“We didn’t think it was going to last”
A true innovator and creative force within the British techno scene, Karl ‘Regis’ O’Connor talks us through 30 years of contorting the world’s dance floors to his own dark vision.
Photo: Nikki Sneakers
Emerging from Birmingham in the early 90s as part of a wave of artists exploring intensely heavy and punishing electronic music including Surgeon, Scorn and Female, Karl O’Connor’s music as Regis occupies the middle ground between early Detroit minimal techno (think Jeff Mills, Dan Bell, Robert Hood) and the UK’s electronic and industrial lineage (Fad Gadget, Throbbing Gristle, Soft Cell).
In 1993 Karl established Downwards, a platform to release both his own music and that of his contemporaries which over three decades has encompassed techno, noise, post-punk, DIY electronics, shoegaze and, more recently, goth-flecked atmospherics, all presented under a strongly unified aesthetic.
Caustic, experimental and resolutely underground, Downwards profoundly affected the darker corners of dance music, and even – on occasion – skirted close to the mainstream. Whether the brutal rhythms of British Murder Boys, Samuel Kerridge’s murky throb, or the delicate piano playing of Annie Hogan, the Downwards catalogue reflects Karl’s Catholic taste, making it as impressive as it is varied.
I first interviewed Karl for Conform to Deform as I knew he was a massive fan of Some Bizzare. In fact, it was his Baker’s Dozen for The Quietus that stopped me procrastinating and kickstarted me writing the book. While I was familiar with Karl’s work as Regis and British Murder Boys, I was unaware of the breadth – or volume – of his output. So it was with the zeal of the recently converted that I plunged into his back catalogue to educate myself, and many a late-night book editing session was soundtracked by his music.
Last year was the 30th anniversary of Downwards, so to celebrate I sat down with Karl to talk through three decades of punishing noise, rhythmic experiments and nocturnal adventures. Karl chose 12 records he was involved with, as an artist, producer or label boss, that best tell the story. I’ve compiled a playlist of his list which you can find at the end of the piece. Be warned, some of it is… intense.
The interview was conducted before the tragic death of Karl’s friend and Sandwell District band mate, Juan Mendez.
Antonym – Consumer Device (1993)
I used to work in a heavy metal record shop in Birmingham and one day this guy came in with a plastic bag and asked me if I wanted to buy some CDs. So I asked him what they were, and he said, “German reggae and American industrial music from Boston.” And I thought, OK, this could be interesting. And it turned out this guy was from Nuneaton and called Tony Burnham. I became really interested in him because he was one of the few people who had actually seen Robert Rental and The Normal live, so we became friends straightaway. He had equipment as well and made these little mad experimental bits of music under the name Antonym. So we got talking and we decided to make a single. At the same time, this guy called Dutch Henry, who was really into Krautrock, wanted to get involved and was willing to put some money into it but wanted to called the label Zeitgeist. We did a few singles with him, one of which was the Antonym one. Tony and I went to a proper studio in Stourbridge to record it, and as we did it at night we went into The Swan pub first, and Robert Plant was sitting in the corner. We thought, “Well, that’s a good omen.” But the guy in the studio hated us and thought what we were doing was the worst thing he’d ever heard, and he wanted to get it over as quick as possible. And that was the last time that we actually recorded in a proper studio. We released it through Southern, who I was working for at the time.
Nothing happened with the single, and we then released a second record on Zeitgeist, an album by Mark Farmer. We pressed 1,000, sold 15 and got seven returned. So I salvaged about 60 copies of the Antonym single, and re-issued it on my own label Downwards, which I set up with Peter Sutton, who recorded under the name Female. What was that great thing Gavin Friday said? “We had no plan, but we knew exactly what we were doing.” Antonym was completely against everything that was happening at the time, but it sold quite well, so we were off.
Surgeon – Surgeon EP (1994)
A lot of the local faces used to come into the record shop including Mick Harris, the drummer from Napalm Death who was central to everything we did. Without Mick, Downwards would not have happened in any way. He’d just left Napalm and was starting Scorn, and he’d come in the record shop and we’d talk about new music that was coming out at the time, and we both liked the early Warp stuff. And he said, “I know this guy Tony Child who’s doing this kind of techno, you might want to listen to him.” The tracks had been recorded in Mick’s back room, which was basically a downstairs toilet. And he introduced us and we became friends, and I asked Tony if Downwards could put out an EP, and he said, yeah. I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Initial copies came with a postcard in plastic bag, and we didn’t expect to sell any more than maybe 200 or something. And then all of a sudden, we had a phone call from the distributor, asking for more copies. And we said, sure how many do you want, and he said 500! In those days, you could turn vinyl around pretty quick, so we did those. About a week later he came back and said they needed to up the order to 3,000. They came in, I delivered them, and a week later they wanted another 3,000. I then had to do a P&D deal with the distributor, as I just couldn’t finance it at that stage. It just ran out of control straightaway. It turned out John Peel had played it, which helped, but really it was Jeff Mills, Dave Clark, and DJ Hell playing it out that had the biggest impact. It was just instantaneous.
Regis – Montréal (1995)
What I liked about techno was it allowed me to make electronic music without having to sing on it, which I’d tried. Acid House had made the style of electronic music I loved – stuff that had been revolutionary in the 80s – redundant. Electronic music in the 90s was faceless, and that was the whole point. You could be on the dole yet be selling thousands of records and no one would know!
At first I wasn’t DJing and I had no interest in making music, I wanted to run label, like Daniel Miller or Stevo. But then I saw techno as a vessel to get my ideas out there. Did I like dance music? No, I thought it was cheesy. I was completely against it. My ideas and influences were fully formed before I got involved in dance music, and I applied them to the existing frameworks. The interesting thing with dance music was you have a captive audience – with experimental music it’s three blokes in an art gallery. And it was still very DIY then, and under the radar. There was no real press apart from a few fanzines. We weren’t in Mixmag or any of that nonsense –they were the Osmonds and we were the Velvet Underground.
The big track off of the Montréal EP was Speak to Me, which is a seven-minute loop that changes and filters slightly. We put it out on the back of the Surgeon record and the same thing happened instantly. It sold so many copies I bought a house, but for the most part I funneled all the money back into the scene, which is never a good idea. But all of a sudden we were a proper record label.
Various – Hard Education (1997)
When people talk about Detroit techno it’s two distinctly different things. There’s the Derrick May, Juan Atkinson and Kevin Saunders take, which was more House influenced. Then there’s Jeff Mills, Robert Hood and Mike Banks – collectively known as Underground Resistance – who took a European aesthetic and applied it to Detroit sound. And what we were doing in Birmingham was the same but in reverse, creating this harsh, brutal funk.
There was a gap of about five years from 1993 to 1998, when techno was truly experimental – it was breaking the DNA of everything had gone before. There was us, Underground Resistance, Basic Channel in Germany, and Synewave in America, and we had the major labels on the run. They just didn’t understand the music or how we were shifting these units. There was no blueprint for it, we were just a bunch of kids running rings around the corporate structure. The Hard Education compilation captures that – the records we were putting out were completely raw, unedited, one-take performances – like classic dub plates made to be played in clubs.
My first DJ gig ever was in Philadelphia. I’d never done a live gig before as Regis and had no understanding of what was needed, but I went off to New York and did the gig. It went great and I ended up living in New York for a couple of years. It was an interesting time because all of a sudden, these scallywags started infiltrating airport business class lounges, travelling to DJ gigs around the world. It was really funny – we’d be going to all these incredible places for free but used to nick the toilet rolls from hotels ‘cos we had none at home. We didn’t think it was going to last.
Diversion Group – A Man Has Responsibilities (2000)
Downwards had all this massive success in the 90s and we were pigeonholed as a dance label, so in the 2000s we thought we’d branch out a bit. One thing we did was a series of 7”s of things our artists had recorded pre-Downwards. Surgeon released some of his early tape experiments, and I put out some electronic song-based stuff I’d recorded over a decade before. If you knew about Throbbing Gristle, Fad Gadget or early Soft Cell then you could see the influence, but the people who bought Downwards records didn’t because they were too young, so it was all new to them. This was pre-electroclash, and some people went with it, and others didn’t, but it gave me a chance to look forwards a bit because I wasn’t sure how much longer I wanted to be involved in making techno. I felt the real energy of the scene had been subsumed by the majors, and there were agents and a jet set of underground techno DJs, and a lot more infrastructure than there had been in the beginning. So this run of 7”s was about me recalibrating and cleaning the slate for what was to come next.
Surgeon/Regis – British Murder Boys (2001)
Tony had a run of amazing singles as Surgeon with Downwards, really huge, game-changing records. He then moved to Tresor Records in Berlin and became the iconic, global techno star he is today. We wanted to do something together and we were knocking names around, and the one that stuck was British Murder Boys. Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson from Coil chose that for us. I was living in London at the time listening to a lot of South London pirate stations, the early days of grime and dubstep. I wasn’t a huge fan of the music, but there was something very British about it, so Tony and I decided BMB would be our take on what being in a grime band would be like.
Again, it was a project that completely out of sync because in the early the early 2000s, minimal technical was in and harder industrial-tinged experimental techno was out. And we used to get into people’s faces when we played out, which was unimaginable at that time, because clubbing isn’t about that. It’s supposed to be about being free and together, but it’s actually very rigid and insular, and when you snap people out of that the effect could be pretty fucking fantastic. I used to get kicked out of my own gigs halfway through for going into the crowd, and even got arrested in Spain. And Tony was always egging me on to do it!
Sandwell District – Feed Forward (2011)
BMB ground to a halt in 2008 – artistic differences, and all that – and Sandwell District started pretty much straightaway. I’d become very good friends with DJ and producer Juan Mendez from Los Angeles, who records under the name Silent Servant. We started Sandwell District together, and we developed a very strong working relationship. I hate using the word collective, but Sandwell was a collaboration between a group of people and while it wasn’t a commercial venture as such, it reflected the times a lot more accurately than most stuff on Downwards ever did. I didn’t really make music for it, I had more of an overseeing role, so most of the music was made by Female, Function (Dave Sumner) and Silent Servant. I never really had a plan with Downwards, but I definitely did with Sandwell District, and it was massively successful, weirdly. I was living in Berlin at the time and it was reflecting what was going on in clubs like Berghain, planing off the rougher edges of the ‘Birmingham sound,’ and being a bit more minimalist.
Sandwell District only did one album, which sold out in a day. It’s one of the most collectible records in dance music history, it regularly goes for anything up to £400, which is why we re-released it earlier this year [2023]. We’re going to playing live again soon and putting out some new stuff too at some point.
Tropic of Cancer – Be Brave (2011)
After Sandwell District, Juan and I carried on working together, and he sent me some demos that he’d produced for his partner Camella Lobo under the name Tropic of Cancer. They were fantastic, a kind of post-punk 4AD thing. It seemed I was again in the right place at the right time and Downwards released their first couple of singles. We sent the second, Be Brave, to Richard H Kirk from Cabaret Voltaire to remix and he emailed back saying, “Are you taking the piss? This is the Cabs!” Once I’d assured him it wasn’t actually his old band, he did the remix and it really took off. Robert Smith was a fan and put them on at his Meltdown festival in 2018. After Surgeon, they were my second – and last – big signings. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to sign some records that have gone on to be pretty successful, but passed on them to put out something that was more interesting. Tropic of Cancer was one of those rare occasions when the two things crossed.
Ora Iso – Image Certifies (2018)
I left Berlin in a fever and under a cloud, and moved back to New York, and started meeting music people rather than people involved in clubs and dance music. And one of those was Jim Siegel of The Raspberry Bulbs. He played me his roommate Jason’s band, Ora Iso, who were working with legendary New York Avant Garde artist Lary 7. They’d recorded this amazing kind of Pussy Galore, grungy thing which was really against what was going on in New York at the time, so we put the record out and I got them a slot at the Berlin Atonal festival. They played an amazing gig and promptly split up. And that is Downwards really – so close and yet...
Ann Margaret Hogan – Honeysuckle Burials (2020)
I was a huge fan of Marc Almond, particularly the records he made with pianist Annie Hogan as Marc and the Mambas and The Willing Sinners. Mark Farmer had been chatting to Annie online, and he put us in touch. Annie was so fucking great, she didn’t know who I was or anything about me, so she was rightly super cautious about it, but we chatted on the phone and it was almost like we were old mates. I said, Look, I can get you to the level that you deserve to be at, and she took a huge leap of faith with me. Downwards put out a compilation of her older solo material, and then we started putting out her new piano records. I’ve got a great distributor with Boomkat, and they really understood what she was doing and got it out to people who would be into it. I was really proud of how it worked out, and eventually we started working together. It’s an easy working relationship. She’s the musician creating these beautiful pieces of music, and I mess it up by putting noise over the top!
EROS – A Southern Code (2022)
I was recording my first solo album for 20 years, Hidden in This is the Light that You Miss (2022), and I was working with my friend Liam Andrews of MY Disco and Annie, because I wanted to bring something new to the process. And we recorded some of the sessions in Berlin with Boris Wilsdorf, Einstürzende Neubauten’s long-time sound engineer and producer. And that changed everything. He’s easily the best producer I’ve ever worked with, and the synergy in the room was amazing. Once the album was done I wanted to keep it rolling, initially for another Regis record, but after about a day, I just sat down with them all and said, We have to start a band with this stuff. And it became the EROS project. That’s the record I’ll live and die by. We’re halfway through recording an album, which will be out next year, and we also played at this year’s Atonal, which was amazing.
Various – Spasms and Savagery (2023)
I put this compilation together to mark 30 years of the label, and it’s a bit strange seeing it all together in one place. It just reminds me of one wonderful moment in the mid 90’s when we had the major labels on the ropes. They were blindsided by a whole new breed of independent producer and labels, ones that operated outside of any existing structure and framework. I remember EMI press office calling me up and asking who did our PR because the first Surgeon LP had got blanket coverage in the music press. When I said we didn’t have one they got slightly irritated, thinking I was holding out on them. When I said, Maybe just put out good music out and it might get noticed, and they hung up on me! That’s when I knew we were doing something truly important.
Spasms and Savagery is a cassette-only release. I’m not particularly into the tape thing but it allows us to be as agile as we used to be with vinyl, which we can’t be right now. So it looks like we’re going to be celebrating 30 years as a record label without actually releasing any records. Which is actually quite a Downwards thing to do!
#nowplaying
So, I finally got to interview Blixa Bargeld from Einstürzende Neubauten this week. They have an excellent new album out in April, and I spoke to Blixa for a piece I’m writing for The Quietus.
I’ve been a huge Neubauten fan since their 1985 Halber Mensch album, so talking to Blixa was a big deal for me, particularly as he’d declined to contribute to Conform to Deform. I kept the fact that I was the author of the book until about half way through the interview, as I wasn’t sure how he’d take it. When I did tell him, he laughed and said, “Ah, so that was you, was it?” And then launched into a five minute diatribe outlining how much he hates Some Bizzare label boss Stevo, after which he added, “So, as you can see, I was unable to contribute.”
I think humour is something that’s overlooked when it comes to Neubauten. Blixa has a rare dry wit that to my ears is all over the band’s records, particularly the new one, Rampen. Subtitled Alien Pop Music, I think it’s going to surprise a lot of people, especially those for who Neubauten are stuck in their 80’s ‘metal bashing’ iteration. “In a parrellel universe, Neubauten could be as big as The Beatles,” Blixa told me. If that’s the case, then Rampen is their White Album.
What a fantastic band they are.
For those who read to the end…
This is the fourth post from The Dancing Architect, so by now you’ll have an idea of the kind of things I write about. So far, it’s been free, and I’m going to keep that choice open, but from next week I’m going to activate the option to pay for the content if you’ve got a spare few quid and fancy helping to cover costs (for example my free Shutterstock access runs out soon).
I’ve got some great stuff coming up, not just full transcripts from archival pieces, but also new interviews exclusive to The Dancing Architect, never to appear anywhere else. Whether you choose to support financially or not, thanks for staying with this endeavour so far, and I hope you’ll stick around for what’s coming up.
Finally, I have to say I’m loving St Vincent’s new industrial-lite direction. She’s always had it in her to make a harsh and heavy rock album – there’s a great clip of her playing Big Black’s Kerosine that’s worth seeking out – and Broken Man is an indication that’s just what she’s done with All Born Screaming. Plus the video is brilliant.