Q&A: Kode9

Hyperdub boss Kode9 releases his third album next month. It'll be his first without longtime collaborator Spaceape, who died of cancer last year, and represents something of a new beginning for the Scottish-born, London-based artist.

Unlike 'Memories Of The Future' and 'Black Sun', there are no vocals, but there will be an accompanying A/V show which will see Kode9 work with visual artist Lawrence Lek when performing in live spaces. What 'Nothing' does share with those previous albums is a sense of standing on the cutting edge, Kode yet again crafting an LP that sounds like little else.

He also lost another friend in 2014: the inimitable DJ Rashad, who took Chicago's footwork sound to the world and was head of Teklife, a fervent squad of musicians who carry on his legacy today. Kode's been obsessed with footwork, touring with the Teklife stable and releasing tracks by the likes of Rashad, Spinn and Taye via Hyperdub.

Its speedy rhythms can be heard throughout 'Nothing', forming the basis of his new productions and his own vision of future-facing dance music. Last year Hyperdub celebrated its 10th birthday with parties across the globe and records from Fatima Al Qadiri, Cooly G, Flowdan and Ikonika, as well as a series of 10-year comps and a massive comp from the Teklife camp.

Kode9 also received an Innovator award at the AIM Independent Music Awards. But this year has been quieter for the label and its founder, with Kode focusing on his own solo work in the wake of a bittersweet 12 months. We talked to him about the concept of 'Nothing', his continued love of footwork and why 150bpm is the magic number.

Can you explain the concept of 'Nothing'?

Last year was pretty intense for us and I was making an album but I ditched it on New Year's Eve. I was like, 'fuck this', and trashed everything I'd made apart from one track and started again. I felt like I had to go back to zero. When I restarted the album, I went with the idea of not worrying too much about what it was about. But I felt very emotional about 2014, so "nothing" is actually the opposite of what the album is. Because I had so many emotions that I couldn't put into words, calling the album 'Nothing' helped me escape that situation. Towards the end of making it, I started to notice every time I saw a zero. Then I read a book about the history of zero in maths and it was fascinating. The more I read, the more nothing (or zeros, or voids or vacuums) started to seem much more complex. . The concept's also been developing into a live A/V show that we're going to do next year, which is an evacuated, fully automated, luxury hotel called the Notel which has got weird quantum anomalies going on, like two things being in the same place at the same time. I'm working with [visual artist] Lawrence Lek, who simulates neoliberal architecture and tries to critique it and take it elsewhere, so that's what we're doing with this idea of the Notel.

When did you come up with the idea for Notel?

Lawrence got in touch to see if there were any projects at Hyperdub that needed visuals. I'd watched his Unreal Estate piece and I really liked the way it took an animated, interactive brochure for some elite place and did things that, without being too heavy-handed, were visually critiquing it from the inside. Nothing seems to be an idea that's at the heart of neoliberalism.

How does it affect you as an artist when you lose someone like Spaceape?

All the albums I'd done [with him] before were like a conversation. For the first album, I'd make a track, he'd tell me what he thought, do some vocals, then I'd tell him what I thought. We'd change what we'd done, meet in the middle. For the second, he had all the lyrics already written and I wrote the tracks specifically for his voice. Whereas for this, there was nothing. No concept, no guiding story.

How come you remade your seminal 2006 record '9 Samurai' this year?

There's no reason why I did anything in January apart from having so much energy to make music and not really caring about anything. I'd had the idea to do it for ages but it just happened. I felt it needed an upgrade, which is why it's called '9 Drones'.

And why did you want to make music at 150bpm?

I've been trying for a couple of years to make tracks at this speed that fill the hole between grime and dubstep and footwork. It's like a little rope ladder to enable my sets to get faster, without there being this sudden shift [in speed].

Why has footwork struck such a chord with you?

Because all of dance music is so fucking slow! I feel like it's been getting slower in the last few years and I don't approve of it. I've had a thirst for speed since the early days of jungle, and things have been gradually slowing down – dubstep is super-slow. You've got people slowing grime down to 130bpm and slowing jungle down to 125bpm and I just don't get it. What was lacking for me in non-house music was a bit of energy. Over the last couple of years I've spent time getting to the footwork part of my sets because there's loads of different music that I want to play, but there's no doubt that the bit I enjoy the most is the footwork part. When people go off to it, they go off in a way that I don't see with other types of music. There's a frantic deliriousness that's quite special.

Is there any other dance music that's interesting you right now?

There's lots of interesting stuff but what pisses me off is that there's a lot of stuff that's clearly not dance music and is super interesting, but people talk about it like it's some new revelation. There's a lot of stuff that's splintered off the side of grime and it's interesting but I wish people would stop saying it's posing something radical to dance music. There's always been non-dance music, it can be played in a club, but stopping people dancing isn't really that interesting and is very easy to do.

An increasing number of artists like Machinedrum and Egyptrixx are making music for a world they've invented. Why do you think that is?

Obviously the world's in a pretty fucked up place right now, so there's an impetus for people to imagine alternative situations and environments or to speculate with things we already have, try and twist them in other ways. Certainly what seems like part of the idea for the ' Nothing' A/V project is to speculate what a fully automated, luxury hotel would be like if rich people disappeared and it became fair game. On 'Black Sun' we did a developed thing but we never took it into visuals: it was all in the lyrics and the album art. We were interested in sonic fictions around the music; the story we made for that album was basically about Spaceape's fight with cancer, but we didn't want it to be personal. We preferred to depersonalise it and place it in a global context, make it more about a global condition. The nothing thing is similar. Essentially, the project has come from something that's very personal, but I'm not interested in doing biographical projects. It's become something much more general, and hopefully has some ideas in it that everyone will be able to understand.

'Nothing' by Kode 9 is out on November 9