Sometimes you just have to make music for the sake of making music. You know what it's like when you fiddle with a sound, a sample, a preset. Something might click and, like a kid pulling at a thread at the bottom of his jumper, you just can't stop.
James Braddell - aka Funki Porcini - had that itch to dig through charity shop records and promotional flexi-discs and load an ever-increasingly kooky batch of sounds into his sampler, just for the fun of it. The result was the bonkers little album Hed Phone Sex - a wonderfully woozy low-bpm trip through the type of dubby bass, choice dialogue snippets, and precision drum programming, that would come to define the mid-90s era of Ninja Tune and trip-hop.
"It was very much like, 'Let's go on a journey'", says Braddell. "I wanted to play around and make good beats, but also add something dreamier into it all, I think. It would end up quite psychedelic, but I wasn't really pushing for that at the time. I just thought I wanted to make things a bit more interesting, just for me."
Braddell indulged himself. He would mic up frozen lakes and skim chunks of ice across to get sounds, pitch-shift his own voice to make up bizarre characters, and spend a week finding just the right snare to add to his already masterfully layered drum loops. All this in an era when the degree by which samples needed to be stretched was worked out using a calculator and note pad.
"It's so funny thinking back to that period," says Braddell. "Now, everybody has the means to record sound so easily. One forgets how much of a dedicated pursuit it was back then. I was compelled to labour through it."
Here, James Braddell talks us through Hed Phone Sex track by track.
A Word Of Vice
"I got the samples for this one off an old flexi-disc called Sonya's Sex Diary that came free with an old porn mag. It was a sort of really dirty [adopts hushed sexy tones] 'Come over to the bed…' thing. It was pretty hilarious. My brother gave me that one. It used to amuse me so I thought I'd use it here. It sets the tone up for the record as well. It's a seduction record."
B Monkey
"A film script that someone gave me to read inspired this. I put together a nice groove inspired by the story. I always liked grooves where everything was a bit late, and everything falls a little bit late here. It's those slightly off rhythms that I like.
"There's the sound of arcing electricity sampled in there. I wanted to use noises as well as melodies in these songs. I was after anything that could make an atmosphere, really."
Dubble
"There is a bass sample in there from an old reggae record which I manipulated and twisted. I used to listen to a lot of that and dub when I was quite young. I always thought that as a musical style it was probably the most original thing that was around at that time in my life. I've always like dub because of the emptiness of it."
King Ashabanapal Pt1
"That was based around a flexi-disc that was given to me of an American evangelical preacher doing a sermon about King Ashurbanipal, a Biblical figure, and not a very nice one.
"I really liked stretching things out, as you can tell, and changing the speed. It was a lot more difficult to do back then. I'd stretch things out according to the musical timing and pattern. I would grab a sample and take it a third, then take it a fourth, until it was sounding good."
"This is like an underwater track. Fuck me, this is over nine minutes long! How indulgent!
The Deep
"This is like an underwater track. Fuck me, this is over nine minutes long! How indulgent!
"When I was making that record I was just indulging myself. I'm not that good at writing songs, if you see what I mean. Sometimes you just need more time with a track.
"This album was all about me finding a way of being comfortable making music on my own. So, as I
was developing the Funki Porcini thing, I was just really enjoying making music."
King Ashabanapal Pt2
"This was originally all one track, then I thought it would be better as two. I touched on drum 'n' bass rhythms in my drum programming here, with a bit of Beenie Man thrown in over the top. The first thing I'd ever heard that was anything like that rhythm was when I was living in Italy and we had this mixtape from a girl living in Oxford. She was playing everything too fast. This was before jungle and drum 'n' bass or anything like that. I just remember thinking at the time that it sounded great, and that it was a very original approach.
"I used to like speeding up just the end of a bar, so it wasn't all running at that rate. I'd take snippets and chuck them in at double-time."
Michael's Little Friend
"This track just skips. It was a joke, like the listener's CD player wasn't working, or that the CD was scratched. It was me recreating the sound that CD players made when they were on the blink. Then I added a message at the end explaining that. I got an American friend in and recorded them for that one. I just told them that I wanted to make a track where nothing can play it."
White Slave
"I sampled the dialogue for this one off an old Black Beauty record. It was narrated from the horse's perspective. The horse has been sent to market and the buyers are slapping the horse around to see if it's in good nick. I thought I'd twist it around to make it sound sexy. I would buy records like this from charity shops. I used to always go into those places and just buy anything. I would think that there must be at least one sample in there. I used to end up with all these really crappy records, but on each one of them there would be something."
Poseathon
"This is the one with the Bongwater sample. They were a group from America. They made the funniest music. It was like [adopts a Southern drawl], 'Ooooooh. I want a whole lot of rednecks to take me out to the woods,' or whatever. I had to use it.
"This one is a bit more uptempo. It's more of a party track. I was always tempted to make more uptempo music, but I ended up getting bored."
Wicked, Cruel Nasty And Bad
"That was based around an Eartha Kitt sample from her song I Want To Be Evil. She sings 'And in the theatre I want to change my seat/Just so I can step on/Everybody's feet'. Wicked, Cruel Nasty And Bad was actually made for a friend of mine who had written a play that was being performed in a theatre in Cambridge. He wanted a piece of music for it, and I did that for him originally. Then it got included on this record."
"I had a friend that would come over and he would make all these titles up, as I had no idea what to call them."
Pork Albumen
"These are some silly track names. I had a friend that would come over and he would make all these titles up, as I had no idea what to call them. He came up with this one, and his other good one was Tiny Kangaroo Dolphin (From Hell).
"This has some nice field recording stuff on it. I would often go out and capture what I could. I had various little recorders that I used to use. I had quite a good Sony one. It was a professional portable cassette deck, which was very good."
The Softest Thing In The World (Motorway Accident)
"I remember thinking that at this point in the record things were getting a bit too sentimental, so I stuck Motorway Accident into the title to remove the sentimentality. It's a very cinematic track. I think that is what half the frustration was when I was making this album: I really wanted to be making films, but I was making music instead. This track is like a little film, but an oral film. I liked working with dialogue. In this track, it's me putting on the accents and then shifting my voice so I could make up these little characters."
Something Wonderful
"I think I took that title from a quote from the film 2010. The character says, 'Something is going to happen… Something wonderful'. This track is about seven minutes of odd noise. I wasn't really thinking about other people listening to any of this album when I was making it. I was thinking more about what I wanted to hear. I was then quite surprised that other people liked it."
Tiny Kangaroo Dolphin (From Hell)
"This is just over a minute. It's like an intermission piece before the end. It's like a little bit of lemon juice to cleanse the palette. The sequencing of the record came very naturally as it got made. It was a case of making one type of track, and then making the next one a bit different. I always knew that the track A Word Of Vice would go at the beginning, and that Long Road would be the ideal finisher."
Long Road
"When I was making this track, my parents had gone away on holiday so I invited a whole load of people up from London, and they all took copious amounts of mushrooms and hash cookies all weekend. We ended up calling it 'the lost weekend'. I even sampled me saying that on here.
"Did Hed Phone Sex define the Ninja Tune sound of that era? Sometimes I've read that. It just felt like it was all a natural result of using the technology available. And being a bit more psychedelic. It is what it is. I just made what I felt like."
Mushroom Head
"This is only available on the vinyl release. It was really the first ever Funki Porcini record. An ex-girlfriend ad-libbed the name when I asked her to provide some vocals to this beat.
"This track has a really nice sound on it. I went to a frozen lake and put transducers on the ice about 20 yards apart, and chucked lumps of ice across it. It made this wonderful noise. The whole top of the ice sheet works as a diaphragm. When we were doing it, this guy came along who had a shotgun. I said to him, 'Come on. Let off a couple of round into the ice and let's see what it sounds like.' And it was crap [laughs]."
