The reason we make music is because we can't talk

Courtesy of Cracked Machine - © Graeme Rowland

"It's an exorcism for us." For anyone who has experienced the cathartic 2nd Gen live onslaught this release should be clearly evident and ultimately shared by anyone who has similar feelings of anger and frustration. Main man Wajid Yaseen fires up brutal breakbeat noise assaults and lurches back and forth malevolently whilst rapper Scalper twists and flexes in agonised contortions of unrestrained anger as if assailed by all manner of confusing and conflicting forces, the perfect compliment to Yaseen's ultra-distorted computerised eruptions.

"We do feel better and we feel cleaner and saner for a time after we do these gigs," explains Yaseen after an explosive performance in his former hometown Manchester. "Scalper works out with a lot of demons. He hurts a lot. What I do musically is tap into that and it helps him. It helps me get through the day and it helps him get through the day."

Aside from a bit of demonic cackling on the title track, Scalper's raps don't grace the current 2nd Gen EP Against Nature, although only the beatless feedback drone monolith Rushing At Thresholds, which closes both the EP and the live set, now remains instrumental in the live context. However Scalper can be heard in full effect on his own EP, recently released on the Flo imprint, the label Yaseen set up initially to release his own debut EP Noise Sculptures. "We saw the same demons and we saw the same thing."

The pair first hooked up in Asian agit-hoppers Fundamental where Scalper was the frontman and Yaseen the bassist. Whereas Yaseen is primarily inspired by philosophers such as Genet, Sartre and Nietzsche, Scalper brings fucked up, twisted hip hop into the mix.

"Hip hop has an articulation of its own. Some of it is really profound. What I've seen Scalper do is gifted. We were in New Zealand with Fundamental and we hooked up with Boo Ya Tribe, a really fucking talented Samoan rap outfit. These Samoan guys are fucking massive, much bigger than Maoris, and there's about six or seven of them in a circle and one of them goes in the centre and it's just freeform, total ad lib; old school hip hop ethos. It's about the rhythms of what you're saying but more importantly what you're saying because you can't talk shit. He just came in and did his thing and it was wicked, amazing!"

Yaseen left Fundamental to do his own thing and this necessitated a switch from bass to computers. "I had lots of equipment anyway. It was just a case of start to play, get some money, get some stuff and start fucking around."

Yaseen sees absolutely no difference in the freedom he found playing bass to the release he gets when performing a computer triggered set. The most beautiful point comes when he finds himself completely lost in noise, out of control and operating his equipment by unconscious reflex alone.

"The reason why we do music is because we're not very good talkers. It's another way to get something out. You've got to tread this fine line between doing work for yourself which is a purely indulgent thing and saying something to someone. What I'm doing is really quite self indulgent but it tickles people's fancy. It's not vacuous. There are things in it. The reason we make music is because we can't talk. That's why we write, paint or take photographs. That's why we dance."

2nd Gen often work with a Brazilian dancer called Tiago to further extend their communications palette. "He's got his masters in ballet and he's done it for years. He's not a go-go dancer! He's fucking articulate and extremely beautiful and extremely graceful. He's used to being choreographed but the first time we did a couple of gigs I told him he was free to do whatever he wanted and it churned him. He couldn't really get to grips with how free he could be. The next set of gigs after that we told him he could have a certain set of five emotions to play with. Now we're chopping that down to three emotions. I'll not tell you what they are!"

It would probably be a safe bet that one of these emotions is anger as this is the one that the music obviously expresses and is fuelled by.

"There are different ways of looking at anger, as there are different ways of looking at everything. I guess I get a sublime anger, if you can call it that. You get ugly drunks and drunks who are really noble and beautiful in the way they do things. You get junkies who are really ugly and junkies who are beautiful. Nico was a beautiful junkie. It's the same type of thing which I look for; beauty in anger, this sublime part of anger. That's what we get thrilled by."

Yaseen is more vague about what actually enrages him ("Millions of things!"), but there's certainly more than a little existential angst brewing up in the 2nd Gen cauldron.

"They're all so tedious but they build up to one fucking volcanic eruption! We're on our own! No god's there and a lot of it stems from the French philosophers and the feeling of the moment when you're totally fucking gone. I come from a devout religious background and I realised after a long time that everything I'd been taught was not really true, for me. I'm an atheist and that's the painful part of it. Agnostics have got it really easy but I'd rather have had it this way than to be an agnostic because it drives me to think about problems of existence all the time and it's a beautiful area of intellectual curiosity. If I'd come from a different background I might be totally different and not give a shit and I really wish I had that but anybody who's had a religious upbringing can't be agnostic. You've got to be either religious or atheist. From believing there is absolute wisdom and purpose to realising there isn't, there's fuck all, hurts a lot."

Yaseen came to this realisation partly from reading philosophy, chiefly that of German nihilist Nietzsche, and partly due to several near death experiences.

"I'd been travelling in the northern hills of India and there was this village I wanted to get to about twelve thousand feet above sea level, because the architecture was odd. When the village was built there were Buddhist people and Hindu people and they didn't have enough resources to make two different temples so they made this one temple which combines Buddhist and Hindu architecture. It looks really fucking bizarre so I had to go and see it. After spending a couple of days in this place, I took a road which cut right down the side of the mountain. I don't really like taking the normal routes so I took the villagers' path. It was a beautiful walk. After about four hours of trekking down this mountain I got to the bottom and some guys on the road were saying the mountain had just collapsed and covered the road and there was no way of getting through. I walked over this collapsed mountain which was a really silly thing to do because it could just collapse anytime. There were these goods trucks on the other side taking away this big pile of mountain. They'd take this shit away, turn around and come back. There was enough room in the road for me to walk without having to turn round or move as trucks passed by. Three or four trucks passed but as this one truck passed I had this instinctive gut feeling to stop. All my cells were screaming, "Stop right now!" So you try to figure out why you get that in yourself or what has caused it, so you stop. I stopped. The truck passed and about three metres ahead another part of the mountain collapsed. My gut feeling is that scientists are saying we know ten per cent of our brains and they reckon that the larger unknown part of ourselves is what god was to people who saw god. They reckon that all these people who saw god, including Mozart, found some way of getting beyond the ten per cent and saw something true and sublime. Nietzsche got into that territory and some of the things he wrote were amazing, extremely powerful stuff. I think the instinctive feeling I had to stop belongs to that unknown part of my head which is supposedly god. I've been through all the mental processes trying to figure it out but it's important that it's a heartfelt thing, a gut felling that I get about it, and that's got to overrule everything really."

Despite his atheism, Yaseen has a lot of admiration for religious figures such as Mohammed and Jesus.

"I thought they were fucking amazing people. They fought like salmon upstream. What they did was phenomenal. I don't believe Jesus was a modest man. We know he was a fucking tough man. We know he was a fighter. He was a punk! He was full on! He really fought against the grain for his belief and saw the empty vacuous shit in people and said, "Look man, there's a better way of trying to do things.""

References to god and the devil in 2nd Gen's music are metaphorical, as on the one full vocal track Yaseen has so far recorded, Ah Ja Shataan, from Noise Sculptures.

"Fundamental have done a tune called Ja Shataan which means "go away Satan" but my idea was Ah Ja Shataan which means "come Satan, I welcome you." My thing is more a reflection of that discordant satanic thing inside us."

A 2nd gen album, Irony Is, will be released by Novamute on October 30th 2000, preceded by a single And/Or. Extracts from tracks can be found on the 2nd Gen website, along with some of Wajiid's graphic art and poetry and details of 2nd gen releases and collaborations. A 2nd Gen track from the Against Nature EP formed part of the cacophony known only as Welcome to Execrate by Speedranch^Jansky Noise.

Visit Cracked Machine