After leading the extreme music scene for 20 years, Kevin Martin has finally become popular, writes Scott Kara
KEY POINTS:
For someone who has exposed himself to severe noise for 20 years it's surprising Kevin Martin's ears are still in one piece.
"A lot of people are shocked by that," he laughs.
These days the man also known as the Bug - who brings his dubstep bass terror
to Auckland's Bacco Room on January 31 - jokes about how he tried using earplugs once but ditched them pretty quickly. It just wasn't the same.
He likes extremity, gets off on noise and loves "lethal bass". It's these elements that have gone into the music he makes.
"My music is emotional, pure and intensely physical," he said.
Martin is the man behind many musical projects including rugged grindcore-meets-jazz group GOD, the industrial hip-hop duo Techno Animal (with Justin Broadrick from metal pioneers Godflesh and now Jesu), ambient outfit Ice (also with Broadrick) as well as collaborations with other musical outlaws such as saxophonist John Zorn.
Then last year as the Bug he came up with London Zoo - one of the best records of the year which made TimeOut's top 30 albums list and many other end-of-year lists. It's Martin's most popular album to date and not surprisingly his most accessible. Even still, the bass frequencies and yabbering might of the various MCs are still a heart-stopping and rib-rattling experience.
He admits his profile has reached its highest point yet with London Zoo. And he puts it down to being in the right place at the right time as dubstep has become a popular genre.
"That's nice for a change," he said, "because with Techno Animal we felt a bit wounded because no one really appreciated the stuff. We were too noisy for hip-hop people and too hip-hop for noisy people. And with GOD, well, in GOD I hated people anyway so I was happy to piss people off and drive audiences out of the venue. But I've never been interested in courting popularity and it's not like I've done that with London Zoo really, it's just a pleasant surprise that people seem to have picked up on this one."
However, he says the key difference with the Bug's music compared with his other projects is structure.
"What I have done, which I think I never did before, was lose my phobia about melodies and song structures. I wanted to examine song structures more because I'd been anti-music and anti-song and I wanted to work strongly with hooks, lines and choruses on this album."
Coming to New Zealand with Martin is Jamaican-born MC Warrior Queen and this more traditional approach is no better realised than on staunch album highlight Poison Dart.
Ironically, he doesn't consider his music to be dubstep because he's been making this sort of bass-heavy music - albeit in many twisted forms - since the late 80s.
"The key to what I've always done is dub and [drawing on] Jamaican music and Jamaican producers, more to the point. And really, London Zoo's just a continuation of where I started with GOD."
He was dubstep years before dubstep, if you like.
LOWDOWN
Who: Kevin Martin, aka The Bug.
What: From experimental to dubstep.
Where & when: The Bug, Warrior Queen and Rhythm and Sound (featuring Tikiman) play the Bacco Room, Toto, 53 Nelson St, January 31.
Essential albums: As GOD, Possession (1992); as Techno Animal, Re-Entry (1995), Brotherhood of the Bomb (2001); as Ice, Under the Skin (1993); as the Bug, London Zoo (2008).
