at deconstructing the techniques he heard, in this case Grandmaster Flash extending the break on two records, and translating it into something that reflected his own more parochial surroundings. “My dad was an English teacher, so he had all these tapes for teaching foreign students English,” Amon recalls. “I used to steal his tapes and edit them. I had this twin cassette recorder which was the best thing ever. I got really good at basically splicing and changing the words about so that sentences would say different things. I used to stay up and record the Top 40 on Sunday night, then I’d reorganize that. There were tracks or chorus and verses I didn’t like, so I started editing them out to make alternate versions.”
It wasn’t until a few years later when he was living in Portugal working as a holiday rep, one of a series of jobs that made him determined never to make music seem like ‘work’, that Amon saved up for an Akai S01 sampler and was lured back to England, this time along the coast in Brighton, by the nascent sound of jungle, Dillinja and Peshay pricking up his ears with their hyper-speed breakbeats and booming dub subs. “It was a way of taking things that I loved and doing something with them without saying that I’m part of this, do you know what I mean?” he explains on the intrinsic attraction sampling had. “Take blues, for example. I could never authentically make anything that was to do with blues, but I could take a piece of blues, change it and put it in an electronic environment and do something that was valid.” While his career has been a drive to get the most out of the proliferation of technology (“Am I going to do what I could do earlier, much quicker, or am I going to use the same time to do something different?” he explains on his attitude in an interview from his box-set), the beginnings of it were quaintly antiquated, a friend encouraging him to send off some productions to a couple of labels advertising on the back of a music magazine. It resulted in his first album, ‘Adventures In Foam’, under the name of Cujo for Ninebar Records (“The label had a dual purpose, but they were amazing people,” he explains on the studio where he learnt sound engineering), while working with a second, Streatham-based label HOS inspired the drum & bass track ‘Paris, Streatham’, which hinted at his love of film by sampling Wim Wenders’ classic Paris, Texas.
NINJA
to trends, concessions or anything other than his childlike wonder at exploring and understanding, taking apart and reassembling to drill down into the nature of music and the sounds that make it.
Taken backpacking by his mother when his parents split up, his childhood occupied countries including Morocco, Ireland, Holland and England, the pair sometimes living in squats. “Back at that time, people were getting organized in that way and getting self-sufficient in some ways that weren’t, I guess, the normal way to do it,” a spirit of dogged independence that seems to have guided him around the usual music industry pitfalls. While his record collection, stacked in a glass-doored room to the side of his studio, contains vinyl echoes of
the ‘60s greats that marked these years, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and the psychedelic rock of Brazilian band Os Mutantes, it was while settling (for a spell, at least) in the unlikely surroundings of Hastings that the emanations of black ‘80s New York touched his life. “It was kind of a bleak place really, and we didn’t have much to do, so we used to get these tapes that came from the States over to London, then eventually filtered down to our shitty place. We’d listen to that stuff and we’d have pieces of lino... I was in a little crew, we used to battle Bexhill, it was very provincial. But it was great, I loved it. It was Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, all the early electro stuff as well.”
The effects of this went beyond inspiring exuberant attempts at windmills, precipitating his earliest attempt
www.djmag.com
It was when Ninebar moved next to Ninja Tune on Stoney Street in London Bridge, round the corner from Clink Street which had held some of London’s earliest acid house raves, that Amon stepped out under his own name for ‘Brickolage’ (1997), his label debut and a freaky jazz dismembering journey that starts with the slowed-down breaks of trip-hop before bursting forth into rolling Amens and time-stretching on tracks like ‘Chomp Samba’ and ‘Creatures’. From the outset, though, he maintained his position as cultural outsider, only joining their ranks under his own terms. “I had a strange view of them when I first went up there,” he says with a grin. “They seemed very trendy, and they were at the time. I was on this scuffed-up, tiny label and they had Stealth at the Blue Note going on. It was all boys with haircuts which I was a bit suspicious of, really!”
After a cagey meeting with Peter Quicke, who co-runs the label, however, he joined and discovered the rare freedom from label interference or commercial pressures that he still has today. “They really support what I do, but they don’t try to influence it in any way. Well, they have from time to time, but that’s been fixed! We really understand each other and we have a mutual respect. I mean, they’re truly independent and haven’t become part of some bigger label.”
021
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78