“Just make Spokes tunes.” That was the instruction given to Rob Hubbert, AKA Spokes, when embarking on his latest release. He’s a producer, at the age of 29, whose dedication to his craft, and likely his keen ear for the intricate and, at times fragile, interplay between his melodies and drumwork was prompted at an early age. “I came from a traditional, musically educated background. I learned percussion and my dad was a classical musician, so I grew up with a lot of music in the house.”
This heritage, combined with the singularity of his sound, meant that such brief guidance, from Coyote label head Tomas Fraser, was freighted with sufficient metadata so as not to be unhelpful, and demonstrates the confidence placed in him by his friend and collaborator.
While Hubbert was raised “listening to garage and bits of grime and a lot of dubstep,” though, it was not until moving from Nottingham to London after university, he tells Clash, that the orbit of these initial influences began to take shape. In part thanks to nights such as Slackk, Oil Gang and Logos’s Boxed, he developed the focus and drive necessary to forge his own artistic identity.
The first step in this direction, similarly to the seed that would eventually grow into one of the electronic underground’s defining labels, Hyperdub, was a blog. “Back when blogs still had some relevance and people would write blogs and take them seriously,” he jokes. Furthermore, it was this initial “creative outlet” that was to be the foundation for a series of nights under the same name, in east London, where he and his friends were, he says, given huge freedom.
“We used to go to Oxfam in Dalston and just buy loads of different records, bring them and play them. We were lucky in that The Alibi was pretty open minded with what we wanted to play, and generally people were pretty happy to hear a lot of different stuff, as long as you blended it in with the odd thing they knew.”
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In tandem with this, “five or six years ago,” Hubbert remembers, labels such as Oil Gang and Butterz were helping to contribute to resurgent interest in instrumental grime vinyl releases. It was a revitalisation that would later develop into a more fully fledged community, under the stewardship of artists such as Slackk and Mr Mitch, and grow from “ten or fifteen people” at the first nights to a phenomenon with worldwide reach. “They’ve been able to take that, and now they’ve got the label, the nights and the show on Rinse, and they’re playing all over the world, and that’s amazing — having that force of conviction.”
But it was its status as a “very clear beacon” within the emergent scene that was so essential, he notes.
“It creates a community and you get to meet loads of brilliant, likeminded people who want to share that and enjoy that. Oil Gang had been releasing great grime instrumentals way before Boxed ever popped onto the scene, but it was like a convergence; a lot of similar people coming together and it just seemed to work. At the same time it helped give a voice to and elevate some of the MC talent coming through, like Novelist, and also the early radio stuff on NTS, Slackk’s shows, just gave it all a purpose. It felt really fresh and exciting.”
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It creates a community...
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It was this excitement that spurred the nascent producer on: “I remember coming back from Boxed, and you’d be a bit drunk or whatever, and sitting down and opening Logic and trying to recreate some of the sounds you’d heard.” Although he credits this as having given him the impetus to work towards finishing his projects (a “kick up the arse” as he puts it) there is also no doubt that his friendship with Tomas has played a significant role in his development as a musician. Throughout the interview Hubbert is commendably self-effacing, saying, for example, “I’ve never been that person who can sit down and write ten great tracks. I just write a load of stuff and sometimes some of it sounds better than others.”
Tomas’ advice, then, has at times proved crucial. “As a label boss he’s stepping up into a role of feeling more comfortable, where he can critique stuff and pick out the things he likes, and it’s nice having that,” Hubbert says, drawing a contrast between the experience of electronic production with that of being in a band.
“With any other musical process, if you’re recording bands or whatever, there’s somebody in there acting as a producer, it doesn’t all happen in isolation. Whereas with a lot of dance music, especially a lot of the music we write, unless you happen to be Skrillex or Calvin Harris, you haven’t got a lot of outside influences, it’s just you and your mates writing tunes. So it’s useful having people tell you: that’s good, that’s kinda shit.”
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This direction gave rise to his latest EP for Coyote, ‘Flight’, the result of discussions he and Tomas had in the wake of his debut for the label, ‘Green Eyes’.
“‘Flight’ is an older track, written probably a couple of weeks after I’d finished the ‘Green Eyes’ release. I do this thing sometimes where I’ll just sit down with no real purpose, load up Logic, and just try making different stuff, with no real end to it — just be creative. I’d make noises, sounds, background effects, and with that one I was mucking around with some old choral sounds in a VST and just trying reversing them. [Tomas said] I want you to finish it, it’s the best thing you’ve done in ages.”
Considering the track forms the cornerstone of the EP, however, it was dangerously close to being lost for good. Soon after that first release, in the summer of 2015, Hubbert moved to New York, where the majority of ‘Flight’ was written.
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I’d make noises, sounds, background effects...
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“I’d lost a load of stuff in the move and I didn’t back up something properly so a load of tunes went missing. I actually thought it was one of those. Luckily I managed to find it on another hard drive. So that then formed the basis of it.”
When we ask how much New York, both as a place and as an idea but, perhaps more importantly, as a sonic environment, has impacted on the style of his latest offering, the talk turns to Mobb Deep’s 1995 classic ‘The Infamous’. “I really like the way that album sounds and also really like how obnoxiously loud in the mix some of the snare drums are – the whole album just knocks really hard, like ‘Shook Ones pt II’. I actively wanted to have quite upfront snare drums and that came directly from listening to those sorts of records and loving the sound of it.”
In addition to this, the move resulted in his collaboration with singer/songwriter Anna Folwell, a friend of his partner, on the four track’s most plaintive and atmospheric piece, ‘Failed State’. “We just thought we’d try something new — hang out a bit and write some music — and we did one session in my little bedroom studio. I played the piano part and set it to loop and she ad libbed this whole vocal.”
“Then I was bored one afternoon — it was really, really cold in February and I couldn’t leave the house because it was snowing — so I tried just mucking about and seeing what would happen if I pitched up her voice a bit and started to switch out the piano parts for different squarewaves and sounds, and that was the end product. It was purely experimenting and taking that original tiny scrap of a demo, where she’d done a really nice vocal, and I thought it worked really well being pitched up.”
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The tension between peaceful stuff and stuff that’s more aggressive...
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We suggest that her voice has an almost bittersweet quality, reminiscent of Burial, or some of FaltyDL’s work, and he agrees, “I’ve never asked her what the lyrics were about, but it certainly felt bittersweet listening back to it.” It’s also, however, testament to Hubbert’s willingness to engage with different methods of production.
“It’s written like a song, whereas the others are more instrumental, in that there’s a structure to them and they vaguely follow the rules that if you did want to play them in the club, that would work. [With ‘Failed State’] I basically just played it how I thought it sounded good, I didn’t worry about anything else. It was a completely different way of writing — from writing specific tunes to that stuff.”
It was also, by his own admission, a late addition to the EP, and when we suggest that the release maintains a surprising degree of coherency despite this, his natural modesty resurfaces: “I guess it was a happy accident.” There are more deliberate aspects to this consistency as well, though, he explains. “There’s one sample which sits across all three songs — a bullet drop. So in ‘Failed State’ it’s stretched out and you can’t necessarily tell it’s there, whereas then you can hear it in ‘Mercurial’ quite a bit.”
His desire to explore this space, “the tension between peaceful stuff and stuff that’s more aggressive,” also arises from the soundscape of the millennial years. “Gunshot and bullet noises are used quite a bit all over grime obviously, or even in Burial’s music, and they’re often quite aggressive sounds, maybe not directly, but what they signify can be, and they’re just quite interesting sonically. Like when you listen to old Ruff Sqwad music it’s really, really emotional, like ‘Functions on a Low’ or ‘Died in Ur Arms Tonight’, it’s really emotional, but you can counter that with some of the harder stuff.”
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Alongside this, his music is bound by a love of film scores, such as the “really bleak and kind of weirdly dystopian” soundtrack to 1968’s The Planet of the Apes, composed by Jerry Goldsmith. This may in part be another remnant of his earliest encounters with contemporary classical musicians such as Steve Reich, through his father, but it is a passion that has endured to this day. “When I’m buying records I still find myself quite drawn to people like John Carpenter and Ryuichi Sakamoto [composer of The Revenant film score].”
One further key inspiration, he says, were his fellow producers Logos and Bloom, the former of whom’s releases on Keysound, a label regarded by many on the underground circuit as somewhat prescient, helped to shape his understanding of the wider electronic scene in London at the time.
“‘Cold Mission’, the Logos album, and him generally, was an enormous influence. I remember hearing his release on Keysound, a 12” that came out really early on, ‘Kowloon’, I remember hearing that for the first time and being like, what the fuck is this? It just didn’t sound like anything else and was really exciting. I remember that and ‘Quartz’, when Bloom first released that I was like: Holy shit, this is amazing.”
In particular, it was the squarewave sound common to much of the music he both listens to and makes that caught his attention during this period. “When I’m in a club and I hear a track with a big squarewave on it, it just brings a smile to my face,” he tells me.
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It just didn’t sound like anything else...
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“It’s probably part of the reason I love grime so much – the constant use of squarewaves. A lot of the reasons why I like grime is the energy of the MCs, I think that’s really good, but then also just these weird sounds, I’m just really drawn to that. I find it really interesting, the freedom of it all.”
In fact, freedom and experimentation are two themes that recur continually throughout our conversation, and it is the topic we return to when we enquire about his plans for the future. Having enlisted the assistance of Miami-based producer, and Coyote labelmate, Marks, for the remix of ‘Flight,’ Hubbert will reciprocate the favour on the latter’s forthcoming EP.
Beyond that, his next moves are vague but, with trademark relaxed humility, he says that he’ll “probably experiment with slower tempos and try different ideas and sounds, and if something comes along — that’s great.” His love for his art is plain, though, and, as he himself says, “I get really, really lost in it, completely lost in it in a way that nothing else in my life distracts me.” Moreover, he’s clear about the attitude he intends to emulate.
“There’s a lot to be said for sticking to your guns with the music you like and you want to play; not worrying too much about what’s cool and what’s popular around you, and just doing it. Most of the labels I love and the DJs I respect have done that, they haven’t given too much of a shit about what was cool or not, they’ve just got on with what they like, and I think Boxed is a great example of that.”
The result is that this is one producer whose sound will continue to evolve according to his own vision, and whose development will be watched with interest on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Words: Alex McFadyen (@alexmcf_)