Scot McPhee’s girlfriend was offered a gun by criminals, that’s as close as he’s been to grime’s gunman mythology. But the producer who lived through Sydney post-punk at the Gunnery, and played a leading role in the iconic Clan Analogue label is now producing breakbeats that roll like glaciers, heavy on the bass.
“Sorry for the slow reply, I’ve been out bush for the long weekend,” says Scot, when I finally catch him. The laboured restraint of Scot’s latest musical incarnation, Brisbane-based industrial dubstep outfit, Victor Xray Sound System, reflects our interview’s geological progress.
Dubstep is boys’ music; female producers or DJs are extremely rare, even in the UK’s increasingly popular scene. Like hip-hop, the language is encoded aggression; it’s ‘ruff’ or ‘bad’, the music ‘chops’ and ‘clashes’. Scot is a 42-year-old software engineer, for accommodation website Wotif.com, but his music comes from a different place. His overall sound is harsh – “I guess as an old industrial head I simply appreciate that rough, masculine aesthetic” – but the diverse scene growing around dubstep in Brisbane, with bands like Monster Zoku Onsomb and the Nam Shub of Enki, and even a female dubstep DJ, is quite different from elsewhere.
Machismo isn’t limited to dubstep though. Scot recalls, with shock, hearing a well-known DJ describe the number of women at a Clan Analogue party (featuring B[if]tek) at Sydney University by saying there was a lot of “pussy”. Scot moved north when his wife, who “doesn’t like a lot of wobble, but quite likes Skream”, was offered a plum job in Queensland. It’s a small point, but instructive; although dark and harsh, Scot’s music is not particularly aggressive. That steers it closer to well-established producers in the dubstep scene, like Kode9 and Horsepower Productions, whose music is rooted in dub and deeper electronic production.
Scot’s music reaches back to dub too. Through alter-egos like Nerve Agent (Clan Analogue), Now:Zero (Trans:com) and now Victor Xray Sound System, Scot has tended to filter the Jamaican roots of the scene through Berlin’s ultra-minimal dub techno or East London’s dubstep. From Burial Mix to Burial, then.
Scot’s a geek at heart. Take his progression in alter-egos, for example. From G-Type Nerve Agent (a nerve gas like Sarin, used in the Tokyo subway attack), he moved to a newer nerve gas, V-Type, VX or in the lingo, Victor Xray. That tendency extends to his studio set-up, which has changed since G-Type, from using external sequencers, hardware synths and a sampler, to Ableton Live and a Nord Modular synth. These days he avoids sample-based production, starting with live bass or guitar, he “builds out”, playing the composition into a keyboard and recording into the computer.
“I think there are several points of contact with dub,” says Scot, whose first exposure to dubstep was a Kode9 show at a Frigid night at Sydney’s Hopetoun Hotel, several years ago. “I love bass and rhythm… Speaking as a producer, all this music shares a sense of time and space. The idea that music can be formed from the silences between notes as much as the notes themselves. To take things and turn them inside out with delays and other processing to get a lush, layered and textured sound out of sometimes initially basic elements.”
Scot is reflexively alternative. A natural position, perhaps, for someone who’s spent so long in counter-cultural scenes. He was born in Brisbane, and grew up on a diet of Gary Numan, Talking Heads and 1970s Countdown, but catapulted himself into Sydney’s nascent post-punk scene when he moved into Woolloomooloo squat The Gunnery in 1981. Sydney has a long tradition of naming warehouse spaces after their original function: Imperial Slacks was a clothing factory, Lanfranchi’s was known as The Chocolate Factory before its residents changed name, and the Gunnery used to be a Naval Gunnery School.
The city’s musical underground was peaking on a mixture of nihilistic hedonism and new technology. Inspired by the city’s ‘little bands’ scene, especially Severed Heads, the Brisbanian found his niche. “There were some pretty wild things going on in the Gunnery, especially in the early days,” he says, recounting the night his girlfriend was given a gun by criminals who had moved into the squat. “I was pretty freaked out by that.”
“Another night we were all on acid and someone decided to throw things at taxis, which resulted in a couple of angry taxi drivers trying to batter down the main doors in the rear lane with their cars. I guess various drugs did have a bit to do with the general Gunnery ‘vibe’. I lived there for about a year, until it got too much battling the squatter’s demons. Four of us moved out around the corner, into another squat, where we lived for over seven years, outlasting The Gunnery. In fact, some of the soon-to-be Vibe Tribe guys moved into the place next door to us, although at that time they where all anarcho-punks and not at all into electronic music.”
It’s evidence that from very early on, there was an explicit link between warehouse spaces and the emerging music scene in Sydney. A link that cemented with time, from the post-punk and experimental performance art/music early ’80s to rave. As Ben Byrne noted in a recent essay, warehouses have provided a unique environment for artists to produce and present their work free of the expectations and limitations of the more heavily codified spaces that dominate society.
Wild parties and performance theatre electrified venues like The Gunnery and Lost In Space, supported by illegal beer and wine sales. Scot recalls: “Some transgender friends dressed as Easter bunnies, skipping around, handing out lollies and god knows what mind altering substances to the audience.” The inner city property market was yet to explode, and squats like these weren’t just places to live. Residents were artists, musicians, addicts and criminals, sometimes a mixture of all of the above. People got caught up in the highs and lows.
“There was a great Gunnery Festival night where I did the big party upstairs after the theatre event downstairs. We had separate ticketing and in the mad rush after the theatre we didn’t get the thing sorted out correctly. It was fixed by one of the theatre people, a tall imposing woman called Helen who was still made-up, practically naked but body-painted to look like some sort of she-devil, demanding to see people’s tickets until we got it set up right. It was pretty funny, watching all these people’s completely startled expressions when she challenged their right of entry.”
Do scenes like that they still exist? The kids are still around, creatively inspiring collectives too, but there’s no doubt they’re controlled by the real estate market. “Even after the Gunnery shut, there were still interesting rented warehouse spaces around Sydney,” says Scot. “But I hear that the last, Lanfranchi’s, closed. That’s a real pity, because those spaces always gave the interesting stuff a place to be performed. It may be only a tiny minority of people who go to see some obscure music played, but those events do have an effect on a city that’s more than the immediate audience. They give a city its texture.”
As the Gunnery ebbed, collectives like Clan Analogue and Jellyheads picked up the slack. “I think the biggest change occurred in the late 1980s and early ’90s,” says Scot, “when the big dance parties hit their stride – as opposed to electronic music that you might dance to. A lot of venues either shut down their stages for poker machines or turned into music barns powered by DJs. Both those things pushed live electronic music to the margins.”
“Clan Analogue was formed in part as a reaction against this trend – a way to promote local electronic music, particularly stuff that wasn’t so… cheesecake? I guess that might be a word to describe it, that’s why I joined, around the time of EP2. It was pretty exciting. I think over time, Clan and its allies – directly and indirectly – were quite successful at championing this scene.”
The music scene has changed hugely, home studios come bundled with laptops and live electronic music is hotter than ever. “It’s different, but primarily in the economics of its organisation, its political economy. The major record labels are dead, they are actually just walking zombies who don’t yet realise they are dead.”
“On the other hand, what becomes ‘popular’ is, in a sense, vastly more controlled than before. Look at some of those Countdown specials that Rage runs around the new year. You will see these ugly, totally non-photogenic people on TV performing their hit – people you just know couldn’t be on TV today, parading as pop stars. The cult of celebrity has taken over. In the old days to be a celebrity you had to have at least done something notable at least once. The nature of celebrity has completely changed music at that end of the spectrum.”
For someone who recorded for iconic Australian electronic labels like Volition and Clan Analogue, Scot’s been unusually accepting of the new music environment. He records quickly and mixes down in a day, often posting MP3s to his blog (modular.autonomous.org/music) immediately. His 12-inch single has attracted interest in Australia, but the recording is also available globally on iTunes, via Brisbane netlabel Trans:com. He finds the traditional process frustrating, describing releasing a record as being, “almost like an archival task.”
“There’s a splintering of musical cultures, there is no longer the large, almost monolithic, cultural movements there were in the past. There’s a weakening of control over distribution from the record majors, but a fascistic semi-autonomous image machine that self-organises the notion of celebrity around itself. At the fringes, we can have a great party, but there’s no real mainstream anymore to crossover into, unless you really want to play the celebrity game. I guess there’s a sort of ‘indie-mainstream’, which might go as far as having some US college students buy your record.”
“On the other hand, you’ve got the ability for all sorts of small communities, united by interest and real passion, to develop around particular sorts of obscure music. The dubstep communities you might find on Dubstep.com.au or Baredubs.com are just one of countless thousands, whatever you’re into you can find something online for it nowadays.”
“I don’t drive a car so I certainly never listen to [music]the same way most people do. Instead, I make a special space at least once a week when I listen to new music. I don’t use music as wallpaper, except at social events. I try to sit and listen to it and see what I can hear in it. I still listen to heaps of reggae, rock like Bowie or Roxy Music, lots of electronic music, both modern, like dubstep, and more nostalgic, like Kraftwerk.” Scot downloads tracks and DJ mixes, then mail-orders vinyl that takes his fancy, though he’s recently shifted to buying MP3s to save on shipping costs. Whatever the format, Brisbane’s sun and surf-brand t-shirts are a long way from London.
“Well,” starts Scot, “Queensland seems to have this weird fascination with alternative music, from punks and goths, and so on, right through the ’80s. I think it’s because there’s a really seedy underside to the whole sun’n’surf and Aussie hooligan thing that infests this place. It’s really ‘mainstream Australia’ in a way you can be almost totally insulated from in inner-city Sydney nowadays, especially if you’ve got any money. So there’s a side of me that wants to push back against that culture, to confuse it with something that doesn’t gel with its own values”
“When I came up here, I guess I realised I could continue on in a happy little bubble of my own making, reggae’s pretty big up here, or I could challenge myself a little and stretch out in different directions.” Inspired by the city’s well-established industrial goth community, his music got darker. That darkness, and dubstep’s inherent and calculated use of repetition, must make it a challenging sound in a place like Brisbane. Despite this, there’s a thriving community of DJs pushing the sound.
“It seems to fit into the spaces between other music like drum’n’bass, minimal techno, and even electronic goth and industrial music, but it seems to be pretty well received by people who come to it from those territories. There is always a mixture. But currently it’s lacking a regular weekly or monthly night, they are sporadic. Hopefully that will be rectified in the near future from talking to some people around town recently.”
The Dark Arts of Dub 12 inch is available through Vinyl Factory Distribution, or online from Trans:com/iTunes. The Horse, He Sick blog can be found at modular.autonomous.org/music.
