Sonic Router

The Devil’s Work: Chris Farrell & Kowton’s Idle Hands

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“Idle Hands started from working at Rooted Records and being interested in putting out music. It tied in with our whole ethos, which was trying to represent good music in Bristol.” Chris Farrell is discussing the origins of his Idle Hands record label, which recently put out its fifth release – a pair of weighty slow-motion house tracks from Joe Cowton under his Kowton moniker – to widespread critical acclaim. “The label just flowed organically from being in the shop and meeting people, and a desire to have good stuff out there. No big agenda, other than wanting to represent new music.”

I meet Chris and Joe on Bristol’s Stokes Croft, just a minute’s walk from the location of Farrell’s new record shop – also called Idle Hands – to discuss the label, its successes so far, and its expansion into a physical shop space. At the end of last year, it was announced that Bristol’s finest record shop and dubstep scene hub Rooted Records would be closing its doors in early 2011. Initial reactions were obviously of dismay – as the last small independent record shop in the city, and an iconic location for the city’s blossoming bass scene, it seemed yet another casualty of a public increasingly disinterested in physically engaging with the music they were listening to. However, Farrell, who was working alongside Kowton at Rooted at the time of its closure, had already started planning a possible successor, feeling that to lose that space entirely would be a great loss for Bristol’s tight-knit musical community. Idle Hands opened at the end of February, less than two months after Rooted closed its doors.

But it first started life as record label at the end of 2009, with its first release from Rooted manager Tom Ford, aka Punch Drunk boss Peverelist. Though officially anonymous at the time, its rolling percussion and fractal melodies were immediately recognisable as Ford’s own, though perhaps slightly more abstract than some of the dancefloor oriented material he was releasing on his own label. “Tom was the person who got me started on doing a label,” explains Farrell. “He’d mentioned it a few times, but in the end he called me and said ‘Chris, I need to talk to you’ – this was my manager at work, I thought ‘what have I done wrong?’” he laughs. “But he asked if I wanted these two tracks, and the anonymous thing was a bit of fun. They’re tunes that perhaps don’t necessarily fit into the Peverelist canon as easily.”

The label’s following few releases were all from Bristol producers, all strikingly different in execution but underpinned by a constant four-to-the-floor pulse. Atki2 & Dub Boy’s ‘Tigerflower’ mixed seamlessly with UK funky but added tropical heat, its gaudy synthetic steel pans weaving dizzying patterns above clicking percussion. Headhunter’s first release since the success of his Addison Groove alias was by turns more muscular and melodic than anything he’s yet put his name to. But Kowton’s pair of 12”s remain the label’s finest moments, four tracks of darkened, claustrophobic house that crawl along at almost oppressively slow tempo. Sonically, they’re probably closest to the experimental transmissions coming from Leipzig’s Workshop label, but with added soundsystem heft and lightened by the odd glimmer of melody. By dropping the tempo to sub-120 bpm shuffle, Kowton’s tracks are exposed as little more than bone, sinew and muscle, each element swung slightly against one another to generate elastic tension. The results are lean and ruthlessly effective, but often subtly pretty.

“There are a lot of people at the moment making house music at a slower tempo, with a darker edge and more bass… It’s not dubstep, it’s not Berghain house or techno, it doesn’t have a name yet, which is a really good thing.”

The next two releases from Idle Hands follow in a similar vein, with 12”s from Canadian producer Kevin McPhee and Szare, whose pitch black broken techno has been making quiet waves over the last year. “There are a lot of people at the moment making house music at a slower tempo, with a darker edge and more bass,” muses Cowton. “And while Bristol’s nowhere near the epicentre, Idle Hands is becoming associated with it – especially with the Szare release coming up, the music I’ve been doing, and the Caravan stuff. It’s in no way a scene, but there are some good records coming out. It’s not dubstep, it’s not Berghain house or techno, and it doesn’t have a name yet, which is a really good thing.”

Kevin McPhee’s release features a pair of slowed house tracks, ‘House 44’ exploring similarly unnerved headspaces as Cowton’s music, but with a gritty, spontaneous feel. Alongside a forthcoming release on [nakedlunch], they constitute the tip of the iceberg – he’s apparently strikingly prolific. “What I like about Kevin’s music is that so many similar producers’ tracks are so polished, but he’s got a roughness to his music,” explains Farrell. “They just sound a bit rawer, which I like. And he’s got a lot of ideas to get out – there are some tracks he’s sent me just recently which are on a completely different tip from the ones I’m putting out soon. One’s on a bit of a boogie tip, but just really heavy, scratchy and fucked up. He’s doing good things.”

“The other thing is that when Kevin does the emotional, mournful thing it genuinely is quite emotional,” adds Cowton. “His tune ‘Try’, without being in any way twee, is actually quite sad. It’s almost like Burial – he manages to do it, he skirts the line just right so it never gets twee, and it’s heartbreaking stuff. I think Kevin’s got the right idea about what it takes to walk that line.”

Szare’s upcoming 12”, meanwhile, is similar in tone to his previous tracks on Horizontal Ground. ‘Volya’ writhes like last year’s ‘Snake Cave’, but with greater tempo and an unstoppable sense of forward momentum, and ‘Action Five’ is more sedate despite its name, a sea of calm broken only by the ripple of hi-hats like raindrops on its surface.

“I think it comes down largely to my personal taste, what I thought we could get away with, what I thought was relevant and what people would be into. Not trying to set any agendas or anything, but just avoiding being stagnant and pushing the subtle differences that arise in dance music,” Farrell says of the label’s musical ethos, which despite its varied nature is firmly rooted in the four-to-the-floor propulsion of house and techno. “Although Bristol has been all about dubstep, and I like dubstep as well as drum ‘n’ bass, I’ve always preferred house and techno,” he says. “So it seems like quite a good time, a lot more peoples’ ears are bent towards that sound at the moment.”

Bristol has long been seen as a hub for bass-heavy music, thanks to the city’s soundsystem heritage and its role in the development of some of its most distinctive mutations (drum ‘n’ bass, dubstep) over the last fifteen years or so. But of late there has been a resurgence in interest in house and techno sounds within the city, with collectives like Headrush and Dirtytalk supporting the city’s own producers and bringing people from further afield. Caravan, the club night recently established by Farrell, Simon Twine and Caravan record label boss October, has also attracted sizeable crowds, but house and techno’s sudden spike in popularity is also linked to the dubstep scene’s meltdown into a host of slower, 4/4 driven hybrids. Ears are open to a UK musical landscape that’s more in thrall than ever to the sounds of Chicago, Berlin and Detroit, with Bristol represented strongly through producer/DJs like Kowton, Appleblim, October, Addison Groove, Al Tourettes, Kidkut and Outboxx.

“The whole dubstep-techno crossover thing from a few years ago just seems completely redundant now,” ponders Farrell. “It’s just people making music: it’s house and techno, but it’s got bass, and sometimes it’s got extra snares in it. It might be that the accessibility of music now means that people can hear all these different sounds, absorb them very quickly and take them in.”

“It’s contemporary,” adds Cowton, “not a forced amalgamation of a lot of things. It’s more that a lot of people have grown up with a lot of similar influences and are now focused on making similar music, and it just comes out the way it does.”

“There’s almost more openness now,” he continues. “When dubstep was growing up there was this idea that you had to have listened to Metalheadz since day dot, and you had to know everything El-B had ever done. Now, it’s more that in reality your influences are more diverse than that, you probably know a bit about everything, but not everyone’s pretending to have had the same musical past. People can just be honest about what their formative influences were.”

It might then seem an appropriate time for the move away from Rooted – with its reputation as dubstep hub – towards Idle Hands; a shift in the shop’s location might constitute a reboot of sorts, a chance to reshape and restructure in a changing musical climate. “It was, and it remains, a nice trajectory from Rooted into Idle Hands, with Tom [Peverelist] still being a big part of that,” agrees Cowton. “And it’s all part of the scene. Tom’s so happy to chat to everyone at Dubloaded, there’s no pretension there at all, it’s almost like he’s still behind the counter.”

“We’re doing different things, and we’re excited by the music that’s around. We’re at the point now where we’re hearing people ten years younger than us making music that really excites us…”

“We’re all excited at the moment, we’re moving onto the next thing,” says Farrell. “We’re doing different things, and we’re excited by the music that’s around. We’re at the point now where we’re hearing people ten years younger than us making music that really excites us, and which probably has the same vibe we were looking for when we were that age. And Bristol’s still moving on – this house thing’s starting to emerge a little bit, but also this reggae steppas thing is coming back in. It’s all different instances that have arisen, but that’s what’s nice about it. It’s almost a continuation of dubstep, but it’s different again.”

The shop opened at the end of February, and already has the sort of dynamic energy you’d expect of a local dance music-centric record shop. The crew recently hosted a three hour instore set from 2562, his blend of broken techno, house, disco and more bleeding out across Stokes Croft – itself one of the city’s most rapidly developing areas – to a crowd of both scene regulars and passers by. And the same week saw the launch party for the city’s new Schmorgasbord label, which kicks off with a blistering collaborative 12” from Appleblim and October, in dubbed-out house mode.

“We do want to be a hub for the scene,” Farrell says, “but there’s something beyond that too, which is just being into vinyl, liking it as a format and as a physical thing. Vinyl might be expensive, but you buy one record by, say, Kassem Mosse, and you’ll play it for the next six months solidly, and it’ll sit next to the other good records that you need in your life. Not to devalue the digital thing, but for me, and I think a number of other people, vinyl is the way. There is that culture of popping in to a record shop on a Saturday afternoon; and that’s where the hub thing comes in.”

“I like the permanence of it,” agrees Cowton. “That’s what record shops are all about – the permanence of buying something, spending a certain amount of money on it, then dedicating the amount of time that money equates to.”

And at a time when it’s getting easier to consume music as completely separate from the people and scenes that gave rise to it, that’s an attitude that continues to permeate many aspects of Bristol’s music scene. Regardless of ongoing developments in London, Leeds and further afield, the city’s sounds continue to play by their own rules. With any luck, Idle Hands will form another physical node within that network.

Words: Rory Gibb

Idle Hands will be releasing new music shortly, you can find the shop at 74 Stokes Croft, Bristol.

Title photo: Idle Hands shop crew (L-R): Joe Cowton, Shanti Celeste, Chris Farrell, Sean Kelly
Shop photo by Alex Digard