Taken from the Summer issue. Order your copy now.
Having moved from London to a small village on the outskirts of Bristol, Hugh Pescod grew up immersed in music of the 90s. Citing everyone from hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan to DJs M J Cole and Tim Deluxe, he tells me that going to illegal parties, warehouse raves, and festivals to watch “great artists and crews do their thing” inspired him to get into music himself. “Art as well, I find that really inspiring,” he adds. “I feel like it’s easy to become lazy and forget that you’re in your own little world and you need to get outside and see what everyone else is up to. As soon as you do, you’re like ‘Oh my god, why didn’t I do this six months ago?’ Keith Haring was on at the Tate, which I found really inspiring. When you see something like that you come back with a different perspective on batches or groups of work, and how to make a collection of music and art.”
After spending some time in the UK charts under the alias Redlight, the DJ and producer has now decided to revive his original jungle title, CLIPZ, with hopes to reconnect with the sounds he grew up with. “I wanted to feel something I hadn’t felt for a while: an energy. Music to me is about energies. Everything I make makes me feel different; sometimes it can make me feel shit, sometimes a rush… Sometimes nothing. But with the jungle stuff I’ve been making this time round, it’s been giving me a good feeling. That’s what I’m chasing.”
This feeling emanates through his latest track “Again” with Ms. Dynamite, Ms. Banks and Jaykae, as well as his remix of Koffee’s “Toast” last summer. “I just think she’s amazing, good vibes, good energy,” he says, and the timing couldn’t have been better. “Everyone started playing it at [Notting Hill] Carnival. It was just one of those ones, really!” Pescod is sitting on a collection of unreleased music ready to be deployed at the right time too. Having just completed a remix for Disclosure, he’s currently working with producer and head of XL Recordings Richard Russell, and will be releasing both a new single under CLIPZ, and a full album under Redlight, soon. “Yeah, I’m working on about three different projects at the moment,” he laughs. “You definitely have to keep busy, and especially in isolation. You’ve got to make sure you’re still finishing stuff and keeping positive about the future, so when things do go back to normal, or evolve into something else, you’ve got product to give and you’re still enjoying what you do.”
In Pescod’s opinion, “normal” will look very different once the COVID-19-induced lockdown is over, especially in the live music industry. However, he believes in the transcendent power of music, and specifically the jungle genre, to bring people together. “With the jungle thing, it’s multi-generational,” he explains. “You’ve got 15-year-old kids raving to it and you’ve got 50-year-olds raving to it. It’s a whole generation of people that have grown up with this music and it’s a very British sound — a melting pot of all the cultures which make Britain great — so people really relate to it. I just think that’s what’s so special about what’s going on at the moment: there’s so much relatable music, from many different people, and you can dive back and bring something from the 90s or the 00s forward, that people are collaborating [on]. [With] hip-hop now we don’t look to America, we just look down the road. So everyone can just collaborate and create these collages of music and art, and we’re very lucky to have that in Britain.”