FR 116: Facta & K-LONE on Wisdom Teeth’s Pivot to Minimal House

New compilation Pattern Gardening breathes life into a classic sound

K-LONE & Facta

When I recently reviewed Jorg Kuning’s excellent new mini-album Elvers Pass for Pitchfork, I had an intense moment of deja vu—followed by an equally intense feeling of self-doubt.

As I had gotten to know the album, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the minimal house of the late ’90s and early ’00s. Kuning’s record has a similarly fine-tuned sense of sound design, with lithe, blippy tones tracing curlicues against a backdrop of empty space. Following up on my hunch, I went back through his catalog, which seemed to confirm my suspicions. His Chosta-del-sol EP reminded me of Isolée’s quixotic “Beau Mot Plage,” right down to the summery beach pun of the title.

But when I mentioned the idea to my friend Ben Cardew, he countered that Kuning’s record instead sounded maximalist to him. And he sort of had a point; songs like “Skudde” and “Squidward’s Viola” are hyperkinetic riots of texture and color. (Then again, so is the music of Akufen and Robag Wruhme; “minimal” was often a misnomer, even at the genre’s peak.) Was this just a case of confirmation bias? Was I shoehorning Kuning’s record into my theory that a minimal revival is afoot?

So I’m happy to report that my suspicions were confirmed when Wisdom Teeth, not long after, announced its latest compilation, Pattern Gardening. Featuring 22 tracks from label regulars like Iglew, Piezo, Lurka, Duckett, and co-founders Facta and K-LONE, along with fellow travelers like rRoxymore and Polygonia, it’s billed as the label’s take on minimal, microhouse, and tech-house.

That might seem like a surprising shift from a label rooted in dubstep and bass music. But it also feels like a logical progression. There are hints of the sound running through the label’s catalog—in the sprightly crunch of Welsh producer Duckett’s 2017 EP Gannets for Guano, say, or the squirrelly modular workouts of Freerotation regular Steevio, or even woven throughout K-LONE’s 2020 album Cape Cira. But one of Pattern Gardening’s winning qualities is that nothing feels like an exercise in retro box-ticking; no one sounds like they’re expressly trying to recreate any particular sound from the minimal era. Instead, they’ve picked up the bouncy rubber ball and run with it, and while it’s easy to detect the occasional echo of Matthew Herbert or Isolée or Thomas Melchior, in most cases they’ve ended up quite far from the source. Indeed, had Wisdom Teeth not explicitly framed the compilation in the terms they did, a listener who wasn’t primed to listen for certain influences might not detect them at all.

I spoke with co-founders Oscar Henson (Facta) and Joe Gladwell (K-LONE) about the comp; they told me about the process of soliciting tracks for it, why minimal feels like a natural move for a couple of DJs raised on early UK dubstep, how a glut of cheap vinyl opened up the stylistic rabbit hole, and why coming late tonthe genre can actually be creatively liberating.

After we spoke, Henson announced the imminent release of the next Facta album, GULP, and while it’s hardly minimal redux—there are elements of UK garage, deep house, Tristan Arp-style ambient, and even a chunky breakbeat tune that reminds me of Mr. Oizo’s “Flat Beat”—it certainly reflects Wisdom Teeth’s ongoing fascination with the decades-old style in its sparkling sound design and pinpoint precision.

Scroll on for the interview. As with last week’s Anthony Naples interview, the first portion is free to read for all, while the rest is for paying subscribers.

---

Paid subscriptions are $5 a month or $50 a year; perks include exclusive playlists for chilling and clubbing (now available on Deezer as well as Apple Music and Spotify); the ongoing Mixes Digest series; and full access to the archives, including interviews with Penelope Trappes, Stephen Vitiello, Longform Editions head Andrew Khedoori, Bristol bass trickster Bruce, drone titans Belong, Seefeel’s Mark Clifford, and more.

---

---

Facta & K-LONE

I love Pattern Gardening. It touches on a lot of sounds that are very near and dear to me, because they’re sounds that I came up on in my own history with dance music, basically. What were your motivations or intentions with the compilation?

Joe Gladwell (K-LONE): This compilation was a little bit harder to pinpoint than with the last two, To Illustrate and Club Moss. With those, it was just pick a tempo, 100 BPM or 160, and that’s a lot easier because you could just do anything. There’s one very set restriction. With this it was a bit tougher, because we know what we’re looking for, but also not quite. We’ve been playing this sort of minimal tech-house sound for years. I love it because it’s really fun to mix and it’s a very DJ-forward genre. I often think that the sound really comes into its own when you’ve got two of those tracks playing together—often quite simple ideas that once they’re mixed together with something else, they become greater than the sum of their parts. I feel like we were quite vague when we were reaching out to artists.

Oscar Henson (Facta): As Joe said, it was more like we had an idea in our heads of how we wanted it to sound. We’ve been playing this sort of stuff for a while, and like the last two VAs, we wanted to put our stamp on it, or put across how we see ourselves fitting into that [style]. With the 100 BPM one and the 160 BPM one, it was easier to give people free rein, because it felt like slightly more uncharted territories in those worlds. Whereas with this one, these are obviously incredibly like well trodden paths, right? These are sounds that people have been drawing on for decades and decades and have been massively pastiched, so we wanted to find a little nook that makes sense for us, that Wisdom Teeth can have something to say on, because obviously there’s lots of people doing it. A lot of people might say the world doesn’t need 22 more minimal tech-house tracks, because probably thousands of them come out on Beatport every day. But we love that sound so much.

JG: I think it’s also that the label has, through our tastes, got a bit of a sound palette to it—lots of FM synthesis, quite hollow-sounding sounds. We lean towards stuff that’s quite groovy and functional and melodic. You have so many strains of minimal and tech house, you know, you have your stuff that’s leaning towards the dub techno end and then you have your slightly more IDM, textural, robotic-sounding stuff, and I think we were kind of like, Can we get our palette onto that sound? Particularly with the Abentis and Polygonia tunes—I mean, the Abentis tune, when he played that to us, I think he just really hit the nail on the head. It’s got a really nice hook to it, it’s groovy and it’s also functional. I think all of the tracks are kind of us taking little bits and bobs that we love from this quite extensive genre. Like we’ve got that Saudade tune which is really Latin, percussion-forward, which we also love. I feel like it was just kind of saying “Here’s the vague genre” to our favorite artists, who we know might have an idea of what we were thinking.

OH: That’s the other thing, there are so many people we know that love this kind of music and until quite recently, people were a little bit sheepish about it sometimes. But you’d often talk to people at shows, and they’d be like, I just love Ricardo [Villalobos], or whatever. And it’s from having those conversations with people and knowing there’s all these secret minimal heads out there among our mates and people on the label. Lurka’s a perfect example—someone who came up through dubstep and is known for that really amazing, techy, Timedance-y stuff. But he’s a huge minimal tech-house head. Pretty much every day, I’m on WhatsApp talking to him and sharing tunes, you know, old Perlon records and this sort of thing. So going to those people and saying, We’re doing this and we’d love to hear your take on it, and commissioning it from scratch—that was the thought process.

JG: I feel like in some ways, we’re quite late to the party—you look into Ilian Tape’s early releases, they’re super minimal-forward. There’s obviously all the Freerotation gang, all of their old tracks basically sound like what we’re trying to do now.

It’s funny, because I was going back through your catalog today, and I put on Duckett’s Gannets for Guano, and any of those tracks could have been on this compilation. Joe, your “Missed Calls” is also in a similar vein, even some of the stuff on Cape Cira—those ideas have been bubbling up at Wisdom Teeth for a while, without necessarily putting a frame around it and saying, “This is our minimal or microhouse or tech-house record,” or whatever. It feels like a very organic development within your music.

JG: Well, once you’ve got a 4/4 kick and an offbeat hat, you have a groove that immediately fits well in a dance music sphere. So then if you’re doing experimental music but then with that basis, it kind of naturally will hark back to that.

OH: You’re picking out Duckett, you’ve sort of pinpointed a really pivotal time for us. I’m sure so many people would say this, but going to Freerotation, getting into those guys, Steevio, Leif, Duckett—we will shout about them at any opportunity, because they were a huge inspiration to us. We’ve kind of worked backwards. I was living in Bristol at that time, about a decade ago, and there was a lot of this stuff—people weren’t making minimal and tech-house anymore, but they’d obviously come from that world, people like Leif, and were making amazing, super-experimental music, but kind of crossed more into what we were originally doing back then, which was the kind of broken techno stuff, Livity Sound stuff, etc., and then through them we started working backwards and realizing where that sound comes from. And then going to Freerotation and seeing people like Tom Ellis and Joe Ellis and these guys who are absolute heads for that sort of thing and playing all this amazing music, and suddenly you’re like, This makes so much sense to us, because all our favorite artists, this is kind of in their DNA. And also, this constant feedback loop, because we came through dubstep, and all the dubstep that we loved the most was stuff that then started moving away from dubstep and into techno and minimal and that sort of thing—all the Scuba and Substance stuff, and Shackleton appearing on Perlon.