Black Dog Productions- Every Man and Woman Is a Star

"Creativity is a genuinely interactive process between us and the people that listen to our music. Anything we say is just as valid as the opinion of somebody that actually goes out and spends their hard-earned cash on our music.

What greater achievement could there be in today's mainstream arena than to have somebody buy an album like Unsavoury Products- Rather than the latest "Now, That's What I call a Compilation to make a Corporate Label Even Richer" generic album-|

Long dedicated to expressing themselves purely, without compromise or dilution, Black Dog Productions' latest manifesto is expressed through their new long player Unsavoury Products, a co-production recorded with French poet Black Sifichi, which is dedicated to the late, great William Burroughs (one of America's greatest and hardest living authors of the 20th century). Maintaining their trademark electronic musicality (previously expressed most successfully on 1993's Warp album Bytes), the new record is dominated by Sifchi's state-of-consciousness spoken word raps though repeated plays bring out their relentless ear for a surprisingly catchy tune.

In keeping with their no compromise refusal to be filtered, the interview was conducted via email, with skrufff's Jonty Adderley.


Skruffff: How much is the new album designed as a complete entity-

Black Dog Productions: "Unsavoury Products should really be heard as a seamless journey, it's an approach that many of the Beat authors subscribed to. An obvious example is the writing style of (Jack) Kerouac in On The Road. You can dip into our album at any point, or follow the complete journey. Material of this nature
is very demanding as it requires an emotional contribution from the listener, and this is becoming increasingly rare in music today. Creativity is dismissed in preference to commercialism.

If you let go of your expectations and allow yourself to be swept along by Sifichi's voice, and our music, you will (hopefully) be rewarded by your own emotional
contribution to the material. If you're unwilling to make a contribution, the material will be unpalatable, at best. Press reaction has been highly revealing in this respect."


Skrufff: The album is dominated by Sifichi's spoken word; what was the process of writing the words-

Black Dog Productions: "We applied William Burroughs cut-up technique throughout, on both Sifichi's vocals and the musical content. The album took months to create as we threw ideas at each other until they combined, using samples of his voice and material from our archives. Most of the original material was created in San Francisco, the spiritual home of the beats. The album grew, organically.

If we'd all sat in a recording studio and said "let's do track 4 today" it would have been fake, artificial and manufactured. The material is real, emotionally and creatively, right down to the final track, which Sifichi wrote on the Paris Metro. There's a lot of pain and joy in there, it's visceral and real."

Skrufff: On one track you talk of "swimming against the tide of ever increasing cultural conformity"; why is this trend occurring-

Black Dog Productions: "No individual is to blame, it's the 'music industry' as a whole. Creative experimentation is barely tolerated within any musical genre today... We used to celebrate individual ideas and breaking away from the norm, but now it's barely accepted, and there is almost no outlet remaining to present your art. This is not the case in any other genre; film-makers are financially
supported and encouraged to experiment (perfectly illustrated by the work of
artists such as David Lynch, Atom Egoyan or Peter Greenaway) and authors can
write new ideas, with the relative confidence that they will be embraced and
have an outlet, to sit on a shelf in the high street, and be discovered.

But, can you imagine a book shop deciding to only stock the "Top 40" best
sellers- Does that encourage creative Tags

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