Letter #163

hi how r u 🐸,

Well, well, well. LOOK WHO IT IS.

I bet you’d forgotten all about me, hadn’t you? You thought I’d forgotten about you, thought I’d left you forever. Well I’m back, and god damn it I’ve bloody missed you.

How are you? It’s been nearly ten months, so feels a bit daft asking what you’ve been up to, but still, what’s going on? I’d love to hear from you!

I have been - as you’ve probably guessed - a little busy. Common People now has an emergency financial support fund, I trained for (and DNF’d - LOL) the Spine Challenger South, I started training for the Winter Downs 100, I launched a new business focused on helping companies understand culture and create stuff that’s valuable and additive (rather than destructive or extractive), I’ve been reading more than ever, and I’ve been busy with the team building lovewillsavetheday.fm. Oh, and desperately tried to remain a good parent, partner, and friend. It’s been wild, but I’ll spare you ten months worth of diary entries and instead give you a confession: I’ve bloody missed you.

Like, really missed you.

It’s taken me a long time to realise that in many ways, the Letters that I send to you are a sort of diary for me. This is where I work things out, share the beginnings of ideas, test things that I think might be interesting, and document my exploration of music, culture, and my attempts to lead a creative life. It’s a very public showing of my working and processing - and from what you’ve often said over the last (nearly) seven years, that’s often what’s been most interesting about the Letter. That and the music, of course.

So, I’m back.

As ever, just underneath here you’ll find the standard links to a bunch of mixtapes / shows filled with incredible music. I’ve also put together a short Notes, as over the last few weeks I’ve had a bit of a revelation, and it’s been very influential. AND I’ve also put together a TL:DR Section.

It’s good to be back, and I’m so pleased to be writing to you again.

See you on the airwaves,
Jed x

PS. If you're new here, then here’s what you’ve missed so far.

PPS. Oh, and come join our lovely community, you’ll love it ❤️

🥁 Shows, tracklists, and mixtapes

The section that you most likely came here for, so it’s up top. My latest shows and tracklists from lovewillsavetheday.fm.

PLAY NOW

PLAY NOW

📻 My lovewillsavetheday.fm recent highlights

These are my highlights from the station and the community this month…

• Get2Kno - a brilliant interview focused show highlighting crucial female DJs from the 90s.

• Come Collect with Collectivism - in my opinion, one of the best shows we’ve ever broadcast.

• Club Glorious - glorious by name, glorious by nature.

• Suspended in Air - beautiful music, played by a beautiful human. This episode was deeply moving.

• ByUs - Angie and Teresa interview Mr Scruff on their latest show.

Come join our community here, listen live here (Friday-Sunday every week), and listen back to past shows here. If you’re here, you belong.

🌪 TL;DR Section

You, stuff to listen to, stuff to do, and a lot of stuff to read

• What you lot are up to

  • Gabe is the new editor of RA - congratulations!

  • Scrimshire’s got new music out - buy-on-sight, as per

  • Failed Rockstar (AKA Neil) has launched his debut single - Drive-esque 80s deliciousness

  • Machine Soul in Sheffield have got Ash Lauryn playing soon

  • Bopperson’s debut EP is getting the remix (and pressing!) duty

  • There’s also two new great compilations out on 3024 from their excellent mentoring program - big shout, Martyn!

  • And there’s also brilliant new / relaunched newsletters from Becca OGT, Tom Belte, and Cosmic Bob

• Listen

  • I cannot get enough of the NoTags podcast. Listen-on-sight(!)

  • Scuba’s podcast is also on a hot streak at the minute too - this episode with Quinn from Paranoid London was a great listen

• Do

  • If you’re local to London, the Reverb exhibition at 180 Studios is phenomenal - big thanks for Stef for taking me down

• Read

  • Articles

    • Shawn Reynaldo is on great form at the minute - this Shackleton piece is great

    • CCL’s Art Of DJing feature in RA was both impeccable and inspiring

  • Books

    • Uncut Funk, bell hooks and Stuart Hall (as you’d expect - incredible)

    • Hold Your Own, Kae Tempest (beautiful)

    • Chav Solidarity, D. Hunter (astonishing)

    • Comrade, Jodi Dean (clarity on new ways of living)

    • Bring No Clothes, Charlie Porter (never no what to expect, never finish disappointed)

    • Black Women Always, Kevin Morosky (my book of the year)

    • Where We Come From, Aniefiok Ekpoudom (sublime, delicate writing on UK rap)

    • All Crews, Brian Belle-Fortune (the bible)

    • If you’d like more book recommendations / reviews, I publish short reviews of everything I’ve read and enjoyed here

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📝 The notes

Bass is the place.

For the last three years I’ve been going to We Out Here, and for the last three years I’ve had a musical epiphany there. The first year it was Tim Reaper. Last year it was Daudi. This year it was Mia Koden. Given the line up each year, I think it’s probably hard not to have an epiphany, but equally so, with such a ridiculously deep line up, it means the stand out moments really are all-over-goosebumps-holy-fuck-what-did-I-just-witness moments. Moments that seem to crystallise disparate parts of a journey I’ve not quite figured out yet - like finding a map for an adventure you’re already half way through.

With Reaper it was the use of energy in art, a new way of hearing music, and the act of using the past to mark out a path through the present, to the future. With Daudi it was finding a deeper way of understanding a lot of stuff about myself; my childhood, my identity, and friendships (Daudi’s music - and the man himself - has had a profound impact on me). With Koden it was dub.

I got home from Dorset and feverishly started digging through books on dub, articles, essays, albums, songs, documentaries - desperate to understand if this - dub - could be the thread of all that I love about music. Was dub the next part of the map of music that I use to understand the world? It felt like connective tissue between so much of what I loved - connecting art, politics, culture, and music. So I submerged myself.

Now, I’m very lucky in that I get to spend a lot of time with Collectivism’s Trufa Negra. That human is a bodhisattva, a brilliant, balanced, beautiful human, and in one meandering conversation I mentioned being at an impasse with the direction of my show and missing a little fire in how I was exploring, and he said - as clear as day, and with incredible nonchalance - that what typifies my show is an exploration of the edges through bass. It was, friend, a proper lightning strike that shot straight through me.

So my new direction - my new map - is “exploring the margins of music, culture, and life through bass frequencies”. What Kode9 / Steve Goodman would call Bass Materialism. The construction of a cultural ecology that focuses on the audio and tactile feeling of bass frequencies - in music, culture, and life.

Bass has always been important to me - from the donk basslines of illegal raves in village rugby clubs as an early teen, to the low-slung groove of Sun Ra’s Lanquidity - bass has always propelled me forwards.

Bass frequencies tap into our early-stage evolutionary lizard brains - literally - our heads used to be close to the floor, and the rumble of low-end frequencies would tell us about the world around us. Bass would trigger a fight or flight response - it would keep us alive. Millennia later, those same bass frequencies would teach us about the world when we in-utero - it would teach us what was to be alive. We have a biological predisposition to learn about the world from the sounds around us - and bass frequencies are a fundamental part of that.

They carry important cultural messages too. In dub - the act of removing the highs and mids - these bass frequencies carry messages of removal and absence. The absence of vocals and melody is a direct reflection of the cross-generational memories that become coded into dub, reflecting what Isis Semaj-Hall calls “references to an African home, a tortuous Middle Passage, and a weary entry into the New World”. Bass travels the waves across the Black Atlantic, and create the foundation of everything I love about music.

So this new concept of exploring the margins of music, culture, and life through bass frequencies and my moment at Mia Koden took me to dub, but then from dub took me back to Drexciya, to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, and to Kode9’s Hyperdub label. And Kode9 has become another sort of skeleton key for me…

You may not know, but was - until recently - a Lecturer in Music Culture at the School of Sciences, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of East London and member of the CCRU - the cybernetic culture research unit - a hugely influential group of thinkers that included Kodwo Eshun and Mark Fisher.

Kode9 - through his own work, label, and academic work - is the connection between the foundations of dub, critical theory, and bass-driven dance music today. He talks about using songs and albums as sort of audio-essays, telling stories through sentences of sound. On the foundation of heavy bass frequencies, he nods to footwork, and jungle, bass, to UK funky - connecting the rave continuum, and simultaneously connecting to ideas of acid communism, decrying right wing accelerationism, and playing with ideas of post-capitalist desire .

So, the next part of my journey will be about “exploring the margins of music, culture, and life through bass frequencies”.

Fancy joining me?