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D: On the DJ Rupture show (Mudd Up show on WFMU) recently, you were saying, you get sent a lot of music, and your process with that is to listen to a few seconds, and if it’s has got a certain tiny trace which is clichéd them you’ll throw it out the CD machine.

K: I don’t know…. I can make a judgment within a couple of seconds. I suppose a lot of it comes down to specific sounds that are used. I can listen to a track, with dubstep stuff it comes down to the kind of bass which is used. Because if you were to do a statistical chart of all the dubstep that exists in the world… well there’s something that exists in all of it, which is sub bass, which is something you don’t notice it. But in terms of bass you can hear, there’s a particular kind of bass sound which really fucks me off. And I hear it all the time. And it’s not specific to dubstep, I hear it across different dance music genres, and it’s a kind of lowest common denominator way of getting people to move. And I can kind of understand the tendency to go there, it’s a complex of frequencies which works on even the shittest soundsystems. And you can’t underestimate the impact having to play on shit sound systems has on a music culture, and it’s aesthetic decisions, and what it feels it needs to do to translate into as many environments as possible, especially when it’s growing.

D: Can you characterise it?

K: It’s nothing to do with sub-bass because I don’t have anything bad to say about sub-bass [laughs]. It’s not worth even commenting on because it’s like air, it’s like oxygen. It’s not even a sonic thing for me, it’s just a pressure, a vibrational physicality, it’s whether the music has a physical presence. Not in auditory sense, whether you’re in a room with an entity, sense. But. the sound that turns me off often seems to have a rocky quality to it, I always associated it in the late 90s with the Virus synth. I was reading a lot of producers talking about this Virus synth, and then listening to the music and hearing, OK, that’s the sound of that synth that people were jumping on. But it’s not just that synth, across genres, some styles of House Music, it’s got a jump-up edge to it. I’ve got various ways of describing it. Duck fart is one, angry pig [SNORTS].. it’s a kind of grunting pig sound. So it’s that, coupled with a certain amount of repetition of that sound which gets under my skin. It certainly sounds better in a club situation than it does listening at home. Because clearly the reason people do it is to almost rough up the top end of the bass, so the bass that you hear in an amplified situation isn’t just this rounded sub-bass, but also has this slightly aggressive edge to it. And it does sound much better, and less annoying, on a club situation. Almost like broken glass, or someone’s taken sand paper to this rounded thing, and just made it a bit more sharp, more abrasive. But it’s those sounds coupled with repetition, with this rocky repetition of riffs. It literally rubs you up the wrong way. I find it like being shouted out. And I don’t like being shouted at. I don’t mind being screamed at by synths. But being grunted at is not something I find particularly….

D: it’s a testosterone type thing?

K: It’s definitely got something to do with pumping up the testosterone. And almost universally, people love it. The reaction those sounds get is the hands in the air, pogo, mosh reaction. Which is not so much the reaction I’m looking for from dancing. If you’re got your hands in the air and you’re shouting you’re probably dancing less. You’re not really dancing. It’s certainly not what I like to look at, when you’re watching people dance, it’s certainly less interesting, less fun. I like watching cool dancers. That’s why I DJ a certain way, because I like watching people dance.