Interview: Vex’d

“I love the idea of things perpetually moving forward,” enthuses Jamie Teasdale, “and of people looking to that place. I was a kid in the ’80s: my whole bedroom was full of drawings of planets, Ulysses 31 and Tron; as a teenager I watched Akira over and over. I can’t see the city and the world around without traces of Blade Runner and William Gibson.”

As Vex'd, Teasdale and sometime collaborator Roly Porter have done much to expand the possibilities of dubstep. Supported by foundation-building DJs such as J Da Flex, the two former jungle obsessives “unintentionally got into a close relationship” early on with the scene, going on to record its first fully realised album in ‘Degenerate’. Over the past year and a half, however, Teasdale has escaped its gravity, emerging on his own with something like a holographic negative of that sound. His work under the names Kuedo and Jamie Vex’d, on the Planet Mu label, positively gleams with the kind of imaginings he soaked up as a youngster.

“I want to make future-bound music, with no irony or retro fallbacks,” he continues. “I would like to think that everyone making electronic music is doing the same - that’s the whole point of the endeavour to me.”

It’s questionable how universal this attitude in fact is: if the future is already here - and has been for some time, as Gibson’s popular aphorism might be rephrased - that could explain why in music its signifiers are so frequently found stuck in a time loop. That Teasdale manages to indulge his preoccupations without any resort to pastiche is part of what makes him stand out.

Another of his unusual talents lies in the ability to simulate vivid physical impressions: to the imaginative listener at least, the recent ‘Dream Sequence’ release is apt to trace visions, say, of as-yet-impossible architectures, like the breathtakingly animated backgrounds of Akira. This psychoacoustic craft has often been key to the impact of Vex’d, too, particularly on the unfinished second album ‘Cloud Seed’, finally issued last month as a package completed by remix work from the time.

“There have been many tracks where I’ve really focused on it being spatial,” he confirms, “and laboured for days to convey that. I went through a phase of picturing tunes as a 3D space, moving parts around. Roly once said that more than anything else, a Vex’d tune should have a physical feeling, like the actual feeling you get from a large space.”

As for ‘Cloud Seed’, Teasdale says it “actually sounds really close to the album we intended to make,” calling it “an answer to a question that we kept on being asked - what happened after ‘Degenerate’?”

“We were becoming seen as this core dubstep act,” he remembers, “which we didn’t intend to be, and we were increasingly uncomfortable with the way that scene was developing, getting more and more formulaic. Halfway through it, we both had enough of London, but I went to Berlin and Roly settled in Bristol. The intention to write more is fully there: we just can’t say when.”

“I felt myself needing to go in a different direction anyway,” he confesses. “That eventually became Kuedo. Kuedo is my main focus right now: that’s where my heart and inspiration is at this moment and I need to explore it more before I can do anything else. There are a few remixes I’m actively working on and a whole bunch offers, but for sure I want to get started with an album this year.”

Words by Robin Howells

Clash Magazine Issue 50 This is an excerpt from an article that appears in the 50th issue of Clash Magazine. Pick it up in stores from May 7th. You can read the full issue online HERE and subscribe to Clash Magazine HERE.