Untold

Emma Warren

I think we should first of all do a very big welcome, Jack Dunning, Untold.

[applause]

Untold

Thank you.

Emma Warren

I think it’s kind of appropriate with you to play something new, seeing as you’re someone that always likes to push things forward.

Untold

Yup.

Emma Warren

There’s a track called “Doff” that you played last night, which has got this scatter fire drums and you playing guitar in it.

Untold

Yeah, I think this is my first record that’s got me playing a guitar. I’m sorry about that. I’m also very sorry if anyone’s hung over, because it’s a bit of an onslaught this one.

Emma Warren

You’re about to be brutalized.

Untold

Let’s kick it off.

(music: Untold – “Doff” / applause)

Emma Warren

So is this going to be a new Hemlock or a new label thing?

Untold

I think this is going to be an offshoot of Hemlock. It will just be on a black label, with another drum track on the other side. That’s the plan for next year. We’ve been quite slow with releases. We’ve been choosing everyone for Hemlock very carefully and I think the plan for next year is just to try and get as many bits of vinyl out as possible for club play. I don’t know if people have noticed, but there’s not as much vinyl coming out now and I think that’s a shame. That’s the plan with this track, get it out, get it in the clubs.

Emma Warren

Speed things up a little bit. Is that like a construction sort of vibe?

Untold

I’m really, really inspired by Jam City. His drum work I think is insane. It’s next level. I’m always really aware of biting people and trying to take someone’s style but, for me, drum onslaughts is exciting. That’s the sort of thing I want to go dancing to in clubs, yeah, shout out to Jam City. [laughs]

Emma Warren

If you were talking about a kind of aesthetic that you’re really feeling at the moment, would it be rawness? Would it be sparseness? Or would it be the kind of onslaught that you’ve just mentioned?

Untold

I mean, when I go to a club now, I just want to be melted. I’m just so sick of just conservative music within boundaries. It’s like there’s not enough people... I’m not hearing wild enough stuff. Maybe I’m not going to the right places. You tell me where to go that it’s happening. That’s what I want to dance to. It’s like not simple, four-to-the-floor stuff. That’s great. It’s an industry, but I come from dubstep, before that I was into drum & bass. I associate going out and listening to music with having my mind blown, so I’m trying to blow people’s minds.

Emma Warren

I guess also, not just having that feeling but also that progression and that sense of speed, of records being made on the fly, of people responding to what was played last night, what will be played tomorrow, and trying to best that?

Untold

Yeah, definitely, definitely.

Emma Warren

You mentioned there’s not as much vinyl coming out, but you’ve been buying a lot more records recently, haven’t you?

Untold

Last year, I totally switched things up. I had a bit of digital malaise maybe. I was getting sent promos like lots of DJs do and it’s a long list of emails of music to check. You check through it and check through it and it’s like I actually forgot that I used to go and buy records. I unsubscribed from every list and I just went out record shopping. You order it off the online or whatever but I just rediscovered my inner record buyer. I think my sets are better for it.

Emma Warren

I guess that’s one very quick way of making sure you’ve got different records from everybody else then. Also, I suppose the act of listening to music, if you’re listening to promos at home, you might be sitting in the kitchen or in your bedroom or whatever. If you’re out buying records, you’ve had to go maybe uptown. I don’t know if you’re a Soho record shopper but you have to make an effort and you’re in a music environment, aren’t you, when you’re listening to records in a record shop.

Untold

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s become more personal. Rather than just playing a file, I play off USB sticks. I don’t carry around vinyl with me, I’m afraid, but each of them is ripped from the piece of vinyl at home. I then archive that. I feel as though everything I’m playing is my record now and I’ve got that relationship back where the music is. It’s not just playing the latest thing that I got sent. For me, it’s just been really refreshing.

Emma Warren

I think we’ve got a lot of music we want to play today. Jack has kindly selected a load of music that tells a story, interesting records that come out and an interesting time or records where there’s something to talk about. I think we should go back to the beginning. Where shall we start? We’ve got “Test Signal,” haven’t we? The final track on the “Kingdom” 12"?

Untold

Yeah, this…

Emma Warren

…the beginning for you?

Untold

Yeah, this came out, I think late 2007, 2008. It was my first release on Hessle Audio. For me, this is strange because a friend of mine I went to university with is a producer called Milanese. He was on Warp Records. I sent him this track. We’ll maybe talk about it later, but I’d been producing for a long time. But my first release was 2007 and I sent this to Milanese the day it was finished. That day, he sent it to Mary Anne Hobbs. That afternoon, I have an email from Mary Anne. She says, “I love ‘Test Signal.’ It’s going to be on radio once a night.” To me, that’s when my music career started.

Emma Warren

We should hear it.

(music: Untold – “Test Signal” / applause)

Emma Warren

So how much of that record came from time spent on the dancefloor at a certain nightclub called DMZ?

Untold

Yeah, I think Mala has got quite a lot to do with that record. I mean, for people who don’t know DMZ, it’s in a church in Brixton in South London. It’s where dubstep not started, but it’s where dubstep happened. That was a result of coming back from there and rediscovering bass. The soundsystem was incredible. It’s like the physicality of being that room. It was always rammed. There was queues around the block. Once you got in, it was so physical. I guess that was what I was trying to aim for with the sub-bass in that is that physicality and just being blasted with something.

Emma Warren

How did you go from being one of the people that was there each and every time to someone who was actually turning that experience into something creative, making something, contributing?

Untold

We’ve mentioned DMZ. I mean, another important pillar of dubstep, and many other genres, is FWD>>. It was a regular Thursday night in Plastic People. It was pretty much anyone who was making underground bass music in London was there every week. It’s where I met the Hessle Audio guys and it was just a wonderful... Every week, you’d hear a track and then you go the next week and then you hear a track that almost clashes that one. You could tell that there was a dialog going on week-by-week with the sound. It seemed to be evolving so quickly and there’s so many aspects that was in this framework. There seemed to be an open palette that you could do and no rules. That was just chatting to people in the bar, in Plastic People, swapping music.

Emma Warren

That wasn’t the first time, was it, that you had been there at the birth of something? Some of you may have been lucky enough to have been there when something started. If you’ve ever been there when something has started, you will always recognize it again because it’s obviously a very amazing thing, but also it’s a profound thing. Can you tell us about your early to mid ’90s junglist experience?

Untold

Yeah. I mean, I’m 37 now so I’m lucky enough to have been at school, kind of 14, 15, when in jungle’s golden era. I guess, the first time I heard dance music, I was into bands and doing bad Nirvana covers with my college rock band. A friend gave me a cassette tape for my Walkman, with the bass boost, very important. One side of the tape, it said “Hardcore,” the other side it said, “More.” I don’t know what it was. I think maybe it must have been a recording of a tape pack of Dreamscape maybe or something. I was hooked. That was my experience. It was either through swapping tapes or listening to pirate radio.

Eventually, I managed to start sneaking into clubs. The tail end of ‘94, ‘95, where already the music was changing so rapidly. To experience that, as soon as I went to the DMZ Club, it’s the same feeling. It was the same feeling of just being blown away. I feel very privileged to be around.

Emma Warren

It’s a shame, really, that there aren’t more sympathetic bouncers around these days because there was a point maybe in the era when we were going out where a little bit of fake ID would get you into the club and the bouncer would be like, “You’re blatantly 16 but you obviously really want to be here, so come on in.” I think it’s a shame.

Untold

Well, yeah.

Emma Warren

But also, you were saying to me that you was involved with a soundsystem with your friends as well where you were inflicting some of your music tastes on an audience. You maybe weren’t quite so into it to start with?

Untold

Yeah, maybe a little bit later, ‘96 or ‘97, me and my friends got some money together. I don’t know how we found the plans, but we found some blueprints to build a soundsystem. We built a very small, modest rig, bought a van and went out and did free parties. All my friends at the time, and the people that were DJing for the main part were playing fairly awful acid techno.

Emma Warren

Is that the dog-on-a-string era?

Untold

Yeah, you know the crusty kind of dog on a string, messy time. I was the guy that came on at sunrise and played jungle to people that didn’t want to hear it, apart from the guys. Sometimes there was a crew that it was like... We used to do it in Sussex, around Brighton, sometimes on an area called The Ridgeway. All really, really beautiful countryside. Just great to be playing drum & bass to a sunrise. But I wasn’t the most popular DJ [laughs]

Emma Warren

What was your sound called?

Untold

I think I was DJ Magna then.

Emma Warren

Did the whole sound have a name?

Untold

It was called Sabbatical Sound.

Emma Warren

Back to some music. We’re going to go to another Hessle release, aren’t we? “Anaconda”?

Untold

Yeah, just a minute. This was my second. “Test Signal” that we heard before, that was on Hessle Audio number #3. This one was Hessle Audio number #8. I remember Ben UFO really twisting my arm to try and release this track because I didn’t like it when I wrote it. I wrote it, I think at the time it was when there was templates starting to come into dubstep music. What excited me before with dubstep was there really was no template. There seemed to be no rules. It’s just bass, 140 BPM, do what you like. I guess this was me thrashing out a bit against the half-step time, the sort of drum beat that started to become more and more popular. Here it is.

(music: Untold – “Anaconda”)

Untold

You can hear the animal sounds in that. I think there’s one sample CD called Animal Tracks, it’s for Hollywood films or something. It was like nine hours worth of jungle sounds and pigs having sex. [laughs]. It was well rinsed in that track.

Emma Warren

Do you think at this point you were starting to understand what your sound was or maybe what your sound could be?

Untold

I just remember, it was just such a laugh. We were just going to FWD>> each week. I was just having loads of fun. I think you can tell it in that track. It’s not meant to be a serious track. I think music can be powerful, but not necessarily have to be po-faced and serious. That was, yeah, just enjoying making music and being part of a scene.

Emma Warren

Should we move onto a point where you’ve already started your label? You have five releases down and this is your fifth release, “Stop What You’re Doing.” I mean, don’t stop what you’re doing, play “Stop What You’re Doing.”

Untold

This was from Hemlock number #5, which was a double vinyl pack I did. This track was as a result of going, I think it was Brackles that was playing at FWD>> He played an eight bar sub-low grime set. For people that don’t know, it’s instrumental grime and it’s very stripped-back, very raw, but it has a really almost metallic, cold sound in the bass and all these bass laps. I was into drum & bass, I kind of missed grime and garage so I did a lot of learning retrospectively by going seeing Brackles, whose got all the white labels from that era playing. I was blown away. I went back and this is what came out.

(music: Untold – “Stop What You’re Doing”)

Untold

I think near the start there, I think there was a little bit of pigs having sex from that same sample CD just at the front.

Emma Warren

You said you hadn’t heard that version for quite a while.

Untold

Yeah, that’s the first time in about five years I’ve heard that. It’s interesting.

Emma Warren

We can’t really talk about that record without talking about the James Blake remix. You said when we were chatting earlier that you just kind of had this casual conversation with him. How did it go?

Untold

Yeah, it just turned up in the mail. That was Hemlock release number five. Number four was James Blake’s debut, “Air & Lack Thereof.” He was actually the first artist for the label that we had approached cold if you like, via email. I think we heard it on a radio show on Rinse FM maybe. We heard “Air & Lack Thereof.” It was like, “We have to sign this. Let’s find out what’s going.” We just put that out and we were beginning our relationship with James. I sent him an early version of this. Three days later, he comes back with a remix.

(music: Untold – “Stop What You’re Doing (James Blake Remix)”)

Untold

I think he said in the email, he said, “Oh yeah, I just really like the melody.” He was quite persistent with the melody. “Oh yeah, I’ve done some bits over it.” “Yeah, OK James, we have to put this out now you realize?”

Emma Warren

There’s quite a few more records that we need to talk about, so I think we should move on and take ourselves to the point where R&S Records re-started, which was a big moment for anyone that had loved those original techno records.

Untold

Yeah, I mean, so this is a track called “Stereo Freeze.” It came out on R&S in 2009, 2010 maybe. I mean R&S Records, obviously legendary label, but it lay dormant maybe for, I don’t know, ten years or something like that. It was rebooted and I was really, really lucky just to be asked to write something. We mentioned before my background is drum & bass. I don’t know anything about techno. All I know is the classic Aphex Twin releases on R&S and just what a legendary kind of legacy it has. The first track that I wrote is the first track that someone asked me to write for.

It was quite daunting, but I guess what I was trying to do with this, I went back, got on Discogs, educated myself about the entire story of R&S. To me, I just tried to pick out elements that resonated with me. Also, this is an interesting time because dubstep was now not a London thing, it was a global thing. It was blown up in the States and it started to be awkward to be associated with dubstep because it started to mean very different things for very different people. A lot of producers that were there from, maybe not the first wave, but the second wave of dubstep producers, they started to write at slower BPM’s, almost a more, so going from 140 beats per minute down to 130 down to more house tempos just to get a bit of distance away from the dubstep that was not sharing the values of the original records. This is somewhere in the middle, I think. I’m just going to skip a bit of the intro because it’s quite long.

(music: Untold – “Stereo Freeze”)

Emma Warren

Do you think that record is the beginning of how you became an accidental techno hero?

Untold

[laughs] I don’t know. I mean, it was really strange that the crossover, if you like, from people that are associated with dubstep or post-dubstep, you know, all these words and descriptors started to come in and stigmas. It was annoying. It was annoying. It’s the same bunch of people who were all influencing each other and the BPM dropped and there started to be a real cross-pollination between post-dubstep, let’s call it that, and UK funky. UK funky was a sound that came through FWD>> again and it was house tempo. There was a phrase that was banded around at the time called “feminine pressure.” People thought that DMZ was just a bunch of bros in hoodies, kind of not…

Emma Warren

I can attest, that was not true.

Untold

Well, no, of course. But this was basically funky was great because it made just everyone dance. Yeah, it really changed the atmosphere and all the post-dubstep guys, the beats, we were blown away by. The beats, it has that almost kind of soca kind of swing to it. That started to come in. It just had a massive, massive influence. That, I think, is one of the main reasons that the BPM’s dropped. As soon as the BPM’s dropped, house and techno people started playing, let’s say, our music or music from this scene. We get this mesh between worlds, you know? And then you get interesting things like you’d be playing in Berghain one week and then FWD>> on the Thursday before that. Incredible clash of cultures happening because of it. I think a lot of that has to do with funky.

Emma Warren

What happens when you get adopted by another – scene is a problematic word sometimes, but let’s use it for ease. What happens when you get adopted by a world that you’re not necessarily part of?

Untold

It’s a good learning process, you know? The obvious one is people call you a bandwagon jumper, and what have you, but I know that lots of people that made the shift, it was just a continuation of that exploration of different sounds. I started educating myself about Detroit, Chicago, and you realize there’s this whole world of music out there that you hadn’t heard before. That starts coming in.

Emma Warren

Just out of interest, was there anyone, when you did your discovery of Chicago house and Detroit techno that became your instant favorite? Stuff that really hit you straight away?

Untold

It’s pretty obvious that Drexciya is the one. But, yeah, let’s say that rather than going off.

Emma Warren

OK, so Drexciya. I guess we should have a little spin then of “Motion the Dance” then, shouldn’t we?

Untold

Yeah, so this is a track that I wrote in, I think I wrote it in the end of 2011. It came out in 2012 and it was the longest thing I did. Most dubstep records, they’re five minutes long. This one is like seven and a half. What I wanted to do with this track is just present a journey, like going back to ‘91, ‘92 with the old hardcore records. There used to be about three or four different sections, sometimes ten sections, of a track. They would just wind around and these people were writing on samplers that had like four seconds of memory or something. I don’t know how they did it. I was like, “Well, not many tracks do that at the moment. Not many tracks present more than one idea. They just do one thing and they run with it.” This is me trying to get back to some of that windy, wormhole aspects of hardcore, but it’s got a 4/4 behind it. So yeah, I’m jumping the bandwagon into techno. I’m going to skip the intro to this track, so bear with me.

(music: Untold – “Motion the Dance” / applause)

Emma Warren

I wish more people would do that kind of bandwagon jumping. [laughs] We’re moving forward, which means we’ve moved past the point where we can talk about change in a dynamic environment, but this is the conversation we’re having and we can’t talk about everything. Can we come right up to now or nearly now and talk about Black Light Spiral and particularly “Sing a Love Song”?

Untold

OK, so this was one of the first tracks I wrote for my album that’s come out earlier this year on Hemlock, Black Light Spiral. This track I’m going to play here is not one on the album. It’s a VIP version I’ve done that has a longer sample than the main loop. I’m just going to skip through to the beats. I think this was the track off the album that most people chatted about or said to me that they were into it. It was just so much fun to write. The whole album was written in about two weeks, which is very quick for me. Usually, I was taking up to three weeks or something to write a tune, break out the stems, mix it down and for this album, something quite weird happened. I wrote this tune and I played it out in a club and it sounded absolutely fucking awful. There was no bass. It basically folded the system and it was a packed club. I think it was Corsica Studios so it’s a Funktion One soundsystem. There was an interesting dynamic in the room that happened. People sort of looked around at each other. They were like, “What’s going wrong? Is the soundsystem broken?” To me, that created quite a nice atmosphere. There was an uncertainty there, which, to me, was exciting. That then inspired me to write in this style, which is screw the mix downs. Just try and get a reaction. Try and get something that sounds strange in a club. In production forums and coming from drum & bass and dubstep, there’s certain rules, production- wise that you tend to stick to. Your sub-bass has to be around the same frequency area. It can’t go too low or otherwise it won’t reproduce on a soundsystem. For this album I just thought, “Well, no. Screw it. Let’s just go what feels right with the gut. It doesn’t matter what it looks like on a spectrum analyzer or anything. Let’s just have a load of fun writing tracks.” That’s why stuff like this came out so quickly.

Emma Warren

In fact, the whole record sounds brutalized, frayed, heavy, hot. It’s completely different to anything else that you’ve done. It sort of sits aside. It’s funny because often artists seem to make music that progresses from A to B but this just seems like it sits somewhere completely removed from everything else you’ve done. The first track is just five minutes of silence. There’s a little bit of stuff going on in the background. You’re kind of waiting for that to just be the beginning but that’s the whole thing. That’s the entirety.

Untold

Yeah, I mean, I guess I was writing for a few years and in interview questions, the standard one is, “When is your album going to come out?” It’s quite daunting. As soon as I had a couple of these tracks that were sounding very different to me, it fell together. The one track informed another.

Emma Warren

You were battling yourself?

Untold

Yeah, you know, and the distortion, I mean, I was playing in clubs in Germany a lot and actually getting into learning about ‘90s kind of techno, like Regis and Downwards [Records] and all that sound, and really getting into distortion. The whole record is put through lots and lots of processes of distortion and reverberation and delay. I just wanted it to be quite disorienting, I guess. Anyway, here it is.

(music: Untold – “Sing a Love Song” / applause)

Untold

I think it was Mike Paradinas, µ-Ziq, who was saying to me, “That’s the eating a lobster tune.” [laughs]

Emma Warren

What did someone say to me last night? They misheard it as well, they said something like it sounded like “Full Physicality” or something. One of those things you can make it sound like what you want it to sound like. I think one thing that we should really talk about is the thing you’ve been doing more recently with modular synths. You did something with the Modular Review with the London Modular.

Untold

Yeah.

Emma Warren

Try and get the word modular in that sentence four times. I thought the interesting thing to us might be, I think a lot of people are interested in modular synths, but it’s the kind of world that’s quite far away from a lot of people. You don’t really know where you start or how you would get there or there’s kind of a gap of access, information, money, all those other things. Can you just talk us through how you got from being interested in it to having a rig?

Untold

After writing Black Light Spiral, which was done all on computer, I moved. That was written in my flat in London. I had a small kind of basic bedroom- type set up. I moved out of London soon after writing that. I finally have space to actually have some gear. I can’t remember the exact thing that got me into modular but I just wanted to. It just looked so much fun. Yeah, you’re right. There is a huge learning curve. I started going to the London Modular shop, which is in London, it’s well recommended. You can just try stuff out. James is a lecturer down there. You would have seen the rig. I won’t explain it again, but basically it’s like a synthesizer but you’re putting together each component separately and linking them together with wires. The components that you can buy range from oscillators, so traditional synthesis components, right through to stuff that only exists or is only available in a modular format.

Emma Warren

What did you gravitate towards first?

Untold

The first stuff that I bought was I tried to build a synthesizer using it. One of the computer VST or synthesizers that I used a lot up until this point, so all of “Stop What You’re Doing” and the “Anaconda,” that was all written on Native Instruments’ Massive. That’s a wave table synth and it has a very particular sound. It’s got a very cold, almost like FM kind of rubbery, metallic kind of sound. There was a module called Braids, which has a similar type of wave table synthesis. However, the cool thing about modular is that you can plug anything into anything and it won’t break. It’s just control voltages. It’s like five or twelve volts. You’re passing stuff one into the other but you can have one thing doing absolutely crazy things to another module. It can get very, very confusing and you might have seen all these spaghetti wires coming out but that’s part of the charm, really. You get sounds through experimentation and just having fun. It’s not as natural, for me at least, to happen on the computers.

Emma Warren

You started buying some stuff and then you started selling some stuff and finessing what you had?

Untold

Yeah. Modules are pretty expensive. It’s an expensive hobby to have. I think one of the dangers of it is there’s so many options from so many manufacturers. It’s very much like once you get something together, like a patch, you think, “Oh, but only if I had this one, then I could make...” And you just end up going around in circles a bit and you end up with a rig, so your synth that can do many, many things. That, for me, was a bit of a problem. It got too confusing. I made the choice to take away all the things that produce sound. I sold all the oscillators and I concentrated just on things that control sound. There’s a particular set of modules that really kind of blew my mind. These are chaotic modules. It’s a bit daunting for me to actually try and explain this but it’s based on chaos theory. For me, chaos is very similar to randomness, but not quite. The way that I visualize it is randomness is like the black and white fuzz on a broken TV, whereas chaotic noise is like having a set of initial conditions and they will turn into something that’s almost random, but there will be things that repeat. Once you get that in a modular environment and start using the chaotic signals to modulate or control melody or velocity from your synthesizers, you can get some pretty wild stuff.

After I wrote Black Light Spiral, I very quickly wrote another release, it was a free download but also a USB box set. It’s like an hour and ten minutes long of just stuff that was all made on about three modules. The thing that I haven’t told anyone but, I mean, it’s the modules making this music. The set up was me setting up some initial conditions, plugging them into the computer, and hitting record. Then sometimes just going out. [laughs] I’d be recording something for an hour and I would come back and there was ten minutes or so in each of the recordings that I thought was very interesting. I’m going to play the second track in this, which has got quite a lot of melody in it. And that’s the chaos talking. It’s not me writing in these melodies. I find it pretty wild as a concept and I do not understand it.

(music: Untold – “The Maze”)

Untold

[over the music] I’m just skipping to it now. You can kind of hear, there is like a randomness but there are certain phrases that repeat. Those chords that you were hearing wasn’t me. I’ve been in contact with a guy that makes these two particular modules. One is called Chaos Bro[ther]. It’s a good name. The other is Dreamboat, by Snazzy FX. I mean, a lot of the people that make these synthesizers are pretty wild characters. He’s convinced that it’s, well, in his own words, “They are sentient angels in chaos making music for you. When they are in a good mood, they will give you music.” “OK, dude.” [laughs]

Emma Warren

For you, when this happens, what does that do to your idea of what’s possible and where might this kind of thing that you’ve fallen into take you?

Untold

Yeah, I mean, I think this is what’s exciting for me. As you’ve heard, in my music like over these five years, there’s a lot of sound. There’s a lot of different kinds of sounds in there. I mean, I think I’ve got, that’s what’s exciting for me now, it’s like I could spend 20 years learning, getting to the bottom of this or never and just using chaos and to control various synths. It’s all done through Midi. That’s the thing it interfaces with. There’s other options you can do but that’s the one that I use. I’m just going to plug it into a bunch of stuff and see what comes out. I mean, Echo In The Valley is just literally me stepping back and letting the modules do the talking. I think what I will do next is try experimenting with me writing melody and then applying chaos to that, so try and meet them in the middle. Go flying with the angels, man.

Emma Warren

[laughs] One more thing I wanted to ask you before we put it out to you guys. We’ve only got time for maybe three or four questions, so try and keep them snappy if possible. The last thing I wanted to ask you was something you said to me last night after you played that you think that this year has been a really vintage year for music. I wondered what you think is so good about now?

Untold

I don’t know. I mean, like I’ve mentioned before, I’ve unsubscribed from all the crap and now I just go out and buy 12” records and play 12” records. And I’ve bought some wicked records this year from all over. To me, it doesn’t seem as though, like there’s so many cities that are popping up, that are popping off and have their local scenes and are re-influencing each other. I don’t know what it is. It’s like it feels as though ever since post-dubstep was post-dubstep, there’s been another phase and it’s been this other phase and another phase and another thing. The last solid ground, if you like, or a solid scene, was dubstep and we’ve just kind of been floating around, trying to get our heads ‘round it for almost five years now. I’ve kind of just given up trying to understand or define what the good records are and just go with my gut. But something’s working. I can’t see anything now with the way that everyone is interacting online, I can’t see another scene happening in a local town that doesn’t just instantly blow up or that has time to gestate on its own localized before becoming a global thing, before everyone hears it. I mean, I think it’s going to continue like that but it’s working.

Emma Warren

Maybe it’s time for a blackout. If you’ve got something good, don’t tell anyone about it. OK then, so microphone. Questions?

Audience Member

Hey, first of all, thank you for being here. I once saw this documentary, Living Inside the Speaker. I don’t remember who but he said that that’s, at that time, was like a Swiss Army knife of genres. I don’t know, I want to know your thoughts about how culture can mesh with this. I don’t know what’s the science behind the magic of dubstep or related sounds, but that track, “Anaconda” you made, once I heard this really cool remix, I think it’s the Dubbel Dutch on this release but maybe it’s also the tribal guarachero edit, and it’s you being remixed. And you made this remix for The xx, I don’t know, what are your thoughts and how can you merge with other genres, even if it’s like pop music or extremely like local genres on the other side of the world?

Untold

Yeah, I mean, I think dubstep and drum & bass, my two musical touch points, it was there’s very few rules. Usually, it’s tempo and bass. That, to me, is all that needs to be for it to be a dubstep record. Or certainly, that’s how it felt then. Yeah, with that, it’s a blank canvas. It just naturally lends itself to meshing with other scenes and stuff. So yeah, bass and beats. [laughs]

Audience Member

OK. Thank you.

Audience Member

I just have felt like I’ve noticed this phenomenon more recently where a lot of noise artists have started to incorporate beats into their set. I think although noise has been one of the main ingredients of techno since the beginning, I was just wondering if there’s any noise artists that influence you or if it’s the beat-driven stuff or the club stuff that’s the only [influences]. Do you have like a different connection to noise or experimental music?

Untold

Yeah, I said before, I’m a clueless idiot when it comes to music history. I’m doing lots and lots of learning. I’m really identifying with people like Pete Swanson and, like you say, there’s a very interesting... For me, the least interesting aspect of noise is the full-on face-melting blast of white noise. To me, when it has more angles, at least that’s how I identify with it. I really like the strange middle ground of the moment between, “Is it a techno track? Is it noise? Is it something else?” Definitely. But Pete Swanson, I’m rating.

Audience Member

Cool.

Emma Warren

Is there a question back there or was it just a stretch? OK, then in which case, we should just say a very, very big thank you, Untold.

[applause]