Lost And Sound

Rudy Tambala – A.R. Kane

• Paul Hanford • Episode 154

Share episode

There’s a quiet power in rediscovery. Some music doesn’t just endure; it pulses beneath the surface. A.R Kane were one of those bands. This week on Lost and Sound, I had the honor of sitting down with Rudy Tambala, one-half of the groundbreaking duo and also a key figure in the formative acid house/chart smashers M/A/R/R/S.


Rudy Tambala isn’t someone who shouts about legacy. But you can feel it in everything he says. Back in the mid-to-late ’80s, A.R Kane crafted sounds that were indescribable at the time—blurring post-punk guitars with dub’s spaciousness, the ethereal textures of dream pop, and rhythms that felt beamed in from a future club culture still in its infancy. Their debut album, 69, and its follow-up, “i”, eschewed the live band format for a studio playfulness that pointed to bedroom producers and Ableton a good decade before this would even start to become norm. 


On the surface, AR Kane might not be a household name. But dig deeper, and their fingerprints are everywhere. You hear it in shoegaze, trip-hop, and the experimental corners of electronic music. The seeds of jungle, ambient, and post-rock are there too. These were records for outsiders, yet their influence seeps through so many of the sounds that defined the ’90s and beyond.


It’s easy to place AR Kane in the same breath as My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, or even Prince in the way they created entire worlds of sound. But there’s something so singular about their vision, it incorporated old films, literature and design concepts. Rudy spoke candidly about what it meant to exist in a space where commercial success wasn’t the goal, but creating something new—something honest—was everything.


This episode isn’t just about AR Kane’s legacy, though. It’s about the art of listening differently and I got the impression it’s clear that Rudy is no nostalgist. We talk about sonic boundaries, connecting this with both Marshall MacLuhan and, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know a food analogy or too.


Tune in to Lost and Sound this week to hear Rudy Tambala in his own words—reflecting on the past, navigating the present, and imagining the future of sound.


Rudy records now as Jübl, I think you could say AR Kane Mk 2, here’s the Bandcamp.


Up Home Collected by A.R. Kane on Bandcamp


Follow me on Instagram at Paulhanford

Lost and Sound is sponsored by Audio-Technica


My BBC World Service radio documentary “The man who smuggled punk rock across the Berlin Wall” is available now on BBC Sounds. Click here to listen.


My book, Coming To Berlin: Global Journeys Into An Electronic Music And Club Culturet Capital is out now on Velocity Press. Click here to find out more. 


Lost and Sound title music by Thomas Giddins

Paul:

Hello, today's guest is someone whose fingerprints are all over the DNA of modern music Rudy Tambala, co-founder of the legendary group ARKane, godfathers of dream pop, and yet arguably one of the most criminally under-recognized bands of all time. But first, lost Sound is sponsored by Audio-Technica, a global but family-run company that make headphones, turntables, cartridges, microphones, studio-quality yet affordable products, because they believe that high-quality audio should be accessible to all. So, wherever you are in the world, head on over to Audio-Technica dot com to check out all of their range of stuff. Okay, it's the first show of 2025, and it starts now. Thank you, hello, and welcome to episode 154 of Lost in Sound, the first episode of 2025.

Paul:

I'm Paul Hanford, I'm your host, I'm an author, broadcaster and a lecturer, and Lost in Sound is the weekly podcast where I chat with an artist who works outside the box, from global icons to trailblazing outsiders and emerging innovators. We talk music, creativity and perhaps that most daunting part of being an artist the practice of life. Previous guests on the show have included Peaches, suzanne Chiani, jim O'Rourke, cosi Fani Tutti, jean-michel Jarre, mickey Blanco and Thurston Moore, and today you're about to hear a conversation I had with Rudy Tambala. You can listen to my BBC radioc radio documentary, the man who smuggled punk rock across the berlin wall by heading on over to the bbc sounds app. And my book coming to berlin is still available in all good bookshops or via the publisher's website, velocity press. So, yes, I hope you're having a really good start to the year. I'm sat on some snow, um, I'm sat on a snowy bench on a rooftop garden thing outside a cafe in kreuzberg in berlin, and I'm really excited about today's guest. Sometimes on this show I speak with people whose music I I discovered for myself at a very important young point in my life when I was really really really fully finding how incredible music could be in my own way. And and today's guest is is is someone whose music had that, uh, for me.

Paul:

Uh, rudy Tambala, core member of the legendary band AR Kane duo, who practically defined the term dream pop way before it was even considered a genre. Yeah, also arguably one of the most criminally under-recognized bands of their era, or even all time. Really a arcane formed in the mid 80s their music fusing post-punk, dub, jazz, 60s jangle pop and avant-garde noise into something truly groundbreaking over a series of eps and albums. Ark weren't just making music, they kind of defined a lineage. You can hear their sound and everything from my Bloody Valentine to Massive Attack, to even Aphex Twin, through Shoegaze, trip Hop and back in the late 80s and early 90s, where to make music you had to basically go into a studio to make music, and, and and most of their contemporaries were still bands like very much. Even the, the main other dream pop shoegaze bands like my bloody valentine was still like basically like rock bands that would go into a room with guitar, bass, drums and play. Loveless is basically a guitar album, but it's just a very cosmically incredible one. Ar kane were doing something different, but that's not all the rudy tambala and ar kane were doing in in the late 80s. Pump up the volume by mars. That is partially them. Pump up the volume not only a massive hit, but one that also marked a complete seismic shift in the use of how sampling and electronic production are are in music.

Paul:

In recent years, rudy revived a newer incarnation of ar kane without a Alex now going under the name Jubal. The 2019 album DNA Cowboys, which we do talk about is is really if you've not heard it is really really really good. So I reached out to Rudy and he got back and said yes to a chat and I was really really happy and I love chatting with Rudy and something that we get really goes into I got really got an impression of is that, although we really go and talk about ar kane's history and the way he describes it, he describes it vividly. I think he's someone who's occupied not too much with nostalgia. There's a real sense of someone who's deeply culturally literate and has a critical, deep critical perspective on a wide artistic cultural musical lineage that goes far into the future.

Paul:

Um, but before we get going, if you haven't already, please give the show a subscribe, give the show a rating and a review on the platform of your choice really does help. Um, but yeah, I really hope you enjoyed this chat. This is what happened when I caught up with rudy tambala. Hi, rudy, can you hear me okay?

Rudy:

yes, I can hear you. Fine, paul.

Paul:

Hey then yeah, I'm good. Thanks, I'm good, thanks. Thanks so much for speaking to me today. How are you doing?

Rudy:

yeah, I'm doing all right, actually um yeah, are you in?

Paul:

are you in east london? I don't know. I know you were raised there, but do you? Do you still live in east london? No, I'm living.

Rudy:

I live just outside cambridge. Yeah, I was. I left east london, um god, when was it long, long time ago? Um, probably early 90s, about 92, 93, so yeah, I don't even know how many years ago. That is 30 years ago 30 years ago.

Paul:

Right, so that was right during a r kane's first incarnation then but it was towards the end actually.

Rudy:

Um, I think I left east london um just before around about the time that I went to America to make our last album.

Paul:

But yeah, I was born in East London, born in Stratford, um, so I'd like to talk to you quite a bit today about AR Kane, if that's okay. Um, yeah, sure, I genuinely believe one of the key groups of the late 20th century. Um, and when it comes to talking about the past, like, how do you feel about it? Like you know, how, how does it sort of? Do you get emotional, does it sort of give you nostalgia, or is it something what, what is it for you?

Rudy:

I have really mixed feelings about it, to be fair. Um, it depends on what state of mind I'm in. Um, sometimes I mean, I like talking about music anyway. Um, that's a, so that's a thing. But, um, yeah, talking about the past is always treacherous ground, really, because we lie about the past, we remember what we want to remember and block out the things we really can't face, or we, I do, um, and then you know, so, you know, I do interviews and I read them back and I go, oh for fuck's sake, why did you say that? What a load of bollocks. Um, but so so, yeah, it's a strange thing talking about the past, um, but you know, that's where where the heart of our creativity was, as AR Kane. So I understand why it's of interest to people.

Paul:

Yeah, yeah. I definitely think the past is something that we all have our own interpretations of, and, going back a bunch of years, it's like, okay, you know, that's how you feel about something. And then there's also like was that actually really how it happened? I don't know.

Rudy:

yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that you know, the good times are easy, relatively easy to remember and they're kind of rose-tinted and so on. The bad times, um, as in and those are times which, for me, were times which didn't go my way, where I was not in power you know basically what a bad time is. Um, we tend to rewrite history to a certain extent and I think that there is a thing you know with age, when you start chipping away at your view of the world and the way that things were, and try to chip down to get to the truth of it, because you really want to start to understand yourself and the world that you lived in I couldn't say you, and I keep coming back to I, and it's like I oscillate between those two.

Paul:

I think I know what you mean. Yeah, is you, I, we or us, or whatever? But I know there's a we're relating to ourselves, but there's also like a universalness to that.

Rudy:

Yeah, but there was also a lack of commitment in that.

Paul:

Yeah, the royal one, I mean, because I think with AR Kane there was a lot of hype at the time but they've become, I'd say, one of, I mean another critic, jason Ankeny sort of described it as being arguably the most criminally under-recognised band of that era.

Rudy:

Yeah, I've never understood what that meant, but it sounds cool.

Paul:

It does sound cool, doesn't it? I mean, do you think? Because I feel like it was really I really wanted to speak to you today because, like, I got into music in the early 90s and like a lot of shoegaze at the time, a lot of indie and some early house and AR Kane were a presence at the time, but I feel like now I've seen so many generations of artists come up that incorporate like elements of your sound, whether consciously or not. Um, and I feel like you know, I'd like more people to go back and check out these albums really, and check out the eps, and I mean, how do you feel about like this? I mean, I guess it sort of bleeds into the other question a bit as well but when it comes to ar kane's legacy and and how, and talking about it, or kind of thinking about it how, how do you feel about it? Is it something that is comfortable to you?

Rudy:

um, it's not wholly comfortable, yeah, um, I think that, um, then this isn't really to plug, but last year, when we put out the archive, which was, you know, the body of work that we were, a large part of the body of work which we created whilst with rough trade, um, so it's the up home ep, the 69 lp and the I double lp. When we put that out, it's like, um, that forced me to rediscover, re-examine our past in the light of how people perceive us now. It's really, I mean, it is a really interesting area and I don't think there's any simple answer to it. You know, if I look back, you know, looking back you know 35, 40 years, almost, um, on what we did then when I was, you know, starting to do music, if I went back that far, it was unrecognizable as the same genre, almost. You know, I'm talking about the 1950s or the 1940s. I mean, jesus, it was so different as you got to the 60s, which was the decade that I was born in and probably why it connects a lot of people, kind of connect to the late 60s, kind of like avant-garde jazz, psychedelic rock and, um, just the explosion of pop music and pop culture. Um, when you look at that, you can, you can kind of I, I look back at that and, if you can, if you see the stock bbc footage when they're doing something around you know carnaby street and dancing with paint on their face in high park, or you know there's people wandering around, hey, asprey, you get this kind of view of it which is completely postcard and artificial, because the majority of people in britain, for instance, they didn't hang out in carnaby street and look cool, they lived in gray, miserable, ultra conservative britain. Um, whether it wasn't creative, it was hard, you know, and that was the britain I lived in. But all that other stuff was going on.

Rudy:

And I think that when I look back um at the ar came thing, what we were doing wasn't mass, it wasn't mass culture, it was very much on the fringes of kind of experimental, creative pop culture. And so it's for me it's hardly surprising that we get the kind of Jason Arkley kind of statement but at the same time I think to contradict that we were really well recognized at the time. But in pop culture, music scene, so other musicians, producers, labels, journalists, writers, other artists in different genre, you know, um, they were aware of us, but we never, you know, we never had. Well, let's say, we never had those crossover top 10 hits, but we had like number one hit with mars, you know. And then, you know, love from outer space was like a good dance floor track, and you know.

Rudy:

So I think I think that possibly, that that view comes from the fact that bands like my bloody valentine and now slow dive and so on, they are seen as being, you know, the innovators of that period who created this new space, and I think that's where we get, um, we're kind of lost behind the door in that we're not seen as part of that.

Rudy:

And so when you see, like the, you know, the top 20 shoegaze bands, top 20 dream pop bands and all of that kind of stuff, we don't get featured because I think and I think that's partly, you know, because of the way that we were, we didn't look like those types of bands, because we were black, um, we didn't really sound like those types of bands because we had more of a kind of bowie or prince or joni mitchell or kate bush aesthetic, as in, we're going to use every genre we can find and we're going to fuck it up, you know, rather than this is, you know layers of guitar and rock drums, or you know spacey guitar and floaty vocals. We would, we, we did all of that, but we did lots of other stuff as well. So we were a bit more slippy, a bit more mercurial and difficult to pin down. Um, it's much easier to just say my blood and valentine shoegaze gods, whereas you might say a arcane did some good shoegaze tracks yes, which is very different.

Rudy:

You know it's a very different thing. So so, anyway, you know, obviously I I don't think about this all the time, but whenever I have interviews it comes up as in what, why aren't you getting the creds that other bands who came after you or at the same time do get for the music that you did? And that's part of it.

Paul:

Yeah, and I think one aspect that I pick up on, that I'm really interested in as well, is that I think a lot of not just shoegaze bands but just bands generally, quite often not so much now but particularly back in the 80s and through to the 90s, up until the point where something like Ableton becomes completely ubiquitous do sound like bands you know they sound like. It doesn't matter how well produced they are or innovatively arranged they are, that they sound like a bunch of people like in a room being recorded, whereas I although some of your AR cane tracks do sound like that, I feel like the emphasis was a lot more on using the studio as as a creative tool and and sort of really like pushing. Pushing the studio to kind of like express, create something expressive, where the end result is just music really, rather than having to sound like a band being a band.

Rudy:

Yeah, we never went into it with the idea of being a rock band or a soul band or a reggae band or any of those. It was really about making music and whatever we could use and throwing in the kitchen sink. And I think that, um, you know, growing up with, I think it's that intersection of lots of different cultures clashing and creating fusions. And I think that's where we were, you know, being in the East end of London growing up in the sixties and sevent and that whole crossover of different cultures, different musical mixes coming together, different ideas. I mean, I remember at school there were kids who wore Gillan jackets over their leather jackets, like a denim jacket that said Gillan on it or Deep Purple, whatever, and there were kids who listened to Genesis and yes, and there were kids who only listened to reggae and dub music and there were kids who listened to genesis and yes, and there were kids who only listened to reggae and dub music and there were kids who listened to soul music, jazz, funk and disco, and there was very little crossover. Everyone had their tribes, they wore the clothes, they spoke to speak and so on and so forth. Um, I think that where we were, me and Alex, we were absorbing all of it For whatever reason. I think we were slight misfits in that we would listen to rock music and we would listen. We loved pop music but we were really heavily into dub reggae. We'd go to sound system blues parties and stuff and we were really into clubbing massively and so we loved soul music. We loved the whole black American culture disco music, jazz, funk Started getting into jazz a bit later on when we grew up a bit and we also had very much I mean the punk aesthetic that exploded in 1976. That affected us majorly in terms of attitude and the diy component of that as well. So there's a lot, there's this whole mix of different things coming together and ours wasn't we want to be this thing, ours was let's just be magpies, let's grab everything and chuck it all in. Now, if I, like you know, sad, sweet dream of my sweet sensation, how did I get that silky feel, you know, but no, equally well, it'd be. I love anarchy in the UK destroy, and it's like so you've got all these different mixes and it's like we didn't feel that we had to go down one path. I don't know why that is, but we never felt that. I don't know why that is, but we never felt that, and so we just used whatever we felt like.

Rudy:

And in the studio we were lucky enough, right at the outset, to meet with One Little Indian Records, whose in-house producer at the time was Ray Shulman, who was from Gentle Giant, and he was an absolute virtuoso musician and music technologist, um of another level, and he knew how everything worked, and so, and also, at the same time, when we first met him and he took us into the studio, he was working with adrian sherwood and african head charge and the anxiety bim shem, all these guys, and so he knew the dub stuff, and so we went there with our little dreadlocks he kind of knew where we were coming from, that look, and we were saying, oh, can we put some echo on that? And why can't we push that up and why can't we spin in a reverb? He was completely on top of that and he loved it, and so he showed us that right at the get-go. This is how a studio can be used as an instrument, you know. So we're all at the control desk, not sitting back and watching some engineer or producer. We all have knobs and sliders to punch things in and out and pan things and chuck them into the reverb or put up a little bit of copycat echo and bleed that into distortion.

Rudy:

So all of that was going on in our very first session. And so you, when you hear, when you're sad, relatively conventional rock song, you know, based on that kind of um, what is it? Ronette's type vibe, that kind of rock and roll, um, and but then you flip it to haunting and there's nothing quite like it. It's just like let's just overload. What happens if you overload everything? So that was our starting point and then we just blew up from that.

Paul:

Um, yeah yeah, I mean, and now people make music with that approach a lot more often, just because the, the means of production, are there to do it and um, and I think also things like spotify or streaming kind of encourages people. Like what is really interesting what you're saying about how tribal people were in terms of like the Gillen jackets, you know and you know. So, listening to like your more recent music, I say I don't know how to pronounce this because I live in Germany, so we would say Jubel, jubel, jubel, right, yeah, jubal, right. Yeah. I spend too much time in Germany where the Js are Ys and then the dots over the U, no, it was supposed to be the normal spelling of Jubal J-U-B-A-L, or Jubal as you might say in Israel.

Rudy:

It's a character from Stranger in a Strange Land.

Paul:

He's like the writer.

Rudy:

Yeah, stranger in a Strange Land, the Heinlein book, which is one of my favourite books and I've always loved that character. It's just that we were about to put out a new ARK album and Alex said I don't think it's right that you should put out these songs as ARK. And so I thought about it for a little while and I agreed with him at that time. I agreed with him, um, so I had to come up with a name really, really quickly. So I had like a month to release the album, to come up with a brand and a design and all that kind of stuff. So I grabbed Jubal and, um, run with that.

Paul:

Yeah yeah, all right. Okay, and what? What were the origins of the name AR Kane as well? Because it sort of sounds really mysterious like it could be a character out of a 40s film noir, or something?

Rudy:

Yeah, definitely. I mean I think that Alex and I and it goes back a long way we shared a kind of literary interest and musical interest. We read. We always read the same books. We would go out to Smith's and we'd steal books. Uh, when we were school kids like 13, 14 years old, um, while our mates were spending their lunch money on fags, we were licking books in smith's. So we would sit at the back of the class and we'd read books and when we'd finish them we'd swap them. We'd read a book a day, or book every two days, and mostly sci-fi, um books and stuff like that, and we used to discuss them afterwards and we loved ideas and that was our own little bubble that we lived in.

Rudy:

Um, the ar came thing came out of that kind of playful thing with words that we both we both shared and, um, you know. So I remember we were at a party. It was, um, about this time it was a solstice night in 85. And we had already decided that we wanted to do music together and we were really inspired by the Cutto twins and the fact that they didn't have a drummer and didn't look like a band. They just looked like really cool people made a massive noise about moving, and so that was the kind of our model, our prototype blueprint, if you like. And so we decided we're going to have a band at a party, probably a little bit pissed, a little bit higher, and so we said what we need is a name.

Rudy:

And this is very much where alex comes in as well, because he's a copywriter at the time and he loved wordplay thing. And I suggested um that we use the name arcane, because I like to dead can dance was. There's a few reasons. One is I like dead can dance, and there and I basically rinsed the garden of arcane delights, um, until it was bald, and I love that word arcane. So it's up. It meant hidden and mysterious. Well, yeah, that's mysterious.

Rudy:

And then we started playing on that and alex said, um, you know what about arcane with a cave? Because he really likes citizen kane, the movie. And in the 80s in the ad world, citizen came with a big influence and I was really into herman hess and in um demian book there was the mark of kane. We started playing with the mark of kane. Then we started the idea of a and r cane that's our initials and then the idea of ark, two by two into the arc, because that's this word playing, a word plan and word playing like as if we were on coke or something in those days. We couldn't afford it. Um. So it was just natural high and stupidity. But we played with those ideas.

Rudy:

And then that same evening I bumped into ray and tan shulman, ray, the producer. And he says how do you know, alex? And I said oh, we've got a band together. He said what are you called? I said we're called AR Kane. That was the first time I was actually spoken that evening and he went oh, that sounds interesting. And it went from there, it stuck.

Rudy:

Right, that's amazing Because I heard somewhere as well, something that fits with that that didn't one of you big up the sound of what a arcane would be to someone before you'd? Yeah so. So at that party that same even went to a second party and the first person I met was tan shulman uh, ray's wife, and we were just chilling out together at his party and smoking a spliff and, um she's, he called ray over today. You know ray, because ray knew alex from advertising, because he did music for the mads, and she said oh, rudy knows alex. And they said why? I said we're in a band, okay, and they said what's it like?

Rudy:

And then I just kind of bludged out you know what I've been listening to on my walkman that day, which is like joni mitchell, miles davis, jimmy hendrix, velvet underground, and I kind of remember it like yesterday, so sometimes something going back that all could be apocryphal and it could be bullshit actually, but that's how I remember it. But that was in a way telling because they were things that I was listening to at the time that we started the band and I could definitely hear. You know, I could hear the Velvet Underground. I could definitely hear, you know, I could hear the velvet underground. I could hear not necessarily jodie mitchell, but I could hear the hendrix in there and the miles davis element of, like the free form jazz. So I think it was. It was part bollocks, because I was blagging and I didn't know ray was a producer at the time. Um, but it was also partly true, yeah kind of manifesting it as well a bit.

Rudy:

Yeah, maybe we didn't have that word in those days, but I think we used to wishful think. Uh, I think also one of the things is that what alex and I quite liked about it later on was that ar came was like an alter ego and it was combined of two people to make one person, and I think we worked very much like one person and it sounded like somebody's name rather than a band. We quite liked that. And then once you create this alter ego, you can live through it, you can act into it if you like, because I think that what we did musically we probably didn't live as adventurously.

Paul:

Yeah, and the music's so adventurous as well. It gives a platform to just be free musically. I guess doing that yeah, it did.

Rudy:

I mean we didn't. I mean I think it was interesting. I remember, like must have been 86. Yeah, probably late 86, early 87, we went up to Manchester and it was just before the whole Manchester baggy and the rave scene exploded and it was talking about those. The thing about tribes again, I remember being in a pub somewhere in central manchester. We were going to a party that night and every tribe you could think of was all in one pub and that never happened in london. You know, you've got sometimes you've got clubs where it will be a, a soul club or um, a funk club and at some point it might kind of break out into more electronic or it might even have 30 minutes of rockabilly. But you never really got that melding of different, different um tribes. But in manchester they were all in the same pub and it was like a microcosm of British kind of musical culture. And I remember Alex and I saying this is fucking amazing, we should move to Manchester. Something big is going to happen here.

Rudy:

I remember we had a real feeling that there was a buzz in the air. It was open. You know all bets are off, anything goes, kind of thing.

Paul:

Yeah better off, anything goes, kind of thing. Yeah, like I mean, with the second album I um, there is that feeling of of like, maybe more embracing, like, um, more dance rhythms, like more of a kind of a pop sound, I guess. And that was 1989, is it the 80, 88, 88? Sorry, yeah, that was like real on the again, that was a little bit before, like I guess the bag, I know you might you might be right.

Rudy:

Actually, um 87 god, I've lost track actually um 69 came out in 88, you're right, so I came out in 89. Yeah, I mean with that it's like basically we bought new technology, um, so we bought, you know, sequences, samplers. When we got our first um bit of cash in, we learned how to use them and we learned how to do that kind of music. So, you know, growing up with dance music, it's like, how do you get that kind of thing? Oh, you can sample this. Or you can actually like just go boom, boom, boom, four on the floor. Um, as as ever, ray was instrumental in helping us to kind of choose equipment. And you know, we say, how do we get that sound? You'd say this is how you do that, you know. So if you want to do dance music, this is what you need to do yeah, yeah it is.

Paul:

I mean on dance music, though, talking about like pump up the volume, I mean how did that come about?

Rudy:

so so that was a fucker this is one of those bunches.

Rudy:

That's a bit sweet because we were at a stage where things I think it's I'm not quite sure the term might be kairos, a great term for when there's kind of maximum potential for things to happen. But we're at a stage where everything we wanted to do just seemed to be happening and we didn't seem to be doing it, you know. So we admired 4ad because of their catalog, their whole aesthetic, the bands that were on there and, we've wondered, indian, who were absolute shite to work with um, don't mind saying that. And so we just said, well, let's send the tape to 4ad and see what happens. And they were like, yeah, we'll have it.

Rudy:

And it was like I remember me and I sitting in a bar going what the fuck's happened? We wanted to work with 4ad. We wanted to be produced by robin guffrey of cocktail to it and it's all just happening. And it felt like it was just snowballing and gathering momentum. We just kind of felt very trippypping out of body, a bit like let's just go for the ride, and I think that, um, the first thing that we wanted to do was a dance track with 4ad. So we had a few songs that wanted to do with robin.

Rudy:

But before we did that we said went to iva and said we've been chatting with adrian sherwood, who is a connection through ray and one at india, and he can get Doug Wimbish and Keith Lebonk to do a rhythm be our rhythm section, because we didn't have drum machines and stuff like that to do it. We actually wanted to use a rhythm section Sugar Hill Gangs and they will be up for it. Can we go into the studio with those guys and do a dance track? And this is what we want to do. This track called annie tina, which we've done on a ford track in alex's bedroom and um ivo. Reaction was oh, I think that's just a little bit too obvious. Still don't know what the fuck you meant by that. That's just a bit too obvious for you to work with those guys. Why don't? I mean it's like we were completely unknown and there was nothing obvious about these two east london boys waiting with the biggest, most famous rhythm section in the world yeah, right, yeah.

Rudy:

So anyway, he said I'd rather you worked with one of my bands. They're called color box. Now I think it was a good move for him, because color box had stopped working for almost two years. They just weren't doing anything and that actually ended as a band, I think, because after mars they didn't do any. I think they did one more remix and they never did anything ever again.

Rudy:

So for whatever their height, the reason for their hiatus, this brought them back into play and what he did is we went back into the offices. He gave us all of the color box stuff and said listen to it, do what you think. And alex and I were straight away that fuck, they've got drum machines and they know how to use them, because they had this massive sound and you know, kind of like big gated snares and kicks, and I had an 808 drum machine, all this shit. So I said, yeah, well, let's do it, let's just do it. And we were just excited.

Rudy:

Anyway, we would have worked with anybody and anything at that time. Um, so we got a professional band to come in. They'd already had their bits of fame and they were renowned, they were quality and you know. So martin steven wasn't around at the time, at the beginning of the session, but martin came with his drum machine and we came in with our four track, dumped it onto a 24 track in the studio black queen studio and just said let's make the drums sound good. So he just made these massive drums and if you listen to any teeter now it's still absolutely fucking amazing. And we just threw the kitchen sink at it.

Paul:

It's like we had nasty guitars.

Rudy:

We had 12 string guitars, we had synthesizers, we had dove echoes, copycats, space echoes, and we just thought let's just go as far as we can possibly go from our knowledge and from the experience and you know the people working in the studio so we did that and, um, originally martin came in with this piano piece it's a little bit harold budd, um, yeah, and um, we, we didn't want to work on that and we did our track and we just said, martin, what do you want us to do? This? We could just do layers of feedback on, drown it out, so it sounds all right, but it's not really that we can do. And he said, well, no, and I think he got energized and buzzed up on it. He said, well, I've got a drum groove which I think could be a nice track. I'll bring that in. And it was like the 808 drum machine pump up the volume. So he's got those little percussion bits and just like it's a simple house groove.

Rudy:

And so we started playing around with that and we were in the studio for like a day or two and it started to really motor, pump up the volume, track anything he was in the bag, pump on and started to motor. We laid down some guitars and stuff on it and then I think that um martin really knows he was onto a really big thing and he had a couple of mates that he worked with, which was um cj mackintosh, the kind of um award-winning scratch dj, and um that other guy who's now a few to remember, and uh, there you go and um they, they came in and they started grooving with it and they brought in their record collections and started sampling records, just like sampling everything, and in those days samplers are really basic so you couldn't really do. You had to take it in the pitch it was on or just turn the speed. So you had to get certain types of samples and I just covered it in samples and um cj scratched over bits and pieces of it and they chucked us out of studio.

Paul:

They didn't want us around anymore how come were they like what the fuck's going on um?

Rudy:

no, so basically those guys were all mates and they were on to something um, they didn't want us to be part of it, um. But I just said, oh, you guys can go and play pool now. So we just want to play pool. We were, we were happy as anything. It wasn't until after he realized we've been a little bit screwed over right, I see especially when the contracts arrived, it's like, oh, you didn't work on that track.

Rudy:

It's like, well, what the fuck? Yes, we did, it was the, even the name mars. You know, I made up the name mars. I just took out, like I kind of took our initials, played with them a little bit with fridge magnets and said, well, mars, that's that's a nice word, isn't it? It's a planet, it's the god of war and it's also a. Mar is a stain or an error or you know something, a fall in something when something's marred, and I like that. And so we come up with that idea and so so, yeah, it was, it was a.

Rudy:

It was a strange time, um, I know. I mean, I think that when we sat back and listened to the two tracks, we could see, yeah, this has got something. You know, ours was very even with the any tina track. It's very much. We've got this dub, spacey dub, rock fusion. We don't know what it is, um indie rock, space dub. I don't know what it was, but we took him.

Rudy:

A couple of things. One is we took in chicane youth, which is sonic youth, into the groovy, which was their um madonna track, because we thought that was fucking amazing when you heard it in the club it was like nothing you'd ever heard. It's like this is kind of madonna but it's nasty. Um, and the other thing we took in was a janet jackson control remixes which had these massive drums and an incredible vibe and really nice bass lines and that kind of thing which isn't far away from either of the bass lines that are on the mars track and we would listen to those things a lot in our breaks. We're just putting them on full blast and kicking back again. Yeah, get the vibe going.

Rudy:

So when we listened to it, I remember us saying you know, this single could sell like 100,000. Yeah, this could actually really this might actually even break into you know be a proper club track, because both sides of it were completely alien, but really catchy and really well produced. Little did we know it was going to sell millions. Yeah, you know, called it caused a lot of pain for people and it was a rude awakening for us very early on in our career about what the music industry is, about the industry part of it, yeah, and it's quite nasty. But you know we learned quick and we bounce back very quickly. We've got a check in our pocket.

Rudy:

Right, OK, that's always a good thing, yeah, that helps Cue as many melodies Totally. But the thing is, all we wanted to do at that stage, because the momentum was building, we had, you know, lift under our wings was make music, yeah, and so that money enabled us to buy guitars, to buy drum machines, samplers and also um, I think that it made us famous so we were in melody maker and nma every week.

Rudy:

Even if we farted, you know, um, they would celebrate that. So we were seen as being something really special and different at the time, um. So, jason arkley, fuck off, you don't want to talk about mate um, and you know, all we wanted to do is music and it gave us the ability to make music and it also attracted a lot of attention. Now we've got nice publishing deal and then rough trade just picked us up after it all fell apart politically with 4ad and said to us what do you want to do? We said we want to build our own studio. We want to do our own thing from here on in no. So they gave us a record recording advance. I think those things don't even exist anymore recording advance. They gave us a recording advance and we built a studio. Ray came along, helped us, took us shopping. When I think about it, you would never do that now in that way spend like £20,000 on equipment because you don't need to.

Paul:

You don't need that. No, If you spend £5,000, you've got a kick-ass studio built, but we did it and we learned how to use the studio and we started making 69 that's amazing, and and are you in another interview I think it might be one with simon reynolds that you talk about how, for you, music has four elements, like rhythm? I can't remember.

Rudy:

I was wondering if you could sort of yeah, I just found that really interesting so you know, in my day job I do digital transformation and strategy, and so I'm often thinking about how you can turn things into algorithms. And so I took a musical, an algorithmic view of music, that you could describe any music using an algorithm, but not just describe it, you could also actually generate it and create it. And so I kind of put that lens, that algorithmic lens I put ar came through that, and so the core four modulators, if you like are music has a rhythmic, a melodic, a lyric and a sonic element. All music has those. But if you think of them as sliders, you can slide them up and down. So if you slide the lyric down to zero, you get instrumental. If you slide it up to 10, you might get spoken word you know if you add.

Rudy:

Add some rhythmic element to it and some melodic element to it. You might get bob dylan, but sliding it down you might get joda mitchell, and sliding it up you might get stone roses, sliding it down you might get more, and so you can play around with those. But then you modulate those four things, they feed into one and you modulate those through genre, time period, attitude and all these other things, just like a synthesizer where you will patch things and take them through things and you can describe every music in that sense. So that's what I was talking about, and I would love to build that machine, but I think that probably AI has done that already.

Paul:

I think they have. Yeah, I was wondering with that, is there like maybe because, like that, you know when you're recording there's any certain amount of bandwidth that's available to you at a time. Is it possible to have something where all of these four elements are like no?

Rudy:

no, you get phase cancellation, um. So if you take, I mean, it's been a, it's been a consistent battle for us because we have, we love sonic experimentation and creating, you know, um, unreal sonic spaces and pushing the sonic up to 10, and you can hear that on some tracks. But we love the rhythmic side as well, the groove and they, they tend they can battle with each other. So if you let sonic go free, fall and the groove push up, they start to cancel each other out. So the groove is less impactful and the sonic part is less dynamic, if you like, less free-flowing, because it's pulled down by a groove and rhythm, and then if you add lyric to it, that takes it in another direction as well. So they can, they can fight each other.

Rudy:

If you've just got lyric and rhythmic, you're talking about hip-hop, you know so I think what we would do was how far can we go before it forms art? So on 69, I think we pushed the sonic envelope as far as we can go in terms of, like, using feedback rather than using um. The melodic side or the harmonic side would use feedback which had no melody or harmony to it and it was free flowing, and then the drums might just be a pulse underneath. So they've been pulled right down and sublimated. So I think the 69 was very much a sonic experimentation. I was, as you go through one side to the four, across the four sides of the double album, we we gave emphasis to different parts, so there's more of a dance one and then there's more of kind of noisy one and there's more of a dubby one and so on. But to perfect that in one song, that's, that's um, an ambition which I feel we haven't yet maybe it's possible somehow.

Paul:

Yeah, yeah, well I'm not sure.

Rudy:

Yeah, it's like you know, the ace away trumps, the two kind of thing. It's a law. You can't change that and I think some things just physical laws. They don't change. And it's because of the way that our brain works, the way that our ears work, the way that our ears work and the way that our bodies work and how we perceive and consume um sound and music that it might be that if we change, something can change that's a really good perspective actually.

Paul:

I mean, I I can see it a bit like food as well, like how I'm noticing more bakeries will like have salts with like sweet products.

Paul:

You know, salt on croissants um but, but you know, at the same time, you you wouldn't have like a, you know, ice cream, chocolate with sausages yet, but, um, that you know may say maybe that you can. You know that that's the salt with the salt with a quason is like maybe the uh, the rhythm turned up a little bit, but it's still within the parameters, isn't it? Yeah, it's also perceiving it differently.

Rudy:

And if you think about listening to, you know space is the place by samra, and then just go and that would be for the most extreme jazz aficionados in the late 60s, early 70s or whatever. Um, but if it was about 10 years that would have been unrecognizable as music it was. It's so dissonant, you know, and you know. So the other day I was I was making some toast and I thought it's gonna cinnamon toast and I picked up the wrong jar and I sprinkled it on and I put on the maple syrup and I had my cup of coffee. I was like, yeah, here we go breakfast. And I took a bite of it and my brain just went fuck, what is this? I'd use cumin, oh. And so the effect was really weird and then I just went with it. I thought, hold on, it is cumin, but let's just taste that. It's like, do you know what cumin with maple syrup is actually not bad at all that, that's a out of a mistake.

Paul:

That's like it becomes like an avant-garde moment, doesn't it that? Like maybe maybe gets filtered, like next time you do it.

Rudy:

It's sort of become maybe a little bit more mainstream in your kitchen yeah, I mean, and almost at the opposite end of that I'm very thinking marshall mcclure now don't explain, explore, because that's what we're doing. But at the opposite end of that is the nostalgia thing. Um, so things that have become very, very established but are no longer relevant are retrieved. You know so, in any way, we, we cured meats or cheeses or jams. We, we cured them, we, and we jammed things because we didn't have refrigeration and they would go off.

Rudy:

But even after we got refrigeration, we still eat queue of meats which are way too salty and too fatty. We eat cheeses which taste shit, but we love that taste. It's sour, sour milk isn't good, but cheese it. And so we grow up with these things and we retrieve things from the past that no longer are purely utilitarian or functional but actually have a nostalgic or an emotional appeal. Yeah, because they become established in their own way, even though they're no longer necessary. I think music is a little bit like that. You know the way that you can retrieve bands love to do it, they love to go. Oh man, you know who's that guy with the ginger hair who ripped off?

Paul:

um, oh, are you gonna say mick huck, mick hucknell well, you could say mick hucknell.

Rudy:

I was thinking of something much more recent. Oh, ed sheeran, ed sheeran, you know, it's like he took that marvin gaye, um vibe, he went to court and he didn't lose. But everybody knows you've just taken Marvin Gaye, whether or not it's illegal or illegal. But yes, you should just put your hand and say love, marvin, love that track, mashed it and people retrieve it. The indie scene when we started out was lots of mop-haired kids trying to do 60s psyched-a-dee there. They were trying to do the monkeys and the beetles and the birds and that's what they were doing. They were retrieving it, but doing it slightly different. No, they didn't have to go backwards, but they did because there was some kind of nostalgic emotional appeal from that time. That said, we want to be groovy like those guys were in those days, which was wrong, because they were viewing it through rose tinted glasses found one, probably, and I think there is part of that.

Rudy:

I mean, even you know, when ar came with doing, you know, baby milk snatcher and stuff like that and anitina, we were thinking back, you know, not so many years, but no 10 or 15 years um, thinking back to early dub reggae and how you know, when we were kids we'd be a blues party or whatever, and that feeling of, like you know, being in a room where you're getting stoned on the fumes, that the dreads you know from the dread smoke and the big bass bins and the way that the bass made you feel, you know, and how you were all together just vibing eye and eye. And so we do retrieve things from the past as well as experiment and invent new things and I think, where those things come together and actually clash and work. Maybe that's a new modulator I need to add to the algorithm I think that's a good idea.

Paul:

I feel, yeah, it's interesting what you were saying about like the feeling of the blues parties, because it's sometimes it is about like wanting to just recreate that feet or like have that feeling back again for yourself. And maybe because the equipment you're using is different, the uh, you know the culture around has changed, you know it is going to come out differently, um, and yeah, I think there's a real art to kind of letting that happen kind of naturally as well, rather than necessarily like processing it into something that is definitely like recognizably like what you're doing with a arcane is there's a dub influence, but it's not like king tubby, exactly you know what I mean.

Rudy:

No, no, I mean that's it. It is the inference and I think that's the. I think you know I use Ableton. I used to use Cubase but I switched to Ableton and it's very much because when I play live now I don't want a computer so I use the Ableton Push, which is standard and it's just a box and there's no PC and it's a musical instrument and it's a sample and it's a sequence. So it does everything for me and I use that.

Rudy:

But what I do see a lot of promotions around ableton is if you want to get that sound that so-and-so had, if you want to sound like hard floor doing acid house, you know, love them, love what they did, but why would anyone want to sound exactly like them? Is it? Is it some kind of like a mental exercise or something you know? It's like something you do when you're doing your O-level GCSE music. You know, try and make the sound of that song and people do that and then they put it out as if you know, as if it's, you know, innovative or unique. But no, it's actually. You've just completely imitated something that was great 40 years ago. Actually, you've just completely imitated something that was great 40 years ago. You know, and I think also you lose the connection because you know, if you, if I was to do an acid house track, it'd be very easy to take me about an hour.

Rudy:

Um, using the equipment, I've got as long as I tamed the equipment and only use like a few tracks out of it. Um, but there's no audience. There might be people want to listen to it, but that audience that existed in 1988 they're, they're old and dead. I did too much. But you know, it's like that audience, that vibe, that culture, the political status of the world. You know what was what was going through economically, politically, spiritually, religiously, everything that was happening in the world in those days. Culturally it's gone. So when you drop an identical, you know track into the mix, now it's, it's not going to have the same effect, so why bother? But what you could do is say when you get that acid squelch, you know, three minutes into the song, that will work on this track, which is not an acid house track, you know, it's like just picking and mixing, really, yeah yeah, yeah.

Paul:

Again, it goes down to the right amount of salt on the croissant in a way. Yeah, just putting a right little, or the cumin on the yeah, or the bacon in the candle.

Rudy:

Bacon in the candle, yeah.

Paul:

With the Jubal stuff and using Ableton and using modern stuff, do you feel? I mean, do you still use big studio sort of setups or do you put it all you know? Is it all focused?

Rudy:

in. I do everything I mean.

Rudy:

At the moment I'm sitting in my little garden shed studio at home and I thought it had the look of the garden, my keyboards and the guitars and all of my effects pedals always there, and some decent speakers got my ableton push and I got all my vocal effects and all that kind of stuff. So it's so I this is where I would create everything. But when it comes to the final master not the mix, but the final master I like to choose um a studio which has got really good monitors. So basically I could, I could spend, you know, probably one day. I could master four tracks.

Rudy:

So with Jubal, what I did was there was a I lived in um St Albans at the time and there was a guy who had a mastering suite just about 10 minutes walk from where I lived. So on a hot sunny day I'll just grab my rucksack with my computer in it, walk around to his studio and spend a day there and mix half of the album, but know that I'm getting really good monitoring and that he can actually bring something to it as well, which is his own thing. But what I do want to do is my son's a producer now I want to do the production um with him at home. Yeah, it means taking this room and soundproofing it and getting the acoustics right, but I've got everything you need really. I mean, my son produces all of his own stuff on headphones and a laptop. You know he doesn't go near studios generally.

Paul:

Um, and the sound, the modern sound now is actually harder and brighter and more precise than it was back in the day and I think a lot of people are listening to music just through headphones now as well, Unless you're like maybe I mean I'm making a random judgment here, but I definitely think that there's more examples at times where people just would purely listen to music, like on the go, through headphones. So you know, making music with headphones feels like there is a direct connection there to how people listen to it.

Rudy:

Yeah, I would say that the balance has definitely shifted.

Rudy:

If you look at all the different ways that people consume music, whether it's in an elevator or a shop or in their headphones and my daughter has constantly got earaches because she has her beats on full blast all fucking day you know it's like no, that ain't good for you, but I think that you know the different ways you can consume fucking day. You know it's like no, that ain't good for you, but I think that you know the different ways you can consume it. You know you might be at a party and it's just like you just want it loud, you know. Or you might be chilling and listen to. You know, seriously, listen to a really good piece of music and it could be like on your hi-fi speakers and you're kicking back and you're smoking a spliff and you're thinking, yeah, rocking to that, and so the different ways you can see it.

Rudy:

But I would say the balance is definitely. You know, for when we were kids the walkman was the new invention which meant you could take your music with you and you live in a movie. I think everyone's living in that movie now, with a soundtrack to their own choice of soundtrack, and it does change your perceptions, you know it heightens. It actually heightens your sense of sight when you block off all the external things except what you want. Um, so yeah, I think that mixing on headphones is is a good idea for certain types of music, certain types yeah, yeah, I mean the stuff that my son does.

Rudy:

He does that broken b and kind of new soul and some drum and bass stuff and stuff like that. It's definitely because when you put it on the headphones you can hear all of the subtleties and the nuance and bass stuff and stuff like that. It's definitely because when you put it on the headphones you can hear all of the subtleties and the nuance and the bits and pieces going on, whereas other stuff stuff that you're going to do, techno, for instance it's just solid thumping, kick drums, solid bass. You just want it loud in mono.

Paul:

Yes, yeah, I wonder if there's an algorithm that can work with that as well, because, for example, living in berlin, uh, like you know, there's clubs like berghain where the sound is just incredible and you don't really need much in terms of the product, you know, in terms of like many sounds going on in the techno. You just need, you know, you feel the, you feel like the kick drum in a particular way and you feel like certain frequencies, whereas when I lived in london and I used to dj in a lot of pubs, that would usually have like really crappy little tiny speakers and you would play very vocal based music, because that was the only frequency that, yeah, way the music could reach out is by getting people to sort of drunkenly sing along to something.

Rudy:

Yeah, I mean, things have changed a lot. The last gig that we played was in Suffolk. A small club in Suffolk, atomizer, and one of the things that we used to suffer from back in the day was we could never get enough bass. Systems didn't have much bass, rock bands don't use a lot of bass, and those hubs and clubs and venues didn't go with the bass. If you wanted bass, you had to get a dub sound system, you know, or? But now every system has fuck off bass, you know. So the last gig was playing I actually I actually our second song in I had to say to the sound man, please turn the bass down. It was killing me. It could be old age, right, but I really couldn't. It was. It was going through me so hard that I couldn't even perform. It was like shocking, it's shocking levels of bass. It's like you don't really need that, do you? No, definitely, I'm definitely getting old.

Paul:

Yeah, if you could tell your younger self that when you, you were like needing more bass from sound systems and I guess like the final question really is like what would you tell your younger self?

Rudy:

yeah, get a normal job, mate. Take out a pension, get a normal job. Start saving for your first mortgage yeah, yeah, I mean no, no, I'm happy, I'm happy I wouldn't say shit to him because he wouldn't listen, right just got to go through it, yeah say what you're chatting about, your old fool.

Rudy:

but definitely, you know, know, things change. We change To a certain extent. We become more conservative, don't we? And we become more fearful as we get older because we get a sense of our own mortality, whereas when we're young we're definitely more immortal, unbreakable and, you know, maybe we get more humility. I think if I had to say one thing thing, if I could pass it back, I'd say rudy, for fuck's sake, be patient okay, that's a good one, because that doesn't affect.

Paul:

You know that, that you can go through everything. You're going to go through with that, but you just have to slow down a little bit, you know, yeah you check in on yourself take a deep breath.

Rudy:

You hold it for a couple of seconds. You say don't react. You know, just take your time. You know it's like. You know, I had a bunch of shows booked for early next year and I cancelled them two weeks ago because I wasn't feeling great and I thought I haven't been feeling great for a while. I think I'm actually a little bit exhausted. I just need a break, you know, and, um, you know. So I just talked to myself don't worry about it, you can do more gigs later. Yeah, no, just be patient, because I've been building momentum, you know I okay and had a good good 2024. We did some really, really great shows. We've got, um, a whole bunch of stuff that's ready to record and stuff like that. That's what.

Rudy:

Well, there's no hurry you know, in the past it's like give me, give me, give me, let's get going. No, fuck one little indian. We're going to 4d, fuck 4d. We're going to rough trade, fuck. No, it's like no. But it's now. It's just like just chill out, relax, you know, take your time and do things proper yeah, yeah, rudy, thank you so much.

Paul:

That was a really lovely interview, thanks so much for giving your time, yeah okay, so that was me, paul hamford, talking with rudy tambala for lost and sound podcast, and we had that chat on the 20th of december 2024. Thank you so much, rudy, for for your time and thoughts there, and I should say, if you've not done already, do check out the jubile album dna cowboys. It came out in 2019. Um, I don't think it's always the most easy thing to find, because you know the name isn't a arcane, but it's really, really, I think it's a really good record. Um, so yeah, if you like the show and you a arcane, but it's really, really, I think it's a really good record. Um, so, yeah, if you like the show and you haven't already, please give it a subscribe, give the show a rating and a review on a platform of your choice. But even if you don't, thank you so much for listening. If you if you're still listening by now thank you for so much for listening to the whole thing, really appreciate it and I hope you enjoyed it. Um, you can listen to my radio documentary the man who Smuggled Punk Rock Across the Berlin Wall on the BBC Sounds app, and my book Coming to Berlin is still available in all good bookshops or via the publisher's website Velocity Press Audio-Technica sponsor Lost and Sound Audio-Technica, the global but still family-run company that make headphones, turntables, cartridges, microphones, studio tables, cartridges, microphones, studio quality, yet affordable products, because they believe that high quality audio should be accessible to all.

Paul:

So, wherever you are in the world, head on over to audiotechnicacom to check out all of their range of stuff. The music that you hear at the beginning, at the end of every episode of lost in sound is by thomas kiddens, and right now my fingers are kind of freezing because, if I don't remember at the beginning, I'm sat outside in the snow, so I'm gonna fuck off inside into the warmth get another coffee. I hope, whatever you're doing today, you're having a really, really beautiful one. Take care, thank you you.