Q. Where are you from? What kind of environment did you grow up in?

I grew up on the south coast of England between Portsmouth and Southampton. I wouldn’t say either of these places are very inspirational musically, but I grew up in a very musical family. We always had a piano in the house, and my grandma paid for music lessons for me and my brother from a young age. She was a great pianist in her youth and wanted to carry on the musical passion to the new generation. My Dad also plays some piano and sings in a local choir, and both my parents are huge music fans so it was always a part of daily life. My brother is only 2 years younger than me and we share a lot of our musical taste, so growing up we played in a lot of bands together and spent a lot of time finding new music wherever we could.

Q. When did you first become interested in music? What kind of music initially hooked you?

Thinking back, it was probably mostly guitar music that hooked me initially. I remember listening to a bit of pop punk stuff like The Offspring and some old classics like Led Zeppelin, but it was probably when I found Radiohead I got really hooked in a major way. They opened my mind to things beyond a classic band setup as well, especially with Kid A/Amnesiac/Hail to the Thief. The Mars Volta were a big inspiration too. I had limited exposure to electronic stuff until I moved to London in 2006 and started going to see loads of Breakcore and Dubstep stuff and got totally hooked.

Q. Your music has a Hip Hop and Jazz feel to it. In the tones, the gaps between sounds, and the placement. Are you actually influenced by those music?

Yeah absolutely. I’d say more by Jazz than Hip-Hop honestly. I’ve played Saxophone since I was 11 and played in a lot of Jazz bands through my teenage years. Ultimately I fell more in love with the music production process and rave music more generally, but I’ve always enjoyed incorporating Jazz elements into what I’m doing. Hip-Hop’s more of a rhythmical thing for me. I like the way the drums work, the swing/wonk/groove makes the music really physically engaging when you translate that to a dance floor.

Q. What were your other interests besides music?

Science Fiction books, movies and video games have definitely been a big inspiration for me. The dystopian vision portrayed in that kind of fiction has always resonated with the atmosphere I’m trying to create in my music.

Q. When was the first time you went to a Club, Rave or Festival? What was your experience then?

One of the early events I went to that really shaped my musical journey was Bang Face in London. It was a melting pot of so many different kinds of rave music from Dubstep to the most extreme noisecore madness, all with a sense of humour and a great community of people. I still attend their yearly festival all these years later and it’s still great! It showed me you can really do whatever you want as long as you commit to it!

Q. What teenage years did you have?

I grew up just outside Southampton on the south coast of England. There was a couple of small venues and promoters that booked interesting bands but it wasn’t exactly a hotspot for new and interesting things. I was mostly trying to find as much interesting new music as possible with my brother (who now makes music as Minor Science). We would go into record stores and try and find the weirdest thing we could. I remember picking up a copy of Confield by Autechre and it absolutely scrambled our brains with how abstract and weird it was. We had a few bands together over the years. As I mentioned earlier I also played in a load of Jazz bands, including a quartet from about 12 years old. We used to get booked to play at the local cricket club after matches playing jazz standards, and garden parties and things like that. I pretty much just played in as many bands as possible. I think at one point I was in 12 different groups. It took up pretty much all my free time!

Q. When did Seppa start? What did you do before that?

I was making electronic music under the name Duskky for a long time. I’m not sure exactly when I started using that name, maybe 2008? It was originally mostly 140 stuff, but very breakbeat driven. We had a collective called Mothers Against Noise (which still exists now) with myself, my brother, Hurtdeer, Myr, [Insert Gore], Macka, Slavetothewage, wAgAwAgA and others which was pushing this kind of really breakbeat driven Dubstep we called Dubfunk. We did a few events in London before a good chunk of us moved to Bristol. I had an album released on Acroplane Recordings back in 2009 or 2010 that is a good example of that stuff: https://archive.org/details/ACP074_Duskky_-_Illeism

I joined Wonk#ay Records around that time and began to play a lot more events, especially psychedelic squat parties and similar things. Over the following 5 years or so I got more traction with what I was doing and started to see a route to have a more active music career as a producer. At some point in that period a deep house duo named Dusky got really big so I thought it would be a good time to change name, and switched to Seppa in 2016. It was good to have a fresh start as I knew a lot more about how to make music and could start from a better place. I’d already started to shift stylistically to something more technical and bass driven, incorporating Neurofunk DnB style sounds into what I was doing.

Around the time i changed name it was becoming really apparent that there was a huge audience in the USA so we started Slug Wife to push the collective of artists we knew making similar hip-hop infused bass music and that accelerated my career (and everyone elses) in a big way!

Q. I believe Seppa's music is also called "Glitch Hop". When did you first become aware of those musical styles? Do you actually consider your music "Glitch Hop"?

I don’t consider it Glitch Hop at this point. I think some of the later stuff I was doing as Duskky could fall in to that category, but to my mind Glitch Hop is more of a midtempo 100bpm kinda thing, which is a speed I don’t really mess with now. The rhythmical feel is quite different in my opinion. I got connected to the Half Time DnB thing when that was big but really it never was in my mind, it was very much it’s own Hip-Hop driven style. There’s a big scene of people making this kind of music in America which I’m grateful to be connected to. I don’t really see what I’m doing as genre specific though. My music ranges from 60bpm to 90bpm and incorporates elements of most kinds of electronic music that fall in that range.

Q. Please tell me about the history of Slug Wife. How did this label/collective get started?

Slug Wife was started but myself, FFINN and Kursa as a way to collectively push our music and share fanbases. We ran it but we supported Lone Drum, Skope, Reso, Vellum, Ben Pest, AKOV and other artists who made music in the same vein. Really it’s because of FFINN’s involvement that we could make it happen, they had the artistic vision that complemented the music and the organisational skills to make it happen.

2024.09

MDC Interview#65 " Seppa "