Choice Mix: Sim Hutchins

Once a month, since the start of 2016, Sim Hutchins and O.D. Davey have uploaded their Headcase sketches to Hutchins’s Soundcloud page. An offshoot of the ragged club experimentations of independent London radio station Radar Radio’s BODY COUNT show, it’s “ten minutes of masochistic mindful meditation, designed as a handy self un-help experience,” says Hutchins, his sincerity served with a smirk.

Headcase operates on the same unsettling axis as British comedic writer Chris Morris’s Blue Jam broadcasts, in which ambient music lays a bed for bleak storytelling. The most recent Headcase has Davey riffing about eating a tub of ice cream before smashing someone’s face into a pavement. It’s embedded with fragments of “I Will Unify The Hood Through My Vision,” the lead single from Hutchins’s debut album I Enjoy To Sweep a Room. The track lays pulsing drones over a sheet of opaque black metal: a techno interlude that feels like Grouper going toe-to-toe with Dean Blunt. As a listener, you wonder what Hutchins is meditating on.

Hutchins lives in a village called Stansted Mountfitchet. It’s in northwest Essex, so it’s close enough to London to spend his nights in clubs, but far enough away that he can create in isolation. “I think Stansted is a weird place to outsiders,” he says. “It’s ancient and has the remnants of a castle. You can’t help but think that bloody battles occurred here over pointless stuff. The same is true nowadays, but the battles are outside the public houses at closing time.”

The videos that Hutchins makes to accompany his music deals with those types of battles. They’re littered with meme-tastic quips that hint at futile moral outrage, drunken night bus rides and austerity nostalgia. The latter is a topic that particularly concerns him. He’s one of millions of kids who watched the Gallagher brothers drink champagne with a newly elected Tony Blair on TV. “I’m always wondering to what extent nostalgia is being commodified and the way it’s in danger of becoming normal to bask in it,” he explains. “I look at the #TBT hashtag and wonder whether it’s healthy to be living in the past – especially one that’s being recycled and fed back to us at an alarming speed. It’s a present that’s not as concerned with reinvention as I would have liked.”

Hutchins’s musical and visual designs work together as a vigorous reprocessing of material in order to pinpoint their flaws. “When I’m in the studio, I’m not looking at my drum machine and thinking, ‘I need to make the perfect acid trax pastiche’ with it. I’m thinking, ‘How far do I need to go before it sounds as far removed from an acid track as possible?’ and to detach it from that heritage. I seem to surround myself with old things that I hope I can break new ground with.”

For his videos, he uses cheap HD cameras that he buys off eBay. The video for “I Will Unify the Hood through My Vision” uses the type of early Internet language that trumpeted the idea of transcending the physical in order to create a self that exists free from societal constraints. “I like the idea that you can be whoever you want to be on the Internet, and I thought this was one of the main pulls for myself and a lot of early adopters... Policy is obviously trying to erode this option now, as it’s clearly dangerous [to the policy makers],” an erosion that he sees as counterproductive to honest self-expression. “The fact you have to use your real name on Facebook denies you an element of the freedom of self-fluidity (whether that’s gender, or just wanting to be addressed by your nickname) that I see as a right of every human being.”

When it comes to his music, he feels an affinity with black metal. “A lot of it was intended to piss a lot of people off, and this is something that I enjoy doing,” he says. “Before black metal, you’d have a metal band record their album in a million dollar studio. It would be nicely mixed by the top engineers, and with all the vocals sitting right. What black metal did was flip that idea. They’d use shitty headphones to record whole drum tracks, make the vocals as indiscernible as possible, and 99% of people in the population fucking hate that. That 1% is who I feel that I’m directing my music at. Zoom into any perfect object close enough, and you can see somewhere the ugliness it’s made up from. I try to utilise and almost celebrate these flaws.”

You can hear the approach in the way that Hutchins tears down atmospheric genres that skewer linear structures: trap, post-punk, drone and techno. I Enjoy to Sweep a Room is a mock-meditation on wandering in the gloom, delivered with the humor of a pisstaker who does want to be taken seriously. Probably. “I’m extremely glad that I didn’t choose to pick up a guitar and sing. Instrumental tracks speak volumes. I was actually worried that my album would be too revealing. Then again, I’m a fan of the saying ‘May the bridges you burn light the way.’”

Listen to Sim Hutchins’ Choice Mix on RBMA Radio here.