J. On the one hand I do like really experimental / fucked up music but I also like total straight down the line pop music. I like melody and songs that are only three or four minutes. Songs that come in do their thing and that’s it. I like the immediacy of pop, the way it’s got a big hook and the way it grabs you. I like the fact that it appeals to a lot of people as well.
B. You have a definite ability to come up with commercial elements within the abstractness of your tunes. Is that something you flirt with ?
B. Is there ever a temptation to do a very commercial project, in order to feed the more experimental stuff.
B. So the tune ‘Skabot’ that TB.Spook Unit have got coming out on our Garage Dubs album. It’s quite a mash up of styles. Could you try and put into words some idea of how it sounds, for those that haven’t yet heard it ?
B. The other album that we’ve got coming out is Twenty First Century Ska 2001 which is not a straight Ska album but a compilation of Ska influenced contemporary tunes in a break beat mash up stylee. I’m wondering whether you have an angle on why you think that the Ska Beat has endured in such a strong and influential way?
B. With all your other activities, are you still finding time for the solo Subtropic project ?
B. I looked at the Subtropic website and noticed that you had downloadable MP3 tracks. Which leads me to the whole artist rights verses MP3 debate. What's your take on that whole issue ?
B. So when your making music where do start ?
B. Do you have a favourite piece of kit
T.B SPOOK UNIT SPEAKS
Jake Subtropic uses words like Glich- Hop and Synco Beat to describe his musical output. Terms which are, I suspect suitably vague for his purposes. Elsewhere he is a little more forthcoming offering up " It’s all about mashing up breaks and beats with whatever electronic noise fits the mood ". Free Radical Sounds recently met with Jake to chat about among other things his latest project T. B SPOOK UNIT . Jake is not someone who accepts being boxed in and began by telling of his affections for seemingly opposing music styles.
J. I wouldn’t say that I flirt with it. It’s just part of what I like in music. I’m flirting with it more on the Unseen Force vocal project. That’s definitely seen as having more of a poppy angle. It’s a mixture of two step and abstract down tempo with a lady called Fiona singing on it. It’s kind of quirky and pop music at the same time. You could whistle the tunes, which is different for me, I’ve not done anything quite like that before. But on the other stuff I do, it just comes through. There definitely hasn’t been a conscious decision to add a poppy element.
J. Yes and no, the vocal project is a conscious effort to try and do something that is commercially viable but if I played it against anything that’s in the charts it would just sound odd. It would not fit in, so my idea of what pop is, is probably not the same as what the corporate label bosses idea of what pop is. I can’t be that contrived and say lets use this formula and create something poppy. The idea is to create something that has soul and integrity while at the same time has a kind of commercial value as well. Trying to strike the balance. As far as the question of one feeding the other. The way you phrased it, it’s like doing one thing you’re not really into in order to fund something else that you are into and that's not the case. I am into both these areas. I do love experimental and I love pop as well.
J. It’s been going about two years and is collaboration between myself and Adam Kiosk. We’ve known each other a while and I’d always been into his music .Eventually we got together and decided to try making some music together. We started off making some quite weird and quirky tracks The first thing we did was a three minute track and each minute was like a completely different song. After that we carried on together and it has now developed itself into a sort of Tech / Two step contemporary beats thing with this kind of glitchy thing going on in the background.
J. The track !! Well the title kind gives it away a little, in that it’s got a very electronic feel to it and hence the roboticness. Then it’s got a bouncy offbeat Ska flavour to it as well. It’s a twisted Two Step track with loads of bass, some funky beats and a few old blues vocal samples floating around in the mix. It twists and turns all over the place and by the end rolls out on a minimal techno tip.
J. For no other reason than that it’s a good beat and it works. It’s really simple, it gets your body moving and everybody can relate to it. I’ve found that the tracks that work the best especially when you’re playing out are always the tracks that are simple Tracks that you can move to and the Ska beat is an excellent example of that. It’s music that's made purely to get on down too. So you can take that basic rhythmic element and put it into a completely different context and it still works. It a great groove that puts a smile on people’s faces. It’s never gone away and you can look back on Ska, Reggae and Dub in particular and see how its influenced so much music. What with the bass, the production, the space and the echo effects. Its influence has filtered into virtually everything that came after it. Its definitely the case that the whole idea of the remix might never have happened without the influence of Dub, cause they were stripping those tunes right down to the basics and making something new out it. 
B. Tell us about your new label
J. It’s called Sonic Tonic and has come out of our Club night Experiments in Brighton. Our releases are a mixture of my stuff, my collaborations and other artists. It’s mostly tech / break beat based with some quirky stuff as well. We’re interested in artists who are not so generic or following the pack. But are more expressive of themselves and have got their own sound. Our first release is a four artist, four track E.P. It’ll act as an intro to label, its sounds and styles. The artists featured on the first E.P are Cake Boy whose track is a Two Step thang but a little way different as well. Track two is a Subtropic VS Ben Burns track. Which is another project I do and is a quite dark electro meets breaks meets techno vibe. There’s a T.B Spook unit tune which is a more down tempo thing than the one featured on the Garage Dubs album. It’s sort of twisted R’n’B meets My Bloody Valentine Meets Dub ( laughs ). The forth artist is Liquid Acrobat whose an old friend of mine from New Jersey. His tune is pretty straight ahead Electro with a real phat bass going on. So the E.P is a nice selection with lots of different tempo’s and styles going on. They all work to together very well and you can hear how they’re all tied together.
J. Not really only in as much as with Subtropic VS Ben Burns. I’ve done two albums and five E.P ‘s as Subtropic and now feel I’ve got the solo artist thing out of my system. I prefer working in collaboration with others, it’s more fun. It’s nice ‘cause when it works you end up with something neither of you would have done on your own. If in the future I have a sudden urge to flex my ego again as a solo artist then maybe, but I can’t see it at the moment.
J. I can understand both sides of it. It’s good for artists that need a leg up because of the potentially huge audience. But on the other hand speaking as an artist trying to survive in a money led economy you don’t really want to be giving away all of your music. So you have to find a balance. I’m really into MP3. It’s a good form for getting music out there and it’s a good for people who can’t get music any other way. Maybe they don’t have a record shop nearby or the shop they have can’t supply the sounds that they want. One thing worth considering is that MP3 is such a pure format it’s just data and there’s something about human beings. We’re physical beings and we like physical objects. When you get into that realm of pure data people find it hard to get a grip on it. It's such an abstract thing just a load of zero’s and ones. I think that there will always be a demand for physical items. It’s just a part of human nature, it’s the world we live in. People like physical things that they can touch, that are tactile and that they can look at. Also if your hard drive gets wiped or the chip on your MP3 player goes down you’ve lost all your music. So the demand will always be there. There’s been a lot of unfounded paranoia being banded around especially from the major record labels. And even if the majors did go down I wouldn’t be too upset ‘cause they’ve been working against music for a long time, just by treating it as such a commodified thing, rather than an art form. Also for Mp3 it’s very much early days and nobody really knows how to treat it. There are so many different ideas around. It’ll just take time to see what actually works and what people get into. I think though that in the main it’s a very exciting new medium to work with.
J. Generally it tends to start with the beat and everything else gets hung on top of that. With the music that I do, the Groove is the most important thing. I like to try to keep a balance. My ideal music is stuff that works well at home and therefore is interesting enough to listen to from beginning to end. It sounds good in headphones i.e. there’s enough weirdness going on. Also it’s got to be well enough produced and have enough space in it to sound good on a big sound system and rock that. So that's how music has got to go for me now and that’s what the label will be focusing on. People who make music that’s interesting to listen to and still gets you moving. There’s lots of good dance records that work on the sound system but when you get them home you’re bored after two minutes and want something else to happen. So it’s all about trying to get those different elements in there. I’ve always felt that my music has gotta work for your head, it’s gotta have some heart and soul as well as getting your feet moving as well.
J. There is no single one piece of kit that I could say is my favourite. I’m not really into technology, it’s just a tool. I’ve got a very basic set up. Just a P.C, an Akai sampler, a nice mixing desk and a few effects. I’ve had loads of different set ups over the years and it doesn’t make fuck all difference what sort of gear you’ve got. It’s just the ideas you have of how to use and abuse it. That's all that counts. It’s all just boxes with lights on in’it.
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