The Bug: Machine
(Relapse)
Out Now
2LP, 5LP, 2CD, and digital
Order HERE
Far from being just an instrumental dub album, when experiencing either the live or recorded works of Kevin ‘The Bug’ Martin, the idea of a ‘just’ anything is a criminal offence. Machine is a masterstroke of many different sides, split litters, outer regions and inner cities yet still, coexisting as one, vibrating spirit. Interview and Review by Ryan Walker.
”In modern warfare, mechanical and metallic, the element of sight is almost zero. The
sense, the significance, and the expressiveness of noise, however, are infinite. There is no movement or activity that is not revealed by noise’‘ – Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, 1913.
We feel it before we see it. We feel it before we hear it. We fear it before we see it. We fear it before we see it. We never see it. It’s all around us. The Machine hangs in the mortar of the walls. The Machine peeks out from security cameras perched on every corner as a gargoyle would overlook a city square from the overhead cathedral spires. The Machine submits manuscripts to itself that outline how the past was, and the future will be. The Machine gnaws through wires. The Machine is a leak in the wind. Both the silence and what breaks it, the Machine buzzes through the radio like a bullet through a chunk of flesh and bone. The Machine casts spells.
Understood through the lens of the Macro Dub Infection philosophy, a manifesto Martin wrote decades ago that has come to predict everything we conceive as everyday custom in our climate of remix and culture of recycling, but a manifesto that virtually exposes the sacred underside writhing behind the walls of everything that fronts our conceivable reality, Machine is an extension consolidation of all that has been learned along the way. Armed with postmodern experiments snatched from literature and film applied alongside the ferocious, shamanic space-sonics and rebellious, disorderly technological time-anarchy of dub, the Infection disarms, disrupts, dismantles, detonates, bugs. The Machine album sonically personifies it.
Out now both physically and digitally via Relapse Records, you can buy a 5xLP copy of the record which includes everything from the project, or – the specially curated twelve-track record utilising selected appendages from the broader scopes of Machine as it lives and breaths, proves to be just as much an integral, uncompromising artillery-trip throughout this moment of an artists’ unstoppable trajectory and his relationship with the world around us.
Started as a series of self-released EPs, a quintet of ‘floor weapons’, put out into the public domain online via his Pressure label between 2023-2024 to meet Bandcamp deadlines that, although stressful eventually fed Kevin’s energy, in turn feeding the record, it would seem the ambition of the Bug’s new album, Machines, I-V was always built to be appreciated (or incurred) according to the full velocity and magnitude of those individual fragments pulled together as one, relentless incantation or statement of immense, ripped-scripture attack.
”I knew it was going to be a series of EPs. I’d had that in my mind from the beginning’’, Kevin explains. ”It was inspired in a way by Rhythm & Sound who had something similar with Tikiman, it was ambient and live, a series of related EPs. I also knew that each EP was part of a puzzle that would only make sense once you’ve put it together. You’ve formed a code that can make it. How people put it together as an album was taking shape as each EP developed”.
Slow. Disorienting. In. Out. Static sharpened into rhythm. Rhythm refined into a granite speartip and then again into a wrought joint, the whirl of an alarm echoes into the night of raving shadows stretched into insanity. Opener Annihilated (Force of Gravity) fucks its fists into the floor and creates a crater into the side of the planet for something deadly to emerge. Ambient signals simultaneously freeze and thaw as they try flying through the time-snapped night. Laughing chainsaws stuck juddering on the dirty floor. Drifting hours. Dropping off. Melting. A bulbous bass, distorted, thick, oily, and mangled haunts and hits hard throughout, repeating the inner workings of the interlocking groove to itself. Apocalyptic electronics grow and gyrate. A sound system from Kingston is beamed into the back of one’s mind like a flash of a flickering hologram. Intermittent interruptions of feedback, growl and decay phase from the left and right sides of a well-known warehouse in the afterlife. Sickness (Slowly Dying) starts its jerk in the manner of a muzzled techno-dub grunt.
The decision to call the album Machine is, in a typically Bug way, replete with multiple different reasons, meanings and levels. A lot like his Bug alias, based on a film score for the 1974 neo-noir crime thriller The Conversation about surveillance experts, or how bugging someone is pissing someone off, or how Tribe Called Quest were talking about buggin’ out on the Low End Theory, ”It can be theoretical or philosophical” states Kevin. ”Machine, in a way, appealed to me as it was about exactly that: my relationship to the machinery around me and work with, and not having to communicate with human beings, i.e. MCs. On the other side, I like the idea of the Machine literally being those social structures we all have to ensure, the machinery of the world, how this world is shaped, inequalities, the pain within, and how we can find a light at the end of any given tunnel. There was a duality to it that appealed right away. It was simple too. It leaves more room for someone to interpret psychologically and put their picture on it. If you’re too specific about it it can limit someone’s enjoyment of it”.
Devoid of any MCs or vocalists, this is Kevin’s debut instrumental record. Yet we can still imagine them behind walls. Behind us. Vocalists under floorboards. Vocalists down a complex development of corridors that envelop us the more we dare to disappear into them. ”I was aware there would be MCs that end up on the rhythms that I chose”, Kevin states, ”although I wasn’t specifically building the beats with any MCs from the off. I think, for me, there’s probably a connection to the cinematic scope and scale to the Kevin Richard Martin material I’ve been working on, that’s infected the Machine album as well. What if you had the intense physicality of a Bug rhythm, but also had that cinematic scale and scope, that can work in a visual as well as sonic way?”
Minimal. Space that subsumes. Sucks you through. Crushes you in the clockwork mechanisms of its coagulated, revolving cement mixer textures, at home as one takes a deep dive into whatever the Machine might be, the more Kevin proceeded to work on the tracks, a process improved by Relapses’ signing of the record that enabled Kevin to work less narratively, the more the atmosphere of something that haunts the afterthought was only amplified due to the lack of a vocalist. ”How can I make this stuff work live?” Kevin questions, ”The more I worked on the tracks, the more it had its own trajectory. That paranoid, dystopian, sci-fi feel, is amplified more because of the lack of the vocalists. The ghosts in the machine. Literally, spectres in there. You’re not actually hearing them. They’re inferred voices. Space to let your imagination run rampant with an atmosphere of tension and intensity to the sonics”.
True to the craft of the Bug, those intense sonics, those feral hexes and inferences of something about to happen in the liminal zones of each groove remain as strong as they always are when the Bug issues forth a strike on the body and the mind – it’s a sensory experience, as much for Kevin as it is for us. ”I just want to get fired up by the music that I play. I hope that has the same impact on the listener. I’m aware it’s not an easy listen. I like to test people’s parameters’’ he says. ”Playing parties that you think might be easy ones are the toughest shows I’ve had to play because they’re not that formula. Despite being called a dubstep artist in some areas, I’ve never felt I was that. When I play a dubstep party, for me the holy grail is more to do with the yard tapes of Jamaica that sound chaotic and intense”.
Now as much as then, a label at the cutting edge of cross-pollinating genres and generations, and despite Kevin’s absence of any expectations when he reached out to them that the project would be realised in all its whole, glorious entirety, Relapse Records picked up the LP. Impressed by how they operate as a team initially considering the album to be self-released by Kevin’s Pressure label (but soon-noted shortcomings such as time, promotion and presentation…budget basically) thanks to Relapse realising the extent of what they had on their hands – an uncompromising puzzle piece split and sent to various corners of the globe, an equally uncompromising subjective narrative required to be aligned together according to the listener perceiving the entity of the Machine for themselves as something streamlined but still unwaning in it’s leviathan construction, Relapse were able to fulfil the needs of the work and, as a truck would rise up from the swamps of one’s stomach, accomplish manifesting it’s somnabulant, goliath power. ”They got back within 15 minutes saying they’d love to do it. All I felt was positivity. Whereas in the past working with certain labels I was made to feel like an alien, that they don’t understand what it is I’m trying to achieve. I hope it’s loved, but I don’t make it to be loved”.
Home to crust punk and death metal group Sacrilege, and also hardcore-tinged shoegazers (or shoegaze-tinted hardcore outfit) Nothing, the idea of approaching them came from Zonal/Techno Animal co-founder, Justin Broadrick. The label was big Godflesh fans and reissued the Brotherhood of the Bomb and Re-entry Techno Animal albums from the duo. Wrecked, the Zonal debut album from 2019, a continued collaboration after the Techno Animal project was terminated, was also issued through the label. ”I’ve no expectations. Sometimes an indie label can just turn out to be as big an arsehole as a major label. I wanted to find a label that gets what I do. But at the same time I knew they were releasing things that I like. I’ve been into Primitive Man quite heavily over the last couple of years. Incredible. One of the heaviest acts I’ve ever heard”.
Elements of Release Entertainment, the subsidiary label of Relapse oozes throughout Machine. The roster according to their 90s compilations, be it both volumes of Release Your Mind and the utterly inescapable Japanese/American Noise Treaty release from the same year Martin put out his Macro Dub compilation with its very own treatise on dub as postmodern warfare, as a militaristic mindset capable of social sorcery and deliberate, political trickery. The noise compilation, with one side dedicated to Japanese noise artists (Merzbow or Incapacitants) and the other dedicated to American (Richard Ramirez, Crawl Unit) performed as a similar guidebook, or go-to, tastemaking operations manual that insightfully wanted to not just pick the padlocks, but prize apart the entire landscape and establish connections with both lacunas and locales far and wide that something happened, that something was happening. A label from the Noise Treaty album warned listeners that ”they are not responsible for “degradation and destruction of the following: preamplifiers, power supply components, loudspeakers and/or related transducer assemblies, tape-based magnetic storage devices, and personal hearing impairment”.
The same could be said for Martin, as the Bug, and on Release, mind you. A perfect home. But what does he make of metal generally?
”I have a strange relationship with metal in general. I’ve wanted to like it”, Kevin states. ”Some I do like, such as Primitive Man for instance. I knew there was a core of the material that could suit them. Surprisingly. People coming to the parties feeling stuff. Perfect. I could see the potential was there and trojan horse it”. Whilst under the wing of Dylan Carlson, the duo played Roadburn Festival in 2017. Also joined by frequent comrades Flowdan and Logan, it was here that arguably the Bug’s baptism into those more metal circles with initiated. ”The room was absolutely packed. On stage you had people like Primitive Man, Full of Hell, and Big Brave watching right next to me, making a point that they were there. Really, it was metal people and seeing people freaking the hell out to a total Bug show without compromise, was beautiful. It didn’t sound so stupid to knock on Relapse’s door”.
Itching. Scratching. Vertical (Never See You Again) intensifies the pulse rate. Voices pulled through walls and from the years they belonged to within them. A foreboding synthscape secretly pours itself into the ethers of the track, a keyboard line from a still-kicking Roland TB-303 creaks and squelches as the leviathan kicks against a caustic, inverted can. A robot voice and a fierce industrial beat – naked and raw and shimmering slithers of ghostly, dub magic. Floored (Point of Impact) harnesses the terror of intergalactic air raids, gunfire, and gruesome, ruinous grooves to maximum heat. It bangs against an aluminium silo semi-trailer. 3.13 mindfuck muzak break – elevator shafts slide up and down a hoistway, opening and closing for no one, eerie whistles run and reverberate across the whole floor. The whole building. A drum machine soon resurrected as it crashes around the corner, destroying all it surrounds, leaving a frazzled leaf of shrapnel shaking in the middle of the desolated hell-wreckage.
Decaying. Developing. With a vocal version featuring vocals from rising Nigerian-British MC Magugu now available (Deep in the Mud), its instrumental twin, Drop (Machine Sex), is every bit as ominous as the title suggests. A baying-for-blood bass, camouflaged one moment, then a tangible force to reckon with the next, spikes in and out of focus. The track is laced with wrath of lysergic textures and intense, Venus-slow, techno trip. Dynamic in how a beautiful melody manages to cradle us in a last, little coda, the lacerating voltages of a radio receiver still fizzing away to the sound of a runout groove eternally circling the same spot. New dub frontiers. Alien.
Enveloping. Emptying. Hypnotised (Fucked Up) hangs us in the air as murmurations of antique grand pianos and post-industrial conjurations from the fires of Black Ark breathe in and out. Pads are smacked like punching bags of sensitive flesh, spark and crackle. Distant thunderstorms echo and erupt. It soon shatters and shapeshifts into something else – guided and punctuated by the elephant heartbeat, the steel-flagellating flames strike themselves against the sky. Peeling. Applying. Inhuman (Let The Machine Do The Talking) silences anything that should shuffle around it with its seismic klaxon belch and stammering clockwork dance. Dub bolts pop and pounce against the sides of a luminous cavern. Countless ounces of ominous atmospherics, turbocharged bass and repulsive setaceous clicks grind up and down the spine like a round liner tattoo needle eating into the central nervous system causing the skin to slip off.
From 1995, the Macro Dub Infection compilation featured a broad spectrum of artists curated by Martin. It included Coil, Tricky, Mad Professor, Wagon Christ, Omni Trio, Tortoise and Scorn. Within the sleeve notes, Martin references the work of Neuromancer author William Gibson and William Burroughs, particularly the latter’s technique with Découpé or cut-up, in addition to the films of French New Wave auteur Jean Luc-Godard and the jump-cut edits favoured by the Caméra Stylo, whilst also discussing Jackson Pollock and his abstract expressionist paintings. In other words, figures who succeed in reinterpreting and rearranging reality. Employing/deploying their anti-structural devices and various revelatory techniques as a way to reinforce that nothing is as it seems, that magic is real, and that dub, a very special conjuration of dub according to the philosophical and cerebral, yet still visceral principles that Martin has come to explore it with, trashes the rubric of song structure with something far more relentless and dense in the place of that structure with a ripped piece of ligament twitching in its once immutable position. ”That was the beauty of music for me. The idea that, on the one side, it could sound like a series of mistakes. But on the other side, you provide the narrative interpretation. I like that. I also like the way time travels. Dub music sounded weirdly archaic and wildly futuristic. I wanted to construct a new form of dub that appealed to me, that I wasn’t hearing anywhere else. I was playing a festival over summer, playing some of the material and horrified these white crusties”.
Finding new ways to understand an infinite way of working, as opposed to a beginning, middle and end, The Macro Dub Philosophy addressed the postmodern approach to art as inbuilt into dub and in turn, ingrained in the world we find ourselves walking through, adhering to orthodoxy, obeying commands, unyielding to constraint, unable to question the hand that feeds. The world around us as a dubplate for the taking. On this compilation, Martin joins dots, builds bridges, and establishes connections between the neurons of the pioneers both past, future, and present: ”Just as reggae’s pioneering spirits were infected by pops instantaneousness”, Martin detailed, ”so Dub’s leading practitioners were aware of Phil Spector. Berry Gordy and Brian Wilson’s radical sound exploits”.
Referencing the embodiment of brain-machine interface such as A Guy Called Gerald, Blackbeard Bovell, Andy Weatherall, Bunny Lee, Ian Penman and the Upsetter, Scratch Perry, a kindred TEAC reel-to-reel, spatio-spiritual montage experimentalist to Brion Gysin who performed similar practices in the 50s, Kevin’s sleeve notes boasted a barrage of fierce rhetoric that tingled with tactile electricity, a way for the world to see how ”Dub has evolved into a mutant virus. Its amoral corruption affects all musical forms it digests”, or, ”Addicted to change, Dub has ignored the rule world by cutting out all territorial claims”, or ”As a technological agent of transformation, its core identity remains compellingly elusive, leaving only rarefied traces of its mysterious past”.
Along with the instrumental nature of the record, a literary edge glows at its core. The bracketed subtitles recognise this glow, a guiding metonymy that follows in the wake of the initial word, the impact of the bastard track, and then the ensuing resonance of whatever shape an indentation it leaves in us once the smoke has finally cleared. One could apply Derrida’s deconstructionist theory of ”reversing and displacing a conceptual and nonconceptual order with which it is articulated” and the parentheses to what Kevin’s intention was with these subtitles, inasmuch how they relate to a sense of displacing the authoritative flow of the non-parenthetical, in this case, Shafted, Battered or Limbo, and partnering it with a parenthetical sedative to soothe the shark-eyed storm from snapping one’s ankles into branches: (Law of Attraction/Repulsion), (Curse of Addiction), (Lust and Paralysis).
The parentheses, that inscription dividing inside and out, confounding boundaries, oscillating between digital and non-digital, new and not so new, and ultimately helps as Jeff Scheible states to ”trouble and shift” our abilities to define these departments, is as irritating as any variation on the dub form that one can imagination. ”I knew I wanted the titles to be blunt, one-worded, and sort of, physical as possible. But I liked the idea of subtitles, scientific in a way, that leads to an informed narrative throughout. Like chapters in a book. Sometimes a word can become a red herring. Then you put the transcendental subheading next to it, there’s contradiction there too’’.
Machine is a new embodiment of Floor Weapons direct from the fields of the Killing Sound, a compilation of the Razor-X 7-inches, ”was very much linked and connected to reggae and soundsystem warfare” Kevin tells me. Extrapolated onto the wider world, it’s the influence of the one-word titles: Bodied, Buried, Hunted, Annihilated, Inhuman, Skullcrusher that does the most damage, that gives people experiences they’re not accustomed to, yet might crave exploring further for themselves. Played at Pressure parties, Razor-X showed no mercy when creating a climate for a tribal clash of bodies to gather in states of ritualistic intensity in the sand and cement, an action painting based on early reviews of On-U-Sound parties with Adrian Sherwood and Mark Stewart that talked about ”how half of the audience left, fast, and the other half said it was life-changing. In a way, that’s the aim for me” Kevin recalls.
Testament to where he has come from, and where he is now with audiences either obliterated from view or recruited and converted for eternity. ”I’m very fortunate that throughout the history of the Bug, the audiences have come closer and closer to what I’d always hoped, which is extremely mixed. The funny thing for me was that the final piece of the puzzle in the last five years is that Metalheads have started turning up in Sun O))) or Godflesh or Earth T-shirts”.
A synthesis of Onhou and Sun O))), scorched by the same smite of light, split apart, and stuck back together in by the time these cataclysmic glides of doom and dub (the dub side of doom, the doom of metal), singles Buried (Your Life Is Short) and Bodied (Send For The Hearse) converge and overspill into this propulsive, pendulum-swing. Buried. Bodied. Buried. Bodied. Buried again. Bodied again. One could argue the career of Kevin Martin, at least in terms of the various versions of the Bug he introduces to us, can be summarised by these distinct tracks: dissimilar, yet a part of the same balance. Buried digs in deep with its trance-inducing turns, evaporating lathe melodies, intense drops and powerful hammer stabs taking decades to reach shoulder to surface. Bodied meanwhile, beginning with a hideous upload of an emaciated metronome, soon joined by howls of hallucinatory electronics and a meatier, mightier force condenses concrete pillars to no more than crumbs in an empty crisp packet. Mass of soil separates and reveals a bunker vibrating below. Penetrates and lingers for eternity.
Less a stylistic tool applied as an afterthought to a tune, more an opportunity to rupture control mechanisms. An out-of-control approach to mix down. The Macro Dub Infection reveals the world being feasted on via the Machine.
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Words by Ryan Walker
Photo by C Lessire ©
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