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Per
· May 23, 2024
Now in its 12th year, electronic music publisher SVBKVLT is entering a new phase as a global entity with a roster of contributors from nearly every continent. Its complex international network grew out of a hyperlocal event in Shanghai, developing alongside some of the city’s most important incubators of club culture. Shanghai is two months Covid quarantine 2022 he freed the label from its physical basis, expanding its jurisdiction to operate in new cultural zones.
The label was founded in 2013 by Gaz Williams, a British transplant in Shanghai, who at the time also managed bookings at the legendary underground club. Refuge. Alongside his own Sub-Culture nights featuring early dubstep and dub, Williams oversaw an almost nightly program that mixed local DJs and early-career producers with peers from across Asia and innovators of regional styles such as Chicago footwork, South African gqomand various directions of UK bass music.
SVBKVLT began to attract more media attention and DJ spins in 2016, just as The Shelter closed and its hive of activity moved to Williams’ new club, ALL, which opened the following summer. A rich and competitive scene among Shanghai-based artists in the two clubs enriched SVBKVLT’s output during this period, as its curatorial focus narrowed to a shared—albeit loose—aesthetic: boisterous, often abrasive and discordant, laced with surprising melodies and rhythms without he never left the club.
various artists
Cache 01
The foundation of the label is its community of artists, and compilations have occasionally been a signature focus of SVBKVLT over the years. Collection 2019 Cache 01 it’s a good place to start, as it represents SVBKVLT’s transition to an outward-facing international release and touring program.
“(Cache 01) got a lot of international attention and that’s when we started doing a lot more international stuff,” reflects Williams. It was the first time he worked with the duo Gabber Modus Operandi from Bali, he later organized a Chinese tour and album release. The compilation led to an ongoing collaboration with a Polish experimental electronic festival Unhealthyand exchanging back and forth with the label based in Uganda Nyege Nyege tapes.
Featuring tracks from then-Shanghai producers Osheyack, Gooooose, 33EMYBW, Hyph11E, and Swimful—all central to the label’s output in subsequent years—Cache 01 also notes the influence of the visual artist Kim Laughton, whose posters and installations for SVBKVLT events at The Shelter and ALL created an instantly recognizable visual paradigm that has been widely imitated ever since. Laughton made the cover for Cache 01 and continuation in 2020. Cache 02both of which play with the idea of ”geocaching” in Laughton’s typically playful, post-human style.
She swims
Rushlight
SVBKVLT’s first major shake-up of international exposure took place in 2016 “Shanghai (Swimful’s 青浦 Remake),” a take on the MC Wiley original by producer Jamie Charlton, aka Swimful, who was living in the city at the time. “It was the first song from the label that a lot of DJs started playing, and it became an anthem in Shanghai for a while,” Williams remembers. Charlton calls this period a “fruitful time,” noting that his fellow Shanghai producer Tzusing has enjoyed increased exposure from a well received release for Brooklyn label LIES and Shanghai Genome 6.66Mbp the collective has just started from a standstill.
The latest edition of Swimful, Rushlightit was recorded before Charlton left Shanghai in 2022. With remixes of Hyperdub’s Ikonika and “legends of gqom” Phelimuncasi, Rushlight skitters between amapiano, drill and other fringe club genres in a way that Charlton attributes to the Shanghai milieu in which he was born. “When I look at the way I combine styles, I think it’s actually a Shanghai thing…I think the methodology is kind of the same, the idea of taking different things and finding how they can work together.”
Dash 11e
A disappearing cinema
“Black Pepper” from Hyph11e A disappearing cinema he also had a lot of early DJ gigs, according to Williams. Hyph11e, known as Tess Sun, was a member of the Genome 6.66Mbp collective that emerged in the final years of Shelter, and contributed a memorable opening track to his inaugural comp in 2016. The following year Disappearing cinema, her debut EP, was an early indicator of the sonic territory SVBKVLT’s future releases would traverse, fusing contemporary bass and club music with industrial and noise elements through precise sound design.
Hyph11e was also a central figure in SVBKVLT’s back-and-forth with Nyege Nyege, a collaboration that produced some excellent, poultry “Slip B” The EP was created by Sun and a Kenyan producer Slickback. She was part of the Shanghai cohort that performed in Uganda at Nyege Nyege 2019, alongside label mates 33EMYBW and Gooose.
Nahash
Flowers of revolution
SVBKVLT has established a pattern of cross-cultural cooperation with several cultural entities, using music festivals and club spaces as a vector of exchange. At the same time, the label standardized the sound of its product by hiring Raphaël Valensi, aka Nahash, who mixed and mastered most of SVBKVLT’s 70+ releases. Valensi was an established DJ in Shanghai when SVBKVLT was formed, and organized a regular noise and drone night at The Shelter during the label’s early years. Ironically, his relationship with SVBKVLT became stronger after he left Shanghai for Montreal in early 2017.
Eavesdropping for a remix of the Shanghai artist Gooooose’s song “Plasma Sunrise” catalyzed a new phase of Valensi’s solo project Nahash, which had been dormant for years when he released it Flowers of revolution. The reverb-heavy atmosphere of the older Nahash material is re-synthesized here into a fierce club sound that mixes old-school rave with a lingering trace of an earlier tendency towards abrasive, distorted sounds.
Osheyack & Nahash
Bait
Within a few months after he held his first gig at The Shelter during a night booked by Tzusing, an American producer Osheyack released his debut EP on SVBKVLT in 2016 Fake/Fiction/Scam. Over the next few years, his evolution as an artist can be traced to the following solo LPs and ongoing collaboration with Nahash, including the just-released club EP, Bait. He considers the scene around Shelter and the early years of ALL to be the crucible that sharpened his craft. “You’d go hear someone else and you’d just be blown away by what they decided to do, and then there’s trying to bring your work to a certain level,” he recalls of that period. “It was extremely important to have criticism from colleagues.”
The emergence of Covid-19 stopped all international plans for the label. Osheyack left Shanghai “somehow under duress” during a strict, two-month lockdown in mid-2022 when most people barely left their apartments. Other key SVBKVLT personnel also left town at the time, including Swimful, Hyph11e and Williams, whose ALL club is now under different ownership. “Almost everyone who laid the groundwork for that scene has left in one way or another,” Osheyack says of a return visit to Shanghai late last year.
Gooooos
The basics
SVBKVLT still has several Shanghai-based artists on its main roster, including Han Han, aka Gooooose, whose first release for the label he was released only after that Cache 01. Han Han has been a fixture on the Shanghai music scene for over 15 years through his band Duck Fight Goose and other projects. He and bandmate Wu Shanmin (aka 33EMYBW) began experimenting with electronic music in 2013 and later became regulars at The Shelter, beginning a long relationship with Williams and SVBKVLT.
With travel restrictions to and from China eased from late 2022, Han Han has been to the UK and EU several times to perform under the SVBKVLT banner. They’re about to go on tour A/V show based on its 2023 release. The basics, a deliberate return to the rhythmic and percussive basics of an artist known for his penchant for fine-tuned tinkering. Gooooose regularly performs in newer clubs in Shanghai like System and Heimand is “optimistic” about fresh signs of life on the local scene.
33EMYBW
Sinian holes
Fellow Shanghainese artist 33EMYBW has represented SVBKVLT at several high-profile festivals around the world, operating on the fringes of electronic and experimental music. Last October, she premiered a performance with visual artist Joey Holder at Unsound in Krakow, which they recently performed again in Austriaand will perform in Unhealthy Adelaide over the summer.
The latest album from 33EMYBW, perhaps the hardest hitting artist on the label Sinian holes neatly captures the label’s tendency to blend a number of genre-averse, asymmetrical styles of dance music together in a way that’s still coherent in the club. She and Gooooose are some of Valensi’s favorite SVBKVLT artists to receive raw recordings from. “I’m always very eager to get new music from them,” he says, adding that 33EMYBW has a special sense of “pushing the sound forward”.
Sautéed
Ministry of Fairy Tales
Since breaking away from Shanghai as its geographic base, SVBKVLT has also expanded its scope, recently releasing releases from artists from Cairo, Tehran and Reykjavik. Valensi says mixing and mastering releases for Iranian artist Sote in 2024. Ministry of Fairy Tales, was a personal and professional turning point. A composition less ready for the club than most on the label, Ministry of Fairy Tales is an intricate and primal arranged set of cold, inhuman atmospheres and eerie, mechanical melodies, aesthetically aligned with SVBKVLT’s more experimental, darker and ambient releases.
Answer to Ministry of Fairy Tales it put the label on the wider radar, according to Valensi, attracting the attention of experimental and drone artists who might otherwise not have paid attention, and giving SVBKVLT “a bit of an experimental album”.
Abadir
Ison
Another new addition to the list is Egyptian artist Abadir, whose 2023 album Ison it was his second for the label. Abadir, aka Rami Abadir, is the editor of an Arabic music webzine Ma3azefand became involved in SVBKVLT after publishing several of its editions on the website.
“People who post on (SVBKVLT) now know him for his aesthetic, so there’s a kind of self-influence,” notes Osheyack, who says that Abadir’s music fits naturally with his and Nahash’s, and that the Icelandic trio’s upcoming SVBKVLT release a side project obliquely resembles 33EMYBW.
“It definitely opens up more possibilities,” founder Gaz Williams says of SVBKVLT’s decentralized horizon today. Although ALL is no longer Ground Zero, the label is based at the White Hotel in Manchester, which hosts regular SVBKVLT events. Last year, Williams was part of the label’s showcase at a medieval church in rural Italy alongside Abadir, Osheyack, Hyph11e, Swimful and Nahash.
“There’s something that ties it all together and I think it’s Gaz’s taste,” Osheyack says of the latest iteration of SVBKVLT. “It has a pretty sharp curatorial feel, and I think that’s the main line that’s continuing right now.”
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