"The Mythical Creature From The Mist": In Depth With The Black Dog

Often considered as pioneers in their field, Sheffield based outfit, The Black Dog, have been consistently reinventing themselves and their sound since they first came to light as one of Warp Records' most successful acts in the early 1990s. Having gone through several lineup changes, the group currently consists of founding member Ken Downie, and brothers Martin & Richard Dust of Dust Recordings. The change in lineup after a several year hiatus in the early 2000s certainly hasn't slowed their rate of production however. Their most recent album Tranklements which received a multitude of positive reviews, as well as the first two editions their most recent project – the ‘Darkhaus’ series have both seen their releases this year, and the trio show no signs of slowing down as the year continues. With an appearance at fabric scheduled for the 20th July, we caught up with Martin Dust to discuss artistic integrity, 'Electronic Supper Club', and what it is that makes Sheffield such an interesting place to be an electronic musician. The Black Dog has seen several incarnations, both in terms of lineup and sound. What is it that ties the project together through this? I guess what ties Black Dog together for this incarnation, and I guess us three, is that we're really good friends. We work together - we were friends when Virtual came out when Ken was working with Warp, Ed and Andy. It’s just like a natural transition – we knew it was always going to be tough for us, because there's always five people on a forum somewhere wanting you to continue to make and replicate the same thing over and over again. I've always viewed music and being in a collective or a band as being like a painter, and in all honesty I've got no desire myself – and I don't think Ken or Rich have, to paint the same picture over and over again. It's really odd that people don't view it as like a living breathing artist that have families, do gardening, see films, you know – get influenced by other people and influenced by things around them, then expect you to stay doing one thing. Equally I totally understand when people like one thing and want you to do that all the time, but if you were to look at that written down on paper it’s such a ridiculous naïve thing to do. I mean we've carried a lot of supporters on from the early days of what we were doing because they're interested in electronic music and where we're going, but some people clearly love the Spanners period, and for me there's nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly natural when you think about all your record collection, and all the bands you've followed, and ones that you've stopped following, it's just a natural thing to do. We're just friends more than anything. We do music and we do other projects together like coding and electronics, it’s difficult to separate it out and see it sometimes perhaps as outsiders see it. It’s certainly a weird kind of situation and conundrum when you put it down on paper, but it’s understandable. I guess to some extent it must be encouraging that as you say you have carried over a lot of fans across these different periods. People are still interested in following your progression and the path you want to go down. It's always nice when anyone appreciates anything that you do, but as an artist it’s not why I or any of the other lads sit at a keyboard, and why we spend hours discussing stuff. The difference with an artist is that an artist gets up and does what the hell he wants. A designer gets up and does things for an audience or to a brief, where as we consider being an artist where you get up do what you want and publisher be damned. It's that kind of philosophy that we've had to adopt, and I think it's quite a difficult thing to do because you look at what other people are doing and you know, you get caught up with why the same track has been in Beatport's charts for the last five years. The top 100 just sounds like the same song. It creates this illusion that that's doing really well and that's selling really well, and the grass is greener but we've kind of got over that. We, selfishly, enjoy what we've doing and if people don't like it and don't understand it, then there's very little we can do about it and we accept that. How directly do you think living in Sheffield affects your sound? I was reading recently about Lo Shea's first release for 100 Years in which he visited Forgemasters Steelworks to take field recordings for the record... That's quite an interesting record; we've just done a load of filming in it. I think Sheffield is a really weird city because in terms of electronic music we kind of invented some stuff. If you talk to some of the early Detroit guys they'll tell you the influence of people like Heaven 17, Clock DVA, Richard H Kirk, Cab Voltaire - all that kind of stuff, and it's really interesting that they were into that, picked up on that and sent techno back with their interpretation of it. Sheffield musically…? I think you're pretty aware that Sheffield is an industrial city. After Thatcher decided to close the miner's unions and steel unions the city was devastated, going from millions of people being employed to millions of people being unemployed. So you're aware that you do live on the edge of some heavy industry. On a summers night you can still hear the drop hammers travelling across, but there's not as many people working in that industry anymore, so to use those sounds in your recordings – it feels fairly natural as it surrounds us all the time. Equally we're about two minutes away from the Peak District so you've kind of got a weird conundrum. I think Sheffield as a political city and the way it operates affects us just as much as the industrial sound, because Sheffield is a fairly cheap place to live which affords that that you can spend more time doing things, and not feel under pressure. There are a lot of electronic artists and some fucking great DJs around, but we all leave each other alone. We're not in each other’s pockets - it’s not competitive. I guess some people imagine that it's like a hotbed of creativity where everybody's collaborated together and things like that. It's a tough city where you almost have to go away and be successful before you get any credit when you come back, it's really weird. I once saw Human League when they were number one in the single and album charts – for the first five songs they played when I went to see them, nobody clapped. It's really weird and I used to be in a punk band before, about 1979, and we got so bad about getting nervous and stuff we actually took all the gaps out the songs, so we'd play one song into another, not leaving a gap so if we got a clap it'd be right at the end. We've talked about it with other artists - it's a weird conundrum, why won't this city recognise something? It kind of does when you go away and come back but it doesn't inflate your ego too much. I guess it's really grounded but it can be quite frustrating. I've been a musician in this city for nearly thirty years and I've only ever been contacted by one journalist from this city. We've been trying to work out whether that’s a blessing or not, it's a weird thing. You go to London and people are more open to celebrating success and things like that – it's kind of difficult here to do that. So I think that and the industry, the peak district and other artists in the city come together, it's quite a strong influence. It's kind of interesting what you were saying earlier and how it's like a journalistic thing to impose these communities of producers and stuff because it makes a neat little story, but it's not always the case a lot of the time. I did a study of Krautrock and a lot of the people I talked to said they weren't aware of the other bands at the time, and it wasn't till the late 70s that they actually met... Well Kraftwerk certainly weren't aware of Can or Faust or any of those bands. They were just small pockets of people working on similar ideas with different takes on it. That's what was great about Krautrock. They all had similar political manifestos to go against the Schlager music and all come up with their own stuff, but they all had a different take on it and that's what was really rich. It's kind of what you get in Sheffield. Everyone thinks that Sheffield is influenced by bleep, but it was never ever about bleep, it was always about bass. Sheffield has always been about that, so you get younger kids like Mella Dee and Squarehead who are garage/house DJs. I mean they're doing some great, great stuff. Yeah one of the things I wanted to ask you about was the 'Electronic Supper Club' and how it has progressed since its inception? It sounds like a good thing to be doing; I don't think there's enough of those platforms for new artists... It kind of came out of two things really. We've always been interested in broadcast as an idea and a medium, and we've got friends who own sound systems and own factories, so we thought we'd try one season to see if we'd enjoy the process of not playing the music any more, but getting people on that are doing really good things even if it's a million miles away from what we play or indeed buy. I think the first season went really well and we're just off to look at some more venues. We bought much better equipment this time so we can broadcast in HD. We got more people involved, but it's a combination of finding a really decent venue and a really fast internet connection! We wanted to do a different take to what Boiler Room were doing. We don't understand Boiler Room at the minute. I don't understand the people in the chatroom because they have some really good stuff on but I think the format and the programming – we can't work out if it’s the sponsors driving that or if those lads just like a lot of parties. With ESC we just wanted to reconnect with the younger generation and share some ideas and ideals that we've got, give them a bit of a platform and just keep it really tight. Not get caught in having to do it every week, not get caught having to have a sponsor and all the other traps, just do what we want and find the right people. It's kind of about giving an opportunity for talent in the north and people that want to come and visit. Also presenting more experimental things like SND and Demdike Stare and all those people that wouldn't normally get a look in that you know for a fact would upset everybody in popular chatrooms. It goes back to what we were talking about your study on Krautrock, it's about presenting all those little things, and seeing how it all fits together and makes perfect sense, and keeping that spectrum really wide. I think in a lot of cases people have narrowed their musical scope and they only like one thing, which I guess goes back to what we were talking about, about our albums and fans and moving forwards. People are getting narrower and narrower and when you remember the beauty of people like John Peel playing reggae and The Fall, Altered Images, Souxsie And The Banshees, Dillinger, Ivor Cutler. It's a massively wide spectrum of brilliant art stuff, and that’s why we wanted to do it, to see if we could do more of that. So what sort of thing are you currently listening to? Are there any new artists you think people should be hearing? New artist wise I think Geiom… and I think… Beneath. Beneath is going to break so big soon. I mean we've got quite a lot of his recordings that have not been released yet and we're massive fans of what he's doing – really amazing stuff. We're really enjoying Squarehead's stuff, the current Plant 43 on CPU Records. I'm not actually listening to too much at the moment as we're currently writing the next single so we don't want to get influenced by anything, but there's a lot of great young artists out there and people that have been around quite a bit doing some great stuff. 2013 is turning out to be a great year for a lot of great albums. What are your thoughts on the recent resurgence of interest in Techno in the UK? People like Blawan, Skudge and Forward Strategy Group? Well firstly they're all fucking great artists. I mean watching Jamie [Blawan] DJ is quite entertaining, you can clearly tell he loves what he's doing. Its great music, I mean, we were worried about him. The amount of gigs he's getting, it looked like he was doing twenty eight dates a month. For young kids it’s cool but twenty eight dates of partying as old fellas can pretty much kill you. I think there's quite a few things that work there with that kind of like more industrial loopy sound that’s a bit deeper. What we're seeing in Sheffield is smaller parties with really good PAs cropping up. In Sheffield we don't have specialist clubs like fabric or things like that. We have nights that are put on in existing establishments that care about taking your coat off and how much you spend at the bar. We've seen quite a lot of promoters do up factories and put people on. Things like CADs, Hope Works, Dan Sane are all done in different locations. They're all done in different warehouses, so we're seeing a lot more of that up here, and that sound fits perfectly because people aren't dressing up to the nines, it not ten quid for a lager, there's no cloakroom. I think politically as well it fits with the mind-set that the younger generation are getting more politically minded and they’re fucking sick of being told what to do with the rest of their lives and being constantly in debt. I don't think it’s one thing, I think it's a lot of things that all collide at the same time that make a great picture. I've heard you talk briefly about the vinyl format in interviews briefly – do you think digital formats de-value the work of an artist? I think physical products – we're still in love with them because creating an object as an artist is still a thing. It's kind of like a full stop to a project. It's as good or bad as it's received as a journey from A to B. Does it devalue stuff? Kids today consume things differently and think about things differently. It's hard to put a sweeping generalisation over it. I mean personally myself I don't understand why people cherry pick two songs off an album when an album has clearly been constructed as a journey from A to B, but a lot of artists these days don't create an album from A to B, it's more like a series of collections. I guess it's changed the marketplace, I don't think it devalues anything. If anything its more accessible to a lot of people worldwide. It's certainly created a larger scale bootlegging problem which is interesting. You kind of touched on the album thing which was something else I wanted to ask about – Black Dog has had quite a lot of albums out, what do you think the key is to making dancefloor music in the album format? I don't think there really is a key, and I think Ken here would agree that we've made throughout all these twenty five years - none of us feel that we've made that one album or that one thing where our creative train kind of like pulls in and stops. The mindset for us would then be: how do we ever beat this? I don't think we've got their yet, but we've done ambient albums and more downbeat albums. It usually comes from a set of ideas and writing music all the time that comes together as a cohesive group. I mean for Tranklements there's probably twenty six tracks that never made it onto that album but they were all written and finished with something in mind that doesn't quite work. We create songs and tracks like a painter selects paints, and then the album is the picture. To ask briefly about the name, does it bear any relation to Winston Churchill's use of the term 'The Black Dog'? I think it can be many things, it's the mythical creature from the mist… the depression… but we've never used it in that sense. I think it was Regis that said that in the art of naming something big and dumb – Sandwell District was the biggest and dumbest name to ever use, but it just got adopted for that reason and I think sometimes, like Tranklements was just a great Sheffield word for a collection of special trinkets and objects, and that just makes perfect sense – we don't have to explain it any more than that. One of the things we did with that and The Return Ov Bleep 12”s, were that we refused to put a back story behind them. Just to see whether they'd actually get reviewed or whether journalists would actually write their own paragraphs instead of rewording what we'd written. I think for a lot of people the back story is more interesting than the fucking music. Do you write a lot of material that you don't actually release and just feel content to say we've made that experiment and it doesn't need to get any further? We've probably got about 500 terabytes of that stuff! I think it’s part of that creative process and I think it's a really natural thing. It's kind of like that when you first start as a musician, you emulate your heroes and you need to get that out of your system as quickly as possible, and then as an artist you're not really in control of what comes through that day. You can try as much as you want but, if you look at a trained musician who's is in the studio quite a lot they do things automatically and an analogy of that would be if you drive a car a lot sometimes you drive somewhere that you've driven thousands of times and not remember how you've got there because stuff becomes automatic. A lot of stuff we do - you can tell it's not Black Dog. We could probably invent ten different bands to fit these different songs into but I think it's really natural and just part of the process. I mean we wrote a really long sixty minute drone piece while the tennis final was on on Sunday, and that's never going anywhere. It's just like, how can we make that work? Some of the process of getting the orchestrated voices in against the noise to eek out the little spots that give you the release after ten minutes of extreme noise… some of those ideas might pop up somewhere else. I mean I think a lot of people do it - you as a writer, how many times have you rewritten paragraphs? Definitely in terms of the process I think it's really natural. Can you tell us a little bit about your live setup and what people can expect from your performance at Fabric on the 20th? Well we've got a brand new ninety minute live set where we've reconstructed the album and some of the 12”s into a unique set built for bass, built for bleeps and built for partying. fabric's got such a fucking great soundsystem. Are you in Room Two this time? Yeah, we played in Room One last time after Gary Beck, and he'd fucking rinsed the audience, so we had to start really slow. I've always preferred Room Two to be honest because you get a different mix. Its weird Room One feels more dressy - a boyfriend and girlfriend kinda thing, and Room Two is like “I’m here to dance”. I think they're going to put a load of extra bass in too; the sound guys there have always been great. So hopefully we’ll just be playing a really good set with loads of new stuff in that people get into. So to what extent do you prepare the set beforehand and how much is improvised? The set is broken down into different pieces, so it's all broken down into components. One of the things we learnt about twelve years ago from playing festivals was, we thought people would be playing what they usually play in clubs, not hit after hit after hit after hit you know? People were just playing a string of their biggest hits, and completely fucking the audience over in an hour, and we got caught out by that. We kind of deconstructed our set completely - we've also got different strength kick drums as well, so in a couple of places that we've played, I don't know what it is but a DJ will leave us on a jungle record that’s playing at 180bpm, and it's like “for fucks sake, how do we follow this?” But the answer is you don't, you just start again. We've got everything broken down, and I think if you play it end to end there's probably about four hours’ worth of material in there. We kind of have it set up so we can read the crowd and move the crowd, so we have as much freedom to try different things, and if that's not working we can do something else. It's kind of like we play live as a DJ would – every DJ has a ‘get the crowd back record’. We know what those tracks are for us but we're still not afraid to try things and expose people to stuff. You know that festival experience… even though it did wake us up to that situation, it's still not something that we would do. It's just awful and lazy. Finally what is in store for The Black Dog over the rest of the year? We've got another Darkhaus 12” coming, we're working on a project with Shaun Bloodworth and Warp Records, and then we've got another 12”. I think we've got three 12”s before the end of the year that have got quite a bit of variation really, quite a few ideas. We might do some stuff just digital, we're doing some film work with Shaun and we have a really big announcement that we can't tell anybody about – we're all bursting at the seams to say something but we can't! It's a really big project for us that we can't wait to talk about, and it's not musical either. There's quite a lot there and we've got gigs in Berghain and Moscow coming up as well.