As much as Paul Rose loves pop music, he also kind of hates it. After 2010's Triangulation, the producer/DJ known as Scuba and founder of Hotflush Records consciously moved away from his dubstep roots toward sample-led, house-and UKG-informed tracks. "I was taking it in a new direction to challenge people's perceptions of me," he tells me over Skype from Mexico, where he's taking a break from his Hotflush Label Showcase tour to attend his cousin's wedding. Faced with the prospect of touring a record that might put him on a stage with Calvin Harris, however, Rose decided to go with "stuff that's going to be pretty dark, pretty underground."Fittingly, Rose's moves in 2013—releasing Update in April, closing his famed Berghain club nights Sub:Stance over the summer, and releasing the muttering time bomb "Rope" b/w "Technique" in November—seemed to signal some kind of closure and transition in his career, even though he insists he's not quite ready to release another full-length yet. We took a few minutes to chat with Rose in advance of his Valentine's Day show at Brooklyn venue Output about his 2014 LP, London's jungle revival, and undergraduates on Twitter.THUMP: Are you working on a new LP right now?
Scuba: I'm not currently. I'm sure it will be released this year in that kind of format. I've gotten an enormous amount of material in the past year or so.You said your new material was kind of darker, and it seems like "Rope" and "Technique" are a bit darker than earlier stuff you had released.
Yeah, there was a period after Triangulation where I did my best to alienate a large part of my audience [laughs] by making light-hearted, pop-y stuff. I was trying to challenge people's perceptions of me. After I had been doing that for about 18 months to two years—with "Adrenalin" and Personality and "Hardbody" and stuff like that—in the last year or so, certainly since I got back in the studio with the intention of writing another album, I've been grappling with the next thing. As much as I like pop music, and as much as I enjoy writing it (and I've written all kinds which will never see the light of day), this one is going to be much more underground. It doesn't really appeal to me, doing big cheesy raves.It seems like you're able to anticipate trends before they happen.
People do say that (and I've said it before) but I'm not completely convinced that I do anticipate trends. I hate to say this, but I really just concentrate on my own thing. I don't listen to a lot of contemporary stuff. That might sound like a bit of a funny thing to say considering I own a label, but, for example, the whole jungle revival thing—which has been happening in London over the past 18 months or so—completely caught me off guard.Do you listen to all the demos you receive for Hotflush?
[Laughs] No way! Of course not. People that say they do are basically lying. I just don't believe that anyone does that. I listen to a lot of them, but there's no fucking way I could listen to all of them. You lose perspective of what is good and what isn't good. When you listen to 50 awful tracks that arrive, and then you have one that's okay, it suddenly sounds amazing [laughs] and it's not. I try and spread it out. Every day I listen to a couple, or whatever, because we get sent stuff a lot.What about when you started Hotflush? Did your first years at the label influence the music you made as Scuba?
It was a very interesting time, those first few years. We were centered on what became the dubstep scene; between 2002 and 2005 that was really just a monthly club in London that was sparsely attended. What it revolved around was going to this club with a bunch of CDs of your tracks and swapping CDs with everyone else. It was an enormously fertile ground for someone starting a label, because every month you had tons of brand-new, fresh-sounding, quite unique music. People like Benga and Skream and Caspa. The way things worked back then, you didn't get sent demos ever. You picked them up direct from the source every month.Even though I had been making music for years and years already, it took me a little while to find my feet with the engineering side and find a musical direction and also the confidence in what I was doing artistically. It felt like we were doing something cool at the time, but that was because literally no one gave a shit, it was so confined.How does it feel as a label head watching an artist like Mount Kimbie, which Hotflush sort of incubated, release their new record on Warp, one of the labels that shaped your music tastes?
Generally speaking, when you're running a label that's the size that mine is, you just have to accept if you do your job pretty well and you build up an artist, if it's someone really good, understandably they're going to move elsewhere. It's very, very unusual for someone to get really, really big and stay with a really, really small label (obviously). About a year ago, they were close to signing to a much bigger label, which I don't think would have been a good idea even though I would have gotten paid lots of money. But [Mount Kimbie] have a lot of freedom now, and they have a good team behind them. The thing about [Warp] is they have the money, and a good infrastructure, and a global network. They've given them artistic freedom, which is pretty crucial for anyone that's remotely serious about making music.Speaking of Twitter, I'm interested in how you use it as a forum to air your political views and discuss them with others, and I think it's interesting how you'll make a statement and then say, "discuss."
[Laughs] I started the "discuss" thing because I gradually realized almost all the people that followed me on Twitter are undergraduate students. I went through a stage where I would get into arguments with people about that kind of stuff. Realistically, with the limitations of the medium, it's not always easy—gradually I realized it probably wasn't the best idea to be arguing with people who like my music about stuff that's completely peripheral. Equally, I think there's a place for that kind of stuff. A lot of the time, when I do one of those "discuss" tweets, it'll be something deliberately provocative so I can sit back and see what happens. A lot of the time on Twitter, I'm bored and looking for something to do. I've got be careful. I've definitely gotten into trouble in the past.Harley doesn't hate Calvin Harris -@harleyoliverb
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Scuba: I'm not currently. I'm sure it will be released this year in that kind of format. I've gotten an enormous amount of material in the past year or so.You said your new material was kind of darker, and it seems like "Rope" and "Technique" are a bit darker than earlier stuff you had released.
Yeah, there was a period after Triangulation where I did my best to alienate a large part of my audience [laughs] by making light-hearted, pop-y stuff. I was trying to challenge people's perceptions of me. After I had been doing that for about 18 months to two years—with "Adrenalin" and Personality and "Hardbody" and stuff like that—in the last year or so, certainly since I got back in the studio with the intention of writing another album, I've been grappling with the next thing. As much as I like pop music, and as much as I enjoy writing it (and I've written all kinds which will never see the light of day), this one is going to be much more underground. It doesn't really appeal to me, doing big cheesy raves.
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People do say that (and I've said it before) but I'm not completely convinced that I do anticipate trends. I hate to say this, but I really just concentrate on my own thing. I don't listen to a lot of contemporary stuff. That might sound like a bit of a funny thing to say considering I own a label, but, for example, the whole jungle revival thing—which has been happening in London over the past 18 months or so—completely caught me off guard.Do you listen to all the demos you receive for Hotflush?
[Laughs] No way! Of course not. People that say they do are basically lying. I just don't believe that anyone does that. I listen to a lot of them, but there's no fucking way I could listen to all of them. You lose perspective of what is good and what isn't good. When you listen to 50 awful tracks that arrive, and then you have one that's okay, it suddenly sounds amazing [laughs] and it's not. I try and spread it out. Every day I listen to a couple, or whatever, because we get sent stuff a lot.What about when you started Hotflush? Did your first years at the label influence the music you made as Scuba?
It was a very interesting time, those first few years. We were centered on what became the dubstep scene; between 2002 and 2005 that was really just a monthly club in London that was sparsely attended. What it revolved around was going to this club with a bunch of CDs of your tracks and swapping CDs with everyone else. It was an enormously fertile ground for someone starting a label, because every month you had tons of brand-new, fresh-sounding, quite unique music. People like Benga and Skream and Caspa. The way things worked back then, you didn't get sent demos ever. You picked them up direct from the source every month.Even though I had been making music for years and years already, it took me a little while to find my feet with the engineering side and find a musical direction and also the confidence in what I was doing artistically. It felt like we were doing something cool at the time, but that was because literally no one gave a shit, it was so confined.How does it feel as a label head watching an artist like Mount Kimbie, which Hotflush sort of incubated, release their new record on Warp, one of the labels that shaped your music tastes?
Generally speaking, when you're running a label that's the size that mine is, you just have to accept if you do your job pretty well and you build up an artist, if it's someone really good, understandably they're going to move elsewhere. It's very, very unusual for someone to get really, really big and stay with a really, really small label (obviously). About a year ago, they were close to signing to a much bigger label, which I don't think would have been a good idea even though I would have gotten paid lots of money. But [Mount Kimbie] have a lot of freedom now, and they have a good team behind them. The thing about [Warp] is they have the money, and a good infrastructure, and a global network. They've given them artistic freedom, which is pretty crucial for anyone that's remotely serious about making music.Speaking of Twitter, I'm interested in how you use it as a forum to air your political views and discuss them with others, and I think it's interesting how you'll make a statement and then say, "discuss."
[Laughs] I started the "discuss" thing because I gradually realized almost all the people that followed me on Twitter are undergraduate students. I went through a stage where I would get into arguments with people about that kind of stuff. Realistically, with the limitations of the medium, it's not always easy—gradually I realized it probably wasn't the best idea to be arguing with people who like my music about stuff that's completely peripheral. Equally, I think there's a place for that kind of stuff. A lot of the time, when I do one of those "discuss" tweets, it'll be something deliberately provocative so I can sit back and see what happens. A lot of the time on Twitter, I'm bored and looking for something to do. I've got be careful. I've definitely gotten into trouble in the past.Harley doesn't hate Calvin Harris -@harleyoliverb