The Bug picks ten records: beats, riffs, drones and heavenly voices

The question put to him in 2019 was a plain one: what are you listening to. Kevin Richard Martin, who as The Bug has spent twenty years welding Caribbean riddims to distortion, came back with ten records.

He did not hand them over as a list. He sorted them into four piles, and the names of the piles already tell you how he listens: beats, riffs, drones, heavenly voices.

Before picking anything he explained why he bothers. He said he is hungry for music, and that he needs it because he is competitive with sound: hearing something good makes him want to work harder.

The dub, which is where all of it starts

His reggae pick is not a famous record. It is “The Walls of Jerusalem” by Yabby You with King Tubby, reissued by Pressure Sounds.

Martin says Pete Holdsworth, who runs the label, has become a friend, and that Pressure Sounds is the finest reggae reissue label there is.

The reason he gives is not taste: it is that every release teaches him something and leaves him asking what on earth he is hearing.

On King Tubby he is blunter: one of his favourite producers of all time.

Listen while you read

The record that barely exists off Bandcamp

The strangest pick is “8 Furnitures” by the Japanese musician Yosuke Tokunaga, and the best part is how he got to it.

His wife is Japanese, he says, and even she cannot find interviews with the man. He seems to exist in a void that is hard to reach: he has made a lot of music, and Martin found it there, on Bandcamp, and nowhere else.

What he hears in it he says with three names: it joins the dots between early DJ Krush, Scorn and even Burial. Carefully built sound, heavy atmospheres, and very slow.

When he says drones he means a church

Kali Malone’s “The Sacrificial Code”, organ and nothing else, got him straight away. He calls it sacred and ambient at the same time, and then finds a phrase worth more than a review: psychedelic church music.

In the same answer he states his rule, and it is the clearest of the ten: he swings constantly between maximum and minimal, between ugly and beautiful, because what pulls him in are extremes.

The rest of his picks say the same thing from another angle: under riffs he puts Big Brave and Deafkids, guitars that come out of early Swans and refuse to stay there.

The last heading is called heavenly voices

In it sits Nivhek, who is Liz Harris, who is Grouper under another name.

Martin describes seeing her live at Café Oto in London, sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing very quietly. He says it was one of the quietest shows he has ever heard, and that this is exactly why it made him listen harder.

Then he closes the pick with a line that explains half the selection: he is very drawn to the colour blue in music.

We played the three records you can find one after another, and they do hold together: the instruments change, the room does not.

What a selection built this way tells you

Ten records sorted into beats, riffs, drones and voices are not a ranking. They are four uses for music, spelled out by somebody who manufactures it.

And there is a detail worth keeping: half of those releases are not on the platforms where playlists live. They are on Bandcamp, where he found them, one at a time.