SCUBA interview

Paul Rose aka Scuba has trodden a long path from from his roots in the formative London dubstep scene. Since 2007 he's been operating out of Berlin and as a headline DJ, producer, label boss and promoter he's well place d to survey the European underground dance music scene.

His label Hotflush Recordings is pushing on for 7 years in the business. With recent signings like Joy Orbison, Sigha and Mount Kimbie making a big impact, Hotflush is one of the key labels to watch. Scuba is one of the few dubstep-affiliated DJ's to get regular bookings all over Europe. His popularity as a DJ has led to a respectable placing in the 2009 Resident Advisor top 100 DJs poll, and he's already released a Sub:stance mix album in 2010.

We met up with him before the release of his second studio album Triangulation to talk about running nights in the world's coolest club, making music in London and Berlin, and how, if things had gone differently, he might have stopped Razorlight from ever coming into existence...



[Since July 2008 you've been running the Sub:stance night in Berlin. This seems to have been a big platform for your work and dubstep type music in general. How did you get involved?]
Basically I moved over [to Berlin] in the back end of 2007 and one of the things I wanted to do in the city was to do a big night cos noone had really stuck their neck out and tried to do something at one of the big clubs. I wanted to try and get a big line up together and just see if it worked, cos there had been a following for the music in the city, but it hadn't really been given a chance to properly get going.

Basically the ideal scenario was to do it in Berghain. It just happened by chance really, I bumped into one of the guys who works there and set up a meeting, turned up, said we wanna do a night, and was expecting maybe a Thursday or a Sunday or something. The thing with it is that on Fridays the big room, the Berghain room, isn't normally open, it's just the Panoramabar. So when they said do you want to do on a Friday night we we're like O-K yes of course we would.

The first night we did was the first night Berghain had ever been open on a Friday night which just made it doubly mad, and we're there to put on - I say its a dubstep night, but its not really, its just a kind of general bass music night. I wouldn't want to be associated with a dubstep night these days, I think there's a lot of interesting music but it doesn't all come under the dubstep banner anymore. So its just a night for good music. There is a bit of techno - I play a bit of techno in my sets - but thats what they normally have at Berghain, so we don't book techno DJs. Theres techno producers who I'd really like to book to play there but I don't cos that's what normally goes on there.

I think the main impact that our night has had, from the fact that its been at Berghain, is that the scene there is a lot more receptive to this kind of music now. So that's definitely been a big positive change I think.



[It should be no surprise that Sub:stance has been a success in such a cosmopolitan city as Berlin. But how do you think the rest of Europe is responding to dubstep and bass music? Are there many people from further afield doing good stuff?]
Yeah its generally quite healthy at the moment across the board, there's a lot of interesting music being made, coming from a lot of different angles. I really hate the dubstep-techno crossover thing, its a bullshit kind of concept, but from that to the UK funky thing which is coming from a completely different angle, to all the other stuff thats going on - I think its positive, and there's people from different parts of the world, not just Europe, working at it... I was in Japan last month and there were some really really interesting local acts playing on the same bill as me, I was really impressed.


[How do you feel about Berlin in 2010?]
Its certainly changed since I've been there, and they're trying to change it. There's loads of big development plans that the local government are trying to get through, cos the thing about the city is it has no money at all, the town hall has no cash. They're trying to push through these things like the Media Spree development [in Friedrichshain] where they're going to knock down a load of buildings along the river and build a shopping mall and hotels. Watergate would go if it happens, shit loads of things are gonna go if it happens. Theres all these protests about it, and on the one hand you think, well yes the city needs some money so they've got to try and generate the cash somehow - but the flipside of it is that a lot of the tourist revenue which comes into Berlin is based on the counter culture that they're trying to get rid of. Its sort of a transitional period I guess, but its still totally different to everywhere else.



[You've lived in notable musical cities like Bristol and London as well. How important do you think the different music scenes in certain cities is? Does it influence the music, or is the talk of scenes just media hype?]
When you say a scene its the people who are putting on nights and the people who are making music, that for me is the scene... In Europe the scene is the house and techno producers, but in London there is no house and techno scene - you have big house and techno clubs and people like the music, but there is no scene as such. So thats the difference and theres a little bass music scene in Berlin and other cities but there isn't what I'd call a scene - its nothing like this great scene that produced dubstep in the first place, which is quite a unique thing anyway.

England's got this urban scene which doesn't really exist in Europe, but they've got this underground house and techno scene that doesn't really exist [in the UK].




[Did the Bristol scene support you much when you were starting out in electronic music?]
Well, not so much. When I was living in Bristol I was a student, so I was just doing student stuff and wasn't really a part of it to be honest. But yeah in London, I was totally part of the dubstep thing when it was coming up. And it has been interesting watching it all develop, I still find it quite bizarre that its come to anything at all really. But we all believed in it, else we wouldn't have kept on bashing away for god knows how long without making no money out of it. Its something I look back on and think it was really good to be a part of that, certainly.

And now its just about seeing how far it can be taken. I've said before that I wouldn't want to be part of a dubstep night so obviously I'm not completely enamoured with how its gone.... I would clarify that and say there is still a lot of dubstep I do like but my problem with it now is that its become... the way its perceived has turned into quite a narrow thing, thats my problem with it. But I'm not averse to the odd bit of wobble every now and again, in very small doses.



[Has the move from London to Berlin influenced the music you make?]
With the Scuba stuff I wouldn't say that the city [Berlin] has had much influence on me at all. I've always been really into techno - that was the first music I was getting into when I was a teenager. Theres always been a lot of different influences that have gone into what I do, and techno is just one thing. That said the SCB project that I'm doing is nakedly influenced by Berghain, I make no apology for that. But the album [Triangulation] is much more.... well maybe UK, I dunno. Its different things. The reason it's called Triangulation is because of the three musical influences coming into it, which are the kind of dubstep thing, the house and techno thing, and the drum and bass or half-time stuff.



[The 12 tracks on Triangulation cover a broad range of styles. How did the album come together?]
I spent a year trying to do something and it only really came together in the last few months. I sat down in January and said I'm gonna make an album by June, and by June I had got absolutely nowhere. The whole of last year was just a kind of perpetual frustration, anger and just general rage.. but in September I said its gotta be done by Christmas or I'm never gonna do another album ever again. I just made myself do it, but I'm pretty happy with the way its panned out, I think its certainly a step forward from the last one. If you're making a step forward then you can't ask for much more than that.

I was writing the first one [A Mutual Antipathy] just before I moved over [to Berlin]. I wrote pretty much the whole album, listened to it and thought "no, this is shit". After I got over, it just flowed a little bit more. One track remained on the final album. And this one... like I said I was working for six months and produced basically nothing, and then in September it was just like yeah lets fucking do it.. and it just about worked out.



[You use vocals on the album, and some of the tracks are more song like than your earlier productions. Is this a new direction you are looking to develop?]
It's sort of a continuation of the track I did on the previous ep, which was just messing around with vocals and not trying to do anything too profound with it - just use them as an instrument, to get an extra layer or texture. It's just to experiment with it but I think I am interested in the song form - I used to write songs when I was in bands when I was a teenager... I got into techno first and then I became an indie kid for a year, then got into techno again. I was in a band with Johnny Borrell from Razorlight actually. And we very nearly got a deal, just before I went to university. There was one stage where we did a gig at the Dublin Castle in Camden where the head of Sony A&R came to see us, and basically we were ready to get a deal and we screwed the gig totally and split up on stage. It was like fucking calamity of calamities... and two days later I applied to university, that was it, I didn't do anything else for ages.



[Your label Hotflush Recordings is getting on to be 7 years old, with more than 50 releases. Although its lauded as a major dubstep label, the releases have always been pretty varied. What's the ethos behind what you do with Hotflush?]
Going back to the start, the more succesful A&R things were when it was entirely revolved around my DJ sets, so when you get passed a tune and it works well, put it out. And its still like that to a large extent. Probably people think a lot of the stuff we put out is quite down tempo - certainly a proportion of it is quite down tempo, quite not-danceable, but to be honest I think its more about the way you DJ and contextualise stuff within a set. I do play a lot that might seem to be not danceable tunes in my set, but you play them right and people will still dance.

When we started the label it wasn't intended to be a dubstep thing really, it was one of the things we were interested in but it just gradually happened. In the last couple of years its broadened out again which was the intention originally. So yeah, its a cliche but you want to put out good music - thats all you can really do with a label. Moving forward we want to do more albums, got albums coming out in March, and the Mount Kimbie albums out in June.



[You've been able to work full time as DJ, producer and label boss for a while now. Has this bought new pressures or just new opportunities? Where do you want to get to in the future?]
Its more the thinking time than anything else - being able to consider where you want to be and think about things a bit more longterm... I mean, theres pressures when you've got to put food on the table but you've got to look past that, and short term solutions in music are usually the wrong solutions. That's probably true for most things, but I think its just about keeping sight of what made you do it in the first place. I think thats the most important thing cos thats why anyone wants do this kind of shit.

Musically, I haven't done anything yet really. Certainly with the label - when I started the label I wanted to be, you know... Warp is the obvious one for an independent label, thats where you want to get to. But that's a twenty year project potentially. And as a producer it's a learning curve really, I don't think anyone could ever say they're totally satisfied with what they are doing musically. I've thought i'll maybe do four albums as Scuba but you never know whats gonna happen with it. It could all go tits up next year, you never know. Obviously you've gotta have an eye on the long term but equally you've gotta appreciate where you are in the present and try make the most of it.


by Michael Curtis
published March 2010 at http://www.trafficmag.org/