An interview with LV: Making Noise Quietly

An interview with LV: Making Noise Quietly

11 January, 2012
by: Trol23

Tomas Olesen chats to two of the shadowy trio behind some of Hyperdub's most interesting releases.

Kode9’s label Hyperdub has a lot of fairly faceless artists on it, the emphasis is clearly on putting out interesting music rather than cultivating a roster of personalities. The most obvious example of this would be Burial but there’s another anonymous set of gentlemen who’ve been consistently releasing fantastic records without appearing on the covers of magazines - LV. Speaking to me in a suitably low key cafe in Clapham, Will Horrocks and Simon Williams aren't what one might expect from London’s bass-led underground. Affable, intelligent, and funny; our meandering conversation took in everyone from Goddard to Bob Ross. Here's a few of the finer moments.

2011 saw critical acclaim for 'Routes'(Keysound) your collaborative album with one of London's finest poets - Joshua Idehen. But a Google search for “LV” doesn’t bring up anything on you guys until page two or three. Is that a deliberate ploy to be mysterious - to keep the focus on the music?

LV: It's funny, the whole being under the radar thing is quite a natural way for us to act - we don't really seek out publicity...It might partly be because we didn't do much live stuff until we did Routes, and when we started doing stuff with Josh we thought he'd be a natural frontman for live stuff, which he is, we really wanted to avoid just being some people with a laptop on stage not really doing anything interesting. So now we've got this crazy, lanky weird dude up front shouting at people which does deflect attention away from us. It's not necessarily that we don't want to be the focus so much as we've experienced a lot of 'live' electronic music before and been quite bored by it.

Despite being relatively new to playing live you've done quite a lot of smaller DJ gigs, what's been your biggest gig to date?

LV: If you only ever do gigs to tens of thousands of people then you're only getting half the experience, you've got to pay your dues a little bit and play to almost nobody. The biggest gig was probably in the Hyperdub tent at Bestival. We played last actually..er...by which we mean headlined obviously! Kode9 supported us, Funkystepz supported us, King Midas Sound supported us, Joker was on just before us. You know, just little guys, you want to give them the chance to come through, to play to these bigger crowds that we naturally draw to us. Kode was probably the most grateful, we gave him the early warm up set, he played some old jungle tunes, a bit of Chris Brown, you know he's still feeling his way a bit but one day he'll do big things. (At this point they can maintain straight faces no longer).

You’re clearly acutely aware of your relative notoriety when it comes to the heavy hitters you have as label mates then, do you ever feel eclipsed by that?

LV: We don't see it that way, it's not a competitive thing at all, it's not a race...unless we're winning! Then we'll shove it in everyone's faces obviously.

LV make a broad range of different genres and tempos of music. I've noticed since you released 'Boomslang' you're often referred to as a Kwaito, but it's not really a Kwaito track and you've released a lot of different sounds with different vocalists. Do you care what genre you're filed under?

LV: Genre labels are useful for discovering music. If you like something then it makes it easier to find more things that sound like that, but genre is not something we’re interested in at all. We always try to do something that compliments the vocalist we're working with - and that influences our output. Above all else that's what has led to our output always being quite varied.”

You seem quite content with the slow build of recognition you've had over the last 6 or 7 years, are you ever tempted to make more overtly commercial music?

LV: Some people are in the happy position that they like making music that's commercially viable, like David Guetta for example. We don't like his music but obviously millions of people do - including him you've got to assume - because if you didn't like it you couldn't sit there making it. We do sometimes wish our sensibilities were more commercial and we could sit there and think 'right let's put ourselves in the mind of Black Eyed Peas and make something totally horrendous'...but we can’t!

LV & Joshua Idehen's album 'Routes' is available now on Keysound Records.

You can catch LV performing live with Joshua Idehen at Queen of Hoxton this Friday alongside a cracking line up that includes King Porter's Stomp and a host of great DJs.

Trol23