In 2009 I was lucky enough to interview UK music journeyman The Bug (government name: Kevin Martin) before his debut New Zealand tour. Martin was a generous and thoughtful interviewee, one of ideas and passion as big as, if not bigger than his stadium-sized dubstep/ragga/noise music. On the 25th of August this year, Ninja Tune will release Angels And Devils, his latest album as The Bug. While we wait for Angels And Devils to arrive online (and on record store shelves) I thought it would be worthwhile revisiting where Martin’s head-space was at the time.

When Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, released London Zoo last year, the exuberantly apocalyptic re-imagining of life in London, he found himself in the right place at the right time for the first time in his fifteen year career as a saxophonist, bassist, DJ, producer and remixer. Artistically speaking that is. Sifting together the mercurial sands of dancehall reggae, industrial noise, dubstep, grime and punk, through London Zoo Martin presented a conglomeration of the different strands of reggae music’s impact on every British street subculture to emerge over the last three decades. Concurrently, alongside his ragga vocalist co-conspirators Warrior Queen, Ricky Ranking and others, he flipped this into an unapologetically crossbred “beats’n’noise” protest music for the new millennium.

Aside from securing Martin the hat-trick of genuine artistic victory, undeniable manifesto of intent, and solicitation of almost academic critical acclaim, London Zoo (his third full-length release under The Bug moniker) also drew Martin’s music to the attention of the always artistically vital Trent Reznor. This afforded Martin the opportunity to “spread The Bug virus across America, and discover a mutual admiration,” through taking part in an extensive US tour playing support to Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails. “Sometimes the audience got it, sometimes they didn’t,” Reznor admits. “But there was enough love to think, this was really worth doing. Once, during the tour, he said we should contact each other about working together; so there may well be something in the pipeline.”

Though this hook-up may seem unexpected to dancehall reggae and dubstep focused fans of Martin’s music, for those familiar with his extensive past catalogue as a member of jazzcore pioneers God, industrial hip-hop architects Techno Animal, and noise rock/free jazz outfit Ice, the pairing seems not one iota short of overdue. “I think it’s a refinement of what I was doing [earlier in my career],” he offers. “If anything what changed with London Zoo is I decided to be more focus on songwriting and tried to investigate choruses and melodies, although I used to have an aversion to both.”

Raised in a “shitty town on the South Coast of England,” Martin exists within a longstanding family tradition of musicianship, yet he has never had any qualms about throwing the rulebook away. “My father was a musician and my grandfather was a musician. Music was always all around me,” he recalls. “My mother would play very disgusting heavy metal albums all the time, which almost put me off guitars for life. Then when I was fourteen I started making music on a friends four track. But to call it music is probably an exaggeration; it was experimental sound really. I basically got into music by listening to punk really, Joy Division, Discharge, stuff that was anti-structure, anti-social and had a great big fuck-off attitude.”

As those familiar with the history of the development of English music are well aware, for many aurally baptised during the eighties end of the UK punk rock spectrum, punk rock went hand in hand with ska, reggae and dub. And those adventurous individuals such as Martin who chose to follow these different musics’ splitting threads more often than not ended up as disciples of of ragga, bashment, jungle, drum’n’bass, UK garage, 2-step, industrial, grime and dubstep in the late 90s and early 2000s.

For Martin this appears to have been the artistic arc of development, except like many of his contemporaries the music wasn’t the be all and end all. No, that quality of influence can be shared equally with what was occurring around the music on a social and cultural level. “My family was pretty fucked up,” he admits. “My old man was a cunt… I hate family structure because of my mother’s suffering [and my suffering]. Hence I was drawn to quite extreme music. When I heard punk rock for the first time it made me question everything and gave me an opportunity to see that there were other ways of thinking. I think it was through listening to those forms of music, and actually reading loads of interviews with with musicians at the time, when interviews were actually about information as opposed to selling t-shirts as they are now, that drew me to film, photography, art, literature, [disciplines] which were all crucial to my development.”

“Music has always been my alternative universe to this fucked up world, and it’s about getting hold of information in anyway you can that is contrary to the middle mass of nothingness… I think that through trying to understand our environment as opposed to just absorbing everything, I’ve often been drawn to things that are very anti, as opposed to social.” “In saying that, the fifteen years I’ve spent living in London has been the time that I’ve been making music properly, and London is probably the biggest influence on me actually. This city does leave it’s mark on you. Musically it’s an incredibly fertile city, so many influences and inspirations. I love and hate this city, and that’s what I tried to put across with London Zoo.”

www.atwarwithtime.com

Angels And Demons is due for release on the 25th of August 2014.