Producer Batu has made a studio for aspiring musicians

Producer and DJ Batu is known to friends and family as Omar McCutcheon. Growing up in Oxfordshire, McCutcheon was an only child. He knew that he wanted to be a musician from a young age: ​“Music is entwined with all my earliest memories,” he explains. ​“My family generally are really, really into music. They’re not necessarily musicians, but they were really into music.” From dub to punk, music was a constant in his parent’s household. As a teen, McCutcheon became part of the then emerging Dubstep scene, quietly building knowledge from dub​step​fo​rum​.com and broadcasting from his bedroom as Streamizm.

It was in this online landscape that McCutcheon met Bristol-based producer Lurka, who advised him to follow in his own footsteps by applying to the music production course at Bath Spa University where Omar McCutcheon went on to meet producers Bruce and Ploy – friendships which unfurled into a house share in Bristol, a label and a club night.

Timedance grew out of the roots of the city, binding Bristol’s soundsystem culture with disruptive dance music which brought together a new underground scene based on open-minded values and mutual respect. In the five years that followed, Batu rose to prominence as one of the most respected selectors in the scene, taking his tunes everywhere from Boiler Room to Dekmantal.

But as Omar McCutcheon was on the up, with plans to curate a new festival in South Wales underway, the pandemic hit. The metal shutters clattered down on nightclubs around Europe and across the world. The dance was over, for the foreseeable future. So when Dr. Martens Presents got in touch to see how they could help, McCutcheon had the perfect idea.

“I’ve been thinking for a while about how in Bristol – where there’s just so much music and creativity – that we’re slightly lacking in music studios or facilities that are participating in the community,” McCutcheon says. ​“So I felt like there was space for something that was basically more aimed at the community, just purely for the benefit of different parts of the music community in Bristol.”

The city’s music studios are largely privately-owned, which as McCutcheon points out, means that they do not necessarily reflect the needs of the communities that they serve. So together with Dr. Martens Presents and a group of collaborators in the Bristol scene, McCutcheon set about creating an accessible studio in the heart of Bristol, offering free sessions to musicians of all genres who don’t have access to their own space, as well as mentoring and DJ and production workshops.

You can grab yourself a spot at First Light Studios in the Trinity Centre, a multi-purpose arts hub in a former police station, the same location where Batu held early Timedance events. In McCutcheon’s vision, the studio will become a community hub where artists can learn, develop and collaborate.

“I think there’s a lot of cross-pollination of ideas because it’s a relatively small city,” McCutcheon says. Bristol is known for its DIY attitude. ​“People like to do stuff themselves,” McCutcheon says, pointing to Bristol’s musical legacy; the dub influence, which goes through from jungle to dubstep to trip hop, the Caribbean influence, of sound system culture. ​“I think what Bristol was really good at is constantly being open to new people and new ideas,” McCutcheon concludes. ​“And musically, everyone here is really open, so there’s always fresh energy and fresh creativity.”

@guillaume_de_ubeda

Introduce yourself and tell us what you do in your own words.

My name is Guillaume de Ubéda, I’m a French multidisciplinary artist and I’ve been living and working in Bristol since 2013. I’m mostly a graphic designer working for the underground dance music scene. I used to design gig posters when gigs were still a thing but with lockdown and everything that has been happening this past year, my activity is now more centered around another aspect of my work which is designing records. I also paint, do murals for venues, design logos, make music videos, produce music under the alias Deep Nalström and I co-host a radio show called No Regrets on Noods Radio.

Tell us when and how you met Batu.

Everybody kind of knows each other in the Bristol scene so it’s hard to remember when

you met someone precisely but we’ve known each other for quite a few years now. Batu is mostly a friend of my girlfriend Danielle and we have many friends in common. I do remember the first time I saw him play though, it was in a sweaty room at Freerotation, it was pretty intense and definitely one of the highlights of the festival for me.

How have you collaborated with Batu so far?

Batu is quite supportive of people around him and he will always try and collaborate with you if there’s an opportunity. In 2017, he asked me to do the design for his Murmur EP on Timedance. I’ve also done some illustration work to accompany an interview of him in a local Bristol independent magazine. The past two or three years, Batu’s been working with Butt Studio for the Timedance designs – I’m really admirative of the work they’ve been doing together and I hope it’s gonna carry on, even if it means I probably won’t ever design a Timedance record again! The First Light Studios mural at Trinity Center is our last collaboration in date and probably the most visually striking so far.

Tell us about the mural you’ve made for First Light Studios.

My designs are usually monochrome and have a kind of raw photocopy-like aesthetic, it allows me to work on a very large scale without worrying about image quality loss. For this mural, Batu and myself ended up deciding to go for something multicoloured to contrast with the black and white room, and bring a bit of colour to the studio. The artwork plays with different layers and scales, with vaporous elements as well as more geometrical ones morphing and blending into each other. On one hand, the geometrical elements can be seen as a reference to the mathematical structures in music and its repetitive nature. It can also be interpreted as a nod to the visual vocabulary of music softwares in which music elements are represented by blocks, lines and cubes. On the other hand the vaporous, and sometimes liquid, elements refer to the more intangible aspects of music and the almost magical nature of the music creation process. That being said, when I design a piece like this I try to leave it as open as possible so anyone can create their own interpretation.

What does collective creativity mean to you?

To me, it means bringing together individuals with different sensibilities and different visions to work together and create something that goes beyond what any of them could have created on their own. I’m used to work on my own a lot and although I do think it can be important to follow your own intuitions as an artist and sometime discard other people’s point of views to bring your own vision to life, it’s also a necessity to remain open to collaboration, be ready to work with people who have different approaches and explore new ways of creating that you wouldn’t have necessarily considered in the first place.

Finally, what does the future of music look like in Bristol?

It’s a hard one, Bristol has many different scenes and each year brings new surprises and new talents. There’s a huge variety in terms of music being released and all these different scenes are being brought together by entities like Noods Radio, Idle Hands or Dirtytalk’s new venue Strange Brew creating new connections. It feels like everybody is either an artist, a music producer, a DJ or a record label or venue owner, everyone is involved in their own right in the scene, it’s always bubbling and it never ceases to amaze me. So I don’t know what the future of music will look like in Bristol but I’m not worried at all, I know it will keep surprising us.