Future Rhythm Machine: Auntie Flo brings Huntleys & Palmers to Manchester

A balmy Thursday evening outside of Kinross, summer 2013: 10,000 ravers gather in a huge marquee, losing their mind to a live performance of traditional African music in anticipation of the likes of Rihanna, Mumford and Sons, Calvin Harris and the rest of T in the Park. It’s a spectacular semi-local gig for Glaswegian producer Brian D'Souza aka Auntie Flo, and testimony to the unique position he now finds himself in. Together with Andrew Thomson of boutique label Huntleys & Palmers, the pair have, over the last few years, maintained a unique ascent with their celebrated Highlife parties in Glasgow, featuring unique live acts and a genre policy that defies pigeonholing as well as various other expectations.

Shortly celebrating its sixth birthday, Huntleys & Palmers' early form in Glasgow was far removed from the world-influenced dance music it has become known for today – although initially Thomson was booking acts as smart and diverse as Border Community’s James Holden and psych pioneers Silver Apples. Meanwhile, as a student down the line in Edinburgh, playing live and DJing, D’Souza’s Auntie Flo project began in 2003 before, in the wake of education and business (D’Souza also founded a musical consultancy company) – and even a divergence into field recordings and electro-acoustic music – the act fell on the backburner. It wasn't until 2010 that the tracks for D’Souza’s debut LP, Future Rhythm Machine, were produced and helped form the catalyst for the label in its current form. The release was last year longlisted for Scottish Album of the Year, after which D’Souza was gifted by the organisers “two very expensive bottles of whiskey.” Not quite the £20,000 prize, but a regionally appropriate and thoughtful reward nonetheless.

“I got really into electro-acoustic music, really out-there sound art, and I did that for two years,” D'Souza recalls. “There was noise, quite a lot of noise. The artier, more experimental side of music is still really interesting to me and I hope I can get back into it at one point.”

Although D’Souza is not directly involved in Huntleys & Palmers, Highlife is a shared baby, best known for intertwining strands of music from afrobeat and kwaito into the form of classic house, disco and electronica. Sharing a city with seminal whatever-works clubnight Optimo, Highlife comes with the blessing of Optimo founder JD Twitch, who has described it as the night he 'always wanted to put on.' D’Souza acknowledges that what he and Thomson do at the club is fairly unique as nights out go – but does he believe that club audiences are more receptive to different kinds of music than previously?

“People’s tastes are undoubtedly diversifying massively,” he observes. “Even in pop music, you have someone like Avicii, making a dance record with a country influence and a soul singer. And that’s pop music, you know? We’re doing things differently, as we’re not market-led.”

Earlier this year, Huntleys & Palmers began a ‘Sun Ritual’ party during which the DJ has full control of the lights throughout the set, eventually generating so much brightness in such a small space that the sold-out club turned up with their own shades, leading to a bombastic finale to the tune of Caribou’s transcendent Sun, as well as Auntie Flo’s own Sun Ritual. “People were craving the light throughout until by the end, they just wanted more of this fake Vitamin D injection,” D’Souza laughs, at least for now declining The Skinny’s collaborative idea of a Seasonal Affective Disco.

“Before Highlife, I’d come off the back of a night called Slabs of the Tabernacle, which was focused on Italo disco and Detroit techno and so on,” he explains, describing the all-vinyl affair as “very purist but very fun.” The genesis of Highlife happened gradually in his record collection. “My interests had moved on to Afro-futurist, Fourth World, however you want to describe it… I come up with really crap names for it,” he admits.

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“I’ve carved out an identity in which I’m not stuck in one sort of world” – Brian D’Souza

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The ‘Highlife’ name itself is derived from a term for a Ghanaian genre of music, popularised at the beginning of the 20th century – “I knew it represented a particular type of music, but it made sense; the name in terms of the literal meaning of it being a party” – and the Auntie Flo Rhythm Machine is about to go full circle with a show in South Africa later this year. D’Souza is already wary of the dangers of playing a set of music adapted from the very crowd he’s playing for, not to mention keen to avoid a “roots label” in any genre or scene. “There’s as much Chilean and Argentinian influence in what we do, for example, and nor did we ever want the night to be categorised as ‘global bass,’” he says. Nonetheless, despite dipping in and out of mainstream music as part of his career and creative life, it’s not easy to imagine D’Souza visiting South Africa with a swap box of our greatest dance-pop exports.

“One of the reasons we started to listen to music away from the norm was to offer something a bit different, but I’ve carved out an identity in which I’m not stuck in one sort of world. But maybe the next big thing will be African-influenced music, which leads to me getting a lot of attention, and then what happens after that? What’s interesting in pop music is that there’s a weird semiology going on, all these genres are forming, dance and soul and country, because people have realised you can make money from it” – though even in the relatively underground world of alternative dance music, D’Souza doesn’t see much difference in these trends.

One of the biggest influences on Highlife’s inception was the Chilean-German label Cómeme, founded by true techno one-off Matias Aguayo in devotion to 'self styled electronic primitives' and translating as 'a body that gives way to itself.' Thomson and D’Souza moved their project forward when the former booked Cómeme staple Rebolledo for one of his parties, and now, neatly, Cómeme is set to release Auntie Flo material in the near future.

D’Souza has also just contributed a production to JD Twitch’s charitable release Autonomous Africa Vol 2, a politically savvy four-track that also features music from Midland as well as Twitch himself.

“The music that we’re doing is driven by a selfish and personal interest, as a music fan, as a DJ and a crate digger, to break out of this tribal mode,” D'Souza comments. “In Glasgow, what we did was introduce the sort of night that supposedly couldn’t be done – but we’ve made Highlife work.”