“A fundamental voice for little-known internet music”: 10 years of TT

Take a cursory flick through TT’s back catalogue and you’d be forgiven for thinking its output couldn’t get any further from the sticky floors and kitsch decor of an Oceana-like nightclub based in a town just outside London. It was from a club night at the Watford venue Hydeout, however, that the label first materialised.

The brainchild of Robert Venning, AKA DJ Pitch, and some friends, the event in their home town emerged in 2013 amid the peak of the ‘post-dubstep’ era as labels such as Night Slugs and Hessle Audio brought young clubbers together and drove a new buzz of excitement on UK dancefloors. “There weren’t a great deal of parties happening in Watford that I was really into musically, so myself and some friends took it upon ourselves to start doing something,” Venning says now of that time. “Through that, I started to meet people in the area – some of whom are still making music and DJing now – who were also into the same things, and a local radio station called I’m In Radio popped up too so we connected with them.”

A small community soon began to form with Venning being introduced to artists like Organ Tapes and ZINI, who have gone on to become core affiliates of TT as a label, while running the parties for around two years. “People I had met were making tracks and I’d also started connecting with other people online, so that was the point at which it became a label,” Venning says, crediting SoundCloud discoveries and his addition to a Facebook group called Classical Trax while in his early twenties as crucial to broadening his musical taste and guiding the early years of TT.

The early members of Classical Trax, he says, were “really into the phase of Night Slugs that followed the UK funky stuff when Jam City put out 'Classical Curves', and people were making music that was quite ‘80s Jam & Lewis-inspired, but also percussive house and techno. I really can’t downplay the importance of the community around that group in helping me build the label and my own sound.”

TT, initially known as Tobago Tracks, launched as a record label in 2014 with a series of compilations combining tracks from friends of the fledgling imprint with productions by artists hailing from four different countries: France, Turkey, the USA and China. It’s on the first release that followed them, however – 2015’s 'WORD LIFE' by Organ Tapes – that Venning believes the label began to actually find its voice. “One of the reasons I discount those initial compilations is because, at the time, I was still obsessively into this Night Slugs-adjacent sound and maybe it was all a little too indebted to that,” he says. “I think Organ Tapes’ album signalled a shift away from that. It started as this obsession with what people used to refer to as ‘club trax’, and then my interests became much broader towards the end of 2014 as I was introduced to more different music.”

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Throwing himself headfirst into the scene rather reductively at the time, and memeably in the present day, referred to as ‘deconstructed club’, London-based parties like Tropical Waste and Bala Club soon introduced Venning to reggaetón, dancehall and various US rap sounds that he hadn’t discovered before, serving as a great source of inspiration for TT moving forward. Early releases like WORD LIFE and 2016’s 8ULENTINA-curated compilation 'DISMISS U' (featuring contributions from DJ Haram, FOOZOOL and 8ULENTINA himself, among others) looked beyond 4x4 dancefloor functionality, folding in unorthodox rhythms, glitched-out noise and, in Organ Tapes’ case, autotuned vocals more akin to an Atlanta trap record.

With TT growing and consuming more of Venning’s time through its first couple of years, he ultimately took the decision to welcome a new voice into the fold to co-run the label in 2017. “I realised I couldn’t continue doing it on my own, so Gribs came on board,” Venning says. The pair had met via a Facebook group that Gribs had set up, called Anti-Bangers. “The spirit of that group,” Venning recalls, “was people talking about the weirder end of things around the Hessle Audio universe and the music that I was more involved in, which was adjacent to Bala Club and that ‘deconstructed club’ thing.”

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TT has consistently looked to provide a platform to lesser-known names since its earliest days, and Gribs was responsible for bringing a number of new faces into the label’s orbit while part of the set-up until 2020. One of those artists is object blue, who debuted in 2018 with 'Do you plan to end a siege?'. Centred around austere drum fills, garbled vocal samples and pulsating basslines, the release came about after Gribs discovered her music via SoundCloud. “That was the first time that one of our releases immediately took on a life of its own and quite quickly led to an artist’s career changing almost overnight, which was pretty cool to see,” Venning says.

The material that appeared on the EP was incidentally pulled together from a live set that object blue played at a live show attended by Venning at London’s Corsica Studios. Reflecting now on debuting via TT, she is effusive in her praise of the imprint. “It's a label of great curation, passionate about its taste for this weird corner of music,” she says. “There are bangers in the catalogue, but there is also intimate listening music. It’s not a club label, it's not a contemporary classical label; it's a label that releases good music, and crucially, what it judges to be good music, not anyone else. I'm so drawn to labels that release a wide range of musical genres, because what I make never seems to neatly fit into a genre.”

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BFTT and Iceboy Violet, both debuting in 2018, are two further Gribs discoveries – this time via real-life friendships – who have since continued to build their sound on a variety of respected labels, releasing records between them on the likes of Hyperdub, AD 93 and Local Action offshoot 2 B REAL. BFTT, real name Ryan Lewis, had been aware of TT since a friend, the Manchester-based DJ Hesska, played a track from Julien’s 'No Renaissance' EP at a party in Leeds in 2017. “We all went craaaazy for the ID,” he says. It’s been a fruitful partnership for him and TT, with his debut album, 2022’s 'Redefines', also coming out through the label. He also credits the label for introducing him to artists such as Junior XL, aircode, INTENTIONALLY COLD and Organ Tapes.

Since 2018, Venning has run TT alongside the more club-focused label All Centre. Differentiating the two, he believes the former’s less focused approach to genre has allowed the label to build its ‘sound’ organically. “With TT, I’m very interested in the artist as an individual and how they present their influences,” he says. “I don’t want them to make music that they simply think suits the label, because it might not fully represent them. TT, to me, is music that is idiosyncratic and feels very singular.”

Much of the continued development of the label’s sound in recent years has come down to the hands-on A&R and overall operations support of Maya Vika and Madjestic Kasual, the latter of whom went to school with Organ Tapes. “Having gone back to running it myself, I started wondering whether TT had run its course by the end of 2021,” Venning confesses. “I realised that I just needed to ask for help and open it up to other people just like before when Gribs became involved. They do a lot of the day-to-day running of the label now, so I guess it’s the first time I had ‘hired’ someone.”

Between them, they’ve continued TT’s mission statement of showcasing bright, new and experimentally-minded artists via SoundCloud finds and personal connections. Releases in recent years have seen the label explore scorched club tools (dj meddle’s 'le jeu du stop'), abstract techno ('scanner' by ex.sses), guitar-driven bedroom pop (Chareth Cutestory’s 'What Did I Miss') and vividly melodic IDM ('Schema' by Lovefear), among all manner of other sounds. “TT represents a fundamental voice for little-known internet music,” says Lovefear, nailing why the label has endured for what is now a decade of operations.

The imprint’s 10th anniversary was marked earlier this year with the release of the compilation 'A Place Outside Time', featuring new cuts from ongoing label affiliates such as 8ULENTINA, Iceboy Violet, Organ Tapes, Sylvere, object blue, GOMID and, naturally, Venning himself, operating under his DJ Pitch alias. BFTT, object blue and ex.sses also formed part of a bill that additionally included DJ Python, aya and lots more for a packed-out celebratory party at London’s Corsica Studios in July.

Bringing together so many figures who’ve been essential to the label’s evolution under one roof – Venning, Maya Vika, Madjestic Kasual and Gribs were also on the line-up – it was a fine opportunity to take stock of what TT represents as a label today. Organ Tapes, another artist who played at the Corsica Studios event and has been with the imprint since the very beginning, describes TT as “the opposite of a vanity project”, adding that the label has been “totally unguided by bullshit trends or clout-seeking”.

“The relationships you build with artists are what make it all worth doing,” Venning says, reflecting on the past 10 years. “‘Community’ has become such a meaningless buzzword in lots of instances, but being able to surround yourself with a crew of people who have a shared spirit in how they approach things is so important, and has been really personally enriching.”

'TT 10: A Place Outside Time' is out now, get it here

Christian Eede is News Editor at The Quietus and a freelance writer, follow him on Twitter