Long Live the New Flesh: Marshall Applewhite

As he prepares to release his debut album, Leave Earth, avid metalhead Joel Dunn gives us the lowdown on his sludge sound, his musical education and his love for grime

Feature by Ronan Martin | 05 Dec 2014

“I didn’t really go out to parties ever.” Asked about the electronic music scene in his native Detroit and its influence on his work, Joel Dunn AKA Marshall Applewhite gives an early indication that he can perhaps be considered as something of a studious outsider. To listen to his new material – a gritty, downtempo synthesis of acid and techno – you may draw several conclusions about Dunn which belie both his time in the game and the scope of his various musical interests. In particular, listening to his accomplished debut album as Applewhite, it’s hard to believe the 31 year old is relatively new to production and hasn’t necessarily been raised on a strict diet of classic house and techno.

The album, Leave Earth, is released this month and is brimming with rich acid lines and booming percussion. It is underpinned by a frequent sense of doom, emanating from eerie synth hooks and pitched down vocal drawls which are deployed with a sense of careful restraint throughout. This creepy ambience is framed perfectly by the concept surrounding Dunn’s assumed name – Marshall Applewhite was the infamous leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult who convinced 39 people to commit mass suicide in the belief their spirits would be taken aboard a spacecraft to another planet. Heavy.

The overall sound of the Applewhite material is what Joel and a small group of fellow practitioners call sludge – “an amalgamation of a slowed down version of ghettotech, acid and industrial,” he explains.  “It’s really distorted and more raw.” Crucially, over 12 tracks, Dunn crafts an album which could convincingly slot into the back catalogue of one of techno’s more well-renowned past masters. This makes it all the more intriguing to discover the somewhat unconventional path Joel took to his current style.    

“When I first started producing, I was playing guitar in metal bands, but I didn’t like working with people,” he admits with a chuckle. “So I started buying drum machines, just so I could record my own stuff.” This led to him finding out where techno sounds originated from and he quickly learned more about classic equipment such as the famous Roland 808.

As well as through these one man band experiments, Dunn was exposed to some essential music from his teenage years onwards, as his interest in shopping for vinyl developed. “I wasn’t a part of the rave scene per se, but I grew up in the record stores,” he explains. With the “older heads” there to assist, he was always going to have a good grounding and he talks fondly of the way his passion for music evolved. “You’d go into the record store and explain what you were into and they would tell you how bad it was,” he says, laughing. “So they would guide you a little further.”

“The radio used to be different back then too. We used to have all the ghettotech mix shows and the booty bass mix shows – that’s the kind of stuff I grew up on. I was a little too young to catch all the Wizard stuff [an early Jeff Mills guise] and all the actual techno going on in the city when it was first coming out.”

That love of ghettotech, and his time spent at record stores over the years, led him to strike up a friendship with local luminary Brian Gillespie, better known as Starski of the mighty Databass label. “I had been giving him music since I was a kid,” Dunn explains. “It just finally clicked one day.” With the slowing down of the output from Databass – a vinyl label in what was a troubling time for the format – the two decided to set up their own imprint, Yo Sucka!, focusing on what became classified as moombahton, alongside housier material and even bass music. In fact, Dunn’s early productions as OktoRed are encouraging examples of a US producer with more of a cultivated take on dubstep than most on that side of the pond.

“I do whatever comes to my head,” says Dunn when asked about his genre-hopping approach to production. Over the course of our conversation, the most apparent aspect of his approach to music is his refreshing lack of fixation on any one sound or scene. He does hold a regular VJ slot at a popular Detroit afterhours spot which attracts mostly a bass music crowd, yet it was beginning to play more music there that allowed his more recent tastes to come to the fore. “[Sludge] was kind of facilitated by the afterhours scene here,” he explains. “It goes down better. You wouldn’t play it at like 10 o’clock at night, but after two or three in the morning it goes off really well.”

Seemingly always looking for other avenues in music, Dunn's most recent experiments have been with grime, and he reveals that he has just been asked to contribute to a compilation for celebrated UK outlet Big Dada. “I happened upon it one day,” he says when asked how he developed a taste for the genre. “It had to have been a Dizzee Rascal track; he was the first MC I heard and I kind of lost my mind.

“This had to be 2004 or 2005. It was just really hard to access over here. We didn’t have the social networking in the way we do now so I didn’t really know anybody overseas. It was just a matter of getting on the share sites or finding bootlegs of pirate radio broadcasts. I couldn’t stand dubstep when I first heard it. It was really boring to me. I just liked the MCs [in grime]. It just gives it this hype.”

With his appreciation of the raucous vocal styles found in grime, it’s no surprise that Dunn is keen to use the OktoRed guise to collaborate with MCs wherever possible – and he reveals that plans are already afoot to team up with Manga of Roll Deep on a couple of tracks. The timing is certainly fitting for a dip into such territory – “I hear from friends over there that grime is actually starting to take off,” says Dunn, though you suspect he would pursue his interests in a particular genre regardless of current trends.  

When we do finally get round to talking specifically about particular Detroit names that strike a chord with Dunn, the artists he cites go some way to explaining the richness to be found at the heart of his debut Marshall Applewhite album. “As far as dance music goes, electro was the first for me,” he reveals. “Japanese Telecom, Drexciya, all of the UR stuff – the electro side of that stuff is just mind-melting. Luckily, growing up here, we had no shortage of records ever. That was the kind of stuff that mixes with the ghettotech. A lot of the ghettotech stuff was drawn from that.”

Joel Dunn represents, to some extent, a new breed of Detroit producer. While the musical foundations for many of the pioneering first wave of Detroit techno artists may have been in Motown music or George Clinton, there are also those for whom metal can in some way play a peculiar part in the genesis of new forms. Ghettotech, itself descended from early techno tracks, can become the first point of reference for those with an interest to discover the likes of Drexciya and Underground Resistance. With the increasing cross pollination of genres and new generations developing their own take on classic sounds, it seems safe to assume that the birthplace of techno will continue to provide a healthy environment where electronic music of all hues can evolve in ways its pioneers could not have possibly anticipated. This can only be a good thing. All hail Motor City Sludge!

Leave Earth by Marshall Applewhite is out on Mon 8 Dec via Yo Sucka! https://soundcloud.com/marshall-applewhite