S.O.T.U chat to N.A.D
Rush Hour's reissue of New Age Of Dance sets the UK's NAD among the forgotten gems of dance music. So we got Mustafa Ali, the man behind the project, down to the Soul Jazz basement to talk over his origins and inspirations.
"It really begins with being at college in the mid '80s, and going into a clothing shop with some friends, and hearing 'Jack Your Body' by Steve Silk Hurley." Hurley's standard-bearing chart topper led Mustafa Ali deeper, via Jazzy M's radio show on South London pirate LWR and his record shop in Croydon, towards the first wave of Detroit techno.
"Things are kicking off in Detroit. We're getting spatterings of Derrick May productions, Juan Atkins productions: 'Off to battle' 'No UFOs' 'It Is What It Is'. Template music. I knew nothing about this stuff, so Jazzy M was really my entry point.' Mustafa turned to production. 'I bought myself a Yamaha DX100, a RX17 drum machine, a very simple two track sequencer and started trying to lay down some tracks." The obvious destination for the cassette-recorded output was Jazzy M, who aired Ali's track 'Close Jack Encounter' on LWR in early '88:
LE Bass - Close Jack Encounter
'Close Jack Encounter' got credited to Lords Of The Eastern Bass. Mustafa's L.E. Bass catalogue went on to include a sideways, vocal acid track for the 'Acid House Vol. One' compilation, plus a single, 'Play Her Way'. And then, in 1989, NAD surfaces with the Distant Drums single, and that's it as far as LE Bass is concerned.
The majority of the original NAD album was recorded over a few days in the first year of the 90s, in a cheap studio in Brockley, with an engineer present and Mustafa's school friend Eugene Gbekor featuring on backing vocals. Eight of the tracks they recorded went onto the LP, along with Distant Drums. All the business was managed by Tony Thorpe of the Moody Boys, the head of the BPM label.
When you ask Mustafa about UK producers, he says that he met the KLF once ("they were crazy… they had this huge car outside, this old american police car"), and mentions that he studied cybernetics with the professor who fathered half of Chicane. But he scored a hit on the UK techno scene with the tune VLSI Heaven, released on Jazzy M's label under the Epoch 90 name, which grew out of a 20-minute track recorded during the NAD sessions after the engineer had gone to bed. It turns out he was out of the loop enough to have had no idea of its success. 'it's totally bizarre, seeing it on Youtube now… really bizarre."
We played him a few recent releases, but - with the exception of Photodementia - he wasn't feeling them. He mentions Legowelt, though. "I really like the fact that he's giving the middle finger to a whole lot of really polished contemporary electronic music, and saying; you guys are missing the point. it doesn't matter how it sounds, in the sense of the perfect sonics, its about groove, and its about that rawness of feel. and im definintely from that school"
Legowelt - The Paranormal Soul
Through all the time we talk, Mustafa keeps bringing the conversation back to Derrick May. "Derrick may is a strange kind of guy. I dont know what he was on. I'd like to sit down and ask slightly different questions, not talking so much about the music. It's weird his stuff, it's not music, its something else… i'd like to probe where derrick may is at, spiritually. '
Rhythim is rhythim (Derrick May) - It Is What It Is
Relating to the afro-futurism of US deep house and techno producers, Mustafa calls his stuff Islamo-Futurism. 'the spirituality is very important. dealing with the human condition, reflecting on where we're going, where we could be going.' As a sort of expression of his belies in sound, the music has an edge of privacy. "I never really took anything too seriously. You just do the music because you have to do the music, because the music is summoning itself forth from you, so you just put it down. And there were people crazy enough to say, 'here, you can have studio time', or, 'here, we'll press it'"