Hodge

With his debut LP, Shadows In Blue, Jacob Martin cements his reputation as one of the UK’s most innovative producers. Si Truss catches up with him to talk synths, sci-fi and the challenges of writing an album

Over the past decade, Bristol-based musician Jacob Martin – aka Hodge – has carved out a space for himself at the forefront of the UK’s underground club circuit. Having also worked as one half of house duo Outboxx, Martin’s solo project productions have always seen him gravitate towards the more eclectic and experimental end of techno, blending the genre’s bass-heavy rhythms with elements of jungle, dubstep, ambient and more.

With years of relentless touring and a string of releases for the likes of Punch Drunk, Livity Sound and Peach Discs under his belt, 2020 sees Martin branch out with his excellent debut solo LP, Shadows In Blue. We caught up with him to find out more.

Why are you putting out an album out at this point in your career?

“It’s quite hard to do an album, because everything is geared around the club for me. The reason I started was because of the inspiration of rhythm and wanting to make music that made people dance and that lent itself very well with making dance music. Especially when I was just starting out I was obsessed with going out. I was going out in Bristol every weekend. So it was just natural to write for the dancefloor. As the years progressed I started DJing out and that became my job. “Oh my God, I can make money from this.” And the music I was making during the week I was testing in the clubs at the weekend. The vibe I got then would feed back into the music. That kept me going for so long.

“I did think about making an album – everyone wants to do something that’s a more conscious project. But I didn’t think I had it in me at the time because I was in this really fun loop. But after a few years of that, I didn’t want to be in a club constantly. I kind of had a reaction against the idea of being in clubs. Especially if you do six or seven gigs in a month. The time you spend at home kind of flips into being the time you enjoy. And rather than me wanting to be at home writing dance music, I started experimenting with other sorts of sounds, and that slowly mutated into the album.”

How long ago did you first start toying with those ideas that ended up on the record?

“Probably two years before the album got finished I started playing around. If I wrote a track that I thought would be cool for an album I put it to one side. Across about a year I had that in my head but I only wrote two tracks for the album in that time. Because I wasn’t going out of my way to make an album and I was scared of the pressure I would end up putting on myself. I’ve succumbed to creative blocks before. I decided to wait until tracks

happened, so every time I was sketching around, I would put it in a folder. And probably six months before I finished I noticed I had two or three, then that became four or five. I probably did four or five months on the album after I finished those tracks. But amusingly, only one of those original ones went into the actual album.”

They were kind of your route into it?

“I was getting obsessed with gardening and sci-fi and I’d filled up my house with house plants. I’d just played a gig in Singapore where there are a lot of these vertical gardens, and I had this very specific, nature-takes-back-the-world image in my mind. I was trying to work out how that sounded. But as I started work on the album I suddenly thought,‘Oh my God, I want to go out!’ And I thought, why can’t it be a journey? Why can’t it start like one thing and then blend into another?”

So that’s why it starts out quite ambient and builds into more tribal and techno?

“It was so hard as a creative process, but I definitely needed a track that I could play in a club, as it’s such a big part of what I do. Rather than ambient tracks that could have sounded more tokenistic. The album gave me an opportunity to try new sounds while doing things I know and love.”

You wanted to have tracks that you could fit into your sets and play out?

“It just felt like a missed opportunity if I didn’t! Because that’s the most fun I’ve had in music. The physical moving, the dancing, the social aspect and interaction. Everything is very solitary up until the point that you play something out and it feels so good once you do. It would have been a disservice to myself not to put some dancey stuff on there.”

Had you played many of the tracks out before you finished it then?

“Not properly but sometimes when I make a tune, I’ll take an 8-bar loop and make it into a 5-minute thing that doesn’t change, just to see how people react to it. It helps get context on it. You’ve got to be really careful with that though. You can so quickly judge your music on a bunch of the wrong people!”

In case you find that you’ve written a bunch of music for one very specific techno crowd?

“[Laughs] Exactly! So I didn’t do it too much. I did drop a bit of the ambient stuff into some sets I played in Shanghai. That was more useful.”

With club tracks, you get an obvious reaction when you play it out. But how did that work with the ambient stuff?

“I’ve probably only done four or five ambient sets as they’re so much less common. But the stuff I did in Shanghai at a club called Elevator and a night that’s called Space Out. I’ve done it two or three times. It’s amazing. Everyone buys a drink or two and then they turn the lights down, spread a lot of cushions around and whoever’s playing is free to play for as long as they want. Some people are asleep – they’re encouraged to – some people are listening or meditating, but noone’s talking. There are no phones lighting up. It’s very rare that you get to stand still for two hours playing music. I was conscious not to use the faders too loudly in case it disturbed the presence! Being that hyper present is a great place to get into. And it was very helpful.”

You touched on some sci-fi influences. Are there any specifics works that informed the LP?

“As I was writing the album I read loads of books, but specifically I read the Octavia E Butler book Seed To Harvest. The back story is that she is setting up a land to live on and feed the starving world. But I was reading bits of William Gibson, cyber-punk stuff. Basically other-worldly stuff. Bruce Sterling. I tried some Asamov but I wanted more human or plant-based stuff!”

Let’s talk about the gear you used. We’ve read that you have quite a lot of hardware?

“I’m not a modular kind of guy. I’m more of the type of person to get a DX7 and run it through some guitar pedals or that kind of thing.”

What is it about using the DX7 that appeals to you? Over, say, an FM8?

“Well funnily enough the FM8 is one of my favourite softsynths of all time. But they’re very

“A linear process is the opposite of creativity. I‘d start to create the same song over and over”

different. Just running through the algorithms, the results are so much less predictable and wild. Every now and then you get a sound where you think, how have I got to that. That’s very hard to recreate with software. Because obviously everything’s code. My DX7 is crackly as hell. It depends where you put the volume, if I put it a third of the way up it has a weird hiss that it doesn’t have at any other level. Silly little artefacts like that. Those artefacts are sometimes the best part of the recording! I end up honing in on them. It will annoy me at the time but I end up coming back to it and messing with it.”

What other gear do you use a lot?

“Roland Space Echo. Ibanez AD202 analogue delay, a bunch of guitar pedals. Some weird distortion pedal that I got online, it’s just called ‘Greek distortion pedal’. I have a Korg Triton, M1, DX7. A Virus. A Waldorf Streichfett. And a lot of sound recorders. When I play gigs I often bring sound recorders to record bits ‘n’ pieces from where I am.”

We were going to ask about some of those ambient textures...

“One of the favourite things I did was, when I was in LA, I went to a tunnel where they filmed Blade Runner with my friend Laurel and we were just shouting and saying stupid stuff and clapping. And all of those have been used on tracks in some form, to give them some life.

“I use that stuff on everything. Especially when you’re trying to recreate an atmosphere for the song to sit in. I hate that dry feeling on tracks. It works great for some people, like when Peverelist does it, it’s incredible. But I like it to be a bit messier. Kind of like Arthur Russell used to leave his microwave on in the background.”

Is that the same with your club-focussed stuff?

“It’s very rare that I don’t. Naturally the sounds I use will have weird artefacts anyway. I was walking down the street and heard a guy playing drums and asked if I could record it. Then when I got home I cut up all those hits into separate hits and noticed all these people talking in the background which gave extra harmonic frequencies you wouldn’t have in studio recordings.”

When you sit down and make a track what stage do you put all that in?

“It changes each time, I wish there was a rule. The moment I create a formula, I have to change it because it then seems to stunt my creativity! If I’m writing like that it becomes a linear process which is the opposite of creativity. I start to create the same song over and over.”

So you don’t have a set place where you start?

“I just started a tune before you rang, which basically started with a random synth patch. Then immediately I thought, I want it to be more than just that. So I bounced down the actual tone and then put that into Kontakt and then in Kontakt I made it a group instrument and layered some field recordings under it, like, a few hits. That’s an example of how I would complicate a sound from the first point. But other times I’ll be halfway through a tune and I suddenly think, ‘that sounds dry’ and run something under it.

“I sent some stems once to Peverelist to remix and he couldn’t work out how I had managed to make it sound so good. ‘You’ve got all these weird sounds! Why are they in there?’ I was like ‘dunno. That’s just what I do.’ Awful studio practice basically! I did a degree in music tech and a lot of the stuff I learned I’d say ‘bullshit’. They’d talk about Radiohead, who famously put microphones in every corner of the studio and took bits from those. There’s no wrong.”

Do you use plugins at all?

“Of course. A lot of sounds I start in software and then combine it. I use FM8 all the time. Soundtoys stuff and Kontak too. One of the things I did for the album was that I contacted a lot of musicians I knew

and paid them to make sample packs. Then I wrote the album with those. My friend’s partner plays cello. I told her to go into the studio for an hour and record a whole bunch of sounds, do whatever she wants. That became the basis of a couple of tracks, like Shadows in Blue. The lead melody of that is all just lead cello sounds chopped up. It sounds like a trumpet. Like a dreamy Blade Runner-y kind of sound, but it’s actually a cello.”

What other sounds did you source that way?

“Acoustic guitar, clarinet, trumpet and a lot of stuff with vocals. My partner, Emilie, did a lot with vocals and so did I. We made pads out of vocals which is a lot of fun. There are bits of singing throughout. My partner has a great voice. I didn’t want to make it too sing-songy but every so often that human asset ties into that human sci-fi thing. It needs it.”

The sense of place is important to the music you make. How do you go about finding that...

“With dance music I’ll be thinking about a specific club. Griessmühle, which has just closed, is a great example because I played there four times a year, and was resident at Mother’s Finest. When I think about harder music, it’s immediately there in my head. When I’m writing more ‘broken’ stuff I’m thinking of Freerotation’s second room. I’m trying to recreate the shape in my head. Thinking about reverbs and delays. Not that it has to match exactly, but it’s a space for your brain once you’re writing.”

Are you mostly using plugins for that?

“I use a lot of digital reverbs. I have two units. One, a crappy little Behringer reverb pedal and the other a TC Electronic. I had a lot of fun with that. But a lot of the time it’s digital reverb. I got into creating a reverb tail with the hardware, chopping it and putting that tail on to some other drum hit. Like physically – the audio clip. Which is quite cool because it doesn’t make any sense logically. The sound rings out – but not as it normally would.”

What are your main tools for beats and drums?

“I used Cubase for too long and then switched to Ableton. Off the back of that, when I was writing using Cubase I just dropped audio samples on the screen. And I often still do that now. Many of my drums are just chopped up on the screen; just layering audio samples on the DAW.

“I swear it gives you a different sound! 100% a psychological thing. I was writing 140 grime beats the other day and you can’t get that sound without layering the sounds up, for me. And I’ve been getting into making my own sample packs recently. Randomer said this to me. He said, if you’re ever struggling to make music in the studio, just sit and make yourself a sample pack. So I just sit there for two days making sounds. Hits and loops and putting them all in a folder called ‘percussion loops’, melodic loops’ etc and then I’ll just stop and try and make music out of those loops. Now I’m using more loops like that and I’ll fuck with that even further. A lot of reprocessing of sounds.”

Let’s talk about mixing… we’ve heard Lurka chipped in on the mixing on the record?

“The only person I’ve ever had do it is Ben, Lurka – he’s done it on two of my tracks so far. Normally I mix as I go. When I get to the end of the writing period it’s normally pretty much mixed. But on this record one tune, Sense Inversion, I just couldn’t fucking mix – it was driving me mental. So I hit up Ben – his mixdowns on his tracks are fucking ridiculous. What he really shines at is that quite clean stuff, where he reduces things down to just what needs to be there. In a club his stuff just slams.

“On this track I couldn’t get the bass and the kick to sit right; they were a similar frequency, as the bass hit it kind of pumped the kick and it just felt really weird. I sat there working on it – and I’d just mixed down nine tunes – so I asked Ben to have a go. He sent me it back six hours later, it sounded perfect.

“I’m totally open to other people mixing my stuff. If I had the budget to send it to some crazy mix engineer. I’d 100% have done it just to hear what it sounds like. I’ve sent my stuff out four times in the past and the only person who’s ever done a mix I’ve liked was Ben.”

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Shadows In Blue is out now via Houndstooth. For more: soundcloud.com/hodgebristol

“If you’re ever struggling to make music, just sit and make a sample pack”