Labels are regularly born out of humble club night beginnings. It’s a natural move of course — the act of slow cooking a familiar sound before turning it into your own 12″ fodder for a growing fanbase to digest. The formula appears simple, but it’s one that few manage to decipher with really noticeable results.
For the Her Records family, the idea of a label was a target from the off. Started by childhood friends Sudanim, CYPHR and Miss Modular, their first dancefloor exploits tell a familiar tale. An abandoned Loughborough Junction arch became their first rave site on New Years Eve 2012/2013. They’d stripped it bare, stocked it up with a muscled soundsystem setup and went about cramming 250 heads in till 6am. Hip-hop and dancehall blared out of those speakers, bringing together mates and extended family in one happy, dancing matrimony. Naturally, they wasted no time in following up. A second soiree quickly came soundtracked by Funkystepz, a third by Scratcha DVA thereafter. Unsurprisingly, one noun seemed to tie all these gatherings together: fun.
The ‘fun’ approach has dripped into their output too. So when the time was right to go from testing out venues to test pressing, the move was rather fluid. “Reflector Pack” was quite the introduction – a hyperkinetic Miss Modular production with the right ratio of grime to UK Funky and dancehall. The whole thing is intensely tangible and layered with caverns of tactile percussion. Sudanim’s follow up The Link EP was sonically coherent. On the titular track he harnesses the stripped back rhythmic ingenuity of early 00s hip hop in brilliant fashion, reappropriating its low end swagger for his own club framework as he swings playfully shifting grooves over a booming 808.
There’s so many influences combined, from dancehall to grime to hip hop, but all the elements combine to make something that sounds original and fresh. For All Ends – Fraxinus’ debut release – he gives Big Ria’s 1996 Baltimore Club classic “Knuckleheadz” some spring cleaning to create two heavyhitters – “All Ends”, already a well-established club sing-along, and B side “Off Ends”, popularly known as the “All Ends VIP”.
That’s the thing with Her. Although the reference points are so widespread, there’s a sturdy drum-driven backbone to everything they put out. It’s crucial that these are not the reverent disciples of Metalheadz or Sidewinder. Instead it’s Boxed and Hyperdub that act as relevant cultural pegs — the movements that celebrate the clashes of kaduro, grime, dancehall, Jersey and everything else during their nocturnal gatherings. There are hints of Butter-era HudMo melding with “Cheese N Bun” Lil Silva and Scratcha DVA’s brash disregards for anything normal in their DNA too.
A vivid art direction has emerged alongside the audio. Characterised by shadowy, dark tones it seems like the one overtly serious element to their movement. “I think with Her it always felt like it was more than just making some record artwork, it was more ambient or something; the track and the artwork making this extra kind of atmosphere together,” explains regular cover art creator, Pablo Jones-Soler. “There is something really visceral about the tracks so it is just about reacting to this kind of deep instinctual feeling they give you, there was always this feeling of potential violence, primitive and glossy.”
The label heads prefer to let the artists do the art. “Pablo and Aoto’s work is a huge part of our aesthetic, we’ve been working with them consistently for a while now and want to give them as much free reign as possible,” opens Miss Modular. “If the artwork is going to be a collaborative process, then I feel it should be mostly worked out between the visual artist and the person who made the record. Mine and Suda’s role is to offer the framework to work within.”
I’m into the idea of the artwork being the visual artists’ ‘translation’ of the sounds that they hear in the project. The focus of the artwork, or totems as I like to think of them, should represent the artists’ visceral interpretation of the music. The void-like space in which it exists is largely just aesthetic, though. I like the starkness of it. As for the lack of text, to me it just feels wrong to stamp all this information on top of this beautiful visual.”
Peering past the present, Her are really digging their teeth into more experimentation. Aside from some tracks on The Link EP, there’s not much appreciation for the slower tempos just yet. Or maybe not even slower, but just a general variation in tempo. We’re told that Her Records Volume. 4 (out at the end of the year) will provide that variety — darker and more textural than the previous volume(s), they’re looking to dabble outside their 130-140bpm comfort zone when that arrives later this year.
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In the mean time, we’re preparing for Sudanim, Miss Modular, Fraxinus, Kid Antoine and NKC to man our upstairs studio between 7-11pm (CET) next Tuesday. Find out more information about the session just here.