Altar b2b Luke Handsfree – The Interview Format

What’s the best way to end a clubnight? Correct answer: a back-to-back session. 

I asked Altar if he would like to join me and flex it out for the last set of the Próximo Threads* takeover, and you can hear how much fun it was here: 

A little later I spoke with Altar, aka Jack Christie, owner of Container Records, promoter of the long-running THEM clubnight and record label alongside noted Afrobeat night Kartel, for a bit of a chat about life and music.

On running a record shop

Luke: 

So where is Container at now?

Jack: 

Before Covid came along I was thinking about getting a proper shop near bookmongers in Brixton. I was almost ready to commit to this space I found and it was slightly risky, but I was thinking ‘if I can rejig things it might pay off pretty well; there’ll be a nicer space for in-stores, and there will be a bit more visibility. So let’s go for it.’ I was just weighing it up when Covid hit. 

Luke:

It’s just as well that it hit at that point then!

Jack: 

Haha. I mean, independent businesses are vulnerable to the whims of the market, aka things like Covid, plus your own personal ability to take risks. It’s not easy; a lot of self-will and gambling mentality involved, and it’s quite exposed to the elements of stress. Record shops are quite hard to make money from too, of course.

Luke:

Part of the problem is that the Internet has habitualised the idea of music for free, right? How often do you get people coming in to use your editorial in the shop and then going, ‘I’ve I found this and I found that, and I’ve written them down in my phone and now I’m to go home, add them to my Spotify playlist’ or whatever. 

Jack:

I mean, I didn’t run a record shop before the internet, so I don’t know if that has increased. It does happen. I don’t know whether it was a thing before, you know, 10, 20 years ago. I’m sure it was. I think a record shop should be somewhere that someone with not much money can come in and kind of browse music and not necessarily have the obligation to buy, they’ll know they might get back into it, a place for people to share enthusiasm for music and discover the outside of just the utility of commercial trade. 

Luke:

It’s got a societal meaning, a point of congregation and communion attached to it.

Jack:

Like a church is a place where people congregate and share ideas. And you know, you could just say the same thing about a park. There’s places that have a meaning and a significance that aren’t to do with money. But there’s another side to it where someone comes in, digs through some records and says ‘can I take photos?’ Usually people are nice enough to ask, take a bunch of photos of records and put them back. You know, of course, on a bad day you might roll your eyes, but on a deeper level, every time I feel like that’s completely legit. And, you know, it makes you proud to run a space where people can come in and do that. 

Luke:

Yeah absolutely, one of the really amazing things about record shops is, as you say, the sharing of ideas, of influences. So you can go in and you can be flicking through the racks, and your colleagues in the shop are doing the buying and getting the understanding of what is what, what specific customers like, where it sits and what kind of associations that music has. The type of music that you’ve got in your hand might have some emotional or aesthetic likeness with some other music that Spotify wouldn’t necessarily show you. 

Jack: 

Yes! And also having a conversation with them about music as well. The thing about running a small shop is that invariably you just start chatting and then someone will say, ‘I don’t like this, but I like this’. And it fires off lots of different ideas, it’s probably my favourite part of the job. 

Luke: 

Right now, in terms of the ability for algorithms to perform that function, there isn’t sufficient research around how people make discrete aesthetic choices, we simply don’t know enough about the brain right now to be able to make anything near the same quality and humanity of recommendations. 

Jack: 

You can’t answer back to the Spotify algorithm, and the Spotify algorithm can get things wrong. You know, I listen to Spotify and it gets things right and I’ll discover new artists. Then it gets things wrong and it puts two artists together – a lot of one artist’s audience really likes this other artist, and I don’t, but it keeps on suggesting anyway and you can’t tell it that it is wrong. In the shop though, I’ll say, check this out, and if the customer goes ‘yeah, I can see why you thought that, but that’s a bit too heavy, I’d like it a bit more melodic’, I can instantly go, ‘what about this and this?’, and you navigate the communication between yourself and the customer and find what they’re looking for.  

Luke: 

And it’s an education for you as well, right? 

Jack: 

Yeah, absolutely, loads of times I’ve ended up finding new artists, you know, maybe even stuff that I’d stocked that I hadn’t really given a try properly and ended up really liking it after someone has suggested it.

On new discoveries, transcendence and punk in dance music:

Luke: 

What have been some of the good discoveries that you’ve made recently? 

Jack: 

I really liked the solo record by Adrianne Lenker, who is this American singer-songwriter from a band called Big Thief. She went through a break-up while Big Thief were on tour, at the beginning of Covid. I actually saw them on that tour at the [Hammersmith] Apollo, they’re great. They’ve got folk roots and country roots, and they play on those old sort of Appalachian American folk traditions and bluegrass and whatever. But they also have influences from things like shoegaze and things with lots of space and depth, and so they combine all that.

And obviously, influences aside, she’s just an amazing songwriter. She came into lockdown and after a breakup, so she went to see her sister who lives in the woods in Northeast USA. And she was, you know, songs were just pouring out of her, so they say. She sent for her go-to producer to come up with some kit, and they recorded her songs in this cabin in the woods. They recorded a load of birdsong too, it was springtime. It’s a little while ago now, but it’s a really special reminder of summer lockdown. It really is great. 

Luke: 

Yeah, it’s kind of quite a romantic idea, isn’t it? The Post-Break-Up-Isolation – in this case a doubly-enforced isolation – and then the writing of songs to express oneself in disarray. I really like Big Thief actually, I think they’re brilliant. I saw them live, I haven’t listened to the solo record yet. I think there’s an album of instrumentals with it as well.

Jack:

That’s right, the second disc is all instrumental. It’s all quite unconventional from a kind of modal I perspective. I’m not much of a technical music theorist, but it seems to me that she must take a lot of influence from jazz and there’s a lot of that kind of deconstructing of harmonies going on in the guitar playing. 

Luke: 

Yeah, when I saw them at End Of The Road festival a couple of years ago, she was quite an intense stage presence, there were a couple of points at which the band seemed to be like ‘what the fuck is going on’ while she was twanging away on a single note for like three minutes. She was also asking whether people had done acid and was talking about how she felt like she was losing her shit. 

Jack: 

Go and check out the Big Thief Tiny Desk concert, you’ll get a taste of how intense they are as performers and bandmates. They’re all in the groove and they’re all really doing their thing. The YouTube comments are funny, with people pointing out that they look like they should be in four different bands; the guitarist looks like he’s in the disco, the drummer is about to go fly fishing and the bassist looks like he’s going to Burning Man. But they’re also so intensely involved in what they’re doing. I love bands and artists that have a sort of transcendental reverie to what they’re doing. I can’t get enough of that stuff. 

Luke: 

That engaged reverie also is a bit jazz-vibes as well. 

Jack:

Everybody in the groove together, just staying locked, that’s something I look for in lots of different types of music. In terms of conveying emotion in dance music, I think a lot of it’s done in the studio, in the selection of samples, in the development of sound, before people get to the actual clubs. Singing is a lot more physically connected to your actual ‘voice’ and your sense of expression in a direct way, obviously. People express themselves in electronic music of course, but it’s like there’s another step of translation involved. Though there is that transcendence in performance that you can still find in dance music, people like Giant Swan are definitely on that tip.

Luke: 

I must admit to my slight ignorance of them. 

Jack: 

I don’t want to sound biased, but because they’re coming from a punk rock background, which, you know, I like a lot of that stuff as well, that maybe they’re bringing some of that with them and that’s the ideal state to be in. They’re looking to provoke adrenalin and provoke other things. I think, maybe because of all the technical aspects, most Electronic music is a lot more, you know, logical, cerebral maybe. 

On the Próximo Threads takeover b2b:

Luke:

We had a lot of fun playing records back to back with each other. I mean it was just, man, it was long awaited and I was absolutely blessed to be able to to share the decks with you. 

Jack: 

It’s always a pleasure.

Luke: 

And so, when you were thinking about what records to play, what was going on in your mind? 

Jack: 

I can’t remember where I was now, but I got stuck and had to come with a second set of records that I didn’t plan to, and also I put a load of tracks onto a USB which we couldn’t use. But in terms of Próximo, it was like Jungle Hardcore and early Jungle. Próximo seems to be about a quite modern interpretation of that jungle hardcore continuum, with lots of references to breakbeats, and how it’s dispersed through Techno and DnB and that fertile ground of UK music where everyone’s feeding off of everyone else’s sounds. And since I first met you, probably around 2010 or 11 you’ve always been bang into that kind of thing. Back then, the energy from Dubstep was getting used in all kinds of different areas and in-between-sounds that weren’t easily labelled.

Luke: 

Yeah. It’s still that hardcore continuum. It’s still that screwface rudeness. 

Jack: 

To answer your question, I probably would have been looking to older Jungle tunes that, for one reason or another, they sound like they might have come out last year –  they may be quite sparse or they didn’t have any of the kind of, you know, cliched samples. And then I would have tried to find more recent jungle and breakbeat releases, and maybe one or two that appeal to that technical use to space that Proximo seems to call for, and just tried to create a harmonious palette between them all. 

Luke: 

Yeah, because a lot of that old hardcore stuff is really highly identifiable of its time. 

Jack: 

Yeah, and that doesn’t stop me from liking it, but, you know, that’s because I like all things, really, I kind of tend to be a bit of an omnivore when it comes to music. 

Luke:

Nice one. Thanks so much for being involved Jack, I really appreciate it. I’m really glad that we were able to come together and spin some records. 

Jack:

Any time mate!

You can find Container Records online – https://www.containerrecords.com – and within physical space inside Pop Brixton, around the corner from Brixton tube.

THEM Recordings releases can be found at the THEM Bandcamp: https://themldn.bandcamp.com

Details about the Kartel nights are here: https://ra.co/promoters/36150