Globetrotting Night Slugs Blaze a Trail

Night Slugs co-founder Alex Sushon, aka Bok Bok, muses on the label's atlas-spanning origins and why US dance music sounds like the end of the world (in a good way)

Feature by Ray Philp | 09 Jan 2012

Like most post-whatever, UK-based electronic music labels, Night Slugs have been prey to some pretty quixotic stabs at taxonomy. Looking beyond the puzzlement and pedantry commonly observed on whatever internet forum you might care to mention (and, if we're being entirely frank, on pages like these as well), where splitting hairs seems a semi-professional sport, it suggests that dance music in general has reached a state of maturation that no longer makes it possible to apply specificity to music in HMV aisle-friendly terms of reference. Alex Sushon, aka Bok Bok, who runs the label alongside James Connolly (L-Vis 1990), has been at pains to adopt a similar philosophy to defining the label's output over the last two years, coyly tagging it as 'house', 'bass house' and other variations of the term. Two years on from Night Slugs' inaugural release (Mosca's drowsy take on house and grime, Square One), that nebulousness continues to serve them well, though casting a glance even further back gives a better indication of the scope of influences that the imprint draws upon. 

Talking about the Night Slugs parties that predated the label, Sushon says: "At the time it wasn't such an obvious thing, but I guess the whole remit for the party was to try and unite all of these various styles which we were starting to play, some of which were UK based, and some of which were regional American styles, and also some African stuff too, so I guess at the time it wasn't so obvious to do that within a UK context, within the context of sound system music or urban dance music, that kind of heritage we have of it…that was the kind of idea for the party at the time."

Night Slugs came into being not only to house a melting pot of globetrotting club music. Crucially, it offered an outlet for Sushon to satisfy an interest in grime music and genres similar to it, though he adds that other artists on the Night Slugs roster – Girl Unit in particular – were quick to move beyond that remit.  

"People like Jam City and Kingdom take a lot of influence from [grime], and definitely others, people like Girl Unit have started to, but at the same time there's a lot of other stuff going on there too, and all the producers really have brought something of their own to the table, but also we have a lot of common interests in other stuff like grime." 

In a previous interview, Sushon spoke of establishing Night Slugs on the back of a disenchantment with grime music. Elaborating further on this point, Sushon says that "part of it is my own trajectory as a person discovering music as well as a DJ, y'know, you just learn about stuff don't you? You just discover that other stuff is also cool and has similar faculties, y'know that grime had for me, I found in other places too. Part of the reason that I started looking I guess was that the whole infrastructure for grime unfortunately wasn't really there in that era because it became less rave orientated, and less club orientated, and more of a mixtape culture started to take over with MCs being the focus, and more of a home listening kind of perspective and aim for the whole movement."

"I guess that's where it started to lose me a little bit, and I still follow it really closely but it started to lose me in the sense that I was looking for club music as a DJ, y'know, and that's what led to us trying to experiment with other stuff."

Said experiments have encompassed everything from glossy R&B (Kingdom and Girl Unit have made a knack of turning pop-leaning vocals into something altogether more forceful) to more rugged genotypes of US club music, and Sushon's DJ sets – frequently performed in tandem with Connolly – are particularly reflective of the label's affinity for US-based music, itself a model for hybrid music that takes guidance from far beyond its borders.  

"Both me and James have been playing a lot of stuff from Jersey, both from the Jersey club kind of scene and also the vogue scene. Fade To Mind – which is our sister label that Kingdom runs – they've just found a release from Mike Q, who's one of the better-known artists from that kind of Jersey vogue scene – they're just really really great club tools, they're really great stripped-down drum tracks. They're pretty apocalyptic sounding and pretty punishing, so yeah, they're cool, something I play a lot at the moment." 

Night Slugs' prolific 24 months (2010 alone saw a total of 16 singles, compilations and white labels, a release schedule that Sushon says took "a shitload of work") is at odds with the producer's sporadic production output, mostly as a result of Sushon and Connolly's focus on the label. That said, the Southside EP, a sinewy grime workout that, in a manner of speaking, tore the summer a new one, and his more recent collaboration with Dutch house producer Tom Trago, the unambiguously titled Night Voyage Tool Kit, should pave the way for Sushon to become a more prominent artist in his own right in 2012 – but, as ever, he has other artists to think about. 

"In terms of Jam City, [making an album] was something that we suggested to him and he decided to work with it because, me personally, I would listen to his music in big batches, and it does seem to make sense alongside other tracks by him. The stuff he's writing now is orientated to being part of a journey… I'm really all about the club experience, yknow, in terms of production, that's what motivates me to make tracks so I can play them out and so other people can play them out.

"My music just lives in the club, so for the time being an album format is just not something I'm that interested in."

 

http://nightslugs.net