Music
Joy Fantastic: An Oral History of Hudson Mohawke’s Butter
After emerging from Glasgow scene, in 2009 Hudson Mohawke released his polarising debut LP. HudMo, Benji B, Dam-Funk and various insiders share the stories behind the record’s future-facing recipe.
Butter, Hudson Mohawke’s debut full-length album for Warp, lit up the electronic music landscape in 2009 like a huge neon sign from the digital maximalist future.
Fusing warped and wonky day-glo excess with the RBMA alumni’s sensibility, the genre-melding record bridged a gap between worlds, and you could argue that his innovations unwittingly blazed a trail for everything from trap-influenced club music to PC Music.
The album also helped to catapult the Glaswegian bedroom artist born Ross Birchard into A-list music territory. Birchard’s subsequent solo material enjoyed critical acclaim, while he also he joined forces with Lunice for the intensely popular TNGHT project, co-produced ANOHNI's album alongside Oneohtrix Point Never, worked with the likes of Kanye West, Pusha T and Azaelia Banks and scored video games.
10 years later, Birchard – now living in LA – was ready to reflect on Butter’s impact and the formative years of his career. Read on below for interviews with Bichard, LuckyMe co-founder Dom Flannigan, Butter collaborators Dam-Funk and Nadsroic, Benji B, Warp’s former press manager Martina Connors, artwork creator Tom Scholefield and Jake Jenkins from LA’s Alpha Pup records.
The Glasgow scene
Ross Birchard co-founded the collective LuckyMe with his friends Dominic Flannigan, Martyn Flyn and Mike Slott back in 2007. Having begun life as a Glasgow club night a few years earlier, the label’s first release in 2008 was a 12” of R&B bootlegs by Birchard called Ooops! With its boundary-blurring aesthetic, LuckyMe championed the likes of Éclair Fifi, Jacques Greene and many more.
Ross Birchard: I feel like all of us in that little scene were very keen to not put a label on what we were doing. It was essentially just a palette of sounds, any track could be any BPM, and there was no formula to any of it. I always say this, but the Optimo night was hugely influential for me, because there was this sense of community within a party that meant you could trust the person or the people playing to take you in whatever direction they felt on that particular night.
Dom Flannigan: Glasgow just really sharpens your tastes… We were all developing weirder relationships with electronic music and hip-hop.
Ross Birchard: I ended up working behind the bar at Sub Club (in Glasgow) so I was there soaking up the intensity of it all, but also the honesty of it – just the way you could just stop a techno record in the middle of the night and play a Neptunes instrumental followed by an Aretha Franklin song, and it wasn’t seen as some sort of mashup-type thing. It was just an appreciation for something that’s really fucking good without that sense of playing shit for kudos or just being about ticking boxes.
Nadsroic: Ross and I first met at the Sub Club as we worked there together. Glasgow was just a great community, everything felt really connected. I lived quite nearby to Ross and my uni was nearby as well so on the odd day, I remember I used to go down to Oxfam Music and pick out the cheapest, worst-looking record in the box and take it to him as a present. I don’t know if he actually used anything that was on those records though!
Hudson Mohawke and Konx-Om-Pax in the early days
© Tom Scholefield
A lot of his stuff was very complex and not exactly the most danceable at the time, but it was still brilliant.
The Hudson Mohawke project develops
Ross Birchard christened his Hudson Mohawke moniker in the mid ‘00s with a string of unofficial mixes, beat tapes and EPs – including 2006’s celebrated Hudson’s Heeters mixtape. These releases saw him begin to sketch out his unique, category-busting sound.
Ross Birchard: My aesthetic was very much coming from a hip-hop standpoint, but not all the music had to necessarily sound like hip-hop. Some of the tracks on Heeters were my interpretations of my favourite mainstream rap and pop tracks. For me, it’s this odd middle ground that’s still overtly pop-sounding, but is at the same time kind of fucked-up. The way I saw the Ooops! record was pop music essentially, but it was never perceived as pop music to the people I would play it to. The reaction was always like “this is far too fucked-up sounding” or “there’s not enough continuity across the whole thing.”
Benji B: As far as I’m aware, Ross’s gig at Deviation as HudMo was amongst his first in London – around 2008. He’s since become a key fixture in the history of the club night, but when he first played, we were at a small club called Gramophone and I remember he turned up with his PC laptop and played from that. I also remember being in the booth with him and him being incredibly shy… it was definitely a night that sticks out.
His music was still forming at that point and for a lot of people, it was their first time coming across his name or his sound. A lot of it was very complex stuff that was not exactly the most danceable or head-noddable at the time, but it was still brilliant.
Watch Hudson Mohawke's Red Bull Music Academy lecture with Benji B in Paris:
Hudson Mohawke meets Warp
While attending 2007’s Red Bull Music Academy in Toronto, Birchard met Warp records co-founder Steve Beckett, who was lecturing at the Academy. Warp signed Hudson Mohawke in 2009 and released his Polyfolk Dance EP soon after.
Martina Connors: Hudson Mohawke was yet another one of Warp’s inspired and idiosyncratic signings from that period, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Flying Lotus, Gonjasufi, Grizzly Bear, Bibio and Rustie. I managed the press and promotions department at that time. We had links in the office to the LuckyMe Collective and Glasgow’s Numbers label where Hudson had previously put out material and this helped secure the signing.
Dom Flannigan: I remember going to meet Steve Beckett (Warp co-founder) with Ross. I was so stressed out being in the label offices for the first time, but Steve was just super nice and put all of our apprehensions to rest. He had just received the Squarepusher DAT and played it to us. He just showed right away that he was not that type of A&R who tells people what their music’s meant to be… that’s something that carries into the Warp policy to this day and it definitely took the pressure off Ross. Steve also said this really astute thing of "don’t make a perfect record – a perfect record will ruin your career. All the things that annoy you when you listen back to it – that’s your motivation for your next song."
Benji B: I think being on Warp helped open up Hudson Mohawke to people who like Autechre and Aphex, whereas I think had it stayed in the more beatsy world, it would have got less of a look-in from IDM or whatever it was called at the time. In that respect, I think the signing was a key move. He might have actually opened up these experimental electronic fans to Rick Ross or to listening to US rap in a way that they hadn’t before.
Recording in Glasgow and Amsterdam.
Birchard left Glasgow and moved to Amsterdam, which is where the majority of the Butter album was created. The Nadsroic collaboration, Allhot, was previously recorded for her Room Mist EP of that year.
Nadsroic: Ross wanted to have a female vocalist on his beats so my contribution on the record was really just a total experiment – and a bit of fun. I came from a musical background but us mucking about with music in Glasgow led to the release our Room Mist EP, and that’s how Allhot ended up on Butter. The theme of that track and the EP overall was quite bolshy and on the women’s own terms, which was refreshing in a way compared to a lot of the pop stuff that was out at the time.
Ross Birchard: I made the album using a very simple setup, I don’t like to get too nerdy about it all really. I’m more interested in the equipment being usable and immediate, rather than spending loads of time tweaking things. Most of it was made on FruityLoops, using lots of free plug-ins and lots of fucking around essentially. For me, it’s the importance of holding onto that childlike sense of exploration and to explore for the sake of exploring – having fun with that in itself. I’m a big proponent of starting something and thinking it’s going to turn out a certain way, but during the process of making it, it morphs two or three times and becomes something completely different.
Nadsroic: The great thing about working with Ross is that even if you made mistakes, he would always turn them into something anyway. So there was a lot of reusing, recycling. I really liked the warped vocals and I thought the track added something different. Working together it was always very makeshift, in Ross’s room, with pillows everywhere and a vocal booth that was very made up… quite organic.
Ross Birchard: I was seeing a girl who lived in Amsterdam and worked for Rush Hour. I’d always had a love affair with the city so I went to just see if it was possible to live there for a while. I guess I ended up staying there. Trouw had just opened. The club was located the disused printing press for one of the national newspapers and across the street were the former newspaper offices.
Both buildings had been donated to the arts by the government, so the printing press became the club and the office became studio space for artists and musicians. Everyone had their own DIY studios and I made a lot of the album in there. It was a place where people freely encouraged their peers to just fuck around, to push themselves to be fluid. We were all just coming into the studio every day without the pressure of ‘I have to make a hit today’, or 'I have to make something that works on a massive festival stage', which I think can hold you back quite a bit – certainly me, anyway.
Collaborators and A-list fans
Butter featured three collaborators – Olivier Daysoul on Joy Fantastic and Just Decided, Dâm-Funk on Tell Me What You Want From Me as well as Nadsroic on Allhot. Rihanna was also reportedly interested in taking on album standout Fuse, but Birchard chose to keep that tune for himself.
Ross Birchard: There was always this thing that Fuse was in mind for a Rihanna song, but in hindsight, I’m so glad I actually didn’t do that because that track was so special to me.
Dâm-Funk: Ross and I had previously done a few shows together and I think he hit me up via email to work on some stuff around ‘09. I ended up lacing vocals on one of the songs for his album, finishing right before flying off to Japan. I recorded my vocals at my old studio in Leimert Park, which is a section of Los Angeles below the 10 Freeway. The creative process was simple – Ross allowed me to just do my thang with the lyrics and the vocals. He actually sent me a couple of joints to choose from and this was the one I chose. It turned out nice. The album has stood the test of time, in my humble opinion.
Dâm-Funk on the Red Bull Music Academy stage at Movement in Detroit, 2016.
© Jeremy Deputat/Red Bull Content Pool
Ross Birchard: I had been friends with Olivier Daysoul for a long time. He was on the very first record I had pressed on vinyl with Mike Slott and Heralds of Change. Olivier happened to be an old friend of theirs and he was singing on a bunch of their songs. He’s a very psychedelic performer and vocalist outside the confines of what hip-hop is, per se. I did a bunch of stuff with him and I still continue to do stuff with him now. He’s just such a uniquely talented guy and he just had something about him. He’s very flamboyant and he totally got Joy Fantastic – the weird, description-less world where this music exists.
I wanted to make something that had an uplifting feel and that was ultimately triumphant towards the end, but that was tinged with a melancholic sadness.
Butter is unleashed to the world
Butter was released on Warp Records on October 26th 2009 and cemented Hudson Mohawke as a musical innovator capable of weaving together a seemingly infinite web of ideas. The album, which was euphoric while tinged with melancholy, inspired a colourful stream of descriptions in its wake, from aqua-crunk and turbo soul to neon R&B.
Martina Connors: There was a lot of buzz around HudMo, right from when he put out the Ooops EP, though without a doubt Butter was his coming-of-age record. Fuse and Rising 5 were hits at radio – Benji B was a huge supporter, as was Gilles Peterson. Mary Anne Hobbs played it early on her XFM show and Annie Mac gave it some love when she was doing the Friday night dance show on Radio 1. I loved Hudson’s sound because it’s so bright and there were so many layers to his music yet at the same time, he had a real ear for killer melody.
Dom Flannigan: The release naturally fell on the Warp 20 stuff, which comprised of all these anniversary parties in all the primary markets – so there was one in New York at the World Trade Centre, one in Sheffield, one in Paris and one in Tokyo. They were really good varied bills – the Sheffield bill had Jarvis Cocker playing – that spoke to the history of Warp and Ross had caught this momentum of being the young artist on the roster at that time and it really worked for him. I felt like it gave him a proper leg-up to electronic fans.
Ross Birchard: I wanted to put something together that I felt represented me, in the sense that it didn’t fit with any particular genre in mind, other than the sort of thread that I felt tied all the tracks together. I don’t think there are many songs on the record that were specifically made with the record in mind. We used a collection of things that I happened to be working on at that point. The Ian Campbell Folk Group sample (on Star Crackout) was taken from a record I had lying around and really wanted to do something with. I wanted to make something that had an uplifting feel and that was ultimately triumphant towards the end, but that was tinged with a melancholic sadness or edge. I think that’s been a recurring theme in quite a lot of my work – positioning things that get me really emotional, even if they’re not overtly sad sounding.
Benji B: Butter was like the solidification of Hudson Mohawke’s musical identity and sound where you could actually say "this sounds like Hudson Mohawke." He managed to bridge the bottom end of what was going on at nights like FWD and the dubstep era of music, people who were into the post-dubstep era and then there was the natural bridge to US rap.
[In 2019] the palette of popular tastes in the world, the current backdrop is what I call 808 music – Houston, Memphis, but especially Atlanta 808 music – that’s the thing that runs the world. But it’s worth pointing out that absolutely wasn’t the case 10 years ago. I know that for someone like Hudson Mohawke, he has always been a fan of US rap, but if you went to FWD>> and asked people who were into Mala records who Mannie Fresh was, they might not know.
Me and Tom had quite a similar take on what the artwork for Butter needed to be from hanging out together and sharing a sense of extreme, low-brow, terrible humour.
Album cover
© Konx-Om-Pax / LuckyMe
Butter artwork
© Konx-Om-Pax / LuckyMe
Butter merch
© Konx-Om-Pax / LuckyMe
Visually capturing the zeitgeist
The final design for Butter’s eye-popping artwork came from Tom Scholefield, aka Konx-om-Pax, and was partly inspired by ‘80s metal T-shirts. However, Dom Flannigan also had a hand in putting the fluoro visuals together.
Ross Birchard: Tom had been a good friend for years and years. He was promoting a lot of club nights in Glasgow and I think that one of the first places I saw him play was at one of his own shows.
Tom Scholefield: I was studying graphic design at The Glasgow School of Art at the time, Dominic from LuckyMe was the year above me and I met Ross that way. We played the same nights back in the early days and the odd B2B set, which were always great fun and all over the place. [Before working on Butter] I had done the art for Polyfolk Dance EP previously.
Ross Birchard: At that point I was really into really overblown prog rock record sleeves… I think we had quite a similar take on what the artwork for Butter needed to be from hanging out together and sharing a sense of extreme, low-brow, terrible humour. We still do a bunch of stuff together now.
Tom Scholefield: I wanted it to be a development of Polyfolk Dance EP artwork, focusing on the colourful hair elements that I used before, but expand things way more. I think some of the references came from the ‘80s T-Shirts Ross and Dom liked with wolves and bad airbrush animal art. I used bit of cinema 4D to generate the hair then photoshop. Brian Sweeney took the pics of our mate Holly for the gatefold. The photoshoot for the gatefold with Holly in her pants was pretty funny.
Dom Flanningan: Up to the eleventh hour, Ross wasn’t totally stoked on Tom’s stuff so I came in and did some retouching and artworking. So we have all these alternative versions - there are some quite funny ones of like a hawk flying over a Nevada valley, and stuff like that. And then Tom took one of the final ones I did and flipped it all again and made it even more psychedelic.
Mock-up Butter cover art by Dom Flannigan
© LuckyMe
Tom Scholefield: Dom had designed the HudMo logo and the flying hawk with butter in its claws, so I introduced those elements into my designs. Dom had done a few versions of the sleeve, but I don't think Ross was totally happy with them. I took a lot of influence from them I think but made things trippier looking, adding more animals. It was always meant to look a bit silly to reflect Ross’s sense of humour and musical style. The art and music goes hand in hand, bright and colourful with a surreal daftness added. I think the album and artwork fitted in for the time; Ross and Rustie and Lone were all making super bright-sounding stuff.
Hip-hop, Low End Theory and the LA beat scene
Butter wasn’t well-received by everyone, but Hudson Mohawke was supported by LA club night The Low End Theory – a staple of the city’s beat scene – and he performed there a number of times in this early stage of his career.
Benji B: Butter came out at the tail-end of an era that worshipped sampled drums… and Ross took it one stage further, which was with a super-digital sound when a lot of beatmakers were working in an organic sound space.
Dom Flanningan: I remember Butter estranging some of the beat scene guys as it wasn’t necessarily something you could really play out. It was too proggy.
Ross Birchard: Because Butter didn’t really sit in the world of what Low End Theory was, but it still had influences from that, a lot of the more purist hip-hop DJs were kind of apprehensive about it. I feel like the feedback at the time of the release wasn’t all that great when it came out.
Dom Flanningan: We definitely saw a sort of synergy with Low End, and in fact they used to have a map of the world and it would have a star on Montreal to denote the first tour that me, Ross, Rustie and Mike Slott did. It definitely was an influence on us.
Jake Jenkins: For my LA producer friends and myself, Butter really asserted HudMo as someone that was gonna take the contemporary instrumental hip-hop thing really far. Like FlyLo – no coincidence they were label mates. There are a few folks from that time, that aren't from LA, like HudMo, Dabrye, Dimlite, Dorian [Concept] – these people really brought a lot of influence to our local sound.
I had the opportunity to DJ at our very last Low End Theory [8th August, 2018]. Kid you not, probably a quarter of the music I played was HudMo. Personally, Butter is one of my favourite LPs and truly one of the most iconic releases in the LET / beat-scene paradigm. There is a peculiar technicolour to the album that was unlike the other instrumental hip-hop coming out of LA at the time. Honestly, most likely still unmatched to this day.
Shaping the sounds of the future
Butter was arguably ahead of its time. The album sits at the beginning of a maximalist trend in electronic music, Oneohtrix Point Never’s hypnagogic pop fantasias and a number of years before the intense, experimental pop of the PC Music movement.
Nadsroic: Listening back to the album now I still don’t think it fits in anywhere, so it’s funny to think that people were like, "this is where the future is." It definitely felt like an unconventional record when we were making it – although we were influenced by certain things, a lot of what Ross did so well was combining so many different themes, genres and rhythms.
Benji B: I remember Rising 5 being a really big tune for me. It was super ahead of its time, as was Velvet Peel, as was Fuse, as was Star Crackout.
Dom Flannigan: We were all friends with PC Music. Clair (Éclair Fifi) was the link really; she played A.G. Cook’s Unlimited on her Radio One residency, which was the first radio play PC Music ever got. Then for around a year in 2013/14, we played a number of parties in London with PC Music before it was properly a thing. You could see that PC Music, in terms of frames of reference, was weirder than us or maybe less referential to hip-hop. A.G. Cook was using Ross’s second room in the studio in London around 2016. We continued to be friends with them all.
Ross Birchard: It was probably about five or six years later that people started to consider Butter and cite it as having been something that was influential to them. Truthfully, I think it’s a slippery slope getting into the mindset of how much it influenced other shit or calling it a catalyst for a whole scene of music. What I was doing was just doing shit for fun basically and wearing the influences of it on my sleeve, and it wasn’t done with the intention of anything else. Obviously, I’m flattered, and between this record and a lot of the other things that the group of us were doing in Glasgow at that point a lot of it has gone on to be quite influential. But all I’m doing is doing the shit I like to do, and taking shit that influences me and passing that on.
Butter is a record that I’m proud of and I’m happy with how it all turned out. If I was going to do it all over again, I would do it exactly the same. I think if people can respond emotionally to something that you love, then that’s a really special feeling and a really special connection.
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