TEAM SHADETEK interview

TEAM SHADETEK ARE GOOD CITIZENS OF THE GLOBAL VILLAGE



words: ALEX BOK BOK

Sometimes it takes an outsider to bring into focus what is happening on your very own doorstep. Paradoxically, grime is a music with locality at its core, with London as its framework, yet Internet export has allowed for the emergence of a cult following that spans the globe, threatening to turn an infant scene into a movement. This anonymous blogsphere fanbase exists as a parallel to the real-life grime scene, most members of which act oblivious to their online following. It's unmapped territory, both physically and economically - after all, how do you sell road mixtapes to bloggers in Japan?

Sure there has been some crossover - notably when Roll Deep's Riko got a Blogspot of his very own, or when Diplo donated a not-very-grime production to Kano's album - but no major creative moves had been made in either direction.
That is until recently, when Team Shadetek acted as inverse-ambassadors to the grime scene and announced their official involvement with Jahmek The World, the label operated by East London's Jammer. An MC and production pioneer, as an ex-member of N.A.S.T.Y. Crew, Jammer has been a key contributor to the development of the grime sound from 'day dot'.

Team Shadetek themselves come from New York via Berlin (the duo consists of Zack who is still based in NYC and Matt who has been living in Germany for the past months). They broke through into the electronica world in 2004 with the near-perfect instrumental mini-album Burnerism, a series of mangled yet sublime off-key hiphop productions. This was preceded by several releases on their own label, Shadetek Records, which brought together various artists in glitchy hiphop, breakcore and IDM-orientated ragga and dancehall. Their DJ mixes span all these genres as well, but always include big chunks of 'actual' dancehall (i.e. not made for the IDM scene), carefully selected mainstream hiphop tracks and, lately, more and more grime tunes have been making the cut. What sets Shadetek apart from many of the US DJs making these kinds of mixes right now is that they've followed the whole continuum of UK urban dance music, from an early interest in jungle right the way through 2step and early grime, rather than just jumping on the Dizzee bandwagon (like we here at DOT:ALT did).
Everything Team Shadetek touch, whether its track selection for DJ sets or producing their own tunes, has that sweet rich digital bumpin' sound - they definitely know what they like.


"In the dark days we're living in, people just want to party"



Matt Shadetek spoke to me on the phone from Berlin. A shorter version of this interview appears in the first issue of Fresh & Kleen Magazine, but here is the whole thing:


How are you doing, Matt?
Yeah pretty good. A little hung over. I went and saw Cameo,
Oh is he in Germany right now?
Yeah yeah, with JME, and Tinchy Stryder.
Oh yeah, was that good?
Yeah it was good.

I’m impressed that you guys, from NY via Germany have gotten so heavily into grime. How did you come across the sound first?
We came across the sound because we would come to London now and again to play shows. We were into jungle and then that kind of died out a little and we heard about this thing called speed garage and 2Step. But that never really broke in New York, didn’t really cross over too much, and also it was a little too happy for us.
Haha! Did you hear much of that?
I kind of tuned it out because the whole image I got of it was like champagne and this kind of thing and it wasn’t really what we were looking for at the time.
I think I heard about gangsta garage or whatever they were calling it then. So I had an idea that something like that existed but I really hadn’t heard anything. But then we were in London to do some shows and I went and asked in some shops, you know, ‘what is this?’ We didn’t know anything about it, and that was at the time that Eskimo1 was out with Harry Toddler on it. And so we picked that up, thinking ‘whoa what the fuck is this’. What grabbed me about Eskimo 1 when I bought it was actually the b-side, with Future Troubles over a riddim – I don’t even know, it might have been Blue Rizla riddim. But it was really slow with all these backwards sounds. We were just totally out of our depth, like what the fuck is this. So we got this and then there were a couple of other regular 2Step-y records we got as well, with rapping. We had those for a few years, before we found anything new.
Who were those by?
We had one Social Circles record, and Dynamite – Rush The DJ, and a few little things like that. Then the next thing I took note of was when I Luv U came out, and that was just like what the fuck, this is crazy. From there we started paying attention. When Wiley’s album dropped I was living in Germany, kind of closer to it and we came to England a lot more so we had more access. Cos really from outside of England it was fucking impossible to hear or get ANYTHING. You can’t buy the records and the only way you can hear it is by Internet radio. It’s still kind of like that, still really hard to keep up with.
Do places like Rhythm Division not ship internationally? I’ve never had to try.
They do ship internationally, but each record end up costing about 14 Euros. [White labels] are overpriced to begin with, and then we have the exchange rate and the shipping. It’s cheaper for me to fly over there to go record shopping, and usually I get gigs so I can pay for it.
So even with blogs, and people posting sets on yousendit you’d say that it was still pretty hard to follow the scene?
If you’re someone who spends a lot of time on the Internet, then definitely, there are a lot of good blogs. My best source of new stuff is Rinse and 1Xtra, because they webcast. So I make a lot of tapes of Cameo and Richard Vee, so that’s pretty cool. But the thing is, for me, I already know about the stuff and I’m kind of tuned into it so I can find those things, but other people are in the dark, you know what I mean? They can’t buy it in the shops or find it really easily. It’s just not on the radar.
I guess an American audience needs to be basically slapped in the face with it,
I’ve actually been surprised by the reaction of a lot of American people to the grime thing. We’ve been into various kind of British dance / rave music, and grime is the first one to have that hiphop side to it and that bashment side. It really breaks through to people in New York, people kind of relate to it. As opposed to like, European techno. As soon as they hear anything a little electronic they kind of thing God, you know...

It seems like I looked away for a second and you’re just in the scene now! Suddenly you’re working with Jammer and everything. How did that come about?
Shit, we’re very determined! The way it all came about was basically Jam, Kano and Lethal and D Double came to Berlin for a rave last June. I was on tour at the time, but my girl is a grime DJ as well [that’s Sheen], and I was like baby you have to go down there and meet them. And so she did, and she also met Cappo and Ratty from Hotheadz, who are really cool people. At the time we were trying to get some kind of distribution thing to get records out to Berlin. So we would go over and buy records from Cappo and Ratty. In the course of that we were in London hanging out with them for a few days and buying all of Jammer’s records. Sheen is a big fan of his tune Feedback - and she comes from breakcore and gabba and like the harder side of things, and she was raving about that tune. They were like, ‘oh you like that? We’ll take you to Jam’s studio’. They brought us round and introduced us, and we persuaded Jam to give us some dubs. We’d just spent all our money on a big stack of records. So then we decided to make this mixtape, we jammed together on that. He gave us tunes and we also got Earz and him and a bunch of MCs from the Neckle camp to record freestyles for it. We’re working pretty closely with Jam on that, I sent them some of our music and they were feeling it, and it kind of went like that.
So you’ve got both yours and Jammer’s productions on there?
It’s got two tracks from me, some exclusives from Jam and his camp, especially a lot of stuff from Lewi White and Digimon, they gave us a bunch of riddims and a couple of vocal tunes, and then we made a mix with all these released records and then sent it back to them and they rhymed over it. So it’s a continuous mix with MCing. We’re just finishing the artwork and then it’s gonna come out in the fall.
You’re putting it out on your label?
Yeah Shadetek records.
Fantastic, so it will be out in America as well?
Yeah that’s the goal. I’m actually not even planning to push it so much in London, just because it’s stuff that people in London have heard. We definitely have a few exclusives, but for me its more about taking something that has a bit of that pirate radio feeling and showing it to people in New York.

So over here you were received pretty well, then?
Yeah, I was pretty surprised actually.
Did you think it would be more difficult?
Well you never know really, but truth be told, one of the big things that drew me to grime was that there’s more sonic freedom there than in hiphop, because sometimes it can be a little orthodox. Especially New York hiphop can get really uptight, they just want this one sound. We’re a lot more into all kinds of different types of rhythm, so grime is real cool for that. People seem to be a lot more open-minded about what you can do and still call it grimey.
And also, as disorganised and weeded and moody as people are in the grime scene, I do find that they’re a lot easier to work with than hiphop people or reggae people, just because there’s still a newness about the scene and everyone’s hungry and wants to reach out and collaborate. And also a lot of the kids are into hiphop, and what with me coming from New York, they’re shocked that I’ve heard this stuff.
New York as some kind of promise land, somewhere worth striving to reach?
Yeah kind of, there are connotations of that, but also the fact that I’m making grime and I’m from New York, I think there’s a novelty aspect to it as well.
I’m really glad that there’s that kind of attitude rather than an insular one.

So what’s the relationship between you and Jammer going to be? Are you collaborating on tracks?
Yeah we did some producing together when he was in New York, we recorded some tunes with him and Double and Earz. The Earz one will be on our album on Sound Ink, which is coming out in the fall. And then we’ve got a tune with Double as well that Jammer is going to bring out on Jahmek The World. Basically we’re kind of signed to Jahmek, and we’re giving him beats for that, and he’s gonna help us get them vocalled. Like this new tune of mine called Scatter that him and Skepta just vocalled should be making its way onto radio now. It’s nothing but gunshots and a bassline, slow half-stepping grime. It’s pretty evil.
That’s coming out in London? That’s great!
Yeah, it’s cool. Jammer is working on his solo album and it’s gonna be on there, and there’s another beat of mine as well that he’s gonna record with some drum’n’bass MCs from the Midlands or something, which I’m interested to hear!
He’s putting together all these concept collabos. He’s got a lot of cool ideas that way.
Jam helped us hook up with Flirta D, so he’s got some tunes of ours that he’s supposed to be recording for now, I actually have to call and see how it’s going. But with Flirta, I’m a big fan of what he’s doing, all the sound effects and stuff is really cool.

What do you think about the state of electeonica / IDM / breakcore type music at the moment?
Uuhm. Man [sighs]. I lost interest. There are still a lot of people that are excited about that, you know… To me, a lot of those things kind of dead-ended. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. For me, the electronica thing was then exciting because it was new and there was a lot of innovation and change, a lot of things happening and a lot of artistic energy and new ideas, you know? For a while, every couple of weeks I would find stuff, it was like wow this is cool, this is giving me new ideas. At a certain point for me it became very imitative, and people became content to emulate a lot of the same sounds, imitating a lot of Warp artists, a synthesizer and a granulator going ghhk ghkk. I wasn’t content to stay there. A lot of people were. I know people who I’m friendly with who run labels and stuff who’ve at some point even said to me, like, we want to stay in this classic IDM / electronica style, y’know?
I can’t believe people would actually admit to that out loud, that’s frightening!
Yeah! This guy! Not naming any names, but he straight up said that to me. At that time in New York we were into drum’n’bass, and because of mayor Giuliani it was all criminalised and the raves were shut down. So we weren’t really going out raving, so we kind of shifted more towards this kind of cerebral shit. But now I feel like that’s swung around again, especially with the dark days we’re living in, people just want to party. And I really want something that’s a little more moving, not sitting in my house and scratching my chin. The electronica scene really got stuck in that.cul de sac, especially in the states, but also in England and Europe, with people just being pretentious and not dancing. And if you’ve seen me perform I fucking jump up and down on stage, you know what I mean, I get hyped and that’s what it’s about to me – energy and fun. To do that in front of a room of people who are standing there staring at you and not reacting is a big bummer.


I love your attitude to the music you play as all being danceable, especially to grime as a form of dance music. A lot of the time there seems to be this perception of it as just very still moody music to find a corner to, but I actually think it’s very direct dance music as well.
You should have seen it last night here in Berlin – people were fucken freaking out! Everybody was dancing and it was rammed. It’s been a series of raves for six or eight months now, and this one was the most packed one I’ve been to, people were fucking loving it.
I’ve been playing in some funny places because of these electronica connections with Warp Records. I just played Geneva and was playing grime for them and they just couldn’t believe it, like what the fuck is this.
There’s definitely that side that’s like that half-stepping, slow and dark kind of thing, like Wonder’s What, that sludge kind of thing. But even that, I don’t know if people dance to it, but it gets a big reaction. I guess it’s pretty direct as well, just slow.
And now there’s all this fast stuff coming out, like Dexplicit is kind of setting the pace with all this real jumpy kind of shit and it’s obvious to me that people should be dancing, you know?
Absolutely. And that’s what is vital to me about the way you approach this music in your sets.
I got the Dudes EP you put out recently. That’s awesome, especially the Para One track,
Oh yeah cool, that’s great man, I love that whole camp, the TTC kids, they’re really doing it, they’ve really got it going on.
Definitely. How do you know those guys?
We met them in Paris while touring. Teki came to the show and hollered at us. We actually recorded a track together as well, which is gonna come out, somewhere, with him vocalling one of our beats, a grimy kind of thing.

So everything you’re making now is at garage tempo?
It’s funny you know, we kind of abandoned the other tempos. But right now, it’s what I’m excited about. For me, it’s whatever style of music is moving the fastest, rapidly evolving, it keeps my interest. The past few years it’s been about dancehall and bashment, with crazy new riddims coming out all the time, constantly changing the beat, different patterns and stuff. So it’s refreshing and exiting, coming from the hiphop thing where everyone’s got the snare in the same place all the time. With the grime thing, there’s a lot of excitement there.

Of course you’re not the only ones getting involved with grime in some way – Diplo has taken an interest and produced a track for Kano, and there’s MIA who everyone insists has borrowed a lot from grime. What do you say to people who call that culture tourism, and what do you think about the issue of locality versus a globalised music scene?
Well, it a tough thing. I’m a middle-class white guy, I’m not from the ghetto, you know? I grew up in New York and I was exposed to that, but it’s not my background. So I’m definitely coming from whatever outsider kind of perspective. But to me one of the great things about music is that it crosses boundaries and brings people together. It sounds clichéd or whatever, but I’ve met tons of interesting people and been to tons of interesting places through my interest in music, so to me that’s just it.
In terms of being a cultural tourist or whatever, as long as your motivations are collaboration and dialog, as opposed to appropriation or theft, then people will respect you, people will see that you’re coming with something real and that you’re not just trying to cash in. That’s why I think now we’re working with Jam, cos he sees that we’re really about it and that we’re really into the music.