Future Shock: In Conversation with The Bug’s Kevin Martin

Few have captured the dark atmosphere of these times quite like Kevin Martin.

Since the COVID pandemic, whether it be through the primal, sub bass chaos as The Bug to the emotionally charged dreadscapes alongside Roger Robinson as King Midas Sound or the equally gruelling tunnel drone with Dis Fig, Martin has continuously dragged his listenership deep into the vortex.

On his first instrumental album as The Bug, Machine sees Martin echoing more political unrest through knee-buckling walls of sound. However, while the likes of The Bug’s 2021 landmark, Fire, met that unrest head on, Machine sees the producer teleporting his listeners to a different place: the future.

Originally released as a series of singles on Bandcamp over the past 12 months, in some ways Machine harbours a similar energy to Disconnect, Martin’s collaboration LP alongside Berlin-based Kenyan producer, KMRU, released earlier this year. Listening to both records back-to-back, and a dystopian pattern emerges, feeding into the turbulent times we currently find ourselves in.

Through these 12 compositions, Martin frames an accurate disorder. Annihilated (Force of Gravity) and Vertical (Never See You Again), the kind of menacing sounds where you can almost envision smoke rising from the wreckage. And from here the only thing to do is flee. To the future.

Riders on the Storm: An Interview with The Body & Dis Fig

Which is where we find ourselves with Shafted (Laws of Attraction/ Repulsion) – a sci fi blur with brutal inflections of dub. And speaking of, Floored (Point of Impact) and Hypnotised (F-cked Up) are fresh new takes on of it. Sub bass that jolts, moving through your body like electricity. It’s Martin revealing a new world order through sound, and with any new world order there is light…

And it comes via Departed (Left the Body Behind) and Buried (Your Life is Short) – essential, post-warehouse comedowns with just enough electric shocks to keep the buzz alive. Then there’s the swarming drone assault of Bodied (Send for the Hearse), which sees Martin pulling the listener back into that very warehouse.

While Martin has spent the last several years on a search and destroy mission, Machine sees The Bug in exploration mode, finding new doors to open. And those doors lead to the future. Ideologically, it’s not a world away from the frenzy of Fire or even the game changing London Zoo. It’s just Martin engineering new ways to amplify the same message. The world is in ruins. But now it’s time time to seek refuge beyond.

Last week, I caught up with Martin via Zoom from his Brussels home to discuss a range of issues, including his influences and his blinding run of form, which includes the latest jewel from the crown: Machine.

Sun 13: Do you remember the first record that really changed your perception of music and made you want to make it yourself?

Kevin Martin: “It’d be hard to isolate one record. But what lit me up initially to music, of my own choice and volition, was a friend when I was younger than 10 playing the Sex Pistols album to me. I was just wondering what the fuck that was all about? I didn’t have a particularly happy childhood, so it spoke loud to me. I think the first record I bought was a Discharge record, a couple of their seven inches, I think Fight Back and Realities of War. Punk music spoke to me philosophically and socially.

“The inspiration to make music actually came from post-punk and getting into artists like Crass, Throbbing Gristle, Public Image Ltd, The Birthday Party, Joy Division, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire and Killing Joke. All these artists that were fiercely DIY, and I was like, ‘Hold on, if these guys can do it, surely I can?’ The need to make music, a craving to make it, you know? My father and my grandfather were musicians, so it’s in my blood. Despite not getting on well with my father, I inherited his blood, and my mother had music in the house non-stop as a kid. So music was always there for me. It was my catalyst. To try and understand the world was via music.

“As I said, my father wasn’t a particularly nice guy, had huge fights with my mum, and I’d literally pull speakers off onto the floor and use them as headphones on either side of my ears to drown out the sound of them shouting at each other. So again, music was my saviour, and it was just really a case of the whole DIY, post-punk movement, the self-empowerment in terms of making music. Punk had so many other interesting things too, politically, philosophically, all of which inspired me. It was that time in those areas that interested me enough to think I could do it myself. I had a saxophone at first and a bass guitar and a Roland SH-101 synth, not all at the same time, but around a similar period. And a friend of mine had a four-track Portastudio… we used to write demos and write tracks on it.”

S13: You’ve signed to Relapse Records. How did that come about?

KM: “The original link up to Relapse came from Justin Broadrick. I’m not sure if he was friends of Rennie [Jaffe] who runs Relapse, or if they had approached him to release stuff in the past, but it was Justin. We discussed the idea of trying to reissue Techno Animal stuff, and we couldn’t think of many labels that would do that. But Relapse came into the conversation via Justin, and he said that I can approach them and see if they’re interested. At the same point, we approached them about Zonal and the Zonal album we made with Moor Mother, and they picked up both. They did a great job, I have to say. I’ve spent a long time on a label which I feel didn’t really understand or agree with me aesthetically, so the idea of suddenly being on a label that gave a shit and are passionate was really a positive move for me.

“When I sent the music over to Rennie, he said he was already aware of the music and that he was a big fan of The Bug stuff and was very happy to do it. I was flattered, and it mirrored what I’ve noticed at Bug shows. There’s suddenly been metal heads showing up. I see SUNN O))), Godflesh and Earth shirts now, which I never used to at all. It’s only been in recent years, partly because of the collabs I’ve done with Dylan Carlson. Obviously, there’s an ongoing friendship, and kinship with Justin, working with Al Cisneros, too, so that world’s gravitated towards me. Playing festivals like Roadburn definitely opened me up to a metal crowd, so it’s not such a strange move going from Ninja Tune to Relapse as some people may find. But to be honest, The Bug on Ninja Tune was a bit of a square peg, anyway. It wasn’t the most fitting home for what I was doing, particularly as the music was getting heavier and noisier album by album, which they were probably not that happy about.” (laughs)

S13: Talking about Killing Joke in terms of the post-punk aspect, were they like a gateway into metal for you afterwards?

KT: “Killing Joke are absolutely incredible. I got into them not because they were metal, but because I was 10 years old and the hippest punk in my town had a painting of a Killing Joke sleeve on the back of his leather jacket. I looked at the design and the name, and thought, ‘They’ve got to be good’. I didn’t even know who they were, so I tracked down Killing Joke’s first album, and I wouldn’t have related them to metal. I know that they are spoken about in metal areas but, if anything, my connection to metal has come more from Justin. I mean, what you’ve got to realise for me – which is ironic, considering I am on Relapse – is my mum almost put me off guitars for life because she was really into rock music. (laughs) As a kid I was just hearing Deep Purple and Rainbow and Santana and God knows what other rock bands I found disgusting.

“My revenge was really getting into Crass and punk music to try and drown her out. (laughs). So for me, rock music, and guitars in general, were a bit of a problem area. That put me off metal for quite a long time, and it was only through working with Justin and my love of Godflesh that probably connected me more to metal. I bought his first album, because I remember it had a sticker on there. I think it said something like, ‘Features members of Napalm Death and the Head of David’. I was a fan of both, but again, I didn’t equate Napalm Death with metal at that point. They were punk for me.

“So my pathway to metal is a bit ill fitting. It’s a tough one, because I even laugh about it with the people that work at Relapse. I think the first conversation I had with Rennie was, ‘I don’t really like metal that much’. But I love riffs, and I love the heaviness of some of the best metal I can find. But there’s a lot of it I find repulsive; the theatricality, the cliches, the guitar solos, the macho side of it. There’s a lot I don’t like about metal, but there’s still something that compels me to check for it. And there’s still metal albums that I like a lot. Swans’ Cop was the most metal album ever, because it reduced everything just to the heaviest riffs imaginable with such intensity. When I heard Cop, I thought, ‘Isn’t this what metal should be?’ As I said, Godflesh certainly were a bridge towards metal for me.

S13: The songs from Machine were released as installments on Bandcamp over the last year or so, right?

KM: “Yeah, that’s right. I got into this habit of making the track specifically to coincide with Pressure events, which are the parties I put on, or for The Bug shows, because I wanted new material to play each time. Ever since discovering Bandcamp – really during COVID – I love the instantaneous, direct nature of it, and the absolute DIY-cutting-out-the-middleman side of it. Since EP one, I’d said to close friends and my wife that this was going to be an album. I wanted to make a narrative out of my favourite tracks that would fit best together to form an album. It was always the plan, but I had no idea it would be on Relapse. I probably thought it would be me releasing it on Pressure. But as I said, I’m very happy that Rennie seemed really inspired by the music.”

S13: It feels like the embodiment of the dreadscape, which I think has been your remit in terms of your recent output. What was the fundamental aspect that you wanted to capture with these recordings?

KM: (Pause) “I would say, primarily it was to make a new form of dub music that I wasn’t hearing. I’ve been in love with dub and reggae for decades – again, since I was a kid. Punk and reggae were hand in hand when I grew up, and dub music, dub producers like Scientist, King Tubby, Adrian Sherwood, Lee Perry really inspired me incredibly as a music producer. I think the frustration for me has been that so much contemporary dub music sounds old and boring. It sounds flat and uninspired. What I got from dub music was it felt like music being transmitted from the future and it had future shock value, whereas most contemporary dub music doesn’t sound like that.

“I think I wanted to make dub music that was inspired by sci fi. I think it was William Gibson in Necromancer… there’s a paragraph in there about dub music being carried through the universe, which I’m not into. When I say science fiction, I’m not really into space opera; I’m talking about, JG Ballard where it’s about the dystopia and the uneasy relationship between humans and technology.

“Whilst everyone seems so completely obsessed with being liked, I wanted to make dub music that maybe some people definitely wouldn’t like. I wanted to basically test sound systems, test people’s ears, bodies and perceptions of what dub and dance music could be, because no doubt this stuff isn’t traditional dance music. But at Bug shows, people lose their shit to this stuff, and that’s one of the primary goals… you should have this physical outlet for your tension and frustrations with life. I think I’ve always seen my music as a catalyst for that. A sort of exorcism of just getting shit off your shoulders, get the way out, and using music as a catalyst.”

S13: Science fiction isn’t something I would have said influenced your earlier material, but it feels prevalent with your recent works. Has this been a new source of inspiration, or has it always been in the background?

KM: “Yeah, because my mum used to be an addict for sci fi, so I’d be watching Star Trek and Doctor Who every week. The first time I ever watched Doctor Who I had to hide behind the sofa, because I was so terrified when my mom was watching it. So for me, it goes back to childhood… I was a sci fi nerd. But as I grew older, I realised that the space traveling, shoot ups weren’t really what sci fi was about. I was much more interested in the view of how near futures will be, and just how surreal our present time is… our interaction with each other and with technology and with the developments that continue shifting in socio political life. As I said, someone like JG Ballard was a god in terms of brainstorming. And at the same time, that type of dystopian sci fi, like The Andromeda Strain, or even something like Erasurehead, continually inspired me, because it’s the horror of everyday life that we’re leading and how to navigate the lack of control that most of us are in generally.

“The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits were big influences on me when I was a young kid, too. My idea of punk was all about question everything, believe nothing. Science fiction is question everything again, really. Question your environment and look to the future… where it’s going and try and understand the powers that be in their relentless pursuit of controlling your behaviour. When I first met my wife, she didn’t really know much about sci fi, and when I said I liked it, she couldn’t deal with that idea at all, because for her it just meant Star Wars. Whereas I had to explain nice, good sci fi is really a different way of looking at the world and trying to understand it.”

S13: Speaking of technology and social media, what’s your relationship with it as an artist? Do you embrace it, or do you find a middle ground with it?

KM: “I know a lot of people who are totally anti it. I’m not anti. For me as a kid, going back to sci fi fantasies, I always dreamt that I could have access to the biggest library in the world! When I watch Star Trek, how you can deal with someone like you and I are dealing with each other now… when you are speaking to someone on the other side of the world and looking at them and talking. That felt like a futuristic fantasy when I was a kid, but it’s reality now! The downside is you open this sewer as well. (laughs) I’ve had people threatening to kill me online, threatening to kill my kids, kill my wife for no rational reason whatsoever; just people and fans turning rogue for no good reason, which can get sort of mental. So there’s a downside.

“It’s like going into a pub and just being surrounded by random people and thinking you’re going to get on with everyone; that’s not the case. And even those people you think you will because they are relatively new and shallow relationships, you’ll suddenly find they can turn mighty rogue very quickly. I still don’t know what some of these people have turned so rogue on me for in the past, because I’m generally a positive person and will react and interact with people whenever I can. But there’s obviously only so many minutes in the day, and I think what you come up against is some people are just unhappy in life. That’s my interpretation of it, and if they’re unhappy, they’re going to try and make you unhappy. That’s not my view of life. My view of life is that how you make your dreams real and how you follow your will to whatever it is you want, without harming others.”

S13: Continuing with tech, and going back to Bandcamp…

KM: “When COVID hit, it was a panic station situation for everyone, but certainly Bandcamp saved my arse at that point. Also, being able to meet people who are very cool online is a blessing. We talked about Killing Joke earlier… someone told me on Facebook that Youth put me alongside – I can’t remember who it was – Lee Perry and King Tubby as being like a king of modern dub. I would never have found that out before, and it was hugely flattering, but just very cool that you hear about things in a way you wouldn’t have otherwise. The potential is staggeringly good and staggeringly bad. It’s just human, isn’t it? Those poles of extremity that exist in everything human.”

S13: Do you feel as if your working methods have changed over the years because of how platforms like Bandcamp make things more readily available?

KM: “That’s a good question. I was working fast on the Machine series, because I had deadlines that I set myself for shows. I knew that if I hit Bandcamp Fridays, there was a bonus. That was definitely new. I can remember the anxiety and excitement of trying to hit that deadline… on the day of a show, literally contacting my mastering engineer, saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to master this today’, and him saying, ‘What are you talking about?’ (laughs) And then trying to get artwork finished in time. So in a way it’s changed, but at the same time, if you’re involved in the music industry, it’s a hustle. You just have to think on your feet and always be proactive and react fast to changes.

“The people in the industry that I notice moaning and complaining about everything, from my experience, have just become stale or lazy or uninspired. Change is change. You either accept that change is going to happen and you morph with it and react to it, otherwise you just sound like some old fucker moaning about the dawn of the day.” (laughs)

S13: Do you work on music every day and have a set routine?

KM: “Since I’ve had kids, routines are out the window, because anything random can happen at any moment, and often does. I’m generally not a very disciplined person, but what I am is obsessed with making music. It’s a compulsion. So whenever I can, I make music every single day, that’s for sure.”

S13: Do you think your local surroundings have influenced the latest material you’ve produced?

KM: (Pause) “I think so, yeah. But more indirectly than directly. I think if you make music the way I do continuously, every life event has an impact. So I think Brussels has definitely had an impact, [but] it’d be hard to qualify exactly what it is. What I have done is fallen in love with the city unexpectedly. I don’t miss Berlin, and I think I’ve become more prolific since being in Brussels through COVID. It was through the reality that I had to be prolific to sell my solo albums on Bandcamp, to survive and pay the rent and to feed four mouths.

“The area I live in is very similar to the area where I lived in London. It’s basically the poorest neighbourhood in Belgium and Brussels and the most multicultural. And I love it for that. But whereas neighbourhoods like this in London can be really tense and every culture hates the other culture full stop, here it’s sort of live and let live. If you live in this neighbourhood, you’re having a tough life. It’s a special city. It’s chaotic, messy and dirty. Someone described to me, before I moved here, that it’s like the Naples of the North. I thought ‘Are you tripping?’ But actually, I get what they were getting at it. It’s definitely surprised me in a very positive way. But I have to say, I find it an oasis within Belgium. It’s not that I particularly love Belgium, but I definitely love Brussels.”

S13: Is there the same kind of political disillusion in Belgium as there has been in the U.K. for so many years?

KM: “Belgium’s really fucked up. You’ve got the Flemish in the north, which really want to disassociate themselves from the French in the south and split the country in half. At the most extreme, they want independence, and a lot of those extremists hate Brussels in particular, because they think there are so many immigrants that live here. So it’s quite an uneasy country. You notice a big disparity that the Flemish areas are far more moneyed and affluent than the French areas. So yeah, I think there is a disillusionment, and there’s extremely high unemployment in Brussels and particularly in our neighbourhood. Again, I would say it’s all over Europe now, in terms of the cost of living and inflation and the far right getting dangerously more active. I think those issues seem to be all over Europe, if not the world, so I would say Britain’s no different than Brussels in that respect.”

S13: Is there anyone you haven’t collaborated with that you’d like to work alongside at some point?

KM: “I always have these flights of fantasy of who I’d love to work with. I wanted to work with Tricky for a long time. Unfortunately, he wanted to work with me at a time when I was going through quite a bad phase in my life. I turned him down at that time, and I don’t think he’s ever really forgiven me. Ever since, I tried to rekindle links and I’ve just been turned down, so I get a feeling that’s never going to happen, unfortunately. I really think he’s an incredible lyricist and artist.

“Caspar Brötzmann is someone that we talked loosely about working together before, and I love his guitar style. That’s just off the top of my head… it’s such a tough one to even think of who, but I’m always thinking about who I’d like to collaborate with. Particularly vocalists, because it’s the thing I feel I really can’t do. Because my voice when I was in God was really just primal scream therapy. I can’t sing for shit, and I can’t rap either, so for me, it’s mostly vocalists I’m drawn to work with. There’s talk at some point about me working with a Elucid from Armand Hammer and Vast Aire from Cannibal Ox, who are both New York underground hip-hop acts. But I still have to think how that works… when I’ve worked with American rappers in the past, somehow, I feel it’s hard to find the gelling agent. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing or what.”

S13: If you had to pick a favourite record that you’ve ever been involved with, what would it be?

KM: “The fairest answer would be to say the next one, because I don’t generally like to think back. For all those people who’ve hustled and hassled to get things reissued… of course, I’d like to reissue everything I’ve been involved in, or have it available to the public, but I’d rather spend the time it takes to have to do all those things into doing the next record. That’s the thing; I don’t feel I’ve even reached a creative peak yet. I feel that I’m still always learning, and I always get producer envy when I hear other people’s records, thinking, ‘How did they do that to make it sound so good!’ Being riddled as ever with self-doubt as to whether or not my shit is even worthwhile, you know? So for me, the next record is the one I’m most interested in all the time. Generally, I’m always chasing my tail, because I’ve always got things in place that I need to finish. It sounds like a cop out answer, but it’s not a cop out. I’d rather think about the future than the past.”  

Machine is out via Relapse Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.