Meanwhile, Bleep place us at #5 in their list, Resident Advisor place us at #7 and Fact place us at #2.

Here’s what Juno had to say about us:

Night Slugs have enjoyed such a rich vein of success in 2010 it’s sometimes easy to forget Alex Sushon and James Connolly only started putting out records in January. The year has been a microcosmic story of accomplishment that most labels might hope to achieve in a lifespan. Widespread media coverage from Dazed to Pitchfork and feverish anticipation amongst the more discerning corners of the internet have been an organic side effect for a label whose every release has retained the standard in quality set by that inaugural white label from L Vis 1990. It’s pretty hard to find any new superlatives to pin on the label, and Juno Plus is unlikely to be the sole voice of praise in this season of lists and features. What has really impressed throughout the year is the determination of Sushon and Connolly to mould discontent with the direction their musical surroundings was heading into something nascent and exciting.

Central to this of course was the selfless drive of Sushon and Connolly to use the label as a platform to open the music of their friends and contemporaries to a wider and more than willing audience. Let’s not forget they are both respected DJs and producers in their own right, but other label endeavours have floundered by pandering to the egotistical endeavours of the decision makers. Night Slugs have succeeded because no one else was putting out Kingdom tracks and Egyptrixx somehow couldn’t get a DJ gig in hometown Toronto. It’s hard to even pick an outstanding release from the catalogue, although Girl Unit’s “Wut” has been rightly feted because it’s a track that demands to be played loud in clubs to really bask in its crunk glory. The label has really ended on a high with the unveiling of Jam City’s “Magic Drops” and Jacques Greene’s gloriously R&B soaked house anthem “(Baby I Don’t Know) What You Want”.

Read the whole list here

In the mean time, XLR8R place Bok Bok’s podcast for them at #1 in their list of their top mixes of the year! Check it out here.

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Dan: i guess it’s best to start at the start
how long had the label been planned? when did it form as an idea? was it when night slugs was still in camberwell?

Bok : i guess it was later than the camberwell days but it was a seed quite early on
really it grew out of me and l-vis djing more, ever on the hunt for dubplates, and finding more and more new, unreleased music that we loved and fit right into our sets

Dan: where was that coming from? where were you and Lvis finding the dubplates you were playing?

Bok : the most interesting stuff came directly from people. like-minded producers and djs, people who heard what we were doing
two names to mention at this stage are Kingdom and Egyptrixx.
we were playing both their stuff alongside bassline tunes and stuff me and J were building ourselves from pretty early on, and alongside the early trouble & bass material

Dan: like 2008ish?

Bok : yea 2008
mind reader and that mystic by kingdom were just sitting around not going anywhere. even though we were bangin them out in clubs all over, and we knew dancefloors loved them. but it still felt quite ‘secret’ and that frustrated us, we just wanted to see these tunes do what they were threatening to do, on a full scale

Dan: how did you and kingdom get in touch?

Bok : that was actually ages before. years before he hit me up with an early mixtape. And then about a year after that we emailed again and started talking properly and realised we had a lot in common, musically and otherwise
he played his european debut at night slugs #2 in april 2008

Dan: so around 2008, did you see anything – a sound, a scene – coalescing at that point? or was there just lots of disparate music about that sounded good, independently of each other..

Bok : to some extent it always felt a little like there was a tension between the disparateness of tunes and my job was to make them fit and make it cohesive
but no, personally the whole time i felt as if i was pushing for a new sound. it felt on the brink of coalescing

Dan: you mean bringing together those sounds in a dj set?

Bok : yea, and by booking guests that were opposite in some ways, but kind of fit in with each other. in mixtapes, at the nights and in dj sets and on radio, i felt my role was to curate all these various styles into one and show people their similarities, not their differences

Dan: so was it coalescing? what kind of stuff was in your dj sets in late 2008 and into 2009?

Bok : well the first parties were quite heavy on bassline, mainly because it gave us what i felt grime and dubstep both lacked at that point, physical momentum
at the same tempo too
But yea a lot of older grime, some dirty bird type tech house bits, a lot of drop the lime stuff from when he started T&B.
bmore, chicago ghetto house, detroit ghetto tech stuff, always
Then increasingly, these new up-front bits by myself, L-vis, Kingdom, Egyptrixx, occasionally some early Girl U No Its True beats
and yea bits of Hessle, Hyperdub, stuff by Untold, Ikonika, Ramadanman.

Dan: so were you listening to tunes by girl unit and jam city in 2009?

Bok : not jam city until towards the second half of the year,
but girl u no its true was djing with us and making crunk and ghettotech type stuff quite early on

Dan: It’s interesting to compare to other labels, how well you know the people you’re putting records out by.

Bok : really unusual, really strange the way it came about
We can be a bit private about it, but i think its worth noting because its unusual and essentially a good thing that we’re friends. It’s a bit magic
when Girl Unit made IRL it took us by surprise
but then i always knew he was a brilliant DJ so no surprise there !

Dan: there have been a number of moments this year where you’ve gone ‘MY GOD, WAIT TIL YOU HEAR THE NEXT ONE…’

Bok : yep!!!!! i genuinely felt like that all year
the story with Jam’s production is cool too,
during my birthday ustream a year and a half ago, which he played at, he left a folder in my serato with trax tagged “jam city”
i listened to them and was blown away!
called him up to find out who this mysterious new producer was
it was really my ideal music
the tunes had everything i was after

Dan: what was in that bag of tunes? ones that have come out?

Bok : a lot of the early stuff that was in that FACT piece. Witches Sunset, Underpass, In The Park, Let Me Bang Refix, tunes like that
there were a few brilliant edits too that made a statement about a sort of hybridisation without really setting out to
they were just dj tools but they implied some very potent crossovers

Dan: what kind of things were you, and Jam, and i guess various others at that point, hybridising?

Bok : it was just a development of the same thing i guess we were moving away from bassline, and in its place the UK’s urban world had discovered house music, big time when Funky started to blow up.

Dan:
do you remember that first bassline all-nighter in london we went to at the egg?

Bok : yea Northernline’s night

we owe Northernline our name ! The “___ Slugs” naming convention was Paleface’s, for trax that is. there were all these different tracks named ____ slugs
i checked with him if it was ok to use the name right at the start and he was cool with it

Anyway, 2009 was a real portal for the UK scene i think, and it allowed a lot of stuff to come into our scene. A lot of stuff was suddenly “allowed”
personally, before I was into Funky I was into house, but i was more interested in the older classic stuff from the 80s and early 90s, and then some of the new tech type stuff. what funky did was help me check out all the stuff in between

Dan: what’s the relationship with uk funky like now?

Bok : im not sure what uk funky really is now …
the artists that we’re connected with from that world have moved on to find their own path mostly

Dan: what are your releasing plans on the label generally / when do we get to hear some more Bok Bok beats?

Bok : well i have two tracks on the Allstars 1 comp. that just came out i’ve been working towards a certain sound for a while and i’ve kind of got it where i want it. there will be some new material from me earlyish in the new year…. The label has kept me pretty busy so i haven’t really been focusing on myself this year

but in terms of future output, before the end of the year we have Jam City’s new single Magic Drops
then in the new year will come LPs from both Egyptrixx and Jam City, then later on an L-Vis one.

Dan: how did the albums came about? jam city’s was just an accumulation of stuff right? like there was just too much material

Bok : yea jam has been holding out for us
but its good actually because i feel he’s come sooo far as a producer this year and made some amazing music, so i’m glad we didn’t rush.
a lot of the early stuff is really strong though and one or two of the trax from that phase will make it onto the LP

Dan: how has his sound changed? what will the album sound like?

Bok : i’ve been playing a few of them as for a while now and some are even brand new
its hard to put into words… i think his tracks have become bolder and more direct. some of the more recent material is very focused and in some cases directed more squarely toward the floor
i think magic drops, the single that’s about to come out, gives a little glimpse of what to expect, to some extent

Dan: so, l-vis and egyptrixx. any clues?

Bok: Egyptrixx will actually be the first in line
the album is finished. it’s amazing.
The Only Way Up was the start of where he was going with this LP material
its got that glacial, astral feeling to it. he kept a very tightly controlled sound palette, so the whole thing feels very very cohesive,
some of it is droney, some of it is kind of like strange pop songs
it definitely feels like an album, it goes on a journey, it has a very dynamic shape
because there are tracks on there that are straight up techno, not bangers, but they have the kick drum weight to make a floor explode. i know because i’ve been playing Liberation Front for example for months in every set. (that one is on Allstars 1)
but also there’s stuff on there that he probably didn’t intend for club play, but i still play them and make them work in weird ways

Dan: what’s un-club-like about them?

Bok : like there’s no drums, like devil’s mixes or drumapellas or whatever else as a sort of dance interlude
they play an atmospheric / storytelling role on the LP but i make them work as sort of subverted club material

Dan: and has Lvis been working on his for a while now? and abroad, a bit?

Bok : he’s been building up a very classic sound palette, a lot of vintage drum machines and synths, but he’s writing L-Vis tunes using all of this gear…. ive heard bits and pieces and its sounding very very nice
a great progression for him

Dan: do you have a take on naming the stuff you’re making? people were saying to me in the US, ‘i love this shit, but can we get a name for it yet? just because i want to tell people about it’

Bok : i’m a very firm believer that it’s dangerous territory
we’ve had so much evidence that its not a good move

Dan: if it won’t be named, why name it?

Bok : i certainly wouldn’t want to force anything

Dan: and the thing is, people are trying and failing, and i actually enjoy them failing
i see that as a sign of health
resistance to getting tied down

Do you think the dispersed nature of different rave sub cultures now means that we won’t get a single unified, regionally-located youth culture explosion like grime again?
are the conditions for creativity so different now?
if so, is that a bad thing?

Bok : i think theres actually some weight behind the argument that we’re in a time of entropy musically
but i dont mind, because in 2006 i realised my part in all of this wasn’t to celebrate the patterns of larger movements but to focus in, collect, explore, draw new links.
I have to concede that Night Slugs isn’t just London or the UK
what we take from that culture is a certain formal aesthetic, as in – darkness, soundsystems, sub-bass weight, dubplate/riddim culture the value of newness and progress and pushing forward and so whatever new ideas come to Night Slugs from wherever they may come, we have this context to route everything through, borrowed from Rinse and FWD and the London underground that taught me ! but i have to concede that Slugs is out of my control, in terms of being part of a london-centered lineage. people like kingdom, egyptrixx, and despite his londonness, girl unit, all bring other things to the table entirely
l-vis too because he’s from a slightly different musical background as well.

Dan:  i remember girl unit mixes going up on Lower End Spasm and they were not uk bass-related really

Bok : GU was always vital because i could see how his favourite music directly connected to ours

Dan: the artwork – is that a different zeitgeist? or the same sensibility?
i mean it’s aesthetically capturing the sound, right?
lights in the darkness seem to be recurring themes

Bok : i guess it’s trying to show the elements our music brings together in that it’s dark and moody but also with luminescently bright elements

Dan: did you ask each producer first if they had any ideas or wanted input?

Bok : yea on some occasions i had done

Dan: what kind of responses did you get?
‘phallic’ was one, right?

Bok : yes Velour wanted something phallic
so they got a massive rocket-like tower with their name on it
Girl Unit wanted “something catholic”

on the whole the artwork all occupies this one spooky twilight dimension
it’s really important for me to keep that continuity

Dan: general plan for 2011?

Bok:  so to recap, albums from Egyptrixx, Jam City and L-Vis 1990.
also, I can’t be too specific at this stage but next year the Night Slugs logo will definitely be appearing on a few non-musical products.
ALSO many more hot 12″s and EPs, some of them from myself! Upfront, functional music for the club will continue to be the core of what we’re about into 2011 and beyond.

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Lower End Spasm is in suspended animation here: www.dot-alt.blogspot.com. The blog’s full archive is still available

Purchase CD

Purchase MP3s

01.    Mosca – Square One VIP
02.    Lil Silva – Golds 2 Get
03.    Girl Unit – IRL (Bok Bok Remix)
04.    Kingdom – Bust Broke
05.    L-Vis 1990 & T. Williams – Stand Up
06.    Jam City – Arpjam
07.    Lil Silva – Seasons
08.    Egyptrixx – Liberation Front
09.    Bok Bok & Cubic Zirconia – Reclash Dub
10.    Optimum – Broken Embrace
11.    Jacques Greene – (Baby I Don’t Know) What You Want
12.    Velour – Booty Slammer
13.    Girl Unit – Wut

We’ve had a crazy, hectic 2010. It seems apt to round off a year of non-stop releases with a consolidatory look at where we’ve been, and where we’re heading.
Night Slugs Allstars is a series of compilation that will act as a cohesive guide to our sound.

Volume 1 features brand new material alongside some of our biggest tracks of 2010 including:

Lil Silva‘s “Golds 2 Get”, and his enduring “Seasons” (NS004); Kingdom‘s punishingly percussive “Bust Broke” (NS006); Velour‘s porn-groove laden “Booty Slammer” (NS007); Girl Unit‘s reigning anthem “Wut” (NS008) aptly rounds off the album.

It wouldn’t be Night Slugs without the dubplate pressure:

Mosca‘s “Square One VIP” is a new upfront club twist on the label’s first release; L-Vis 1990 collaborates with Deep Teknologi’s T. Williams on their brutalist bassline-driven “Stand Up”; taken from his debut album, Egyptrixx‘s stratospheric “Liberation Front”; Bok Bok twists up Girl Unit’s futuristic club banger “IRL” into an acid grime ode to FWD>> circa ’04; a stripped-back dub of Bok Bok’s vinyl-only “Reclash” with Cubic Zirconia; Jam City‘s heavyweight techno-grime “Arpjam”;

Allstars Volume 1 introduces two new producers: LuckyMe family member Jacques Greene, and Hum & Buzz boss alongside Ikonika, London’s Optimum. Jacques gives us his acid epic “(Baby I Don’t Know) What You Want”, while
Optimum’s “Broken Embrace” is close to the Detroit school of soulful, robotic techno, but pumped full of sub-bass.

A consolidation of our first year as a label as well as a look ahead into 2011.

November 2010

[youtube T_8Id5XkCVk]

Next comes sister track “Scene Girl”, which borrows the pumping piston drums of the title cut, this time set to dirty makout sawtooths, moans and whimpers.

The EP closes with “2 Hot”, the most atmospheric of the three. Keeping in line with the halftime groove of its predecessors, this is a mesh of droning melodies and trance synths that gather over the track like thunderclouds.

L-Vis 1990′s Night Slugs mix for Resident Advisor (right click save)

Girl Unit – Shade On
L-Vis 1990 – Forever You Dub
Egyptrixx – Liberation Front
Mosca – Square One VIP
Kingdom – Bust Broke
Girl Unit – IRL (Bok Bok Remix)
Jam City – Magic Drops
Lil Silva – Golds 2 Get
L-Vis 1990 – Reprise
Jam City – Arpjam
Velour – The Scent of Romance
Jacques Greene – (Baby I Don’t Know) What You Want
Optimum – Broken Embrace
Girl Unit – Wut

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You’re no longer feeling your local music scene. Do you a) bitch about it, or b) do something about it? “We wanted to bring on a new era and that is what we were saying from the get go,” says Alex Sushon, AKA Bok Bok, on the inception of the Night Slugs parties back in early 2008. Sushon and partner James Connolly, AKA L-Vis 1990, have since translated a sense of personal disquiet into one of London’s freshest sounding parties and 2010′s most celebrated labels.

The revolutionary aims Sushon refers to were, in his case, a reaction to the London grime scene. Having played, produced and partied to the music since discovering a DJ Slimzee mix in 2003, he had grown disenchanted with grime’s apparent shift away from the dance floor. In terms of UK dance strands, he fell back on the nascent bassline scene but was simultaneously getting kicks from much further afield. “I was interested in grime from a socio-economic point of view and I started looking around the world to see if there was anything similar happening,” he remembers. “I got into a lot of the US localised ghetto genres. I got really into the Baltimore club sound, the Chicago ghetto house sound and in Detroit, ghetto tech. I checked out what was going on in Africa and really got into the South African stuff.”

Connolly’s grounding, meanwhile, was as a promoter, DJ and producer in his hometown of Brighton. He co-ran drum & bass and breakstep night Fallout with locals Mumdance and High Rankin during his teens, then, after gradually losing interest in the genres, started the party that would prove pivotal. So Loud! became indicative of Connolly’s more electro-fied tastes. He credits the booking of Drop the Lime (and the ensuing party) for setting him on the musical path he now finds himself—and for the inspiration behind his 2008 breakout track, “Change the Game.” Its speed garage inflections and crafty US hip-hop samples caught the ear of the London-based Sushon, who contacted Connolly through MySpace. The pair began a dialogue based on uncannily similar tastes, while a still Brighton-based Connolly booked Sushon for a party he was throwing up in London.

“It took James to move to London for us to really get going,” recalls Sushon on his partner’s eventual relocation north, “but from an early point when we started to talk about music we said that the status quo in the clubs at that point was basically shit and we weren’t feeling it.” The first Night Slugs party was staged at the Redstar in south London’s Camberwell, March 2008. (The venue now boasts a small chapter in bass music folklore having provided an early platform for artists such as Oneman, Ben UFO, Shackleton and Ramadanman.) The initial party was a smash success, followed by a dip in numbers at subsequent gigs as they experimented with bookings and found their feet. There was also a sense that people were unwilling to venture south of the river for a night out, and the event shifted to the more centrally located East Village.

The array of DJs booked for those early forays—Oneman, Zomby, Rekless, Lil Silva, Kode9, Jackmaster, Crazy Cousinz, DJ Zinc—cultivated a fertile patch of ambiguity surrounding the party; their “4×4/Heavy Bass/Gutter House” descriptor at the foot of flyers was similarly nebulous. Sushon and Connolly had come good on their freewheeling aims. And from the melting pot something new began to form. “After a while it just made a lot of sense,” says Sushon. “What we found was that as DJs in our own right as well as [those playing at] the night, a certain sound was starting to come together around it. There was ourselves, and other people around us started to make tracks that just fit together and fit in our DJ sets.”

The lesser known Girl Unit, Egyptrixx and Kingdom were at the core of this colourful collective—although their sound world continued to reside only within the confines of their club nights. “After a while we found that a lot of the tracks weren’t getting a home and were just sitting around not getting released,” explains Sushon. “In particular some of the early Kingdom stuff was a big motivation. James and I said to each other, ‘Why is this stuff just sitting there? Why aren’t labels picking this stuff up?’ Six months might go past and the same tracks might still not be signed and it was quite frustrating so we thought, ‘Why not just do it?’”

NS001 dropped in January 2010 and sent out a picture-perfect postcard of not only the Night Slugs parties, but the smorgasbord of London bass music. Square One also represented Mosca’s debut release. In its digital form the EP collected eight tracks, including “Nike”—a ten-minute meander through boulevards of bleeps and broken beats—an uproarious remix of “Square One” from Bristol talent Julio Bashmore, and further re-rubs from Roska, Greena, Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990. The EP’s artwork also couldn’t fail to be noticed. Sushon has been behind all of Night Slugs’ incandescent presentation (he has a professional background in design) and agrees that the sounds feed directly into the sights: “There is a lot of neon going on in the music in general I think especially with those really bright analogue synths. I am really obsessed with Tron and that kind of luminescence.”

The world seemed ready and willing to embrace the Night Slugs label from the off. A certain youthful zest and fluorescent brilliance endeared UK sympathetic media outlets to their releases and cast a thematic shaft of light across their discography. It’s best then to think in terms of colours when attempting to delineate the Night Slugs sound: how else to group the nocturnal juke of Girl Unit’s “IRL,” the 8-bit Funky of Lil Silva’s Night Skanker EP, and the mutant R&B of Kingdom’s That Mystic? Connolly is also swift to dismiss any suggested associations between UK Funky and the label. “I wouldn’t want any genre name applied to the label at all,” he says sharply. “UK funky is something totally different. It was Crazy Cousinz, Roska and all those dudes back then. I think that UK funky as a genre is pretty much obsolete now. I think it has turned into a big soup of different sounds.”
Shadowing the imprint proper has been the Night Slugs white label series which began with a re-release of L-Vis 1990′s Compass / Zahonda. “That was one for the heads really,” comments Connolly on their pseudo sub-label. “Getting tracks out that we didn’t want to put on the label to be a statement. It was more getting out tracks for the dance floor and bootlegs as well that we can’t really put out for legal reasons.” On that last point Jam City’s “Ecstasy (Refix)” comes immediately to mind. Endgame’s 1983-released “Ecstasy” was given a sub-bass makeover and has proved to be the imprint’s most coveted 12-inch. A sense of anticipation had been built over Jam City’s debut, but Sushon says that, generally speaking, they favour speed over secrecy: “I learnt lessons from dubstep where in the early-to-mid days of the scene people like DMZ would leave tracks floating around for a year before they would put them out and I saw people getting really frustrated at that. As much as I’m into the dubplate culture, I didn’t want it to be an elitist thing that drives people mad.”

“Brand” is a frowned upon term in certain music circles, although it would be fair to say that Night Slugs is pushing hard on multiple fronts. The pair toured the United States in late 2009—before the imprint was even formed—and the same can be said about their regular show on London’s Rinse FM which began around the same time period. In terms of the label, their first compilation, Night Slugs Allstars Volume One, will drop in November and will be followed by albums from Jam City, Egyptrixx and L-Vis 1990. Connolly has recently spent time in New York feeling out the vibe of his classic house-indebted LP. “It’s like Night Slugs but made in Chicago in 1988,” he says, again illustrating his and the imprint’s resolutely forward momentum.

Night Slugs is flourishing within in an unprecedented climate of creative endeavour that has recently gripped UK bass music; innovation is a word that both Sushon and Connolly use liberally. “That is something that we have always had to a greater or lesser extent and that’s why our music scene is cool,” concludes Sushon when asked why the UK scene is in the midst of such a purple patch. “There is constantly a side of our music scene that doesn’t give a shit and is trying to do something new at the expense of any kind of a rule book. I think that’s what the UK has that some places don’t at the moment. Currently there are two things going on: Firstly, because of the internet and the fact that people have started to pay attention to the UK… it seems like there is a new thing when there might not necessarily be a new thing. Secondly, amongst us guys and maybe our peers, there is a reaction against the more formulaic genres that dominate most of the clubs around the Western world. Formulas are shit and we don’t want them, so that’s why we don’t do them.”

Words: Ryan Keeling