Cursor Minor Live in San Sebastian Mix (MediaFire)

Thanks to Hyponik, hosts of the second room on March 27th, for sorting us this banging mix and galanging interview with Cursor Miner.

Sadly, as you can see from the picture, Cursor (as he’s know to his friends) has become a walking advert for how too much bass for your face can cause premature  muscle wastage, leading to fish pout and even the dreaded, but rarely spoken about, condition of hoody droop. Ever the solider, he won’t be letting mere deformity stop him playing one of his legendary live sets at The Arches.

Do you make breaks? Do you make electronica? Do you make ‘bass’? Basically, what music do you make and who is it for?

Yes to all three! I see ‘breaks’ as the main root of all modern dance music. The original use of breakbeat was just the bit where all the other instruments disappeared and people would just get into the drums on their own.  I’m definitely down with that, as my tunes don’t have much ornamentation.  Electronica, well I use electronics! Though strictly I guess I make digitalia as I don’t have any analogue stuff.  And as for bass, yes sir but it can be over-rated (gasp! heresy!).

The trouble with describing my stuff is that even though I have an overall sound I make things at all tempos , whereas genres of dance music tend to be categorized by tempo. It’s something that frustrates me cos I get bored if I have to listen to the same tempo all night.

Do you you belong to any particular scene or do you try to disassociate yourself from one particular movement?

I think we have a Europe-wide scene that is into extreme bass stuff and open minded to different tempos… anything that rips up the rave basically.  I think it’s quite small compared to things like minimal and DnB but it has influence and gets respect nonetheless.  I think BLOC festival is the biggest expression of that scene in the UK at the moment, though they need to get quite a few big names into that.  But the people in this scene are very wary of calling it anything because that will limit you.   So we’re not limited beat-wise but we may well be limited promotion-wise!

Despite really loving that kind of scene I still make a bunch of songs that wouldn’t fit and fashion-wise I think I belong somewhere totally different! I hate t-shirts.

What’s on the cards for a Cursor Miner live set at Hyp!Hyp!Hyp! on 27th March?

At the moment I’m working out how to seamlessly get from mid-tempo electro to 200bpm dervish music to tweaked out hip-hop tempo stuff and back again. My new stuff is quite slow but still pretty wild. There’s some out of control Latin/Arabic sounding percussion going on, some 6 beat and 1/4 step.  And of course we’ll have some surreal shouting, the aboriginal/op-art LED-suit, some of my shamanic power objects and the laser hat. 

Is music the food of love? If your productions were a particular dish, what would it be?

Yeah I often liken music to cooking. You need fresh ingredients, plenty of meat, nice and spicy but sometimes less is more!  The other day I invented a dish called Banditos Bangers, which is a kind of Mexican version of sausage and mash. Put cumin and mustard in your mash, and instead of gravy fry up some jalapenos, mushrooms, peppers in a creamy stocky sauce.  Solid UK nosh with some exotic twists, sums it up I guess.

What projects do you have in the pipeline?

There’s a new album I’ve just finished which should be out on Lo Recordings, also some heavy downtempo stuff coming out on the Addictech net label and some song-based stuff on Seed Records.  I have another project called Stranded Planets which is me on guitar and my mate Ben on drums, that’s more like experimental krautrock live-meets-electronic kind of stuff.

You’re at the gates of heaven, you have 3 tracks to mix together before entering the realms of the unknown – what are they?

No you’re right I should start thinking about this now… don’t want to get there unprepared. Ummmm. Probably a bit of ‘I feel love’ would go down well, it wouldn’t jar with the pearlyness of the surroundings. I heard that St. Peter is a big Jethro Tull fan so I’d drop some of that to get the crowd on my side. Then I’d play Sport of Kings cos that still kind of sums up what I’m about and I suppose with be the tune that I’m judged by on judgement day.

What music has been floating your boat recently?

I tend to listen to mixes that I find on the internet rather than albums these days, I’d recommend electronicexplorations.org, spannered.org and Scan One’s Lost Tapes series.  Also listening to:

• Portishead’s new album
• TEP download album on bedroom research – this is crazy load of noises all squashed together, great fun.
• Tito Puente – latin mambo stuff, brilliant for dancing round the bedroom to
• Back into nasty drum and bass – Panacea/Dylan/Raiden/Current Value etc. some of it’s a bit cheezy-horrorfilm kind of vibe but the beats and the production is absolutely blinding.
• Line – his 1st album out on Uncharted now, it’s electro with a real soul.
• Monster Zoku Onsomb – Three piece band from down under, kind of like The Cramps do Electro Grime, great stuff.
• Lots of ‘world’ music , gamelan, samba , Persian Daf drumming, Sufi Quwalli, African Djembe, I’m just a middle-class hippy Guardian reader at heart I suppose. But seriously some of these rhythms are pretty radical.

We all like bass – why? Is it really a subconscious link to the mothers womb, or is that bollocks? If you don’t know the answer, why not?

Well if it was to do with the womb you’d think that shuffle beat would be more popular cos a heart beats shuffle innit. And who’s mother was it that sounded like Ed Rush style hoover bass? That’s one fucked up womb if you ask me. But if I listen to my girlfriend’s stomach noises she does sound like a 303 sometimes so there could be something in it.
I think it’s more to do with the human craving for sensation , same as bungy jumping, rollercoasters and horror films. We just want ‘wow’ and if a sound is loud enough to vibrate your whole body that’s wow. I’d like to put on a club where the bass exceeded ear-damaging volume and everyone has to wear super heavy duty ear protection to get in, but the body would get the full effect.

It’s important to realise that humans had to exist for thousands of years without bass, even 70 years ago the most people had was a double bass and thats not really loud at all. Terrible state of affairs, thank god for modernity.