An interview with Hessle Audio's Ben UFO

Like Hyperdub, Hotflush, Hemlock and other labels beginning with 'H', Hessle Audio is redefining the sound of UK dance music. It procures a futuristic blend of homegrown genres like dubstep, house, garage and jungle - a genreless smörgåsbord represented in mainstream by BBC Sound of 2011 winner James Blake, who released a single on the label last year - and eschews them for a new school of electronic fans.

The imprint is led by young London-based producers Ramadanman (22-year-old David Kennedy), Pangaea (Kevin McAuley, 25) and Ben UFO (Ben Thomson, 24), who met each other at dubstep night FWD>> in London, and named after the road that the latter two lived on during their university years in Leeds. Now in their early twenties, their output is on everyone from minimal superstar Ricardo Villalobos to techno legend Carl Craig's radar.

We're especially excited to welcome Ben UFO and Pangaea to Nite Sessions on February 4 for one of their revered back-to-back sets, which will reveal just what to expect from their label's chest-collapsing sound.

Peckhamite Ben UFO gives us some inside knowledge…

Why did you start Hessle?
'Before our show on Rinse FM, we did a radio show on Sub FM, which is where Night Slugs and Elgato, who we've also released, started out. Through doing that we ended up being sent an incredible amount of music from producers who didn't have an outlet for it. It's weird thinking back now, because there are so many labels and so many producers releasing music these days. But back in 2006, or 2004, it was completely different. Our first couple of releases went down well and it snowballed from there. People immediately started sending us more stuff, and better stuff.'

What other labels were you influenced by?
'When we started we just wanted to run a strong dubstep label. We were taking influences from labels like DMZ, Hyperdub and Tempa. We really loved the way that DMZ released music: they didn't really talk about it, they didn't overcomplicate things with any mad designs or anything like that. It was just two tunes on a loud 45rpm cut with the track names and the artist names written on the centre of the label and nothing else. For me at least that was the main inspiration: that people could release music without an explanation, it didn't need to be qualified by anything: it was just music.'

Is that how you feel towards the sound that you guys are renowned for?
'It's difficult to say, because once you get involved in the process of releasing music it's quite difficult to see the records for what they are. But I hope so, that's the idea: I'd like people to just listen to the music and not need any kind of outside input. I like the idea of this music being judged on its own terms but in reality genres and guidelines are useful things because people need ways to discuss music. But that's because people don't really know what to call this sound.'

I've heard everything from 'post-and-minimal dubstep' to 'genreless'…
'I haven't heard any names that I like yet. Maybe I'll ask Simon Reynolds to do it for me. He talks about the hardcore continuum, the continuation of all UK urban genres, from hardcore into jungle into UK garage into grime and dubstep.'

Do you agree with his theory?
'I think it's something that happened but I don't think it's the only way of seeing that music. For me, dubstep didn't just happen in a vacuum: a lot of different sounds fed into it and there are a lot of different reasons why it became as big as it did. It definitely appeals, though: I like the idea that you can trace music in family-tree style.'

You guys are old before your time, like mini Carl Craigs!
'Yeah, I know. We're kind of geeky.'

Was the Leeds music scene much of an influence on your tastes too?
'It was a huge inspiration. I was getting into dubstep and stuff like that up in Leeds. There were very few people who knew what it was there, we were lucky because there were a couple of quite influential promoters who were willing to put DJs on that no one had ever heard of before. So I was able to see Mala and the DMZ guys, and Skream and Hatcha, play at the West Indian Centre before anybody in Leeds really knew who they were. The WIC has just closed now - it's a shame. It was instrumental for dubstep, dub and dub-reggae in Leeds.'

Was this when you discovered electronic music?
'Not really. I was going out in London to the weirder D&B nights. I was into hip hop, soul and funk and stuff like that before, but growing up in west London is different to growing up in east or south, because on the pirate stations, it was all reggae and broken beat. Whereas a lot of my friends who are into this music now were listening to garage on the pirates. There wasn't quite the same pirate radio infrastructure in west London as there was in south or east. It makes me a little bit sad, really, because there doesn't seem to be the same culture of it now. It feels weird to be nostalgic about something that was only six or seven years ago but I feel nostalgic about pirate radio already.'

Young dance music fans today can tune into Rinse FM online and discover what you and Hessle do instead…
'Yeah, Rinse is still there and stronger than it's ever been with the move to legality and becoming a community station. We do a show on the first and third Thursday of every month from 11pm till 1am. It's different to when we play out because we use it as an opportunity to play slightly weirder music and stuff that hopefully people haven't heard before. When we play out in a club, we don't want to alienate people too much. We still do our thing, but radio is a platform on which we can experiment as much as possible: I play a lot of house music and a lot of lower tempo stuff. But Rinse are great because they don't have a problem with me turning up with a bunch of deep disco records or something like that, or playing a Talking Heads or an old Lee Perry record. It really is completely open. I covered a show for Oneman a couple of weeks ago and I used it as an opportunity to play old Brian Eno records and Caretaker and bands like Emeralds; just different music that I love hearing but I never get to play out.'

Do you have much banter?
'Not a lot; we don't have an MC on the show. It's primarily about the music. It's a really good opportunity to mix for two hours. Everything that I do, I tend to do first on radio. They're not my practice hours or anything, but it's very rarely that I'll have the opportunity to stand in my room at home and just mix records. It's valuable to have that time.'

It brings it back to the art of DJing, the mix and the selection, which, you could argue, is being forgotten among many young producers.
'That's right. I think people are expected to make beats and stuff these days, but there's a few of us, like there's Jackmaster and Oneman, who are really primarily known for their DJing and both run labels, Numbers and 502. But they've made their names purely through the quality of their DJing. I like to say it was a conscious thing to just do DJing and not producing but I would like to make music one day. I listen to so much music that I find it quite difficult to think about whether, if I was a new producer, what I would contribute that hasn't been done. So at the moment I'm focusing on finding good music and playing it to people.'

And also finding artists for your label! Have you signed anyone new for this year?
'We tend to keep things under wraps until we're quite close to release stuff just because we don't like to plan too far in advance. Music is moving so fast at the moment and we've seen what happens when people line up a huge schedule of ten releases to release over two years. I don't think it's realistic in order to maintain interest in what you're doing if every move is planned out rigidly in advance. I'd quite like to be flexible and go with where I'm feeling at the time. Our next release is by Pangaea at the end of February, that's number 17, and then after that we've got a couple of projects on a bigger scale than what we've done before, as we've only released singles and EPs so far.'

So you're trying to buck the trend of the current throwaway attitude we have to new music?
'I think the amount of time that people are willing to dedicate to something has decreased. That's led to some interesting music too. A lot of music that's being made right now is very simple and ideas-led, but I think it's about finding a balance between avoiding throwaway music and releasing music that's still immediate.'

You tipped James Blake way back in 2009. And now all of your roster artists are playing everywhere. So what's it like to see your friends and these kinds of sounds become part of the mainstream consciousness?
'I haven't really gotten used to it yet but it's an amazing feeling. It's great to see James do as well as he is and making some brilliant music. He definitely deserves all of the praise he's getting. He's been quite vocal about not wanting to abandon his roots in vinyl and in dance music so hopefully he might be one of the first people to be able to maintain credibility on the underground and make music that people in the mainstream can latch on to as well.'

Is that a rule for Hessle Audio to live by too?
'Maybe. I can't see any Hessle material charting any time soon but, yeah, I'd like to think that that's possible.'

How does it feel to be heading up a label that's defining the new sound of UK dance music?
'It feels good but I try not to think about it too much because it's been quite gradual. We didn't have a specific hit record that catapulted us into newspapers and magazines. It's been quite a slow and steady process, so it feels great but it feels like the natural culmination of quite a lot of work as well.'

You're going back-to-back with Pangaea on Friday. What does that kind of set entail?
'We play back-to-back a lot so we know each other's selection and DJ style quite well. We'll be playing a lot of Hessle-related material and treating it as a bit of a showcase. It'll be very rooted in dubstep - everything that we release is driven by bass - it'll work across a variety of tempos and sounds. The record by Pangaea that's about to come out is a sort of broken house kind of thing, which sounds to me like something I'd expect to hear in the Berghain, the big club in Berlin. But the other side is much more upfront, dubstep-oriented tunes. We'll be taking it in a few different directions, but everything is tied together by bass.'