Batu: The pathfinder

This article is taken from our special print edition Crack Magazine: The Collections, Vol. 1.

First day back at the office. You open your toolkit and freeze. The muscle memory has evaporated. It’s all just a jumble of colours, names and BPMs. This existential crisis is not being navigated in private, no: you’re on the spot in a very loud panopticon, being evaluated remotely by those watching through a screen and locked from the podcast. “Fuck,” you whisper to yourself. “I don’t know if I can do this again. This might be over for me.” You are Batu, the ne plus ultra of DJing in its most adventurous and thrilling form, and you are bricking it.

Thankfully for Omar McCutcheon, his return to public performance as Batu was a one-off nightmare. The next attempt went smoother: in front of a seated audience rather than live streamed, a moment of reinforcement as much as reassurance. “I wasn’t sure if I could muster the energy to push outward again,” McCutcheon recalls as we hang in a courtyard near Stratford, enjoying early September sunshine. “But then, there’s few things better than being able to play music to people. I got the opportunity to step off that constant treadmill, reflect on why I’ve committed time to this. I think I’ll come back with a different sense of purpose now.”

What exactly McCutcheon is coming back to remains precarious. This year was supposed to revolve around the fifth anniversary of his label, Timedance. A mini tour featuring Timedance artists and affiliates allowed for some springtime celebrations, but that was only ever intended as the warm-up. Instead, the kitchen table became McCutcheon’s centre of operations as the gig calendar crossed itself out and pressing plant delays mulched up the label’s schedule. He oversees every release on Timedance with a clinical eye, laughing that he hopes all artists “enjoy the process as an amicable thing, rather than me being a horrible dictator laying down the law”. So while records this summer from Laksa and Metrist do give “small snapshots of where we’re at, gradual advancements of a larger narrative,” there is much less to discuss than there should be.

One big dream never even got off the ground. En Masse, a tiny festival in the Welsh countryside, had been years in the making. It was a way for McCutcheon to redirect his efforts as a promoter away from turf wars in Bristol’s overly congested club scene, toward something purer. The first edition was announced for June and summarily postponed. We’re lucky to have face-to-face time at all – this is the first in-person interview for either party in over six months. We rotate between sitting in three cafés to add some movement into the story, jotting down details at each for a track-and-trace system that we know doesn’t function. A few days later the rules are reverse-engineered to tell us the meeting probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place. True to form, McCutcheon stays level-headed as reality is seemingly made up on the fly around him.

McCutcheon grew up an only child in Oxfordshire. His dad, a white post-punk from Nottingham, and mother, a second generation Bajan-Brit whose own parents were healthcare workers, separated when he was young. As a teenager he hopped from guitar to turntables – inspired in part by his uncle’s involvement in the nascent dubstep scene, operating home broadcasts under the amusingly Skream-riffing name of Streamizm. McCutcheon felt his path was pre-ordained. “I didn’t really do any work in class. I was just like, ‘This isn’t relevant. I want to do music. You’re not telling me how to programme a kick drum, so why would I want to know about this?’” The acceleration from Omar to Batu came in two stages. He injected some flourish into the quotidian by coming home every day and logging onto dubstepforum.com – which, as time goes on, looks increasingly like a finishing school for a generation of DJs and producers. McCutcheon was mostly “a silent observer, sponging up other people’s knowledge”. By absorbing everything from Basic Channel to Autechre, jungle to grime, galaxy-brain theoretical concepts to TV recommendations, his taste crystallised and his resolve strengthened. “I needed to justify music to a family who were sceptical. I couldn’t fuck around; I had to make it work.”

In the early 2010s, fortune guided a conversation between the lurker and Lurka, a more established presence on the scene. Lurka recommended a music production course at Bath Spa University, of which he was a recent graduate alongside Appleblim, Addison Groove and Asusu. This sealed the deal for McCutcheon. Enrollment, he says, “changed everything. My execution, my technicality, my philosophy toward music,” as well as his social circle. He became fast friends with two students cut from a similar cloth in the year above him. McCutcheon started Timedance in 2015 with the last dregs of his student loan, moved into a house in Bristol with those mates – producers Bruce and Ploy – and set about establishing one of the most respected club labels of the past five years.

Timedance’s reputation advanced in lockstep with McCutcheon’s as an artist in his own right. Even a high-profile solo record on XL only seemed to service Timedance in kind, a co-sign for what they were collectively building toward. This incremental growth felt purposeful: McCutcheon frets over aspects of capitalism that propel competitive individualism, and how it detracts from working toward the common good. He radiates an aura of assured calm, laughing frequently but softly, and is inherently drawn to “solitude as my natural state”. As we chart his personal history he gently scoots backward on the bench across from me, receding to the point where he is half-camouflaged by a hanging plant above his head. If there’s a non-confrontational route through a situation, McCutcheon is the type to take it. Which is paradoxical, because as a DJ, McCutcheon has broken out as one of most assertive and inventive technicians in the game.