The Wirebug: Factory Food
Praxis 57 The Wirebug Factory Food
300 copies on vinyl
Cut by Shane the Cutter at Finyl Tweek
Factory Food is the first album from the Wirebug aka Dan Hekate for over a decade. Now a feature film director Dan has brought all his expertise in sound design to bear on this full-length album of industrial beats, soundscapes and noise. Intertwining broken rhythms with melancholic melodies, harsh analogue percussion with acoustic instruments, this is a series of tracks that asks the listener to engage or retreat.
Including collaborations with Praxis founder Christoph Fringeli, instrumentalists Enrico Gontero on the accordion and Steph Voodoos on acoustic guitar this is a listening experience in of itself. It includes tracks that you would drop to packed breakore dancefloor as well as those that would feel more at home in a noise concert but all the same it is cohesive and true to it’s own nature – a cold, minimal, mechanical beast rumbling across the landscape of our digital age.
Posted in Discography
Tagged 2019, Dan Hekate, Factory Food, Hekate Soundsystem, Praxis 57, The Wirebug
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Bourbonese Qualk Interview by Deadly Buda in Massive Magazine 1993
Posted in Interview, Praxis History
Tagged 1993, Autonomia, Bourbonese Qualk, Christoph Fringeli, Deadly Buda, Massive Magazine, Praxis 5, Simon Crab
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DJ Scud: Ambush & Maschinenbau, Interview Resonance#1 (1997)
An interview with DJ Scud about Ambush & Maschinenbau in the first issue of the French zine Resonance (1997) !
You are involved in Ambush and now in the new label you founded with Adverse: Maschinenbau. Can you present us these 2 labels & the persons who are behind?
I do Ambush in partnership with Jason Skeet (Aphasic) and Maschinenbau with Paul Nomex from Adverse records. Maschinenbau is more abrasive-noise and purely Amiga produced. Nomex & myself are dedicated Amiga Abusers.
When did you start working with Jason Skeet? Do you also have solo-projects?
We started working together last year (Sept. ‘96) after going to the Brittany Teknival Tir-Na-Nog. Solo-projects? Ambush 04 is supposed to be a Scud record but I work very slowly and I get bored of my own tracks very easily so I bin most of what i ever start on. It’s better that way. What do I want to be anyway? A solo-artist?!! I prefer working with other people – when you put two minds together there is always a bastard-third.
Tell as about the person of Shizuo about your collaboration with him.
I first met the Shizu-man at the legendary Dead by Dawn parties. He was living in London at the time, on the run from Arab drug-dealers and didn’t have any friends because he was such a nutter and always on acid and getting into fights and molesting girls! He was looking for drugs one night and I sold him some ecstasy and tried to rip him off – I thought he was some sucker squat-punk-tourist & we started making tracks together (this was summer ’95) and the tracks have only just been released this year! -2 on the ‘High on Emotion’ EP and 2 on the LP. Typical DHR…to bury the tracks and sit on them for 2 years! But they have other priorities…
You also run the fanzine FallOut – what does it represent for yon? Which fanzines do you read?
It represents the fact that everything’s screwed up and we like it that way don’t we? I don’t take it too seriously as you can see. It’s just an outlet for my sardonic humour. I read the usual rubbish – TNT, The Skreem, Underzone, Turbulence, some cool Jap ones & other drunken cut & paste punk ‘zines but there are some very well produced professional und*round magazines coming out here in the U.K. which I should say a massive respect to… Datacide & Autotoxicity.
Do you read newspapers? I think you don’t really like TV – what would you say about it?
No. I try not to. It would be crass (but true) to say that is all propaganda & lies – but I said it anyway! You noticed? I guess it IS my pet hate. But like I always like to point out…70% of your leisure time is spent watching the fucking thing! That says it all. On the other hand there is the argument that says “how can you analyse your own culture if you don’t watch TV”? I don’t ever say that I NEVER watch TV – I do, but only very rarely – it’s too passive for me. I actually had a TV fOr a couple of months but it blew up. Too much negative energy…it just imploded.
Your point of view about peoples’ mobilisation for the death of Lady Diana:
Diana, Princess of Wales was the Queen of peoples’ hearts.
It shows a sickness in England towards the traditional Kingdom. It seems that people have enough of this anachronism. Do you think the situation is gonna change?
Well that’s England…love it or leave it! I myself like drinking warm beer and causing trouble at football matches. The real question is “do we hang them or shoot them?’
Back to the music. With Ambush you have developed a new breakbeat, very industrial, metallic sounding with strange structures. Can you describe us the musical & ethical concept of Ambush? Is there an evolution since the beginning?
We don’t have an Ambush manifesto. We just want to release material that doesn’t pander to any genre-market – we think in terms of Mutant machine-music…strange hybrids…broken beats, weird grooves…anti-4/4…anti-speed. We like rough caustic Amiga 8-bit technology fused with more ‘professional’ hard-disk recording-studio production. The evolution happens by itself.
Maschinenbau is more noise oriented with the meeting of harshnoise & breakbeat. This kind of tracks, such as Give Up can bring a lot to hardcore music. What do you think about the alliage of hardcore & noise, breakbeat (or other such as jazz or classical…)?
Hardcore Techno???? I don’t really know what that is anymore. It sounds very ‘92! Like I just said: I think the only way forward is hybrids.
For the Maschinenbau 01, tracks are inspired by urban sounds; a train & a piling machine. What influences you in making your tracks? Sounds of life, other music, anger??
Well the M’bau 01 used sounds of the approaching millenium – not generic urban sounds; the sounds of progress in our fair city of London. Yes my influences are urban and of course other music influences me: Praxis, Shizuo, Jap-noise, Tech-step etc. I’m influenced by the people I work with. When I hear good Djs who fuck it up and make it ruff that inspires me too. I just want to make even rougher records for them to play.
What do you listen to now?
I’m listening to a lot of Ragga at the moment.
You play as DJ Scud, do you also play live?
No, I don’t play live. I haven’t worked out a proper way to do a proper live act. It would be dumb to just take any Amiga along somewhere and just hit play with the mouse and mute channels. There’s too many live fakers as it is. It’s so Rock’n’Roll this ‘live’ thing and anyway I don’t have any lether trousers.
Your projects
Maschinenbau 02 “Skatebored” with Nomex again A London/Berlin 7” project Scud – Kill Out Trash / Nomex – Society Suckers Ambush 04 Scud Ambush 05 Aphasic Ambush 06 Hekate sound system
something to add:
Yes. Big up the Sub-Net Massive! Shouts goin’ out to the Hekate Crew, the Fringeli, the Aphasic, the Nomex…Hold it Down! Oh My Goooooooosh! Message going out to all the French sucker Djs who play their records on 45. Kill Your Speed!!!!!!
Discography Shizuo & Scud (various) DHR 14 & DHR LP7 Jackal & Hide Ambush 01 Aphasic & Scud Ambush 02 Nornex & Scud Maschinenbau 01
Maschinenbau 01 and 02 were rereleased on one 12″ as Praxis 56 in the Autumn of 2018. Get a vinyl copy (with download code) HERE or listen to the tracks here (where you can also get a download):
More information about the Maschinenbau release can be found on our discography page HERE.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 1997, Ambush, Aphasic, Breakcore, DJ Scud, Maschinenbau, Nomex, Shizuo
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Disconnect Store Berlin first Anniversary 23-03-2020
One year ago today we opened our new physical shop in Finowstrasse 25 in Berlin-Friedrichshain. We teamed up with Yaya23 – just like in the old store at Ostkreuz, where we were located from 2012-2018 – and were joined by Simon Lejeune aka Haedre, which added a whole new dimension.
The location is in a former fast food pizzeria which apparently was spontaneously abandoned in all its greasy glory. It took several weeks to renovate the space, but in the end it looked good and we just about got it ready for the grand opening on March 23rd, 2019.
The decision to get involved in a new shop project was not an easy one for me. As much as I liked the previous shop and others before it, economically it had created an ongoing dilemma. After all, the retail operation – physical as well as online – was supposed to generate the funds for the publishing side of things, in my case the label Praxis and the magazine Datacide and their respective offshoots. And besides these, my focus should have been on writing articles and making tracks. Instead, the retail operation was gobbling up more and more of my time while the returns were not nearly justifying the efforts, at least not in economic terms.
On the other hand, I believed that the shop could have a social function that could not be emulated online. Indeed our Countdown to Gentrification series of events in the old store before we were kicked out seemed to confirm that there was still life in that approach.
Also in the months without a shop in late 2018 and early 2019 it became evident that the loss of income, as little as it was, was not being made up by increased online sales. Finally, with a crowdfunding campaign under way, we got a surge of support for the new shop project which seemed to show that there was a broad desire in our small scene to keep a physical meeting point/outlet afloat.
Nevertheless the first months were a bumpy ride. The money from the fundraiser was mostly used up by the renovation and after an initial rush of the first couple of weeks, sales plummeted for the next two months. Our in-store shows, however, proved popular with the audience, not so much with the neighbours … In the summer and autumn the situation seemed to stabilise a bit, fueling optimism that, perhaps, the concept could work out.
I cannot speak for the other two parties under the Disconnect umbrella, nor is it up to me to define their vision of a retail shop and gallery. I can only speak for the Praxis section of it. This vision has been formed from experiences of radical shops selling music and/or literature, both as someone who was influenced by and involved in such projects for decades. Of all places, Berlin would surely be the city where a place combining underground culture and radical politics could be sustainably run, but different factors have put this into question – factors that will need more space to be analysed.
I wish I could be more up-beat for our first anniversary. Instead, the current Corona lockdown forced us to close the physical shop for the time being. At the time of writing it is completely unclear how long this lockdown will continue and what consequences the almost certain economic depression will have on countercultural projects such as ours. If we survive, it will depend on the support of a range of independent, undogmatic, non-aligned, critical, anti-authoritarian, experimental, radical forces.
Our online shop remains open:
https://praxis-records.net/shop
Digital files are available here:
https://praxisrecords.bandcamp.com
Datacide Magazine is online here:
https://datacide-magazine.com
Disconnect Store Berlin blog:
https://disconnectberlin.wordpress.com/