Violet Cowboy
Named lovingly after the venerable boozer from Only Fools and Horses, The Nag's Head was the moniker of Brighton artist Stephen Maskell. Combining on-the-fly field recordings, kitchen sink instrumentation and deliciously collapsing drum patterns, Stephen's music is - as one customer puts it - at times moving, at times hilarious, and sometimes just great dance music.
The first Nag's Head album, Live From Concrete Island, was the inaugural Kit Records release back in 2013. Beaming across like a JG Ballard-esque broadcast from a strange, sunny dystopia, this tiny run of tapes contained a head-spinning tapestry of street recordings, crushed cityscapes, YouTube rips, melodic techno and plenty of steel drums. For the city’s lolloping, dubby percussion, we plunged deep into its guts, pulling out a squiggly bricolage of pistons, pool balls, window frames, jets of steam. From that first contact (somewhere near Elephant and Castle roundabout), Stephen has plotted a sort of psychedelic sonic map of England, with five more waypoints.
Moving up in the world, Luxury Slime Vortex erupted like The Shard, all pointy malice shrouded in metallic cloud voodoo. At this stage, his sound had evolved into shivering, chewy techno constructed at breakbeat velocity with dizzying textural scale. The title track goes off like a grenade in a biscuit tin, signalling buckled metal and half-submerged Miami Bass chants, before eating itself in a tangle of nitrate film.
Stepping through the portal into Gluud Und Scruud, we land in the midst of a road-rage altercation on Canvey Island. While the first two tapes were a mostly breezy journey through the various blends of multicultural England, this was pretty much the opposite: dark VHS rips and paranoid earthy gloops, with rare moments of joy shining through. Gluud Und Scruud crashed into earshot like a wildly edited scrapbook of Euro-chintz catalogues and depressed seaside resort town pamphlets, all coloured with the dopplered rumble of a Subaru Impreza stage left.
ENTROPY NOODLE was Maskell's first LP proper, and signalled another shift in tone. Released in early 2020, this record was a strangely prescient tale of twisting, viral synthesis, feelers grasping every corner of the sonic spectrum, as life was forced down odourless digital corridors. Gone were the radio toasts, the fermented video snippets and provincial ephemera, as every soggy beer mat and bent dart in the pub raptured upwards into the stellar vacuum.
As the world reopened, Honkytonk Cheeseballs saw a return to Stephen's digital dream diary approach. After waving goodbye to the farty upholstery of The Nag's Head (burnt down in a possible insurance job?), in the embers we found Basil Neptune: a kind of sentient Airbnb profile, seeking out the smelliest, strangest sonic vestiges of Albion. Cheeseballs spoke of thickly harmonic ambience, ghostly spoken word, and a few trademark knee wigglers. All shot through the lens of... Scooby Doo? Zoinks.
Finally, we bump into Stephen moonlighting as Violet Cowboy. On Ramraid at the Wiggly Worm we find the sonic sculptor in playful mood, thumbing the flipbook through mulchy blues guitar, gothic storytelling, elasticated dub and gossamerlike classical minimalism. Maskell's flow state seems to exist in the pocket where genres meld, and no sound is safe or sacred. His archive slops like a bargain bin of British culture, topped up on gleeful trawls through the map's ripest folds and furrows. This new collection is part glitched spaghetti western, part macabre travelogue, and - true to form - wholly too slippery to define.
Violet Cowboy is a techno flâneur: an unmoored observer and connoisseur of urban mythology, roving like a cyber dandy between the frames of a reekingly complex cityscape. "Tonight I'm in a window watching everyone watching being watched, and the faces that pass and the stories I make up for them." In Wiggly Worm's frightening closing scenes, Maskell yanks Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd across pungent cobbles and through a tangle of glassy computer processes.
For all its interludes, tangents and jump scares, Ramraid (and, for that matter, Stephen's catalogue as a whole) is the sound of an artist losing himself in the art of making - and somehow helping us make sense of the world we find ourselves in as he does it.
Stephen is also a visual artist (creating much of his own album artwork and videos), and presents a monthly show on Slack City Radio, called Secret Passage.