For almost 25 years now, Kevin Martin has been pushing against the limits of music. Whether in anti-social noise group God, or as part of Techno Animal with Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick, Martin has always operated at the edge of what is feasible, or beyond it. He has always been on the outside looking in, a vital voice of encouragement to those who don’t want their artistic experiences to come watered down.
Martin's greatest success has come in the last 10 years, with his third album as The Bug, London Zoo, arriving as the first wave of dubstep was at its peak in London back in 2008. The hit singles Skeng and Poison Dart touched a collective nerve, and propelled Martin to a far larger audience. However, it was only last year that the long-awaited follow-up, Angels & Devils, finally appeared.
The album marks a time of artistic and personal development in Martin’s life. Having been in London for the best part of two decades, Martin and his partner moved to Berlin a couple of years ago, and have just recently become parents. While listing the obvious benefits of living in the great German city – cheap living, spaciousness, an eventful arts calendar – Martin has also observed a worrying trend, “the rise of nationalism in Germany”.
“It’s really a crazy time in the world,” he says, just 24 hours after the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris. “I mean, with America’s shoot-to-kill-black-people policy lately, with Israel’s insane vendetta against Palestinians, there seems to be so many potential race conflicts going on right now. Sometimes you think there’s some dark undercurrent somewhere of someone who wants to see all out race warfare in the world lately. What’s going on in Germany is alarming, really alarming.”
London recalling
While Britain has hardly escaped these trends entirely, Martin does miss the feeling of London as an unparalleled cultural melting pot.
“A large part of the appeal for me of living in London, in fact the largest appeal and the thing I miss most, is the cultural cross-pollination of London,” he says. “Just the friction therein, for better and worse. There’s an energy that comes from this collision of cultures. London obviously has had horrific racist incidents but, racially, it felt more integrated than most cities I’d been to. I definitely miss that in Berlin.”
Martin's music is as good an example of that friction as any other. His sound is a clash between the beats of contemporary London's most definitive musics – dubstep, grime – and the mind-warping textures of classic Jamaican dub and dancehall. It's also deeply influenced by the ecstatic flows of the most raucous free jazz and the sonic impact of noise and metal. It's physical and aggressive, sometimes overwhelming. All of which made it surprising to see a collaboration with someone like Grouper's Liz Harris on Angels & Devils.
The album’s surface-level split – almost quiet, almost friendly on the first half, aggressive and in your face for the second – masked a deeper concern with the relationships between light and dark, quiet and loud, good and evil.
“For me, it was about an examination of contrast and contradiction,” says Martin. “It was never meant to be just a polar, angels versus devils, this and that. It was about just how much overspill there is. The ugliness in beauty and the beauty in the ugly side of life.”
Dubstep back
Martin says that part of the reason London Zoo took so long to follow up was an immediate instinct to turn his back on the dubstep scene he'd suddenly found himself lumped uncomfortably into. He stopped working on The Bug and focused on Acid Ragga and King Midas Sound, his other musical projects. He came to feel that the next Bug album needed to be a continuation of what had always been unique about his work, not merely a "knee-jerk reaction" to its surprising success. The interpenetration of light and shadow, the ambiguity inherent in his sonic universe – this was the thread that he followed out of London Zoo.
"London Zoo, the general perception of it was of it being this really dystopian, doomsday tract," says Martin. "I felt personally that I wanted there to be great beauty in that record. Also, I just wanted to make both albums into constructions with their own environments, in themselves. I almost wanted both albums to be worlds within worlds, fuelled on contrast, contradiction, conflict, confusion, love and hate."
As anyone who’s been to one of his gigs will testify, listening to a Bug record and seeing the Bug live are two totally different experiences, with the latter being where that “oppositional head-trip” really comes to light. Martin extends his world-making effort to the stage, using the physicality of his sound, his lights and his MCs to create an incredibly immersive show where the ultimate aim is “denying people their senses and attacking their senses simultaneously.”
Going large
“I’m aware of the theatricality of what we do and I want to leave an impression musically, visually and philosophically,” he says. “I want people to go away feeling that they’ve had a large experience. It doesn’t always work out that way, but I just know those types of experiences were crucial to me and that’s what made me want to make music in the first place.
“The greatest compliment from anyone who has ever seen a Bug show, on any level that I’ve had, is where they’ve told me they’ve been inspired to go make music themselves, or they’ve never heard or seen anything like it before. Those are the compliments you live for.
“Although, god knows there’s been enough haters who have said exactly the opposite.”
The Bug & Flowdan play the Twisted Pepper tonight. Angels & Devils is out now on Ninja Tune
