Slugabed
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Slugabed

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Slugabed (Greg Feldwick by day) is a producer based in Brighton and signed to the illustrious Ninja Tune label. As is to be expected from any Ninja Tune act, Slugabed’s music is a maximal mash of sounds from any number of different sources – there is the studied shuffle of hip hop producers like J Dilla and Flying Lotus, the shuddering low end of UK dubstep and endless folds of 8 bit game-boy synthesisers. Slugabed’s great skill as a producer is to pull all of these influences together with a sense of delight and abandon. His debut album, Time Team, creates a kind of all-embracing logic where it feels like any sound or influence could surface at any moment.

Unlike the days of old where localised music scenes would carry their own distinctive sound, Slugabed’s music belongs to a school of production that can be difficult to pinpoint geographically. These are producers who mash genre-signifiers from a wide range of influences into something that sounds not quite of this world. “There is incredible stuff coming out of every corner of the world,” enthuses Feldwick. “There’s so many different subgenres and people pushing so many boundaries worldwide that you can’t really pin down one sound for too long. It’s much more of a universal thing these days, especially with the huge role the internet plays in music.”

It is perhaps unsurprising then, given their remove from geographical space, that Slugabed and many of his Ninja Tune compatriots ground their aesthetic in deep-space, retro-futurism and cartoons. Retro-futurism is how we imagine those living in the ‘70s and ‘80s would have envisioned the future (Star Wars laser sounds, lovingly naff costuming etc). Take, for example, the excellent video-clip for Slugabed’s first single Sex. The clip, directed by Chris Cullens, shows an ‘80s infomercial for a brand of juicer that turns old tapes into fruit juice through a convoluted process of stop motion animation.

“I knew I wanted something fruity and quirky to fit the lolful nature of the track,” says Feldwick, “and I knew I didn’t want anything ‘sexy’ because that’s not really what the track is about. The director came up with this idea for a naff, ‘80s-style infomercial for a juicer, which I loved. Once I saw some of his previous stop-frame animation work I was sold.” The resultant video pulls together nostalgia, cartoon logic, otherworldly extremes and a sense of tongue-in-cheek fun. In short, it’s a pretty spot-on visual equivalent for Slugabed’s music. 

The other key aesthetic running through Time Team is childhood and naivety (there’s plenty of that in the video clip as well). Take track titles like Grandma Paints Nice, Climbing A Tree or Travel Sweets. Take the many samples of children’s voices that run wildly through the album, chanting and singing. Take the concept behind Sex which Feldwick says is about “fannies and pubes and nervousness.” Or (perhaps most importantly) take the playful abandon with which Slugabed combines all the sounds he uses – the sense of discovery and joy that one imagines Feldwick finding as he sits at his computer (believe it or not the whole album was pulled together on Fruity Loops) and finds new and novel synth tones or beat patterns.

Despite these aesthetic signifiers though, for Feldwick, the core of the album is still something abstract. He describes the album as dealing with “deep feelings about mostly inexpressible things, like when I’m gazing out of a window of a train and everything is whizzing past real quick and I’m not thinking about anything in particular. I don’t necessarily feel happy or sad I just feel a wave of stuff that isn’t really attached to anything.” Musically the same frantic pacing courses through Slugabed’s tunes – waves of sound that aren’t necessarily connected to one another, each spilling into the next and overflowing to heady effect.

It is often said that electronic music, with its endless possibility of sound and its remove from the concrete world, is especially adept at conjuring abstract moods such as the ones Slugabed describes. Feldwick insists, however, that the construction of the music is of more importance than the choice of sounds in creating mood. “What really conveys the most complex and abstract emotions is the composition. The melodies, harmonies and rhythms are what’s most important and that’s something that is ubiquitous across all genres.” Listen closely to Slugabed’s music and you’ll hear that oomph in every element of the composition. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

BY HENRY ANDERSEN