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Assuming I’ve never heard of you or any of your work before – can you brief us on your musical career and your roots as a musician?
I started DJing hip hop and acid house on pirate radio in northern England in the late 80s. From the 90s until the present, I put out music and toured extensively via two separate burgeoning DIY worlds: hardcore and punk, and the international noise/experimental underground scenes.
I moved to Canada in 2003 and continued what I’d started in the UK.
In the early 2010s, I stepped back a lot, but not entirely, from guitar-centric genres and scenes, started producing hip hop, and continued with various audio experiments, most of which stayed private.
Since 2015, I’ve worked in Intensive Care – originally a two-piece, now a three-piece. It was initially intended to be power electronics but played by a noise rock band. With every release, that idea becomes less and less defined. Yes, we are named after a Macronympha album.
I mostly release music under my own name now, which, for the past five years, has been an amalgamation of the hip hop productions with the drone and field recordings I was doing in the previous decade. It’s heavily influenced by dub techniques without being Dub, heavily influenced by industrial and post-industrial without being Industrial.
Outside of that, I pick up some work as a remixer here and there, very occasionally do production/mixing/etc. work for others, and have occasionally taken on private students for lessons in production and performance.
The first time I saw you perform was just over 15 years ago when I was 16 in Truro, Nova Scotia. The Endless Blockade played to a basement packed with young punks.
We played Truro on the way to Halifax Pop Explosion. Truro was fun; Halifax had a notably bad show and a notably great one. The matinee show was a very typical corporate letdown we reluctantly agreed to play; “you get free Converse shoes!” only to not get free shoes but still have to play in front of a massive Converse banner. We should have ripped that thing down.
The evening show at a bar was chaotic and made up for it.
You toured heavily with The Endless Blockade as well as other groups in the last 30 years.. do you feel like that time was more mentally and physically taxing or more character-building?
Touring has been far less damaging to my health than my day job has been. Touring is boring and annoying, but at the same time, it can also be very exciting and opens up your horizons.
The hardest thing about regular touring, if you’re in it for the long haul, is that many of your closest relationships end up being with people who live very far away from you, and as you age out, you start seeing much less of each other.
My touring years were 1995 – 2014, with a few easy ones here and there since.
You’ve released dozens of releases with groups as well as solo, and seemingly these days more predominantly working on collaborations and remixes. Aside from your active band Intensive Care, you are releasing more and more under Wolfagram and your own name. Can you tell me about the balance of solo work and collaborative? What is your preferred process when working with others and what does that look like for you?
Collaborations are so common in all genres except punk and metal it’s barely worth commenting on. Sometimes it takes the form of guest contributor, sometimes I take a more producer role.
I tend to view my work in terms of different periods of a longer artistic output. Intensive Care is a continuing collaboration between myself and Ryan Bloomer given a name; it’s a long movement in my work that intersects with a movement in his work. Column of Heaven was a collaboration (primarily) with Eric King and David Kristiansen that is shared across all three of our histories.
What are the main differences between what you do under the moniker Wolfagram and your own name?
Wolfagram work is strictly hip hop; if it strays too far from that core, it gets absorbed into the larger body of work under my own name.
You once told me that you didn’t consider yourself a “noise” artist, although you are heavily affiliated with noise culture and have associations with noise artists here, in the UK, Japan, and furthermore globally. Your work is incredibly diverse, seamlessly blending aggressive forms of Hip Hop, Dub, and Industrial. What’s your personal relationship to noise music? How would you explain your curiosity in the combination of sounds that you tend to harness? In great succession, I might add.
At best, I’m noise-adjacent; I have roots and associations with noise, as you note.
Some of the things I find appealing about dub are some of the exact same things I find appealing about noise; my sonic interests aren’t genres but possibilities that different genres have explored.
The roots of noise, industrial, dub, and hip hop can be simplified into youth culture repurposing cheap consumer electronics and using them in ways they weren’t designed to form entirely new musical styles. Ultimately, these cheap consumer goods have been developed and sold back to us as specialist equipment; delays made for dub, mono synths made for noise and drone, samplers made for creating beats.
The experimentation has been removed, and the price has increased.
Hip hop and dub were historically about manipulating prerecorded music into new forms – hip hop used vinyl as a necessary creative tool, fetishizing it as both process and end product. Similarly, experimental music in its various forms has emphasized tape loops, found sound, and hands-on manipulation of prerecorded audio.
A crab scratch in hip hop or a delay pedal doing an infinite repeat on a snare hit in dub are exactly the same to me as a tape loop or hitting a piece of metal with a contact mic attached to it in noise (etc.).
How did your working relationship with Justin Broadrick (Godflesh) begin? Can you tell me about your LP coming out on his label?
We’re on a few records together as remixers and features. We met in 2023 and talked about our love of Mobb Deep, power electronics, and early jungle. He asked me to do a release for Avalanche, and I worked with him for the Full of Hell collab album.
The album is complete and will be out next year. It’s 8 songs, one of which is a collaboration with Karkossyn (UVB76 Records) from Bristol. It’s dark dub and industrial-influenced electronic music; field recordings, sub-bass, noise layers, heavy drums. A further sharpening of the blade.
I know you’ve been friends and played shows with Full Of Hell for quite some time; they even cited you recently as a massive influence to what they’ve done. How did the idea of collaborative recording Scraping the Divine come about?
I don’t even remember how the collab came about, to be honest; it was an inevitability we’d do something like this, though. I know they began recording for it in 2019, but that was a mostly false start, and we cannibalized the session. The bulk of my work for it was done in stages in 2022 and late 2023.
It was a good collaboration to do, and they were very open to everything I presented them with. They gave me final say on everything, which I honestly wasn’t expecting.
Do you have any upcoming releases that you are able to speak about, or should we expect some new announcements?
There’s an Intensive Care collaboration album with The Body, Was I Good Enough?, being announced in January 2025.
I started a series of mixtapes to give a home to songs that didn’t make the final cut of releases; demos, one-off tracks, and so on. The first two volumes are complete, one for Iron Lung Records, one for Phage. Expect those early 2025.
I recently finished a soundtrack for a feature film, Hangashore, starring James Frecheville (Peaky Blinders) and Hera Hilmar (See), which should be out sometime in 2025. I did a fairly standard score that gradually mutates from violas and choirs to more Coil and Nurse With Wound influences. There’ll be a physical release of my unedited score; I have the cassette arranged but haven’t approached anyone for the vinyl edition yet.
How was that experience of scoring a film & how did this come about? Is this something you’d like to do more of?
I’ve known the director for a long time and did some work 15 years ago on some of his short films. The process was great and not that different from how I mostly work anyway – pick the sound palette, decide on the mood, decide on the techniques, put something together, edit it, and rework it until it fits. The three releases on Absurd Exposition I did between 2016 and 2020 were helpful in the approach.
It’s likely I’ll do more scoring; there are some conversations happening.
You’ve completed tours in the UK recently under your own name; do you have any plans to tour in North America?
I’ve had a few soft asks to do something in BC, and I had to unavoidably cancel a short run on the US east coast this year that I plan to reschedule. The problem is always the distances in Canada and the border for the US.
There seems to be an onslaught of great experimental music currently coming out of Canada. Who do you recommend?
I’ll keep this list to four names only:
The Nausea from Vancouver, sometimes similar in composition to Josef van Wissem, and occasionally the technique is reminiscent of Herman Kopp. Anju has a genuinely exploratory approach to sound that I enjoy; she’s really interested in pushing herself, her sounds, and her techniques into new fields. Worth making the effort to see live and it’s a sound and approach entirely her own.
Death Kneel from Toronto. I like watching noise performances when it’s someone who generally works in more rigid areas trying something that could fall apart at any minute (see also The Nausea above; both are drummers). Watching Max work the Octatrack into a squealing mess, then hearing the sound break up, go quiet, turn into barely audible frequencies, and either come back as a roaring wave or disappear entirely as the Octatrack escapes Max’s grasp is compelling, and it’s compelling because it doesn’t always work. There’s something to admire in a person willing to use techniques in front of an audience that occasionally don’t land.
During these moments, I probably experience what sports fans get out of going to a game.
Death Glaze from Hamilton. I will always respect a noise artist that plays a short set, that uses their equipment well, and has clearly practiced at a suitable volume. At every single all-noise or experimental show, there is at least one act that has never made the sounds they’re doing outside of either headphones or a small hi-fi they’ve plugged into, and they’re unprepared for how a PA alters the sound and way equipment is used. I came away from a recent performance with comparisons to both Kjostad and Pain Jerk.
Echthros from Calgary. The new album on Iron Lung is amazing; Echthros is indigenous power electronics and manages to nail the power electronics perfectly; it stands on its own as power electronics, indigenous or not, something many contemporary acts fail at when adding a modifier to the genre tag. I’m oversimplifying intentionally; indigeneity is not identity politics in the modern understanding.
If the most compelling power electronics and industrial is about power and control, about the sense of the self, about resistance, about questioning popular narratives, about leaving mold on the perfect presentation of an idea, then indigenous power electronics (made by indigenous people) has the potential to encompass all of those aspects.
Again, the album stands on its own as power electronics; my white savior complex isn’t artificially raising it higher than it should be.
Seemingly a generic question – though what truly influenced you into creating your own music, when you did?
Starting a pirate radio station with my friends when I was 15 was a personal reification of music as something beyond a listening experience.
The spark that still continues the creative process is the search to uncover hidden spaces in the quotidian world. Music is the divine immanence that opens the door to Ekstasis.
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