Bok Bok

Musically what’s inspiring you at the moment?

I really like everything from the Azonto scene I’m hearing. The drum tracks are so sick. Similar to the South African house sound but it’s from Ghana. I don’t know that much about Afrobeats, though – I just love hearing it when I do. My own production lately has been taking influences from a classic electronic era of funk, the 90s work of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and the edits and beat structures of ’04-’05 grime.

At one point I think you said you were mixing most of the Night Slugs releases. Is that still the case?

Yes.

There’s an assumption in some electronic music circles that if you aren’t doing everything yourself it’s somehow less authentic. A lot of producers hide the fact that someone else helps mix their tracks. For Night Slugs is it just a case of you being the best at it or is it about creating a cohesive sound for the label?

Most people don’t really care who mixed what and recognise that the vision to write a piece of music is where real creative talent lies, not in the technical side. The tech stuff is just facilitating creativity. That’s not to say mixing isn’t a creative task – for me it definitely is. I mix a lot of the music because again this is club music first and foremost, so I need everything we put out to be engineered right ready for big systems. And yeah it helps with cohesion I guess, although that’s not why I do it.

Are there other areas where you’re passing part of the process on to other people in a similar way?

Yeah. Obviously mastering, but also on the art side – most of the label’s artwork is now being made by highly skilled 3D technicians with my detailed direction.

Do you still enjoy being so hands­-on with every aspect of Night Slugs from the visual aesthetic through to the releases, or are you just a control freak who can’t let go?!

Call it what you will, this is what it takes to create great products. I don’t work on every aspect either nowadays – just the creative side.

The live set you did with Girl Unit and the live grime set you did with Kelela on vocals were both really interesting to me. Do you think that type of performance relates directly back to your standard DJ sets or is it a distinct challenge in its own right?

The live set doesn’t have much to do with DJing at all and at times all I’d want to do is put a record on. For starters DJing is much, much easier than playing live with the all-hardware setup we were using. Playing live like that is a totally different experience and a ton of work. I’d only want to do it very occasionally. It’s pretty restrictive compared to the freedom that comes with DJing. The sets with Kelela are a DJ set. Structurally I don’t see it as different to doing a set with an MC, except she’s singing.

You also contributed a couple of tracks to Kelela’s Cut 4 Me mixtape, of course – alongside contributions from Jam City and Girl Unit. Would you like to do a full collaborative album with a vocalist at some point?

Who knows what the future holds but it’s not something I’m working on at the moment.

On a similar note, will we ever see a Bok Bok artist album? Do you consider your own music to be as suited to a full­-length artist album as, say, Egyptrixx or Jam City’s music?

This next EP on Slugs will actually be something of a mini-album. I’m sitting on at least a full album’s worth of demos for this project already. But I’m mostly still interested in making club jams for the time being. I’m definitely not working in the same way as either Egyptrixx or Jam City. Eventually I can see a full LP happening but I’d need to get some more of the club out of my system first. It’s unlikely I’ll fully ever lose that tendency though.

Bok Bok plays at Fabric on Friday night, back to back with L-Vis 1990 as part of the Night Slugs/ClekClekBoom takeover of Room 2. Find him on Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud.