“Eventually I grew a pair and gave him some music,” Samuel Kerridge says in a Fabric interview, referring to how he ended up on Karl O’Connor’s influential Downwards imprint. “Karl totally understood what I was doing. For me it’s perfect. Downwards epitomizes everything I stand for as an artist through its ideology and aesthetic. Its DIY. There is no ‘plan’. We love the romance of it all.”
As do we, although it helps that the music itself is always on-point. Challenging, sure, but ultimately, quite rewarding. Kerridge’s approach to live sets is a good example; as heard in the abbreviated performance below, it’s all about delayed gratification—waiting nearly 12 minutes to drop a discernible beat, providing a bridge between the darkened sound design of producers like The Haxan Cloak and the ashen techno of Kerridge’s label boss. Sure enough, Kerridge says artists like Sunn O))) and Donato Dozzy taught him how to manipulate a listener’s mood over an extended period of time, “not instant gratification as what had been the norm.”
No kidding…
