Perc: Harmonic Distortion
James Manning talks to Ali Wells about the path to his bracing second album, The Power And The Glory.
Writing for the Guardian in 2011, Tony Naylor suggested Perc’s debut album, Wicker & Steel, was a “bleak audio montage of modern Britain.” Its release came weeks before the 2011 England riots that turned much of east and south London, to parts of Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham, into urban warzones. Two and a half years later Ali Wells’ second album, The Power And The Glory, is released on Perc Trax, and although there’s no such plaudits being thrown around like before, its arrival follows more tension.
On January 8 this year, Officer V53 was acquitted for the unlawful murder of Mark Duggan, victim of a police shooting that sparked the riots. Following the inquest’s not-guilty verdict it was reported a number of protesters were planning to “provoke disorder” during a vigil held out the front of Tottenham police station, but demonstrations were peaceful enough with crowds carrying placards reading, “Justice for Mark Duggan”, while reggae and hip hop played from loudspeakers.
It would seem from this scene that reggae and hip hop is the soundtrack to inner-city London life, not the “hard techno, ambient drones and reconditioned industrial noise,” described by Naylor. This doesn’t mean, however, that political, economical or social association can’t be made with The Power And The Glory – of course there can; venting unrest of these types is what British industrial music has always done best. But as Ali Wells puts it, “if another journalist wants to update the story then it may well happen,” adding, “I don’t think your average supporter of me, or your average fan of techno would make those connections.”
When it comes to industrialised techno, Perc is synonymous. He’s been releasing music since 2002, debuting on a trance and progressive house label run by James Holden, developing his sound across several other similarly minded outlets until about 2005. From there his music began appearing on established labels like Drumcode and CLR, to others like Hans Bouffmyhre’s Sleaze, Josh Wink’s Ovum, and even Kompakt Extra. There have also been forays into conceptual labels like Stroboscopic Artefacts, and most recently a 12” for Chicago’s biggest industrial supporter Prosthetic Pressings, however Wells’ home base has always been his own Perc Trax label.
A dynamic 2013 saw Wells introduce a multitude of new projects and collaborations to his portfolio, like the shared various artist EPs Perc Trax ran with Oscar Mulero’s Pole Group, and the Ampere & Ohm label made especially for the AX & P handle he and Adam X formed to release some of the tracks they’d been chipping away at for the past two years. But the most notable development was the two arms added to the body of his main Perc Trax outlet. On the right there’s Perc Trax LTD, a label that “shamelessly aims directly for the dancefloor while avoiding the big room cliché of so much modern techno.” And the left, an experimental and noise-minded Submit, whose latest release is the Feral Grind compilation, headlined by artists like Pete Swanson, Bleaching Agent, Burial Hex and Prostitutes.
Wells launched Submit with four interpretations he made of songs by German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten. “That was one of these post-Wicker & Steel things where I was thinking of doing something different than just working on my ‘next EP’,” Wells says of his decision for Interpretations to be Submit’s first title. “At one point it was going to be a collaboration of completely new material, and in the end we sent a few things back and forward and (I) ended up working on these dub mixes from their debut album Kollaps,” I’m told on a fresh Finsbury Park morning in a café local to Wells. He also adds that although the Neubauten project was interesting to do over the two years it took to complete, it will remain a one-off collaboration.
Working with some of his inspirations is something Wells has regularly done, dating back to Perc Trax’s 2009 reissue-de-homage of “Defect”, a ’96-released drum and bass production by Ed Rush & Nico that received a new coat of remixes from Perc and Peter Van Hoesen. He’s also had Chris Carter (Throbbing Gristle) remix “My Head Is Slowly Exploding” from Wicker & Steel and Richard H. Kirk (Cabaret Voltaire) rewire Ekoplek’s Perc Trax debut, the Westerleigh Works EP. More recently he rebranded Matt Whitehead’s “A is for Acid” for Perc Trax LTD’s debut 12”, this time with a remix from Truss’ cooled-off MPIA3 alias and two Perc modifications. “I just like to keep Perc Trax interesting,” and “it’s just something fresh,” Wells says after telling me, “it’s nice to approach people who you think are going to say ‘no’, because you think you haven’t got anything to lose.”
After meeting Wells out the front of Arsenal football club’s megastore and walking through the odd scaffold-thoroughfare and past the hair & beauty shops lining some of Finsbury Park’s streets, Wells mentions how things are slowly changing in the area he’s lived for the past four years. “Old greasy-spoon fry-up cafes are (still) going, some of the pubs are under new management and are becoming a bit more sort-of-gastropubs rather than what we call an ‘old man’s pub’.” It’s a slow gentrification that’s happening across many areas of London he says, and at the moment, “it seems fairly steady rather than rampant…The area still has its charm, still has its little secret places that have been here for years, so it’s not completely gentrified, it’s balanced.”
Over a mug of steaming hot tea and some quintessential English grub, a sausage and egg sandwich, Wells elaborates on how his surroundings can influence his music without necessarily becoming his maxim. “The urban influence, the environment and the broken down buildings and things like that – yeah that is an influence,” he says, “but for me it’s more of the whole urban thing and the speed of life in London.”
“It’s not the be-all or end-all,” Wells adds. “I’m sure if I moved to a Caribbean island or somewhere in the country I’d probably make the same music as well as a few more chilled things.” Something that should also be known about Wells is that he’s not the type of guy to constantly play-up the hardcore industrial image, and in an email conversation organising this interview, he wrote, “as for the photos, as long as we avoid all the techno/industrial clichés of urban decay, falling down warehouses and graffiti then I’ll be happy.”
When it comes to an environment Wells affects, it’s the club, and none more than Corsica Studios. “I love the club,” he says, “it’s probably where I’ve played most in London so the DJ booth feels so familiar to me.” But London techno in terms of clubs? It’s a funny one he reckons. “Fabric keep doing what they do and generally have really good line-ups, and London as everyone knows has so many temporary venues; east London warehouses, those kind of things, so it’s quite hard to say a venue has been great because by the time you say it, it’s been shut down or whatever, so the city’s not that stable in terms of venues and parties.”
“The urban influence, the environment and the broken down buildings and things like that – yeah that is an influence, but for me it’s more of the whole urban thing and the speed of life in London.”
Corsica Studios, then, was the obvious choice to launch The Power And The Glory, and supporting was Truss, young Glaswegian pairing Clouds controlling the second room, and more spectral figures Shackleton and Demdike Stare providing “not two rooms of testosterone techno,” as Wells puts it. As for the new album, “I love the clanking, metallic, percussive sound,” he says, but feels, “maybe I pushed it as far as I could.”
Discussing trends and templates of techno popular at the moment, Wells has this to say: “Quite a lot of it is Berlin-centered, or even if it’s (being made) by people away from Berlin, it’s looking toward Berlin clubs.” And although some may think the AnD ‘harder and harder and harder’ style of techno will burn out in the same way loopy ‘90s techno did, there’s some steam to let off yet. “If you look at the stuff like Blawan, Karenn, Truss, Clouds,” Wells points out, “some of the atmospheric sounds are gone and it’s pretty much raw, acidy techno, and it’s tough, and some of that ‘fog of drone’ has been stripped away,” observes Wells. “Maybe that gives it the more direct sound.”
Techno bangers on The Power And The Glory like “Dumpster” with its Truss-like drums and laser-etched percussion, to the album’s call to arms, “Take Your Body Off”, were tested at each gig Wells played during the past six months. And although the album is still slamming in parts, there’s an emphasis on melody and texture that give this second LP an effect of harmonic distortion over brutal mechanisms.
Interestingly, it seems if Wicker & Steel and The Power And The Glory were bound by something, it’s the former’s ambient, spoken word intro “Choice”, which, “until the very last minute was quite a big, banging club track,” reveals Wells. Take a listen to “Choice” and you’ll hear similar strokes of melancholic synthesis on new productions like “Speek”, “Galloper”, “Horse Gum” and its opener “Rotting Sounds”. In “Rotting Sound”, explains Wells, “the speech sample before the track starts came in the last few days of the album’s completion, it kind of cleanses the palette a little, but sets the scene.”
“That’s something I’ve always been interested in,” he adds. “I always liked how everything from rock tracks to rave tracks had some little spoken word thing, loads of rave tracks cut things from film – and even “Loaded” by Primal Scream.” Vocal work on The Power And The Glory came from two sources, Factory Floor’s Nik Void and metal singer Dan Chandler from a band called Dethscalator who split last year. For the album, Wells was looking for a vocalist linked to a hardcore, black metal-type genre, “I had that Black Flag sound in my head,” he says.
After being put in touch with Chandler by friends, “a couple of gigabytes of vocals turned up” in Wells’ inbox. It was every vocal-stem from Dethscalator’s last album, Racial Golf Course No Bitches. “Dan is a self-confessed… you know, he doesn’t know anything about house, techno, dance music, he’s a heavy-rock kind of guy, and he likes the tracks,” Wells says in a tone that suggests he’s happy to have pleased someone unfamiliar to techno.Chandler features on both “Rotting Sound” and “Take Your Body Off”, which Wells explains as having a bit of energy, a bit of bite, “it’s not like he’s on these floaty, ambient things.”
As for Void from Factory Floor, she and the band share a close working relationship with Perc. In addition to supporting each other on stage, Wells remixed Factory Floor in 2012, while Void and Factory Floor reworked tracks from Forward Strategy Group’s album on Perc Trax, Labour Division. “With Nik you don’t just get the vocals dry, she does a lot of processing and you get the whole thing,” Wells says, adding, “it was just a case of editing (her vocals) to fit in line with the track (“Speek”) and they were used a bit more sparingly than what they were originally going to be.”
Other track titles on the album like “Lurch” take their inspiration from the way they sound, while “A Living End” is a figure of speech that gets quite serious I’m told. “It’s a term used for assisted suicides, so it’s sort of (saying), you don’t have to live your life until your body is completely destroyed and you die,” he explains. “It’s a phrase used by people that want a dignified death, by people that want to be able to communicate with their families and not just live their life until they are a complete vegetable.” But when it comes to speaking about the album as a whole, Wells finds it hard to put into words without “sounding like some kind of self-help manual.”
“It’s kind of like; power within, and the ability (of) ‘if you put your mind to it to you can achieve anything’,” he starts. “Some people call the album title egotistical, it’s not like that at all, it’s slightly sarcastic.” Wells takes a second before elaborating, “when you think of these great DJs travelling the world, you have these amazing moments of playing the gig, and hopefully people are enjoying it and they’re really into what you do – and then you have these kind of moments where you’re on your own, so it’s a kind of balance of when you are between these two things.”
There’s a sense of escapism in Wells’ words about The Power And The Glory too, which he also expresses through the artwork. In a way it’s visually similar to The Big Dream LP by famed surrealist director David Lynch, released last year. But unlike Lynch’s industrial, Hazchem-like graphics of a man being struck down by an electricity bolt, Perc’s manga-esque cover art is quite the opposite. “Some people think it’s a guy who’s been caught in an explosion or bomb or something, or he’s been shot with some sort of energy beam or laser: but it’s not, it’s the power coming out of him,” he says. “So it’s the power within him that is so strong that it’s knocked him to the floor.” And this was the brief given to graphic designer, Jonny Costello.
“I never really pulled out a piece of paper and made a conscious decision of how I’ll take the (Perc) sound forward,” Wells explains of the developments you can hear on his new full length. “Wicker & Steel was a bit more personal and more about my ‘journey’,” he adds. “With any artist, you have from the moment you are born to when you make your debut album – that could be anything from 20, 30, 40 years,” explains Wells. “And your second album,” he continues, “you have three or four years, so it’s much less about life up to that point, and more about my experiences between the two albums.” So whether it’s drum and bass reissues, collaborations with seminal industrial bands, to tailoring a compact brand of techno for London, by and large, Wells’ music represents what he calls a “general tone of the city”. “Even if you’re not actively making a mental note of it,” he says, “it’s probably sinking into your head somehow.”
Interview by James Manning
Photography by Tom Medwell
Header image by Ilaria Pace from a photograph by Tom Medwell