Futurism Restated 97: An Interview With Bruce

Cutting loose with the Bristol DJ—and Hessle, Timedance, and Livity Sound veteran—on the launch of his new label, Poorly Knit

Bruce (photo: Holly Gillman)

When I connect with Bruce on a recent Friday afternoon, the Bristol-based DJ is sounding nicely relaxed, which makes sense: Prior to our Zoom call, he’s had a “banging” Italian lunch, and then a nap, in Budapest, where he’s on vacation. Before that, he’d spent the morning in one of the city’s historic spas.

“It’s like this crazy, grand, huge, multi-room thermal bath with five saunas, different rooms,” he says. “I absolutely love it. Lots of hot, then lots of cold, then lots of hot.” He recounts a story about meeting an American guy with a West Coast accent who was timing himself to see how long he could stay underwater. A friendly competition ensued; he lasted a minute and a half, he tells me, laughing. Bruce—real name Larry McCarthy—laughs a lot. In fact, to really get a sense of what he’s like in an interview, you need to overdub a one-man laugh track in your mind, a nearly constant stream of good-natured giggles.

And that kind of tracks with his music. Ever since he emerged, exactly a decade ago, amid the scene clustered around Livity Sound, Hessle Audio, Idle Hands, Timedance, Hemlock Recordings, etc.—he released records on all five labels within just a few years of getting started—Bruce has established himself as one of the most spirited and mischievous members of that crew. His music has a deadly serious playfulness around it—irresistible percussive hooks, wobbly grooves, an unmistakable sense of wrongness—augmented by some of the most evocative titles in the business: “The Trouble With Wilderness,” “My Legs Wouldn’t Go Quick Enough,” “Summer’s Gotta End Some Time,” “Post Rave Wrestle,” “I’m Alright Mate.” “There’s stories behind all those,” he tells me, and after an hour on the horn with him, I can believe it.

Despite his wildly prolific first few years, Bruce slowed his output considerably after dropping his debut album, Sonder Somatic, on Hessle, in 2018; a dry spell, exacerbated by the pandemic, only ended in late 2023 with Not, Ready, and Not Ready for Love, a trilogy of records in which he abandoned his typically lean, canny dancefloor style in favor of vocal-driven avant pop in which his own dramatic voice, often falsetto, took center stage. As the months stretched on with no further club missives, it began to look like he’d given up dance music for good. But as the calendar flipped to 2025, he finally revealed the next chapter: a new label, Poorly Knit, which kicks off with “The Price”/“Mimicry,” a seven-inch (!) single that finds his percussive talents as focused as they’ve ever been. “Mimicry” is a woozy, half-time 160-BPM roller distinguished by his characteristically nuanced sound design, while “The Price” is something completely different—a bizarre, swaggering, completely singular anthem where you’re not sure whether to hoist a pal on your shoulders or slink in fear to the corners of the room.

I’ve been a fan of Bruce’s music for years, but I never knew anything about him. Having such a nondescript alias might do that, and besides, he’s never maintained much of a social-media presence. But not long ago, my good friend Ben Cardew, of Line Noise, recommended I interview Bruce, and since I trust Ben completely, I lined up a chat. (Ben’s own fascinating Radio Primavera Sound interview with Bruce was broadcast just last week; you can listen back in the archives.) Over the course of an hour, McCarthy and I had a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation that touched on abandoning his Oxbridge prospects for a future in dance music; the GRM CD that blew his 17-year-old mind wide open; why sampling makes the best dance music; the creative traumas around his shift toward songwriting; wanting to make a “batshit crazy mission statement” for the label; and more.

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Bruce (photo: Holly Gillman)

Just to start with, where did you grow up, and what was it like?

So I’m from a little town at the end of the Metropolitan line outside London, Zone 9. Most Londoners have no idea it exists. I’m literally the end of the line. With that comes a lot of interesting things, being a country that’s so London-centric. The town I was in didn’t really have its own identity other than being from the home counties. We were very much on the outskirts of things. We had the benefit of being close to London, but no sense of identity or any real things for young people to do.

Kind of a commuter town?

Yeah. I’ve met more people who lived in similar proximity to London, but from the completely other side, and it’s exactly the same. They have a very similar upbringing. It’s big schools, big houses, big aspirations to go to big unis. Essentially 11 plus—are you familiar with 11 plus? It used to be a national exam taken in secondary school to decide whether you go to a grammar school or a comprehensive school. There was a lot of pressure, and trauma—basically, at the age of 10 or 11 they decide whether you’re clever or stupid. It’s way too early for a lot of kids. But yeah, I grew up with a sense of aspiration. I got to secondary school, I passed the 11th class, with tutoring, and came to realize that this system I was benefiting from—I was like, hang on, this is not very nice. I’ve got an unfairly good deal here. I’ve witnessed friends from primary school already start showing trauma from not being able to pass the exam and feeling like they’re second grade. I realized I didn’t want to go to Oxford or Cambridge, I wanted to study art and music. And all the teachers, as soon as you tell them that, they’re just not interested in you anymore.

There was kind of a back and forth between wanting to do art and music. I started doing a lot of painting, and I got quite good at it, because my teacher was really great. He put a lot of time into me realizing my potential, but my heart wasn’t in it. For me, it was escapism from having a pretty abusive relationship I was in at the time, one of my earliest relationships. It was really toxic, looking back at it. And the art was an escape from that. So even though I was getting really good at the art, it was not a happy relationship I had with it. At the same time, I was spending a lot more time in computer labs and writing music in my lunch time, because I never really got into football. I was using Reason 4—I still use Reason today, Reason 10, because I don’t really like changing my software—but yeah, basically my teacher cottoned on that I was spending a lot of time there, and realizing that I loved music inside out, he started showing me this electroacoustic stuff on a whim. He gave me this Christian Zanesi CD, it’s a GRM release—

How old were you?

I was 17. And he gave me the CD and it just blew my world right open. I was just like, Oh my god, this is, this is… Because I was into dubstep. Like, I came into Fabriclive, which, you know, great mixtapes, like, Magda and that stuff, Instra:mental maybe a little bit later. So I’d just gotten into dubstep and like jump-up drum & bass—quite late, but like I said, posh boy. I didn’t really have the connections around me to influence me in that way. I also was so not into drugs as well, until much later on, which is quite funny as well. I was a real, like, goody two-shoes. And then this electroacoustic CD was just like, Oh my god. I thought bass was cool, I’m listening to a CD that has created a whole film and there’s nothing visual to it whatsoever. It was terrifying but thrilling, and its sense of space and sound floor. Are you familiar with it?

No.

I’ll send it to you. Oh god, it’s just one of these ones…. I count myself lucky. Annoyingly, the one on Bandcamp is just two tracks, but the full CD is nuts. There’s a whole track, about eight minutes long, which is just this guy going [panting heavily]. You know, this is coming from someone who’s listening to fucking Benga and Skream. It was a huge leap for me. It is this approach to sound that is so world-creating.

That really set the standard for me. And how I discovered dance music and this sense of community and togetherness, you know? I was connecting with all these guys I’d never really spoke to in school before, because they were the ones with nice headphones, and we’d be listening to dubstep and drum & bass, being like, Oh yeah, that’s really bassy—it was probably terrible sound, but it’s got lots of bass, we think bass is the best. And so there was that, and then also literally sitting in my car, skipping sessions, listening to Christian Zanesi, and occasionally letting people in on that world who I’d feel like might be into it. I’ll play it to them and they’re like, What the fuck? So it’s bringing together this sense of community with dance music, but it’s complete utter world-building through the senses.

It was a tricky one, because people were seeing my art, and people are so much more forgiving of extremes with their eyes. I think you can be much less artistically involved and really appreciate quite extreme visual artwork. So I was showing them my quite—I was making pretty expressive portraiture, very much classic young man, you know, making Francis Bacon, Lucien Freund sort of stuff. It was alright, though, it’s pretty good, but it’s just, you know, classic boys school, you know, little bit gay [laughs], that sort of stuff. And then I’d play my music to people and they’ll be like [doubtful tone], Yeah, real nice that… Just can’t handle it, because it’s bonkers.

So it was tough, because I grew up with a lot of need for affirmation—affirmation was a big thing for me, growing up, for various reasons, and it was hard for me to listen to my heart. But I went to art foundation, I gave in to my art teacher—he was desperate to have an alumnus that went to do art, but he deserved it, because he worked fucking hard—so, fair enough, I gave it a crack, but I went there for a month and I hated it. It was very much all the world I tried to escape from school, this complete snobbery. So I took basically a gap year off, didn’t do much, went on some holidays and started smoking weed—that obviously changed everything [laughs], and for the best—and then decided to go to uni and found a course at Bath Spa, Creative Music Technology. The same course as Omar Batu, Ploy, Lurka, Azuzu. I actually met Ploy the first week of my course. He’s from a little town outside Bath. So similar, you know, outskirts sort of thing. We got on from the first week, best mates. Week in and week out, we listened to the Hessle Audio show, comparing records we bought from Red Eye, getting more and more into the Detroit stuff. I remember having convos with him, we were just sitting around our table in our disgusting flat, just being like, “If we just make good tunes, then Hessle will sign us and we can just be DJs and it’ll be fine!” And we did!

I mean, that kind of happened, right? Take me from those kitchen-table conversations to your first days of putting out records. How did you get hooked up with them? Because looking back over your catalog, your first releases are with Hessle, Livity, Hemlock, Idle Hands—you were really right in there from the beginning. How did that happen?

Timing, firstly, I think. It’s always such a big question in regards to luck, isn’t it. Some days I say it’s luck, some days I think it’s just that we worked really hard, so it’s probably a mix of the two. But yeah, we were focused. We were so focused. We even left Bath for the last year of our course and moved to Bristol. Which is not far, but it’s still a half an hour drive. It was four of us who were all really into our tunes, and we decided we’re going to finish the course, but we need to live in Bristol because we need to be going out more. We’d actually started a night in Bath, which was really fun. We were friends with Origins, another event series in London. They’re still going, but they were at Bath uni and we were at Bath Spa uni, so there was a little bit of rivalry, but we were just doing the thing as we thought we should have done. Our lecturer was like, “You need to start a scene, start a crew.” So we’re like, OK, we need someone to play the records, and had mates who wanted to come see us, so we started at this little pub and we just played and got a few cool guests. We got Palms Trax when he still had hair—I still had hair as well—and who else… Danielle’s first gig ever. She came down with her dad, she had a broken foot. It was a great night. All this sort of stuff. So we did the nights and then stayed in Bristol and just wrote and wrote and wrote. Sam [Ploy] had a record out on Brstl as Samuel, “Numberuma,” it’s fantastic. And then once I got to Bristol, there were lots of uni friendships I was cultivating and loving, and I had to kind of put them on hold for my last year to focus. And being, like, I don’t care what grade I get, I just really want to finish uni with a record release. And I got two, and they came out at the same time—the Dnuos Ytivil and the first Hessle.

I was so driven. I was so focused on nothing but writing these tunes, and it was amazing to have that—I think you know, when you’re young and naive with this sort of stuff, you do believe… When you put loads of work into something and that’s what you want, and you get it, it’s like, Oh sweet, life’s easy, I can just do this! It changed a bit later on. But right from the start, we worked really fucking hard, but it paid off. The Hessles—it just worked. Because it was around the time, you know, 2014, when their first wave of artists are kind of… You know, we’re looking at Elgato, who stopped doing music to become a barrister.

Wow.

Yeah, I bumped into him at Freero Sauna, actually. I was in the saunas and started chatting to him, he was like, “I make music as Elgato,” no fucking way! He had to stop because he was afraid of what effect the nefarious associations of club music might have on his job. Lost a good one. You know what I mean? His tunes are amazing, aren’t they? And then we got Bandshell, who did the one record, but it was like that new crop starting and then weaning off. And then I came in, then Sam and Omar, so I think we just had good timing.

The timing thing is interesting. I interviewed Objekt not long ago, to talk about the “Ganzfeld” reissue, and I asked what had changed in the past 10 years. He said the scene used to be much smaller. Ten years ago, you knew all the names. Maybe you didn’t know them personally, but it was easier to feel like you knew everything that was going on. So for someone like you, who was hungry and wanted to be part of the scene, maybe there was less competition. Because now it’s exploded in every direction, and you don’t necessarily have the same centers of gravity that Hessle and Hemlock and Livity Sound represented.

No, you’re bang on. A lot of that comes down to the internet, I think. You know,

TJ [Objekt], Omar [Batu], Sam, we all benefited from the early internet. I wasn’t on Dubstep Forum—I wasn’t that cool, or nerdy, when you look at it. But you look at that idea of networking and being able to reach out and be connected. And then of course the internet blows up and it’s all decentralized. Lots of decentralizing with the different labels kind of breaking up and also them getting bigger and wanting to do different things. I mean, without sounding naff, but it was in our water, you know what I mean? In the UK, the hardcore continuum was on its final big swing. It was after dubstep. There was this post-dubstep, you know, like, a little bit dodge—but a lot of it fantastic still, you know, it’s aged all right. James Blake’s done awfully well [laughs]... I’m kidding, I’m a big fan. But ultimately, it was kind of this last, like, How nerdy can you take dubstep, essentially, and not be lame? Then there was a lot of stuff I was writing, I was just like, it’s too IDM, you know. Objekt, I think, is the perfect example of how nerd you can get it. Those early Objekt releases, they’re amazing, weren’t they. So good.

Nono Gigsta actually played “Tinderbox” at Freero this year and I couldn’t believe it. I was just like, Oh my god, what is this tune? I was having my mind blown by it. I was like, I know it, I’ve definitely heard it before, it definitely feels old, but it’s still just like… and then I asked Gigsta, and I was like, Oh my god! It says so much—in that context, played by a European DJ, who’s obviously known for her amazing ability with UK sounds, but the way it was recontextualized, today, in a time when we are being fed so many amazing tunes, left right and center…

It still stood out.

It still stood out—but I’d forgotten it, though! Not that I’ve got the best memory with this stuff. I’m quite good at clocking stuff, but sometimes… You know, some people forget their own tunes! That baffles me.

With those early-2010s years in Bristol, how conscious was this idea of pushing things forward? You already talked about how dubstep and post-dubstep were disintegrating, the techno influence was coming in… Was this something that was consciously thought and talked about?

Yeah, Sam and I would talk about it loads. The course had a lot to do with it. We were lucky there were three or four of us in our year who were well into the tunes. We realized all these things we were learning through uni we could apply. My main takeaway was the fact that I could put so much of my own influence into the things around me. We were going out seeing early Blawan, Alex Coulton. All the early Livity stuff. Kowton’s “Pale Fire” came out, and I was like, this is the shit. I bought two copies. I think we were just lucky to be at a time when we were constantly, constantly consuming it. And we had such a low-key competitive attitude between us as well. Sam’ll never admit it, but we did. I honestly didn’t find a huge amount from dubstep, because I came later. Ask Batu and he’d have a very different take. He was so invested in dubstep, but for me, it always felt like something I’d just missed.

That sort of scans, because you’ve never been a real 140 guy. I mean, one of your earliest tracks, “Trip,” is at 80 BPM and it’s in 5/4, if I’m not mistaken. From the very beginning, almost all your records had tracks in slow tempos or no tempos. From the start, you weren’t too concerned about making things fit.

No, no, not at all. I think I’ve always enjoyed fringes, but realistically, the main center of all that is samples. Sam actually taught me an awful lot about that. Whenever anyone asks me about writing tunes, it’s sampling. I won’t push to say “records,” but records are better—you’re able to pick up records from anywhere and you drop a needle and see what comes out. Like that “Trip” tune, I can’t remember where the break is from, but it was just the way the loop landed. For a long time I had a thorn in my side about music theory. I failed it twice. I’ve got through learning instruments just by ear. I never read music. It’s just like, I don’t care—I know what I want it to sound like, I’ve got it in my head. It’s the same with school when they were trying to get us into synthesis. They were trying to get us to work with Pure Data, trying to get us to make compressors and reverb units. And Sam and I were just like, we know what we want! We could just use a VST! I don’t care. We failed that time as well. So the joy of samples is you can so immediately input your influence into something, even though you’re completely stealing it. You’re pinching off someone, but you found the sound, you’ve brought it in the way you want, and you’re bringing a sense of yourself—your soul, and the music you’ve picked out—into it.

That’s really interesting. I was trying to pinpoint some of the defining aspects of your music, and for me one of them is your percussive sensibility, and the other one is sound design—it’s very nuanced without feeling overly sound design-y, you know? And when you started talking about samples, it all made sense. Because sampling, if you do it right, can facilitate both those things. But I never thought about your music in the context of sampling.

Really?

Yeah, I don’t know, I just didn’t clock that, like, of course, that’s where these things are coming from.

Yeah. Fuck, I’ve managed to fool everyone. Honestly, I’ll sample sound design. Like, it does the thing I want it to do. There’s a bassline on my album, “Cacao”—do you know the “Cacao” track, on the Hessle Audio album?—the whole thing is a bassline, the kick drum, and a little bell.

That track’s a good example, because I think it’s just the end of a drum & bass song. This bassline, this big Reese, just kind of goes and does its own thing. Basically I use a lot of pitch, because pitch adds so much humanity if you use it right. I love things feeling human and real, so I’ll find that bassline, and it’ll be nearly there with the melody, and I’m like, Oh, if I just pitch it—here it goes, that’s four beats. Then a car alarm started going off outside, which is like, beep beep beep, and I was like, Sweet, sample that. I know I make it sound easy—obviously I’m being facetious, but realistically it should be that easy. It should be as easy as, you know, you drag it to a potter with their clay, like, “Oh, that’s kind of a pot—whack some clay on it. Now it’s more of a teapot,” you know?

I think one of the biggest hangups in electronic music is technicality. I don’t want to pooh-pooh it because I know it’s a bit lame of me to be like, Oh yeah, don’t worry about technicals, when I clearly spend a lot of time being technical. But ultimately, for me, that always comes later. For me it’s always been about soul first, and mood. And if you get that right with the sounds you’re using, and you feel that it really touches you, you can fine-tune it later, or just get better at grabbing the soul and mood later on, which is what I’ve done, basically.

What’s your studio practice like? Are you always working?

No. I mean, you can look at my discography. I look back and I’m thinking, what the fuck have I been up to all these years? But I need life to get in the way of music. I can’t do anything every day. I’m one of those people who kind of flip-flops between various ’tisms and neurodivergence. So some days I’d be so disciplined, it’d be three days of doing really well, disciplined and doing it, and the fourth day I’m like, if somebody tries to get me to do that today, I’m gonna kill them. Sometimes I’ll get an urge to write music and I’ll be in the studio for a week and I’ll make six songs and then they won’t come out for three years, because I don’t finish them. Which is the case with the new stuff. So yeah, I need life to inspire me, basically. And a lot of my ideas come from the world around me, and feelings related to that.

When you’re working on music, do you have a goal in mind, or is it more exploratory—like, drop the needle on the record and see where it takes you?

Bit of both, bit of both. “Drop the needle on the record” is bang on there, mate. That’s exactly what I feel, you know—it’s bringing it back to the source. They’re cliches for a reason, you know. I haven’t done one for a while, but I’ll build my own sample pack, normally. It’s like, right: Time to write some more tunes, I’ll just go through all my high-quality audio—vinyl, CDs, digital—and just record, and get them into different folders. I advise this to anyone who wants to write music. If you’re a music lover—which is step number one, you know; if you’re going to make music, you’ve got to love loads of music, and then sample it cleverly. These days, you ought to be smart. I can’t get away with much these days. Or, you know, start off with the sample and then replace it, recreate it, which can also lead to really exciting things.

I always wanted to build a sample library, back when I was making music, but every time I would start, I’d get distracted and I’d start making a track instead. So I guess I can’t be mad at that, because I made a track, but I never did finish the sample library.

It’s the thing of, like, Today is sampling—you’ve got to get it done. One time, it was a weird time in my life, and I’d missed a flight to Madrid, because I’m an idiot. There was no reason why I missed it; it was just self-sabotage. But I told myself, like: Stupid, you’d better go home and sample now, because you’ve been a bad boy.

Penance.

Yeah, yeah. I smashed it. I did a really good sample pack. And then somehow, also self-sabotage, for some reason, I managed to delete it. And I was like, great, you’ve got to go and do it again now, because you really are a fucking idiot. And that pack pretty much wrote my singing album. It’s funny how—I make out like it’s easy, but it’s not easy, is it? Sitting down there and just going through all these different bits, it can be like you said, penance is the word.

So tell me about this new EP of yours, “The Price” and “Mimicry.” You said that this is something where for the first time you had an idea in mind.

So back in 2020, I realized I hadn’t written anything other than a couple remixes after my album, which was out in 2018. I spent two very long years writing that, getting distracted by stupid shit. And once that was out, I managed to milk it for two years with gigs. And I was just like, I’m feeling a bit misguided, I wonder why? Oh, it’s because I haven’t written any music. I’ve been very much enjoying flying around a lot and gigging a lot, but wondering why my heart isn’t in it. I basically wasn’t being disciplined, I wasn’t committing, so I was like, right—I need to fucking write some music. And out of that came about six tracks in the space of two weeks, which were what I wanted to create. When you wait that long, you should kind of hope that something good came out, and luckily it did. I wanted to create worlds that were challenging, with a sense of thrillingness—so going back to the Christian Zanesi thing a little bit, but for the dancefloor. I wanted to create dancefloor music that was just a bit scary.

It was a tricky thing, because I’ve always reveled in playing scary music to people. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a scary film you really like and you want to show your friends, you want to experience them just being like [gasps]—you know, a little bit thrilled. I think it’s something not many people did with music. Especially with dance music, because we live in a time of great and very apt self-awareness in the dancefloor being one that’s held for vulnerable people. We’ve all been there and felt incredibly moved on the dancefloor and realized, fucking hell, i needed that cry. I like the idea that you can conjure these same emotions—you know how, in Monsters, Inc., they get energy from—

Kids’ screams.

But they learn a much lovelier way of getting the energy is making people laugh. I’ve kind of done it backwards. So I wrote a lot of music that was using themes and samples to try and create worlds of environmental terror, but using all the wonderful things we know and love of the hardcore continuum. So I wrote a bunch of those tracks. This is 2020, so around the time I was also writing my last singing album. And basically the label were like, “You need to release the singing stuff first, the dance stuff doesn’t make any sense,” which was a shame because it was lined up with the label and would have worked really nicely. But the singing stuff happened and now it’s been ages. I had lined up with a record for last year, which didn’t happen. And around that time, this time last year, I started writing some supporting tracks, and I’ve basically come up with an album’s worth. “Price” and “Mimicry” were the extensions of that project. “Mimicry” is the latest one, that was in November just gone, because I was waiting ages for the record to come out, and I thought, you know what, I need to get something out. So I knew that “Price” would be a pretty funny way to start the label and set the standard for what I’m trying to achieve. And “Mimicry” I thought would be a good counterpart.

Basically there’s an album’s worth of material coming, and I thought I’d drip-feed it in EPs throughout the year.

“Price” is mental. It’s got this swinging rhythm, there’s this kind of train-wreck effect every 32 bars or so where it all just seems to collapse. There’s a spoken-word sample I can’t place. And then there’s this refrain that’s like a playground chant or a children’s song or something. Tell me about it all.

Oh man, I don’t even know. That’s the funny thing. It started from copying another song’s rhythm. That’s where a lot of my songs come from. You know, if you hear a song out of context, and you wonder if I could do something like that, and then before you know it, you’ve made something completely different. A friend did clock the OG, I’m not going to mention it because I’ll get in trouble.

All of a sudden, Adam & the Ants flashed into my mind.

Love that. It’s not that, but it was funny how my mate did clock the exact thing I copied. It was just this stupid rhythm you never hear in dance music otherwise. It’s so silly and kind of swung. I just found a few mean drum & bass samples, and then I think it was the riff that came next. It’s been lovely having people’s response to that riff. I can’t claim any sort of influence, there’s no real intention to this one other than trying to copy that rhythm, and after that it was just ridiculous. I dunno—“Blue Pedro,” that’s one of my favorite tunes of all time. There’s few tunes that move me like that tune does. I don’t think I’m alone in that. It’s just a special song. Just generally, I’ve always enjoyed stupid nursery-rhyme riffs. They always get stuck in my head. I’ve just tried to engage in a sense of silliness which I think maybe I’ve held off from a little bit in the past.

The sample was because I was watching lots of really weird videos on the internet. I’m not going to talk about the sample, because it might get me in trouble as well, but just realistically, I was watching a lot of weird… I think we’re actually out of it now, but there was a weird stage before quite popular pages came around, like now they’re in their hundreds of thousands of followers, there were these few pages that posted quite strange and a bit scary videos of the world, and I was kind of enthralled by it. I was just like, this is so crazy, I’m looking at this through Instagram. I was never into any of the horrible websites, I’ve never seen the horrible weird videos everyone knows about, it was like, everyone says it’s gross, why would I watch it? But I was thinking about these videos that kind of allured me. I’ve sampled a lot of these different videos, and I think they, hopefully, healthily reconnect to a sense of, like, just put your back on edge. But it needs the riff and the silly bassline to make sure it isn’t all scary and dark. Anyway, the point is I was just trying to make a batshit crazy mission statement for the label, because it’s very, very me, and I’m back with dance music and that feels so good.

A little over a year ago, you did something at the complete opposite end of the spectrum with Ready and Not and then Not Ready for Love, which was a kind of avant-pop, new-wave, singer-songwriter, David Sylvian-type homage. What led to that project?

At the start of COVID I kind of snapped a little bit with my relationship with dance music. I’d got very frustrated with where I was going with my DJing. I was not writing music, as I mentioned before, and therefore didn’t have a narrative I was playing to. And whilst I was slowly finding a sound with my DJing, I was still very early days, in regards to going big with it. It was hit or miss whether I’d enjoy gigs or not, because I was so self-conscious. And I just didn’t enjoy it, because I was playing larger and larger rooms, and just not finding comfort in what I was doing. It’s kind of wild how, looking back now, I’ve found a sound I want to be performing, DJ-wise, because that’s what I’ve produced—and also realizing that DJing is actually so much easier than singing. It’s kind of wild I can just step up and go, “Yeah, no, I think I’m quite good at this now, actually.” I can just do this and do what I want. But at the time I was so frustrated. I was playing Panorama Bar and being happy with the performance but coming away just completely shook and wrecked by it. Then other times you’re playing these smaller places and getting so frustrated that I couldn’t play what I wanted.

I had these mad narratives in my head, feeling like, Oh, the club was horrible, they didn’t let me play what I wanted. And I’m sure I literally didn’t even try, it was just completely inside my head, like this idea I was being held back by something. A lot of it was just trauma. I had some deep, unaddressed trauma regarding, yeah, growing up and this idea of being able to do what I wanted and not feel judged for it and making sure it’d be liked. It’s something that’s lingering now, but I’ve done a lot of therapy, and it’s made me realize you can play whatever you want. Especially after 2020, but even back then, before COVID, you could play whatever you want. I mean, we’re out of the days where, I don’t know if you heard the story, Theo Parrish got told to stop at Panorama Bar. You know, I’ve played Berlin plenty of times, and I think one person complained when I played a broken track. That wasn’t my reality. But for some reason, I thought it was. And I was finding this weird stuff, and enjoying weaving it in, but for some reason, not happy with the effects.

But yeah, it was all in my head, and when COVID hit, I was like, well, the apocalypse is coming. And my life skill is playing tunes one after the other. So I’m fucked. And there was this increased sense of apathy and total self-loathing with it, also maybe affected by once again being in toxic relationships. I was in this open relationship that was going terribly. Dumbest thing our generation’s come up with is open relationships. My experience, anyway. I’m sure lots of people really enjoy it, but yeah. And that came with a lot of heartbreak and hardship and I was like, well, I’m gonna do something different.

Oh yeah, and I did karaoke in Japan, and everyone was like, “Wow, that’s really fucking good, you should sing,” so I was like, OK, and I dived straight into pop music and poured my heart into it and came out the other side and couldn’t really find a home for it until I played it to Omar. He was like, “It’s amazing, mate, we need to put it out.” I’m so grateful, I’ll always be so grateful to him for that home I had. I did have a couple of other offers, but it just didn’t feel right. But the fact that Omar was into it really meant a lot.

And, yeah, then it happened, and then I think, realistically—this has been such a lovely interview, because you’ve been so good at letting me rattle on, and asking such good questions and making me realize for the first time that the reason why my singing didn’t work is because I didn’t have a culture to play back. I’d not made that connection. I’ve bitched and moaned about my singing process so much, and I think I’ve come back and forth about why I didn’t feel fulfilled with it. But I think it’s because I didn’t have a Hessle Audio-type inspiration to be like, “Cool, I want to do it like that.” It was very much stepping out into the abyss.

Do you mean in terms of live performance?

No, in regards to the music itself. The live performance was kind of the caveat that made it all worth it, because I was insistent that the project needed to be just me and the backing track. I’ve—you know, uh, posh school—done choir, sung a lot when I was younger, so the singing was quite close to me. The songs were so personal and so raw and so entirely me that I just wanted to be me on stage with a backing track, singing. And when I did do that, people were like, that’s really good, and I’m like, well, thank you very much, I’m glad, because I’ve completely lost my voice, that was really hard to sing. [laughs] But I didn’t get the same response with the music itself. I think that was kind of strange to me, because I’m quite used to getting a lot of praise for my music. As I mentioned before about the affirmation stuff, it kind of spun me out. It was just like, “Oh, I thought this was good, because it was so me,” but I’m realizing that I didn’t have a context. I didn’t have a scene. I didn’t have, like, I can bounce off these walls and land here and it makes sense. But I’ve written another album.

Another singing album.

Yeah. It’s probably going to wait until 2026. It’s very different. I just needed to do it. And I’m really happy with what I’ve learned from it. And it means that it’s all made sense in the end, because I’ve come back to dance music stuff. It’s taken painfully long, but it feels good.

Perhaps to close, could you tell me a little more about your new label, Poorly Knit? Why that name?

It was a rebrand from my radio show, two years ago. I used to do a radio show which had a party connected to it, Get Loose with Bruce. The night stopped, because the venue fucked itself for various reasons, and then COVID fucked events generally. So that stopped, and I changed the radio show. I was just brainstorming ideas of how I wanted to be DJing—I wanted to care much less about the typical craft and form of DJ performance. It was the idea of doing something slightly wrong but having its own charm. It comes from the name of a song by a post-punk band, post-hardcore, MewithoutYou. I absolutely love it. I thought it was a nice way of describing doing something with craft, but a bit looser. And then that made sense to go ahead with the music, because I’m using samples in an even more obvious way now than I ever have before. Normally I’d weave them in a bit more, but I’m letting the edges show; it’s a bit more frayed.

When’s the next Poorly Knit going to come along?

Hopefully April. That’s the big one. This first one’s been cool. It’s been really nice to do 7-inches. I’m going to lose some money, and that’s OK, but the next one has got tracks that I feel really define what I’m trying to do. I won’t give too much away, but ultimately I’m trying to lean into the physical format thing, but make it affordable. It makes me so sad to see how vinyl is becoming less and less of a thing. If it wasn’t for vinyl, I wouldn’t be doing all the sampling, so it’s important to me.

There’s an artist called Henry Greenleaf—he was also a graduate at Bath Spa in the same course—and he came up to me, talking about sampling, and he was like, “I’m gonna sample one of your tunes and see if you can catch it.” Which is really cool. He did it, and it’s a completely different tune. I want people to do that, we should all be sampling each other’s tunes, just making something new. I think vinyl really encourages that. It just feels weird where you buy something on Bandcamp and it’s 24 bit and you drop it in—you know, it needs to sound a bit shit for it to work. So vinyl is going to be important. It’s quite funny, I was playing a track for my mate and he’s like, “Man, I love that tune,” and I was like, well, I can’t send it to you, because it’s vinyl-only.

Wow, so even your friends aren’t getting digital copies?

No. I’ve already had people ticked off at me about it, like, “What the fuck, we’ve made music together and you won’t send me the digis?” But no one’s gonna get them except for the mastering engineer.

I respect that. The thing with all these vinyl-only things is that then all the cool DJs are playing them on CDJ and it’s like, that’s a bit lame, isn’t it?

The tracks will be available digitally, but there’ll be vinyl exclusives. It’s a bit of a gamble, but it feels like the right time to do it. I’ve been so happy to have the response I’ve had from people. Just to be making dance music and people to be like, “Sick you’re back.” It’s so good, so good, to be back.

Bruce (photo: Holly Gillman)

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