“Quite abstract and absurd.”
That’s how Heatsick describes his new record Re-Engineering, yet he’s clear enough about its function, explaining, “I’d like people to use my record as a manual or toolbox to play around with.”A toolbox to explore what, exactly, becomes the theme of our conversation – and what emerges is just how fluid Re-Engineering is. Its principal theme is ecology, but not in the conventional, natural sense. Rather, Heatsick takes a sideways view of the concept, questioning the nature of public and private spaces and cityscapes, and the feedback loop between people and their urban and intellectual environments.
Steven Warwick still works within the warm deep house framework he’s explored on records for the likes of Rush Hour (Convergence) and Not Not Fun (Perpendicular Rain), as well as his current label PAN (which also released Intersex and Déviation). Re-Engineering, however, has a sharper focus. It’s split into what Warwick calls “digestible” tracks, in contrast to the Extended Play multi-sensory live sets he’s become known for, where he plays a Casio keyboard and loops polyrhythmic percussion. These shows might sound naïve on paper, but in reality, they’re complex and enthralling, swallowing whole dancefloors of people into deep, hypnotic grooves for hours on end in a rich, multi-sensory overload. 
On Re-Engineering, Warwick continues to toy with the prolonged anticipation key to the extended disco edit, but counters it with truncation, resculpting the same core track over the course of the album into 11 new forms. As he puts it in the manifesto that accompanies the record: “The tracks on this album are floating like elastic goo, putty, or a malleable brain, remoulded, reshaped, re-branded, rebooted, and shifting definition.” There’s certainly a playfulness to both Warwick’s sonics and his wit, but he’s equally serious about processing the problems of modern life: FOMO, but also “the world heating up and speeding up, climate change into car crash, into clear chanel.” That last isn’t a typo: Warwick makes T-shirts that pun on the Chanel logo to read “Climate Change” and “Car Crash”.
The shirts are typical of his satirical humour – informed, he tells me, by listening to Chris Morris’ Blue Jam late at night after John Peel’s radio shows – that continually shifts the import of his music, and makes it ever more difficult to define. But to define it would be to miss the point entirely. It’s an album of blurred lines: between the bodily and the cerebral, between affect and disconnect, between private and public worlds, between the darkly funny and the deadly serious. Indeed, the only single thing you can confidently say about Re-Engineering is that it exists in a constant state of flux. As you might expect, my conversation with Warwick runs the gamut of topics, from climate change and the current model of music consumption to Samuel Delany’s fiction and Spring Breakers.
There’s a lot to unpack with Re-Engineering, so I’d quite like to use your artist’s statement as the jumping-off point, starting with the reinterpretation of ecology.
It came from stuff I’d been reading, and it’s something I’ve slowly been developing over the course of my work. It developed out of both Intersex, which looked at the idea of gender and sexuality not being fixed but on a constantly shifting scale, and then Déviation, which played more with the cityscape and city planning, and the Haussmannisation of Paris. It’s just a continuation of that, really.
It feels more expansive and dense with ideas than previous records.
There is a lot going on, which is one of the reasons I wanted the record to be digestible – in that there are eleven tracks, and it’s quite compact. It’s almost like an onslaught of information or stimuli. It’s really just stuff that’s in my head that I wanted to throw back out into the world. I also wanted to reflect the condition of the world where we’re bombarded with information that we want to process and interlink and interrelate. So I see it as a record of how we interact with our environment, and how our environment interacts with us in a symbiotic way.
And when you say you wanted to make it digestible, how did you go about that?
Formally, it’s quite standard – I’ve shortened tracks to a length that’s easier to process. But I’ve not attempted to dumb anything down. I’m interested in idea of duration. That’s part of my live set, especially for a longer time, I’m interested in the perception and reception of repeated aural stimuli over a long period of time. That comes out of being in clubs, especially in Berlin [where Warwick is based], and seeing a long DJ set, and how the music changes very slowly over time. The same environment can be altered by different factors upon the senses, and your awareness of the situation heightens. In that way, you link the immediate environment to the ecology.
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There was a lot of that on Intersex and Déviation, these interminable grooves you could get lost in. Re-Engineering feels more disparate.
I wanted it to feel disruptive, like flicking channels or something. At the same time, I’m very interested in the anticipatory moments in music or sound. If you think about the buildup to a track before something changes, I wanted to prolong that anticipation, and I feel that’s what happens in an extended disco edit. You prolong an ecstatic moment. If I was to play in a concert setting, which I did recently, I have to play in a thirty-minute format, which for what I’m trying to do either doesn’t work or is just a very different experience. The time of day also plays a big role.
The Extended Play sets are definitely peak time music, whereas Re-Engineering does actually make me think of flicking through channels. The vocals on the title track reminded me of TV. Like old BBC documentaries, or Look Around You.
That’s a friend of mine, Hanne Lippard. She’s a visual artist who also works with text and voice and poetry. I was interested in working with her precisely for that reason – she has this BBC English style pronunciation. Which is also kind of funny, because she’s Norwegian. I like her delivery; I like the effect that has on the list, and the associations that brings up.
The other vocals on the album are yours, right?
Yeah. I do all of the singing apart from Hanne on ‘Re-Engineering’ and ‘Watermark’ and Jesse Garcia on ‘Dial Again’.
There’s a greater range of samples than in previous records as well, right?
Yes, and also more of me imitating or emulating certain sounds. I was playing a samba beat and I almost wanted it to sound generic, as if I took it from a sample bank, or like something from a BBC advert for a sporting event. I wanted to pervert certain genres, while simultaneously respecting them, remoulding them and waging attrition on them and their reception, like a wave on a rock. ‘Watermark’ is a play on a jingle. When Hanne says “This is PAN”, it’s a play on a Nicki Minaj drop where she says “This is Bad Boy Records.” I heard her sing that as a watermark, and thought it would be funny to change it to PAN. I was thinking of leaked records, and the divide between private and public realms.
Where do you see your music fitting in with regard to private and public spaces? Of course, on the one hand you engage deeply with very public surroundings and spaces, yet at the same time the music sonically evokes a communal but also quite insular vibe.
I guess it’s also about trying to define what public and private are these days. A large part of our surroundings and experiences are clearly privatised these days. Even if you look at the word ‘transparency’, it’s often used in relation to scandal, but what does it really mean? Just because something material is transparent, it doesn’t mean that we can reach the thing we’re seeing, or have access to it.
Going back to Déviation and the Haussmannisation of Paris, wasn’t the goal of that policy to turn the city into a far more public space?
Yeah, when Haussmann was commissioned to redevelop the city, it was because a lot of the streets were narrower, so they were easy to barricade – and so stir up public unrest. So clearing them for these grand boulevards had a twofold function: it was a demonstration of state power, but also crushed people’s attempts to seal themselves off from it.
As well as the public/private divide, there are lots of other conflicts and balances in your work, particularly with regard to the body and mind, or the surrounding environment and personal response. It never falls on one side or the other.
Yes, these tracks are supposed to be malleable. That’s why, production-wise, I made sure they were quite liquid. There’s a lot of bleed between the tracks. Sonically, I wanted them to sound as liquefied as possible, because – deliberately – I’m not trying to make a definitive statement. I don’t want the music to be reified. It’s a problem of definition, really. I see it as a double-edged sword: if you allow something to be defined, it can be captured, and then second-guessing and deception can come into play.
And when you say in your manifesto that people don’t really listen to records any more, do you mean in the sense that people don’t listen to physical objects any more?
People will check out the Soundcloud or the video, and I’m fine with that. It’s how people listen to music now, and the way music is thrown into Soundcloud or Youtube’s algorithms or iTunes libraries is part of the new ecology.
It’s interesting you’re okay with that. I think a lot of artists view it as a necessary evil, and are opposed aesthetically to the idea of taking bits of art out of joint, or choosing a highlight from a work that was conceived as a unified whole.
Part of the theme of the record is malleability and different emergent states. It’s part of the modern landscape of how we process information and music and stimuli, so why shouldn’t the way people consume music be a part of it? The album’s like a pack of cards: it has its own structure, but it’s also subject to change and collapse. The record is quite circular, too, because of course it’s the same track, slightly altered throughout. I actually wrote the text as a map of an exhibition, and it was altered by the way Hanne read it. I was so used to her voice that when it came for me to record my vocals, it felt like a karaoke track. I really liked that, because it created a dissonance with my own cognitive pattern.
It goes back to what you were saying about disruption.
I feel like it goes hand in hand with the record. It’s also a satire on self-help, so I don’t see why I can’t revel in and enjoy it too.
The playful and serious elements work unusually well together. Music with academic or political concerns so often takes itself super seriously.
I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive. I’m the kind of person who will read a book and then go out and get drunk. I hate the idea of “IDM” or something. Why does something have to be defined as intelligent? That in turn provokes a kind of anti-intellectualism, which is so boring. It’s just a minefield. But people will say they’re against over-intellectualisation, or critical theory, even when their music is totally informed by it. It’s becoming a Spring Breakers kind of thing.
Spring Breakers? How so?
It’s got this HD, shiny aesthetic, and Skrillex is on the soundtrack, but at the same time it’s a good film. It’s about these incredibly wealthy schoolgirls, like ‘Common People’ by Pulp. They go on a weekend adventure, all the poor people get killed, and then they just go back to school. It’s so banal but quite funny. There are these crazy moments of pure evil; actions or images that you don’t need words for, but that encapsulate something that’s very now. Musicians often want to sound timeless, but I think it’s great to sound throwaway, and not be so precious. Sounding of-the-moment is nothing to be ashamed of.
Often when people consciously try to sound timeless they end up sounding dated.
Yes. Goldie called his record Timeless, but it’s redolent of a specific time. A lot of art is about documentation, too. That’s what’s funny about people making music specifically about the internet – it gets posted on the internet and feeds back onto itself. In Berlin, I’m surrounded by people making that kind of art and it’s influenced what I do in some way.
Is that what you mean when you talk about “Re-cognizing the virtual” in your manifesto?
Sort of. I like how in books by JG Ballard or Samuel Delany, something fictional will become absorbed into reality. There’s a 1985 book by Samuel Delany called Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand that basically anticipates the internet. His books are saturated with ideas, like overload. He has an idea called General Information, where you can live on a planet and if you have an idea or question, then there’s a brain implant that will give you the answer in your head. And people suffer from cultural fugue – they’re overloaded with information and so they die.
Re-Engineering definitely brings that to the fore; as though the challenge of modern life is our ongoing attempt to process all the information we’re presented with.
Exactly, but I don’t view it as dystopian. I think it just deals with what’s happening now. I make these T-shirts that play on the Chanel logo that say “Climate Change” and “Car Crash.” It’s a comment on participation: how do we participate in the grander scheme, and the circulation of exchange, whether that’s charity or recycling? It references the loop of recycling, and the idea of climate change as a fashion statement. Even that was rebranded from global warming – the idea that you can make change.
I guess the record is political in asking how you can have any effect on a large scale. I’m not anti- or pro- any of it and I’m not into making value judgements; I’m just interested in it. We look at climate change as if it’s a future event, like a fantastical tabloid assault. But we’re always in a crisis – financial, or personal, or ecological – and it’s already happening, so we need to bring this future dread into contemporary life.
