Beneath the Label: Ruf Kutz
Wet Play co-founder Ruf Dug is the cat behind Ruf Kutz, Mancunia's primary purveyor of punchdrunk disco drenched in 80s nostalgia. He chats cassette culture and Helvetica predecessors ahead of his Dancers Wanted party this Saturday
The Skinny: Hey Ruffy, you’ve been touring a lot in Europe this year, playing legendary venues like the Golden Pudel. Any other offbeat finds party-wise, or any nice surprises?
Ruf Dug: Oh man there have been some fun adventures! Pretty much everywhere I've played has been really good... on the offbeat angle I think the Inkfolk lot in Hebden Bridge might have to be the winners – a lovely bunch of people of all ages and walks of life who live up in the hills and come together every few months for a four-day mini festival of sorts in an old mill... Saturday night is the big dance and it's quite the session.
Returning to the Northwest, you were involved in founding Manchester's Wet Play, which birthed some genuinely affirming parties for many in the city. After a while, you went your own way, arguably at its underground peak, pursuing Ruf Kutz exclusively. What informed this decision?
Putting on a party, and particularly Wet Play with all its chaos and colour, is for me a pretty massive endeavour, physically and also emotionally! It takes up a lot of time and energy and as I started to get more gigs out of town as well as working a day job and producing and trying to spend time with my girlfriend – well, something had to give. I remain immensely proud of and grateful for every minute I was involved with Wet Play. It's the best party I've played at in the last six years.
The vision and aesthetic for Ruf Kutz is, it’s fair to say, quite specific thus far. Having released from a fairly small group of producers to date, do you do much A&R work, or do records just find their way to you?
I just work with my friends. I will ask one of my mates to give me some tunes or make something for me; that's kind of the extent of my A&R work. I don't get stuff sent to me by hopeful strangers, and I don't go out searching SoundCloud for unreleased gold to put out. It's more a place for me to do what I want personally – I don't really envisage ever doing more than two or three records a year on it, and I really want each one to be ultra special to me.
With Ruf Tapes, you're taking a widely available format (the mix) and putting it on a slightly archaic format (the cassette tape). The latter has featured widely across your various endeavours; what is its appeal to you? Can you give us an idea about the latest one?
I've loved tape and cassettes forever... some of my most powerful early musical memories involve listening to cassettes in an enormous Walkman that needed loads of batteries and chewed up tapes, and I was a massive Sinclair Spectrum guy and that was all cassette-based, so I personally have a very romantic attachment to the format.
As far as the Ruf Tapes blog goes, I wanted to make a series of mixes last year and my girlfriend had just come back from the charity shop with a load of blank tapes for me, so it was a fairly logical step to put the two together. I'm also lucky that there's a company called Tapeline very close to my house, and they're one of the only places in the UK left that still do tape duplication, and they do it at a very reasonable price. So to mark a year of doing the blog I got some tapes made up to sell, to sort of pay homage to the old days of mixtapes being sold in record shops and the like.
Of course, not many folk have cassette players any more so mine come with a download code, but I've found that a lot of people like simply owning the physical cassette whether or not they can actually play it... it becomes a sort of fetish item, which in some way it always has been for me.
You’ve finally got your own party in Manchester, in the very suitable and smoke-filled Soup Kitchen basement, Dancers Wanted – which we understand features both you and a guest? June’s edition features Luv*Jam, who doesn’t seem to play that often. What’s your relationship? And what about his work gives him the Ruffy seal of approval?
I've known Luv*Jam for a few years now – we always wanted to get him on at Wet Play but it never quite worked out. Matt from Piccadilly [Records] was hooked into his sound right from the outset and once he played me a few records I got straight into his vibe. He definitely is carving his own path; the Dream House sound is quite distinctive, very synthetic and futuristic but warm and melodic, not quite techno, not quite house and most certainly not moody music for boys to all hang around and discuss on internet forums! There's a bright melancholy to his sound... and he is also a bloody excellent DJ and he doesn't really get around that much, so I'm excited for him to be coming to Soup... the whole angle around the night is just me and one guest all night long, no set times or anything like that, just a good night of friends playing records for people to dance to.
The artwork for the night is very distinctive; who’s behind it?
It's me! I like halftone screens and I also like typefaces – a designer friend hooked me up with a copy of the Akzidenz-Grotesk font which is the original typeface used for Helvetica. One for the nerds!
Finally, you played a memorable Boiler Room in Bradley Zero’s front room in Peckham. But I know you’re likely to turn down other media opportunities if you think they’re bullshit. How do you feel about rave and party culture in the UK at the moment, and the involvement of big brands in the proliferation of channels and media otherwise purporting to be underground? Do you feel like running a label is one of the last few ways to do something without major interference?
Jesus, you've finished with a proper essay question here! Man... well look, there's always a thick end and a thin end, and at the thick end there are loads of people and loads of money – and wherever there is loads of money there are always people who are pretty much all about the $$$ and not much else at all and they can fuck things up really easily – which is not to say they will fuck things up but come on, it usually goes that way to some extent, right?
Head on down towards the thin end, though, and there's always some weirdos in a room somewhere with a sound system and odd records and no logos and no money. Powerful people have a real interest in keeping you up the thick end, though, and they will do everything they can (and they can do a lot) to make you stay there.
I don't think I need to say which end I prefer, but you know everybody needs at least a little bit of money and it's a big old world out there, so it's best not to be too judgy. There's room for us all and I think there's probably more freedom down the thin end than there has ever been. It's just all those bell-ends up the thick end making a lot of noise that makes us think differently!