Ben UFO makes the experimental accessible

“I read something recently that I identified with quite strongly,” he says. “That the most interesting music manages to collapse the distinctions between the accessible and the sophisticated, the populist and the experimental, music that manages to make those kinds of hierarchies irrelevant.”

This contradiction powers Thomson’s activities as DJ, radio host and as co-founder of Hessle Audio. Expertly navigating the lineage of UK underground culture and the influx of the worldwide house and techno diaspora, as Ben UFO, Thomson’s exceptional curatorial vision is expansive yet determinedly focused – a skill that has won over crowds to artists to critics alike. His technical prowess and exhaustive approach to selection has seen him steadily become one of the most persistently sought after and universally respected DJs. Why? Thomson is drawn to the thrill of exposing collective transcendence in indefinable sounds. With little to no regard for geographical or chronological borders, eschewing genre boundaries and biases, any given set is a simultaneously considered yet crowd- pleasing mixture of 4/4 grooves, forgotten classics and irresistible oddities.

This devotion to dance music began around a decade ago, with the thrill of hearing alien sounds in transmission across London radio dials. An education steeped in UK pirate radio heritage, having fallen in love with drum’n’bass as a teenager it was the “transformative experiences” of early dubstep nights that offered his jumping-off point. Meeting David Kennedy, later Pearson Sound, around 2005 at Plastic People’s seminal, mythologised club night FWD>>, the pair became perfectly positioned to witness its notable transformation from a serious, eyes-down showcase; what had started off as a gathering of producers listening to each other’s music, smoking weed, with scant interaction, became the focal point of an accelerating scene. As FWD>>’s incubation of ideas hatched, propelling producers like Mala, Coki and Kode9 into the spotlight, it became the focus of a movement with increasing momentum. “That was the first time I’d really seen that happen. When I started going to drum’n’bass nights, despite my enthusiasm for the music the vibe I picked up from people was that things had been better – that the music had had its time. Dubstep felt very open by comparison, it seemed as though anything was achievable.”

Hearing these mutating styles on rib- shaking sound systems, Thomson began to understand music as something functional, music as a response to its immediate environment. “Producers would build tunes for the system, and I think that’s what FWD>> in particular, but also dubstep in general, illustrated to me; that music built for a very specific function could be extremely powerful. I had heard the music at home and hadn’t fully understood it, but as soon as I got to the club it made perfect sense.”

The Hessle Audio triumvirate soon became a source of solidarity in a rapidly unfurling dubstep scene. Via Leeds’s Sub FM, Thomson, Kennedy and Kevin ‘Pangaea’ McAuley set the groundwork for their sound palette of percussive, 140bpm sub-bass heavy music. A regular, and extremely passionate, community of listeners developed.

Championing these artists’ idiosyncratic sense of rhythm since 2007, Hessle Audio debuted some of the most accomplished producers of recent times, including Untold, Joe and Blawan, their series of unplaceable anthems providing a coherent focal point in an increasingly separating UK dance community. Preserving the essence of pirate radio-borne genres and slowly, subtly weaving between the spheres of house and techno, they had forged an unmistakably UK hybrid. “I’ve always found it really satisfying that we’ve found records that simultaneously manage to touch on something quite strange, which still function really well on dancefloors,” he explains. “That’s universally appealing. You hear something that works brilliantly on the dancefloor which doesn’t sound familiar, and it’s exciting.”

Back to the present day, and years after Hessle Audio began their upward trajectory, the inundation of electronic music into an increasingly saturated landscape becomes less and less classifiable. In this era, the role of the DJ as the filter, the selector, is more valuable than ever. And bearing in mind that he still doesn’t have a single production credit to his name – something which can affect a DJ’s career prospects considerably – it’s Thomson’s DJ skills alone which have made him one of the most prominent names among the UK dance community. The pressure he feels to justify this position is what drives his painstaking precision, plotting harmony where tribal differences used to exist. Definitive examples of Thomson’s mixing include the rapid-fire transition from European house, OG dubstep and grime on 2011’s epoch-defining Rinse:16, the decidedly darker but perhaps more succinct FabricLive67, and more recently his Essential Mix, a buoyant dart across the spectrum of classic techno, electro and unreleased material that adapted the shift in momentum to accommodate for non-club listening.

For Thomson, this seamless outlook comes naturally. “I think a lot of the time when people try to pin down what it is that they’re looking for musically, the easiest thing to do is to define their position in terms of what they dislike – house music purists writing off techno as soulless, and techno people writing off house music as naff, whereas the reality of those two positions is much more murky and confused; the distinctions between the two aren’t black and white enough to justify those kinds of generalisations. That’s why I approach DJing in the way that I do. I don’t see those distinctions as being absolute or necessary, I see things as being a bit more fluid.”

Earlier in our conversation, we’d discussed the idea of tribalism; the singular spirit of his education in jungle and the early years of FWD>>. In this era of unlimited information, the subsequent lack of clear boundaries is something he’s embraced. “At the moment, when everyone online has such easy access to anything they choose to investigate, it’s much harder to justify that kind of tribalism. It’s much easier to see the flaws in your own position now that you can go and explore everything all at once.”

Following our first meeting in Peckham, later that evening I meet Ben at a Chinese restaurant just off Brick Lane and then head to the Rinse FM studios, where the dark and thrilling sounds of the Swamp 81 show are drawing to a close. A flurry of Teklife t-shirts and Mancunian accents, a few of their crew eagerly hand over some 12”s to Thomson. At one point, a young guy from Shanghai points Ben out to me and does the sign of the cross from his forehead to his chest, to his shoulders. It’s a tongue-in-cheek gesture, of course, but there’s a palpable sense of admiration in the room.

Thomson is in his element here, and as tonight’s guest DJ October takes over the decks, he casually props himself in front of the mic to shout out the incoming stream of tweets informing us they’re locked. “In the last seven years or so there were maybe one or two months when we didn’t have a regular show, between leaving Sub FM and joining Rinse,” he mentions. Thomson’s appearances on Rinse FM are among the most celebrated of the former London pirate. “It’s almost like having a residency, it means I can really focus in on the constituent parts of what I do, and explore things in detail which I might not have the chance to in a club setting. If I feel like doing an entire two hour show at 108bpm, then I can because I still have the show next week to do something else, and the same audience to play to.”

An hour in and we’re joined by Four Tet, keen to show off the Hindu devotional records bought especially for this evening. Ben himself has been playing a characteristically diverse selection, uniting Swamp 81’s singular aesthetic and an altogether more universal approach, where 1988 field recordings from the Mountain Province of the Northern Philippines sit alongside reggae from The Wailers’ Aston Barrett and anonymous white labels from Hamburg’s Giegling imprint.

“I think a lot of music that’s around at the minute knows what its place is in the world,” he had told us earlier in the café. “Music that’s targeted very well at big spaces; music that’s attempting to cross over into the mainstream. And on the other hand there’s a huge amount of amazing, extremely specialist music around which targets a very particular niche. One of the ways in which I’m trying to keep things interesting for myself is to perhaps try and use the position that I’ve found myself in to try and take some of that music outside of its comfort zone a little bit.”