Chin Stroke Records: The Importance of Being Earnest

Ahead of a club night which promises drunken karaoke, comic breakcore and unusual smells in the Vic Bar, we try to talk sense with a DJ who pretends to be your dad

Feature by Ronan Martin | 17 Nov 2016

As club culture has branched off in various distinct directions over the years, electronic music and DJing have increasingly acquired a more sophisticated status in some quarters. While this signifies the welcome acceptance of a branch of music which was all too often trashed in its infancy, it has also meant that a certain po-faced attitude thrives in some sectors of the 'underground'. Everything must have solid conceptual foundations or speak to something more significant than people having a good time.

Of course, there should always be scope to allow club music to explore spaces outwith the hedonistic confines of the messy weekend, and many artists and labels certainly find the right tone in that regard. But let’s be honest: much of the faux intellectualism and over-conceptualised drivel which serves as a backdrop for electronic music is deserving of the most savage mockery.

Enter Chin Stroke Records.

Founded by DJ Dadmagnet in collaboration with DJ Detweiler – he of flutedrop infamy – Chin Stroke combines a penchant for pisstakery with a love of ridiculous sounds. From incessant airhorn edits of commercial dance tracks to comic breakcore, donk and drunken karaoke, the label doesn’t like to take things too seriously... to say the least. In essence, the project is simply a means for like-minded people to put out silly music and throw unusual parties where fun takes precedence. Yet in their release blurbs and social media communications, they also deliver a pitch perfect skewering of the most pretentious excesses of music promotion.

When you consider Richie Hawtin’s baffling decision to start shifting toothbrushes in recent years, ensuring minimal techno goes hand-in-hand with a commitment to minimal plaque build up, Chin Stroke’s book of abstract sketches of TV soap characters seems only marginally more ridiculous... and infinitely more worthwhile. In fact, the book is pretty impressive in its own odd way and it points to one indisputable characteristic of the label: on the wind-up or not, they put a lot of effort into what they do.

Anyone familiar with the comically subversive tendencies of DJ Dadmagnet, otherwise known as Bertie Suesat-Williams, will recognise his firm dedication to well-executed stunts. In recent years he has published his own book off the back of hiding 50 haiku poems in packets of Sainsbury’s cookies, led an online trolling war against DIY chain Wickes over ownership of the term ‘Power Tool Ballads’, and lent his best efforts to certain other satirical plots to which he would rather not publicly attach his name. Earlier this year, Bertie and his crew took Chin Stroke TV to the Bangface Weekender for the first time, broadcasting to screens across the festival site with a specially curated selection of daft programmes and live segments.

With club sets featuring him tinkering around with assorted DIY paraphernalia, channeling a middle-aged father at work in his shed, Dadmagnet leads a troupe of similarly obscure characters under the Chin Stroke banner. For the upcoming Art School party, the label is represented by bird-sampling kitsch peddler Queerhawk, traditional Scottish donk enthusiast Dairylea Donker and, of course, comic flute virtuoso DJ Detweiler. Big label representation comes in the shape of Planet Mu’s breakcore mashup king DJ Shitmat, whose set may have rare status as one of the more serious elements of a night which serves as an album launch for label newcomer DJ Stretchmark.

But could it be too simple to write the entire Chin Stoke gameplan off as an ironic takedown of cheesy tunes? Amidst all the jokes, perhaps there actually is some truth to the label’s suspicious claim to be tapping into “post-ironic” sentiment. Could there really be an odd kind of sincerity to what they do, taking it beyond mere irony, towards a genuine celebration of the inane? Of course, getting bogged down in the extent to which the label is engaged in some form of self-referential double bluff kind of spoils the fun and is likely to leave us just scratching our heads, or even worse, stroking our chins.

In any case, the parties sound like a great laugh, providing you appreciate the humour in a man using power tools in a club to a backdrop of classic rock anthems. And that’s everyone, right?

So with the label promoting DJ Stretchmark’s album Peng – perhaps their most unashamedly puerile release to date – we got in touch with Dadmagnet to discuss the plans for the Glasgow launch party. We also hoped to enquire further into Chin Stroke’s “post-ironic” mission, with the aim of getting some serious answers on what makes the label tick.

More fool us.

The Skinny: How did Chin Stroke first come about and what are your aims with the project?

Dadmagnet: I started Chin Stroke Records with my son, DJ Detweiler, in 2013. The label began as a way of addressing the need for an honest, old-fashioned, family-run hub for performative and post-analytic contemporary music praxis.

Who or what are the main influences behind the label?

The label is mostly influenced by strands of Poststructuralist thought – thinkers such as Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard and their intellectual descendants. We also really like watching EastEnders and eating crisps.

So much so that a recent release was a book of drawings of EastEnders characters, sketched by a blindfolded artist. What can you tell us about it?

140 Blindfolded Drawings of EastEnders Characters was compiled by a long-standing family friend, Henry Collins. He aimed to reproduce Walford’s cultural icons in a way which transcended the limits of optical vision. In doing so, he drew inspiration from a semi-conscious and immensely personal reservoir of memory and sentiment, built up over a lifetime of EastEnders viewing.

In a cultural landscape dominated by the visual, the garish and the pornographic, such a methodology becomes profoundly radical. To art critic Gary Hernandez, “the depth of Collins’ works can be read as an antidote to the overbearing superficiality of the world from which they were wrought.”

Your decision to release a book hints at a bold vision of what a record label can and should be in 2016. Do you have any plans to diversify further?

We have always felt that an exclusive focus on music is not only limiting in a practical sense, but is based on an artificial and historically constructed compartmentalisation of human experience. Why should music be limited to audible vibration? Is the pleasure derived from taste or smell any different from the pleasure one finds in music? We don't think so – and the exploration of alternatives is a continuation, indeed an imperative, of the postmodern project.

As a label this means trading in books, music and performance – but also other types of content for other dimensions of human adventure. Technological and creative advancements will open up new frontiers in what we can produce, and this will soon extend well beyond the impoverished borders of narrow artistic forms.

Who would you say is the natural target audience for Chin Stroke?

Anyone who is interested in expanding their understanding of what music and art are and can be, and how they can function in a deterritorialised and rhizomatic cultural space. Also people who like EDM remixes of Nickelback, hawk samples, or the most bangin’ Youtube rips in the goddamn Universe. Accepting the well-worn and perhaps tired adage, the Chin Stroke church is broad, yet it is this freedom that defines our practice, and it is this diversity that keeps our gestures from stagnation.

Your upcoming event serves as an album launch for DJ Stretchmark. What can you tell us about him and his work?

DJ Stretchmark really is a phenomenon I could not do justice to in words. He is a pioneer, a preacher, a light in the dark and a daily source of inspiration. His new album, our latest release, is a collection of heartfelt and soulful renditions of karaoke classics, sung powerfully and from the heart – completely a cappella and whilst hammered out of his gourd on cheap brandy.

The launch night is billed as a multi-sensory experience and there is talk of "museum-grade" scent cans being used. Can you elaborate on that?

As hinted at previously, our output aims to challenge the current privileging of one or two senses (sound and sight) in the clubbing experience. By introducing olfactory stimuli, the event at the Art School will call into question these arbitrary and constructed divisions, bringing their paradoxical proximity into sharp, yet surprising relief.

Moreover, the smell and memory centres of the human brain are closely connected, so by introducing carefully curated smells to the dancefloor we aim to not only craft a synaesthetic clubbing atmosphere, but also to reach into the past experiences of the attendees and bring them to bear upon the texture of the present.

You also have Planet Mu regular Shitmat on the bill. Does that bode well for punters' enjoyment of the scent show during this part of the evening?

Assumptions are what we mean to challenge at Chin Stroke. Yet it stands that at the core of our work we are committed to nurturing a safe, fun and meaningful environment for those who are willing to accompany us as we explore the somatic and metaphysical dimensions of ‘the club’.

The Vic Bar has agreed to host the event. Why?

We have taken their consent to mean they understand and appreciate what we're trying to achieve. Perhaps they're also hoping some of our intellectual clout will make them look good. We cannot be sure.

The label has been described – in your own press materials – as post-ironic. Irony can be very tricky to define. Is your post-ironic approach any easier to pin down?

How one challenges the darkness is perhaps a poignant starting point – should we shout, scream or leap into the chasm? How would we feel in ourselves if we did none of the above? In such a landscape of ambivalent nothingness, where irony often avails itself as the only reasonable and rational response, what once may have been considered flippant becomes all too earnest.

Like Judean date seeds, such notions have lain dormant for centuries, and it is in this moment that the irrelevant becomes relevant. In lieu of an answer then, we propose a further question: are we really walking along a boulevard of broken dreams?

What are your views on clubbing culture and how Chin Stroke fits in – or perhaps doesn't fit in – with that landscape?

As mentioned, we aim to create and nurture a fun environment, and a critical aspect of this is inclusivity. As a label that organises club nights we are grouping ourselves in with the likes of the late Fabric and the Boomtown festival, yet we feel like we inhabit a very different tradition. Chin Stroke stands almost alone, founded on stalwart innovation and relentlessly besieged by the high winds of Bandcamp, Soundcloud and–- to a much lesser extent – Time Out magazine.

Finally, power tool purists may be saddened by the absence of Dadmagnet from the bill for the Glasgow event. Can we assume this is just a brief hiatus or have you bowed out on a high and retired to the shed permanently?

Dadmagnet is still around (and available for bookings), but I’ve got a few things round the house I need to fix up. Your mother has been on at me for months and I really can’t get out of it this time. Sorry, kids.


Chin Stroke Records take over The Vic Bar @ The Art School on Thu 24 Nov, featuring DJ Shitmat, DJ Detweiler, Dj Stretchmark and more. £5 OTD

Peng by DJ Stretchmark is out now