“I wanted to do something that was not melodic”

Posted February 16, 2015 in music  |  No Comments so far

The Quietus have published a brilliant interview with Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad.

It’s brilliant because it goes a bit deeper than you might expect into Shocklee’s philosophy of sound, which was—and still is—ambitious, avant-garde and futuristic.

And keep in mind that none of these [Public Enemy] records have got reverb. I’m not using reverb on any of these records. Because reverb softens the sound. And that’s not Public Enemy’s sound. Public Enemy has to be brimstone and fire. Thunder and lightning. It can’t be soft and warm and familiar. Otherwise it won’t create agitation. So with each sample I was pulling up the high frequencies, in order to pull up, not just the snare of the guitar or whatever, but also pulling up the ambience, and even the imperfections in the vinyl itself. So that’s why people started talking about “noise”.

As a kid I was really into Public Enemy. You can imagine me as a more boring, Home Counties version of John Connor from Terminator 2, in a PE t-shirt, doing my paper round every day while deafening myself with Fear of a Black Planet.

Later on I got into My Bloody Valentine as well, thinking of myself as some sort of eclectic connoisseur, but as this interview makes clear, there was always much more in common between MBV and Public Enemy than early-1990s indie tribalism would have dared acknowledge.

One of the records I thought was really cool recently was the My Bloody Valentine record. Dope. It stayed true to what it was.

I always had a lot of respect for Shocklee but that interview made me have even more.


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