With genre-bending album Proximo now on shelves, we asked one half of Pocket 808, Sameer Sengupta, to give us a guided tour through the finished product. Take it away…

“This album took a process and a few years to complete, but there is a story. We started off writing this record soon after we wrote our single Our Break. Having written club tunes under the name POXYMUSIC for many years, we really wanted to write an album of songs rather than just a bunch of club tunes. So we approached a bunch of mates (or friends of friends) who sang, and asked them to sing on our record. A whole bunch of them obliged us – that’s lucky, ‘cos I really don’t think Ken or I should sing!

“So over a period of nine months, we wrote about 10 to 12 tracks in a style that we thought would appeal to our label Hussle/MOS. The songs didn’t sit well with them, so we ditched most of it and started over. The next batch was written, again trying to appease the label. And again, most of it reeked of insincerity – so again, we binned most of it. Then smack bang in the middle of this, I fell ill and was out of action for half a year.

“When we finally got back to writing, we decided to take the approach to write stuff that appeased us, something we hadn’t previously done. This last body of work along with one track from the first and second batches is what forms the album. The word ‘Proximo’ means ‘next’. It’s something we feel deeply connected to and very proud of. We hope others like it too!”

Prefix

“Confusion and noise followed by the sound of a ‘beginning’ is what greets you at the very start.”

Ghostship

“This track was one of the last written songs on the album. My old friend Paul Mac, who knew him well, introduced me to Nathan Hudson from Aussie band Faker. This song’s life started off at a 142-BPM and had a riff resembling a Thin White Duke mix. This song has the most vivid imagery of all the songs on the album. He has such beautiful writing style and although the feel and arrangement of the song was shaped together, the words and style are entirely his. I slowed it down to 135, ditched the old riff, asked our mate Andy Page to add some guitars, and it quickly turned into one of the strongest songs on Proximo.”

Monster (Babe)

“This song’s alternate title is Money Shot. I met Phil Jamieson via my good friend Will Cate, and also while playing at the same festival a few years ago. As things go, we all hung out and carried on after the show. Some time later, I approached Phil (as we did with all the vocalists on the record) as asked if he wanted to contribute to an electronic album we were making.

“The way we tend to work is we start off by creating some beats and maybe a bassline, and get a vibe to it. We then invite the vocalist over and see how they respond to it. We used a couple of ideas from a notebook of lyrics that Ken kept as a starting point for when Phil came over. The beats we made for this song were influenced by both Devo and The Police. Phil used Ken’s ideas to start with, then just went on a tangent of his own, creating an abstract picture of a possessed man at a fun park. Watching Phil’s performance in the studio was amazing…the guy knows how to get a good take. This track is my personal fave on the whole album.”

Surfaces

“This track is an experiment in bass. We wanted to work in all sorts of tempos, and slower tempos let complicated rhythms sound cool. The beats and mood are very British influenced. And after we’d come up with the initial feel, Ali Omar’s voice immediately sprang to mind. He had to sing on this. Ali has been making dub records in Sydney forever and having spent time in Bristol, we felt he’d bring some authenticity to this track. We approached him and he said yes.

“Ali’s voice and style is very distinctive and I wanted an element of this, but I also wanted to push him out of his comfort zone and to try something new, so I got him to ‘sing’, something he rarely did. He’s a Toaster/MC, but pulled of the choruses with a certain charm I can’t put my finger on.

“The lyrics are about a man who has had a rough life, but holds his head up high and seeks redemption despite the nature of the world we live in. Ironically, it’s almost autobiographical. Sadly, Ali passed away in 2009 before this track was released. But it is one of the last published tracks in his very colourful career.”

Warpaint

“We met Gina through our friends Ali Omar and Dave Edwards, when we were on the lookout for a female MC who had some grit. The beats we’d written had a certain urgent nature and were influenced by things like early N*E*R*D*. When she came to our studio, we were faced with this tall red head law student. We were initially unsure if we had the right person. The moment she opened her mouth, our jaws dropped almost simultaneously. What I didn’t know is that Gina has been MCing with her DJ brother since she was little, and knows her way around a mic. She laid down vocals over the beats, and all the melodies were added later.”

Nothing More

“One person Ken and I wanted to work with was our good friend Jamie Lloyd. We both really liked what he was doing and thought it might be fun to hang out and write some tunes, just for the fun of it. We decided the best thing to do was to get some beers and gather at our studio in Kings Cross on Saturday afternoons. The idea was more to just chill, instead of race to a finish line.

“Jamie is one of the most polite, soft spoken and immensely talented people we have met and worked with. He is also a disciple of vintage hardware and decided we were going to use a few of my old synths gathering dust in the back corner of the studio. He brought it out and plugged it in, and through its broken tuning, brought life to this track. The vibe we wanted was to just write a deep house track. He brought some vocal processing toys with him and off we went. The track is filled with ideas and he re-invigorated my love of vintage gear! We have very pleasant memories of lazy Saturdays making this track.”

Kuckoo

“Ken and I listen to a diverse selection of music and amongst things; we wanted to create something kind of delicate. This track started off as a selection of clicks and blips, and various noises to add tension. But it needed release, so we added some chords and various other harmonic parts. In usual style, we got to a point where we thought we should add vocals. We tried two different vocalists, a male and a female, but neither fitted well and labouring on this, decided we’d leave this track as an instrumental.

“Then a publisher heard it and put us in touch with Royce Doherty. As it turned out, I’d met Royce 10 years earlier when he worked with Paul Mac. The Kiva record they made first introduced me to his almost angelic voice. He loved the track as it was, so we sent it down to Melbourne, and he added all these carefully constructed layers of vocals back. It’s the only track on the record that had vocals added after all the music was already in place. We were thrilled with how well his vocals fit the music. And the lyrics, creepy as they are, were also fitting.”

She Bites

“This track came from the second batch of songs we wrote to begin with. We were looking for vocalists when our label put us in touch with Spalding Rockwell, two girls from NYC who had previously sung on a track for Armand Van Helden. During a course of months, we send them the track, only to realise they were in the midst of a break-up!

“Later, Nicole (of the duo) contacted us to say she had recorded some parts while on holiday in the Maldives. A few weeks later we received four CDs worth of files wrapped in hotel stationery and bound with string. The address was hand written and the package was almost entirely covered in stamps from the Maldives!

“Anyway, it took weeks to go through the ‘stream of consciousness’ vocals and to construct a track. The lyrics are pretty abstract and don’t say anything in particular, but we really liked the sound and texture of her vocals, and so we kept it. This track also got ARIA nominated for Best Dance Release. We didn’t win it!”

Better Man

“This track was written with Jamie Lloyd during the same sessions that Nothing More was written, over numerous Saturdays. Although the feel is very different, the vibe for us was very much the same. With this one, we wanted to do something slightly darker. Ken had recently broken up with his partner of many years, and the lyrics are about that story. Jamie again used his vocal toys and an old Casiotone that was sitting around. Our tracks with Jamie were just jams that we later edited down. People often say this is the ‘hardest’ one to get into. But in all honesty, it’s a grower.”

Home

“This is only song we kept from the first spurt of writing, and is the oldest track on the album. We made friends with Aya years ago through friends, and one day I asked if he wanted to try working on something electronic. He jumped at the chance. The main vocal idea was recorded in a matter of minutes. I used a crap mic, and it was done in an open room, and at one point you can even hear an ambulance siren that screamed mid-recording.

“We re-recorded the vocals another time, but that first take was the best so we kept it. The mood of this song can be seen as creepy, but we prefer to think it’s warm. There are three guitarists on this, including the extended fuzz bass solo at the end by Tony Buchen of The Baggsmen. The track is like a journey, and the final destination descends into noise, which is where the album started.”

“So there you have it, an album with as many tracks as it has genres, but it’s as honest an offering as we can make.”

Proximo is out now on Hussle through Ministry Of Sound.