Soul Clapp" and it came out in 1980.

(music: Grand Wizard Theodore & The Fantastic Five – “Can I Get a Soul Clapp”)

Gerd Janson

So you get the idea of disco rap. And what came afterwards for you? There is still quite a long way to go to Quiet Village?

Joel Martin

Lots of stuff in between, really. That’s a deep question. What happened in between? That was, I suppose, the first time Matt and I had ever worked together, and that came during a period where he was already making music in South London because he is slightly older than me. We went to the same school. He actually hated our school. We were problem kids in different ways and he really rebelled against it, he was quite confrontational. I didn’t actually know him at school. Matt, as everyone knows, is also a huge fan of music and comes from a different background than I do. He came through that electro and hip-hop route and we ended up going to lots of similar clubs in London, but not knowing each other, and being exposed to the same kind of stuff without knowing. He was working with another couple of guys in a studio in South London. He was very into “wild pitch” music, house music by Chicago producers like DJ Pierre and Roy Davis Jr., and he was also very into Balearic music, which we both were.

Gerd Janson

Balearic is another, um, smelly term.

Joel Martin

Yeah. It never was, but it is another term that has been completely bastardized. We’ll come back to that.

Gerd Janson

Does everyone know in here what Balearic music is?

Joel Martin

Balearic music – and I have to be very quick about this – Balearic music, traditionally, was music that was discovered to be played in the Balearic Islands, on Ibiza. Well, it was never called Balearic music, that was a term that the English guys who went over there termed it, and they brought it back to London and created their own scene. Originally, it was DJs in Ibiza like Alfredo and José [Padilla], who was the original DJ at the Cafe del Mar. He used to play very chilled out downtempo music and Alfredo used to play pop records and house records, and lots of different stuff in between. And Balearic, I suppose, means “anything goes,” with that Mediterranean summer attitude. But it has changed and has become a specific sound, synonymous with downtempo music. Music no faster than 110 BPM, quite hypnotic, quite “white” sounding. That is what it has become.

Anyway, I used to hang out with Matt in the studio during the latter part of him working and I would play him all of these records I had in my collection. He was pretty inspired and a lot of the stuff I was playing him was library music. Library music is basically music that was manufactured… does anybody know what library music is? For those of you that don’t know, it is basically music that is manufactured by small companies, independent of the regular music business, just for the use of TV, advertising, radio and films, and it is a cheap option. Basically, that is how it started out. If you can’t afford a famous composer or a big orchestra, there is music that has already been manufactured for your use. Some of it is sound-alike stuff, some of it is composed for you, but it is basically a cheap option. These records were never available for sale in the public sector, so you used to be able to find these records in thrift stores and car boot sales. People used to throw them out, put them in skips, you would find them outside offices. Sometimes you could raid old studios and they would have them.

A lot of the music was absolutely awful. Some of it was incredibly inspiring, everything from avant-garde jazz to electronics to proto-house to funk, African, you name it, reggae, every genre. Some of it is incredible. Especially during the ‘60s and ‘70s, many, many famous musicians who maybe had some spare time and wanted some extra money would do session work, and they are on some library records, but anonymously. Jimmy Page, the legendary guitar player from Led Zeppelin, is one example. So I amassed this big collection in the mid-90s and I would just pick up 20 at a time, take them round to Matt and play them to him in the studio and he would normally freak out. We put together about five DATs of music and were thinking of putting out a series of compilations. This is just before we put out the disco rap compilation, and in the end we didn’t do anything with it. It was the beginning of starting to think about what we were into, and label ideas, the genesis of what became Quiet Village.

Gerd Janson

So before we hear what became Quiet Village, maybe you can play us one of those horrible library tunes?

Joel Martin

There are so many interesting ones. What can I play you? If I am going to play one, I am probably going to play you a few because they are generally quite short, but just to show you how advanced and twisted some of these records can be. This is a pretty good example, this is on a label from the early ‘70s called Peer International and the album is called Reggae for Real, but there is no reggae on it at all, as you’ll hear. Well, there are a couple of reggae tracks on it, but the track I am about to play you… why it was put on this record I have no idea. I think it might have been sampled as well, so if there are any spotters out there, you might be able to tell me.

(music: Nino Nardini – “Frantique”)

So that’s library music.

Gerd Janson

Have you ever seen something on TV that actually used that piece?

Joel Martin

Unfortunately, no. But in England we used to have these schools programs. You’d normally get taken into the gym in your school and the one TV in the school would be wheeled out and you’d sit and wait for this program to come on about nature or wildlife or something like that. And this kind of music, not always as severe as that, would normally be preceding it. Maybe I can play another example? Some of you might be familiar with a producer called Jay Dee, a prolific hip-hop producer? If I’m correct, track three on this should be one of his best, which is called “Fuck the Police.” I’m going to play you some of this and then I’m going to play you what he sampled, which is a library record.

(music: J Dilla – “Fuck the Police”)

So I’m sure you all know that classic, and now we are going to play you what was the hook for that record, which is by a French library composer called Roger Roger. It came out on an album from like 1973. It came out on an English library label called Chappell. They had a deal with a French company, I think they licensed some music, and Roger Roger [sic] was one of the key composers. He did a lot of electronic music and this is probably one of his finest. I’m not going to say I was the first person to discover this record, but I think I was. I don’t know how Jay Dee got it, but I got it from BBC Elstree [studios] when they were clearing lots of boxes of records. Pretty good.

(music: René Costy – “Scrabble”)

Roger Roger!

Gerd Janson

But how did you discover these things like library music? They were not really sold, so do you remember the first time you stumbled across one?

Joel Martin

One of the things that became quite a funny pursuit during the mid-1990s, which was a bit of a funny period for music, especially in England – you had all this great house music that came out of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which then became very watered down. I was always looking for something a lot more underground, and then certain DJs that I was into at the time, like Andy Weatherall, were going completely the other way, going against the grain and playing techno, and that shocked a lot of people and freaked people out. We used to go to clubs like Sabresonic and listen to him playing this stuff.

At the time, I was spending a lot of time at a shop called Fat Cat, which has also gone, but they were the purveyors of a lot of this great European and American techno. And also, they sold old bits of hip-hop and all of the early ambient scene – which maybe we will come to – which was very inspiring to someone like me. People like Global Communication [points to Global Communication, AKA Mark Pritchard, in the audience]. One of my heroes!

So I was buying all these things, and at the same time I didn’t have a lot of money and I started going back into thrift stores looking for easy listening records that might have a funky track on it, and some of them did. It became a bit of a scene, and a friend of mine – he wasn’t a friend at the time, but someone I got introduced to afterwards – Martin Green, had a club called Smashing and they used to play famous TV themes and funky easy listening records. He put out this compilation which is, in my mind, the first and best groovy easy listening compilation. It is called The Sound Gallery. Long deleted, but on this compilation there were orchestras making funk tracks and funny men in suits, completely un-groovy people, making Afro-rock records.

Amongst the tracks you had these things – I was trying to work out what labels they were on and a lot of them said EMI and what have you, and a lot of them said KPM. I’d never heard of KPM, and I found out it was a library record label which is owned by EMI. That’s what the compilation came out on [holds up record sleeve]. They all had these generic sleeves, but on the back there were descriptions of what the track is. So from this compilation I discovered what this was, and then I eventually found one and put two and two together. After that I worked out that there were no shops you could buy this music in, so I thought to myself, “Who is going to have these things?” Because they would rarely be in shops. And I phoned up TV companies, every television studio, every hospital radio, I phoned up everyone. And I managed to get quite a lot of big record collections of library music from people, either for nothing or just a little bit of money, because they didn’t realize what they had. I had amassed all these records, took them around to Matt’s studio, and bit by bit I would play them. That’s how I found the records like the track Jay Dee sampled and, of course, you would have to go through a lot of rubbish ones to find jewels in the dust.

Gerd Janson

That is what I meant by obsession earlier on – calling up all those people. You wanted to play us another thing off that KPM record?

Joel Martin

This just shows you how oddball this whole library thing is, on this record entitled The Sound Of Pop it says, “This album mirrors the music of the younger generation. The music is both instrumental and vocal, the lyrics being descriptive of the opinions and activities of the younger generation.” It is 1967 and there is a track on it called “L.S.D.”, which is described as being “a bizarre interpretation pertaining to psychedelic drug hallucination.” So I think you need to hear this one. I hope it’s not a bad trip for anyone. This, weirdly enough, ended up on an episode of the original Spiderman cartoon, the late ‘60s animation one. It just shows you where this music ended up. And as I was saying, this would have been composed and performed by old-fashioned, staid English guys, probably wearing shirts and ties. They would have been told what to do and wouldn’t have had a clue about it and just done what they thought. But “L.S.D.” is so odd. Most libraries did tracks like this, but this is definitely one of the oddest. Anyway, here we go.

(music: Bill Martin & Phil Coulter – “L.S.D.”)

And that would have been sent out to schools and radios and television stations. There you go.

Audience member

So I’m just curious, how did you [deal with] copyright around this work? Would you say it’s like producer loops that you can get today that are copyright free and you can use them in your music? I know that TV and film studios use prefabricated loops as well to do their scores. I don’t understand exactly how the commercial part of it works with these companies.

Joel Martin

I’m not quite sure what you mean.

Audience member

How did they sell them? Because they weren’t available in shops.

Joel Martin

Maybe I haven’t explained myself. The deal with library companies is this: they put up the money and they fund everything. They pay the session musicians the going rate, and they manufacture them. Originally, they used to sell the music by the foot, back in the really old companies. The company that I work for, and we will come to this in a minute, started in 1908 and they are called DeWolfe Music. Before, when people were making films, they would say, “I need 200 feet of action music,” and they would put it on a spool and reel out 200 feet of action music. And then it turned into bring pressed on 78s, and then records, CDs and now everything is digital. But they sent out the records for free. If you are a TV studio and you sign up to this company, you get all the music for free. If you want to license it, then you have to pay them and you pay the musicians’ union and you pay the company. But it works out far cheaper. Like I said before, it is a cheap option. Maybe you’ll pay £300 per track, rather than £3000 or £30,000. It depends on your budget, but that’s what it’s there for. You end up getting sent all the stuff for free if you’re a legitimate company. Now you get an access code through a digital website where you can download everything.

Audience member

You played in Stockholm, right? Did you go record shopping? Did you go to Nostalgia Palace? It is pretty hidden away.

Joel Martin

I think I know the one you mean, I think my friend took me. Is the guy a bit of a freak and has to look at every record’s price, sweating?

Audience member

Well, yeah, but that is like most record store owners that I know.

Joel Martin

Yes, you’re right, you’re right.

Audience member

You should check it out anyway because I know it is a goldmine of this kind of music and sound effects.

Joel Martin

Thank you. So, around this time again, I was working as an assistant film editor. I worked on quite a few films, some not really well-known, some quite well-known, like The Beach.

Gerd Janson

Is that actually what you wanted to become in the first place?

Joel Martin

When I left school I wanted to be in the film industry. My two passions were film and music, and for some weird reason I never considered music to be a viable profession. I always thought it was less worthy. Don’t ask me why, but it was always my hobby and I wanted to get into films. I ended up working on a film as a runner, and on my travels I got to walk past the editing suite. I ended up falling in love with it – this was back when everything was being done by hand. It was a proper craft, you handled the film yourself. It wasn’t just clicking on a mouse, which is what it became. I fell in love with the smell of the numbering machine and wearing the white gloves. This is not a sadistic thing… or maybe it is!

I got friendly with the film editor and I went to go and work for an editing house, which was in a big warehouse space, and in every room you had editors working on their own film. My job was just to clear up the bins and get them tea and coffee and stuff like that. But on my travels, that was how you got to meet people, and after about six months I ended up getting offered a job with an editor, which wasn’t the best experience because I had a clash of personalities. I was the second assistant and the first assistant didn’t really get on with me, but that is another story.

Gerd Janson

How can someone not get on with you?

Joel Martin

I think she had personal problems [laughs]. Anyway, so I went to work on this film and I started getting a few more jobs after that, but it was very difficult to get work. So many people looking for the same jobs. Then, when everything went online you needed fewer people because you had a computer. You didn’t need a first assistant, second assistant, understudy, so everything changed. I left school in 1993. We weren’t part of the computer generation, we just missed it, and I hated computers in a big way. I felt very upset that all that changed, and if I’d maybe been slightly more mature at the age I was, 18 or whatever, and thought things through, maybe I would have realized that no one else knew how this equipment worked, it was all brand new, and if I studied it I would get on very quickly. I didn’t, I got very bitter and frustrated and thought that my chosen career path had been stolen away from me. And I still clung onto this profession. It was obviously the tail end, you still needed to go back and work on film at some point in the process if you were going to show it at the cinema. Now most films are shown on screen digitally, but up until quite recently you still needed to screen it on a film print.

Anyway, I ended up getting a job when the film work ran out for an advertising editing company and they edited TV commercials. While working for them – and this was at the same period where I discovered easy listening and all that rubbish – they had a small collection of these library records, and one of the first ones that I saw was by a company called DeWolfe Music. I basically phoned them up on the blag, so to speak, hoping to get some records from them. I made up this story that we needed some music that had to be quite blaxploitation, cop show-ish, and they were very friendly, invited me in and gave me a few records, some of which I have brought with me.

Gerd Janson

How many feet?

Joel Martin

[Laughs] They gave me records. I struck up a very good friendship with them and I have known them for over ten years and I now actually work for them. I’m in charge of putting together their back catalog, all this old weird stuff that was never released to the general public. That is one of my jobs. At the time, when I went in and discovered that they had this great library, and it was untouched, that is basically what I told the boss. He simply replied, “Yes, I know it’s a goldmine.” I got in touch with a label, or was approached by a label called BBE, Barely Breaking Even – they have done lots of great compilations and artist albums. They did an album with Jay Dee, they did one with Pete Rock, they have done soul, funk, disco, house compilations with most of the big producers, and this was back in their early days. Pete from BBE, he got in touch with me and said, “There is a friend of mine called Mark B who might like to do this library compilation.” That is when I was introduced to Mark and we struck up a friendship quickly.

We went on to go through their archive and both looked up some records and ended up releasing a record with BBE called Bite Hard, which did very well and ended up being sampled by everyone from Jay-Z to Fat Joe, everyone, literally. And the tracks once ended up on a motor racing documentary with James Hunt, I remember every track was on that. It has been very well-received. And that was back in 1997, I think. We’re just about to release volume two in January. It’s their centenary next year and they’ve got some really amazing stuff from the archive to come out. Whether it be film soundtracks that never were issued or interesting jazz or just oddball music, music from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, all that music is owned by them, the music from Dawn of the Dead, the zombie film, all of that stuff is them.

Gerd Janson

You also had something to do with Dawn of the Dead quite recently.

Joel Martin

A few years ago, one of my ideas when I was going through all this music at DeWolfe, I came across some of the music I recognized from the [Oscar] Romero film Dawn of the Dead, which I was a very big fan of.

Gerd Janson

Everyone knows that one, right?

Joel Martin

I had the soundtrack, which was composed by an Italian progressive rock group called Goblin, and I always wondered where the rest of the music was because the film is just loaded with music, absolutely crammed, 70 bits of music on there. So I didn’t know where it was. And when I went to go through this music at DeWolfe, the LPs, I suddenly recognised one of these tracks and I couldn’t believe it. It was a pet project of mine to go through all the records and work out what all the cues were. I eventually did and released an album on a friend’s label [Trunk Records] a few years back, in 2005, and it was Dawn of the Dead: The Unreleased Music. We’re going to do another follow-up because we only put out a few acts and there are some more key tracks for real hardcore zombie fans.

Gerd Janson

Shall we hear one of the scary pieces?

Joel Martin

This sounds like Goblin. I actually thought it was Goblin when I heard it, so it was quite surprising to find out that it is by an English composer called Simon Park. It is called “Motives 1.” There is a “Motives 2,” they are both quite similar.

(music: Simon Park – “Motives 1”)

Gerd Janson

So which scene of Dawn of the Dead is this from?

Joel Martin

I’m pretty sure it is from some weird Italian-only cut. It is not on the regular one, so I can’t pinpoint it, I’m sorry.

Gerd Janson

Before we join the dots now with Quiet Village, you said there is another influential piece for the work you did with Quiet Village, more of a house track?

Joel Martin

There are quite a few, actually. Maybe we can play a couple of them. Let’s play a track. I am wondering what order we should do this in. Matt and I were both big fans of the New York and New Jersey house sound from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. In particular a small label called Nu Groove, and there were some incredible and talented producers on that label. People like Joey Beltram, Rheji and Ronnie Burrell and Bobby Konders. Bobby Konders has made some very inspiring records, very dub-based house music, quite lo-fi sounding. He worked with a keyboard player, Peter Daou, who is incredibly talented. And these people are kind of ancient history. I’m unsure if they [still] make music. Bobby Konders went on to have a very successful label putting out dancehall…

Gerd Janson

He is running a label called Massive B. He is still making, I guess, bashment or dancehall. He is making reggae and is doing quite well and has a Sunday radio show on Hot 97 in New York, I believe.

Joel Martin

His music was so inspiring to me and Matt and friends of mine, just because it came from a different place and time. It wasn’t conventional club music, it was very spacey, very spiritual, very edgy, proper night-time music. You can play it in the early hours. Again, he obviously brought the love of reggae to it and it is very influenced by dub. This is one of the best tracks that he ever produced and it came out on one of the early releases on the label Massive B. It is him under the name Dub Poets and it is called “Black & White,” probably from 1991.

(music: Dub Poets – “Black & White”)

That goes on for another ten minutes but we want to cram in as much as we can. Music from a different age, really. That music wasn’t commercial at all. It was very underground, not many DJs played it. American guys like Tony Humphries, and I don’t know if you know much about these people, they used to play that kind of stuff, but it wasn’t particularly stuff that was played on the radio. It was small little labels releasing these kind of ambient house records and that was a special time for that kind of music.

Gerd Janson

So was there a place in London where you could actually hear this?

Joel Martin

Not really, no. Maybe at Ministry [of Sound] sometimes but I was too young to get in, over-21s only.

Gerd Janson

And you said this was pretty influential on Quiet Village, so maybe we should hear something from Quiet Village in a second. You could talk about how it appeared first. It was on a label called Whatever We Want, from New York?

Joel Martin

What happened was Matt was making music as Radio Slave with another guy and they kind of ended their music-making relationship for whatever reason. I had never considered making music with Matt. I tinkered about producing with one or two other people, and it had been fun in part, but it can be quite stressful in the studio working in a small space with someone. You need the other person to have a certain temperament and I had been feeling I needed to work with someone who has quite an easy and mellow experience. I suppose I didn’t really want to bother Matt because he was working quite a lot and getting a good name for himself, and I was more of a music fan, really.

Eventually, through wanting to do these compilations we started this label called Consume Music and we literally just made some mix CDs, expecting to give them to friends. One day we were sitting in the studio and I came across a few records that I thought might be fun to sample. He had some free time in the studio and we decided to try and work together and it was a really pleasurable experience and we kind of continued. The first record that we did we took to a friend of ours in New York, who had just started a record label called Whatever We Want Records, which was primarily an output for DJ Harvey’s project called Map Of Africa. I played it to my friend with no intention of him putting the record out and after about five seconds he said, “I’m going to release this record.” And I said, “No, you’re joking, you don’t have to say that.” And he said, “No, I’m putting it out. What else have you got?” So we were pretty chuffed and we ended up with three records with him on the label. He had this idea of a trilogy and the first record that we did had a track on it called “Pillow Talk”. Maybe we should play that.

(music: Quiet Village – “Pillow Talk”)

Gerd Janson

Mr. Joel Martin, thank you very much for being here.

Joel Martin

Thanks very much!