On Tyrant and Pacing
The morbidity I felt in my teens wasn’t really my own. It felt pushed upon me - illness, doomy doctors, the comprehension that life was wildly short and the like. Looking back however I feel grateful that grief and the pain and befuddlement that surrounds death remained a mystery for those years. Then in sixth form two of the kids in my school tragically passed away, one in a car crash and the other attempting to jump between two buildings. We were 17. I had this sense that life was fleeting but the brevity in these cases was cold and hard on the one hand, and so difficult to fathom on the other.
I remember few other things from that year, my first partner was sectioned, school and its currents seemed inconsequential in the face of life’s turmoil and heartbreaks, and me and a small circle of friends spent more and more time balancing what felt so dark with small, consistent epiphanies in nightclubs. At that time nights stretched long. Every one a multi-act affair pricked with moments that felt like they offered real insight into the depths of feeling, love, pain and all the rest that we slide through in life. Dance music genuinely seemed to play with time in a way that promised more to life. None of us wanted to be DJs and there was something magical in us having no great expectations of life beyond but being lifted by sharing our feelings and dancing, week after week. Slip through the dark surface of the night and here was something that bordered on compassion for the human spirit. And we learnt quickly. We learnt that cheap thrills were indeed cheap. Trance and DnB passed quickly through our interests primarily because both promoters and DJs were fixated on competition and sugar highs. Dubstep and the Hoxton/DFA fall out scenes seemed more stoned/drunk in their energies, which was good for a Wednesday but lacked the catharsis needed at the weekend. We learnt about the slow swelling of feeling over hours. We learnt from the DJs who were patient with us.
No one seemed more patient than Craig Richards. I first heard Richards not in the club, but at a friends apartment. My friend Konstantina had the two Tyrant CDs that Richards mixed with Lee Burridge. These mixes felt like they needed to be somehow understood as the sequencing seemed enigmatic. They did that thing of moving as if through water. Looking (listening) back I see that they weren’t that mysterious, they just contained a subtlety that wasn’t in huge abundance in dance music (it rarely is) and yet were also fun and melancholic in that measured way that lies at the kernel of Detroit music. With time I came to understand that the musicians and DJs I am naturally drawn to are the ones in which it feels like all of music potentially lives within them, sometimes tip-toeing in and out of the choices they cast, at other times revealing itself through a kind of controlled explosion. I think this is partly why I was drawn to electronic music. It sucked everything in and diffused certain elements of things. In a club environment it often reduced ego to a supporting role in a play of mutual togetherness.
The third Tyrant mix is a better example of this expansiveness in Richard’s. I may be wrong but I think it was done without Burridge. It platforms his use of electro, beatdown and disco soul in a way that one would hear frequently through his years as a resident at fabric. One of the problems when thinking about, or even judging what a DJ does, is how you capture the most important aspect of the craft: the selection of the track that comes next. Every attempt usually gets lost in some bullshit about technique. Technique is a secondary concern. It matters less. If your ability to better select the sequence of what you play in a way that is perfectly attuned to your surroundings and a broader sense of where you are going, if that ability is good, then you will do this job well. It goes against our primal wish to be wowed, of needing spectacle and dazzlement. It delivers on a slower, deeper level that you have to give yourself to. There is not much to see. It certainly doesn’t chime with media consumption or competition. It really can only exist in its element: the club. I feel that this is where Richards has spent much of his life focusing his learning and he is now exceptional at it.
Over time the Tyrant mixes have all suffered from being slightly outside the currents of the revival that has kept a lot of the music from that period relevant. The problem they had was often the shadow that fabric 01 cast (to a lesser degree the direction of Burridge’s career was perhaps another contributing factor.) fabric 01 remains shockingly crisp, it has never really dated and that is a testament to Richards ear. It is an example of this form of pristine pacing. It is riddled with the subtle drawings of rhythmic contrast that marks this London sound at its best. Over the years I have often drawn metaphors for this style when talking about it. The best at it were builders with the pieces of a prefabricated room, building an environment we sank into, beguiled by and in perfect comfort as we stetched details in our joints. We were zooming into our bodies with a patient puzzlemaster guiding us.
We had found a place where time mattered less and every hour was ours. That cut through with nothing but gratitude that all this existed and we could do it. Being in the best clubs we were drawn in to zones of anticipation, other times a spangled realization at what had just occurred. Unlike the outside world every hour was ours and bristled with the potential of joy, abandonment and release. We climbed into feeling, we climbed out of a form of mental isolation. There were moments that drew tears and a dissolution into the present that taught a young person that what if the most important moment is not the next one, but this one. And what if this one can lay the ground for the next one, and that one can give the one after that a shape and form so perfect we are slipped back into the morning light replenished.
That was the essence of the kind of patient pacing that Richards was beginning to excel in. Twenty years hence Richards and I had a lovely conversation about being products of art school. I always had the fortune to have grown up in a household in which expressing oneself creatively was expected and often second nature. Teaching, art, the body and movement were the roots of every person in my family and here I was finding my own path from these roots into my own personhood. It took a long time to learn that grief and love are intertwined. For the time being, a time when me and my friends truly came of age, the sadnesses in life were humbled by the physical movement and outpourings that the club was a catalyst for. We had the privilege to be able to exist in every feeling fully, we had a place to let those feelings surge, and one another to churn through them with. These nights connected these emotions. If life had a sense of profound impermanence then this was even more fleeting. It remains a kind of magic.
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- Mum, teaching a course connecting the body and its movements to life drawing.
I remember few other things from that year, my first partner was sectioned, school and its currents seemed inconsequential in the face of life’s turmoil and heartbreaks, and me and a small circle of friends spent more and more time balancing what felt so dark with small, consistent epiphanies in nightclubs. At that time nights stretched long. Every one a multi-act affair pricked with moments that felt like they offered real insight into the depths of feeling, love, pain and all the rest that we slide through in life. Dance music genuinely seemed to play with time in a way that promised more to life. None of us wanted to be DJs and there was something magical in us having no great expectations of life beyond but being lifted by sharing our feelings and dancing, week after week. Slip through the dark surface of the night and here was something that bordered on compassion for the human spirit. And we learnt quickly. We learnt that cheap thrills were indeed cheap. Trance and DnB passed quickly through our interests primarily because both promoters and DJs were fixated on competition and sugar highs. Dubstep and the Hoxton/DFA fall out scenes seemed more stoned/drunk in their energies, which was good for a Wednesday but lacked the catharsis needed at the weekend. We learnt about the slow swelling of feeling over hours. We learnt from the DJs who were patient with us.
No one seemed more patient than Craig Richards. I first heard Richards not in the club, but at a friends apartment. My friend Konstantina had the two Tyrant CDs that Richards mixed with Lee Burridge. These mixes felt like they needed to be somehow understood as the sequencing seemed enigmatic. They did that thing of moving as if through water. Looking (listening) back I see that they weren’t that mysterious, they just contained a subtlety that wasn’t in huge abundance in dance music (it rarely is) and yet were also fun and melancholic in that measured way that lies at the kernel of Detroit music. With time I came to understand that the musicians and DJs I am naturally drawn to are the ones in which it feels like all of music potentially lives within them, sometimes tip-toeing in and out of the choices they cast, at other times revealing itself through a kind of controlled explosion. I think this is partly why I was drawn to electronic music. It sucked everything in and diffused certain elements of things. In a club environment it often reduced ego to a supporting role in a play of mutual togetherness.
The third Tyrant mix is a better example of this expansiveness in Richard’s. I may be wrong but I think it was done without Burridge. It platforms his use of electro, beatdown and disco soul in a way that one would hear frequently through his years as a resident at fabric. One of the problems when thinking about, or even judging what a DJ does, is how you capture the most important aspect of the craft: the selection of the track that comes next. Every attempt usually gets lost in some bullshit about technique. Technique is a secondary concern. It matters less. If your ability to better select the sequence of what you play in a way that is perfectly attuned to your surroundings and a broader sense of where you are going, if that ability is good, then you will do this job well. It goes against our primal wish to be wowed, of needing spectacle and dazzlement. It delivers on a slower, deeper level that you have to give yourself to. There is not much to see. It certainly doesn’t chime with media consumption or competition. It really can only exist in its element: the club. I feel that this is where Richards has spent much of his life focusing his learning and he is now exceptional at it.
Over time the Tyrant mixes have all suffered from being slightly outside the currents of the revival that has kept a lot of the music from that period relevant. The problem they had was often the shadow that fabric 01 cast (to a lesser degree the direction of Burridge’s career was perhaps another contributing factor.) fabric 01 remains shockingly crisp, it has never really dated and that is a testament to Richards ear. It is an example of this form of pristine pacing. It is riddled with the subtle drawings of rhythmic contrast that marks this London sound at its best. Over the years I have often drawn metaphors for this style when talking about it. The best at it were builders with the pieces of a prefabricated room, building an environment we sank into, beguiled by and in perfect comfort as we stetched details in our joints. We were zooming into our bodies with a patient puzzlemaster guiding us.
We had found a place where time mattered less and every hour was ours. That cut through with nothing but gratitude that all this existed and we could do it. Being in the best clubs we were drawn in to zones of anticipation, other times a spangled realization at what had just occurred. Unlike the outside world every hour was ours and bristled with the potential of joy, abandonment and release. We climbed into feeling, we climbed out of a form of mental isolation. There were moments that drew tears and a dissolution into the present that taught a young person that what if the most important moment is not the next one, but this one. And what if this one can lay the ground for the next one, and that one can give the one after that a shape and form so perfect we are slipped back into the morning light replenished.
That was the essence of the kind of patient pacing that Richards was beginning to excel in. Twenty years hence Richards and I had a lovely conversation about being products of art school. I always had the fortune to have grown up in a household in which expressing oneself creatively was expected and often second nature. Teaching, art, the body and movement were the roots of every person in my family and here I was finding my own path from these roots into my own personhood. It took a long time to learn that grief and love are intertwined. For the time being, a time when me and my friends truly came of age, the sadnesses in life were humbled by the physical movement and outpourings that the club was a catalyst for. We had the privilege to be able to exist in every feeling fully, we had a place to let those feelings surge, and one another to churn through them with. These nights connected these emotions. If life had a sense of profound impermanence then this was even more fleeting. It remains a kind of magic.
- Mum, teaching a course connecting the body and its movements to life drawing.