Seeds Mix #4: Joe Muggs’ Music to Smell the Jasmine whilst watching for Bats in the Twilight

Muggs’s involvement with ambient music includes occasional work with Global Commmunication’s Tom Middleton, perhaps most notably on the 1000 capacity Sound of the Cosmos tent at the 2011 Big Chill, but also on collabs like an epic joint set at Spiritland in 2018 – check this for a flavour.

Muggs has championed ambient music in all its many forms over the years, check his 2014 ambient roundup for FACT magazine, his Solid Steel mix from 2015, and his Worldwide FM show which ran through the ‘Covid years’ and featured guest slots from e.g. JD Twitch, Grandmixxer, Meemo Comma and Surgeon

We recently crossed paths with Joe during a conversation for an upcoming Guardian article he’s tending to on the evolution of chillout, in celebration of the Telepathic Fish compilation set to sprout on September 5th.

What makes Muggs’ current trajectory particularly intriguing is his return to DJing ambient music at festivals like Houghton, We Out Here and the like. Ambient music is making a bit of a comeback, you might have noticed.  As the music on the main stages seemingly gets faster, it feels natural that there’s a need to slow down somewhere, anywhere.

Experimental, ambient, and leftfield sounds to the fore, get horizontal. Something’s feeling quite full circle here.

So it is with some excitement that Joe agreed to don his ambient trousers again and step up for part 4 of the Seeds mix. “Music to Smell the Jasmine Whilst Watching for Bats in the Twilight” encapsulates what is often a poetic approach to ambient curation – clearly less about the dancefloor and more about creating an experience that enhances the environment around you.

Beyond the fabled chill-out room and into the field we go…

Listen and read the interview below:

Who are you?

I’m Joe Muggs, I’m best known for writing about music, but I spend increasingly more time either making and playing it, or branching out into researching social, subcultural, neurological etc aspects of creativity more broadly.

Why are you here?

An infinite cascade of rolls of the quantum dice over billions of years resulted in… well, hello.

When are you happiest?

Really the absolute basics: laughing with my wife and/or kids, long conversations in the pub, finding unexpectedly great music at a festival, DJing to appreciative people, seeing a weasel, all that.

What does the natural world mean to you?

It’s a weird relationship, I grew up in the countryside so took it for granted a bit, I was hugely privileged to run free in fields etc but also associated it with drizzly walks, falling in mud, nettle stings etc as much as anything else… Much later on a walking holiday in the Howgill Fells in horizontal rain in October I started to discover that discomfort is being alive, and now I chide my inner child off for complaining about brambles.  I live rurally again now, but do still also live in my head a lot, and I can forget to look up or leave my shed very often… but that means when I do go out I can be surprised and bowled over by what’s all around me. The other day I saw a weasel hop across the road, I’d been feeling like shit but it put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

We consider it necessary to play music to our plants to help them be the best they can.  Your mix is based on ‘Music to Smell the Jasmine Whilst Watching for Bats in the Twilight’…  Tell us about the selection and how you feel this helps Jasmine and how the bats feel about it.

It’s just the kind of music I play in the evening, either alone or when DJing – in fact quite a few of these tracks got an airing in the We Out Here ambient tent last weekend, and I recorded it in the afterglow from that amazing session. A lot of is quite sad or menacing because soft music is at its best when it’s emotionally full-spectrum, and it really suits the vibe of sitting out in the evening drenched in the jasmine scent, enjoying the fact that England is now A Hot Country, while also terrified about that fact. It’s got lots of ups and downs, and a bit of a sense of the promise of mischief at the end with the epic double dose of Superpitcher, and I like to think bats can dance to it all. They look like they’re dancing when you get more than one doing loop-de-loops round the garden.

What role does ambient or abstract music play in your life, and why do you think it’s something we all keep returning to it along our journey?

I spent a lot of time with headphones on as a weird child, and I loved the transportive power of radio plays, especially sci-fi, and doubly especially Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which is profoundly ambient. The first album I bought, aged 11, was Radiophonic Workshop Sci-Fi Sound Effects, which has a sound called “A Huge Ever-growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld”.As I first got into pop I was fascinated by stuff like Tango in the Night, Graceland, Dire Straits etc which were very expensive exercises in worldbuilding. Even as a teen metaller, I developed a habit of listening to the Friday Rock Show incredibly quietly as I went to sleep, and especially found stuff like Slayer became incredible as textural music. When rave culture came around, at first it was a lot more about sitting around on the Downs or in friends bedrooms listening to tapes – which naturally included a lot of Orb, KLF, etc (in fact I discovered that the tape I’d made with Chill Out on one side and the first Orb Peel Session plus a bunch of other ambient curios on the other had been duplicated to third or fourth generation copies around our town) – than dancing. So the chillout room, when I found them, was like a vision of heaven. I could list thousands of other contexts that took its place over the years, from Alva Noto soundtracked art installations at Sónar, folktronica by a campfire at Baskerville Hall, getting a sense of perfect stillness inside a giant bass tone at DMZ even as the dancefloor around me was going nuts, and on… I’ve just always sought out that cocoon or balloon of sound that takes you into a different world or transforms the space you’re in into something new and numinous.

You programmed the Big Chill ambient tent with Tom Middleton many moons ago. How did your love affair with ambient come to fruition?

Just the one year – 2011, the final Big Chill, and otherwise a slightly sad festival as it was all a bit corporate and unattended, but we somehow got a budget and amazing soundsystem for a whole weekend (all very late in the day, so Tom called up me and our mutual friend Richie to see if we could help). It was ravey during the day – a shit hot lineup actually, though I say so myself – I got Zed Bias, Cooly G, Ben UFO, Pangea, Swindle, Geiom… Dammit why don’t people give me budgets more often? Then after midnight curfew we lowered the volume and lights, pulled these giant sort of cushion-podiums, like giant pouffes, into the middle of the dancefloor, and played super chill until 4am. Proper classic chillout room, people having deep chats, couples smooching, but still some dancing (or swaying) going on too. Bliss. It was the all time harshing-of-my-mellow to drive out of that back to London to find that the “bit of bother in Tottenham” we’d heard occasional mutteirngs about at the festival had spread into something a lot bigger.

Define ambient and what it means to you?

As above, it’s about world building. Environmental music as the Japanese pioneers put it. Anything can be ambient. There’s lots of SONG-songs in this mix – but you can listen to the words or just let them wash over you, Ambient is as ambient does, I guess?

On the same note, what does silence teach you that sound cannot?

You really need to catch me in a chillout room at 4am to get the full spiel on this one. As well as growing up weird and quite isolated in the countryside, I was raised Quaker, and they do silent worship – essentially like a group meditation. One of the most profound artistic experiences of my life was seeing John Hurt do Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and a particular well timed use of the word “silence” at a couple of points in that. I’m not sure there’s any musical moment so powerful as a classic 94-95 jungle tune that has the tiniest moment of silence after the intro breaks, then there’s a siren, a dog barking, someone yelling and all hell breaks loose. Being diagnosed with ADHD at 50 I finally grasp why I crave true silence so much… sometimes. But there’s so many sorts of silence…

If you were a plant, what would you be and why?

Hmm, a massive gnarly old rosemary bush. Strong, dark, bitter, enduring, a bit tasty 🙂

What did you grow in your garden this year? How is the fig tree getting on?

I don’t know what most of the things in the garden are. The old couple who lived here before us, seven years ago, planted so well and durably, I just have to trim and prune, the one big and endless job is keeping brambles at bay. Fortunately I always love overgrown and tangled things, and there’s some great sprawling lavender bushes, wild strawberries growing like weeds everywhere, and climbing roses, grapevines, honeysuckle and passion flower that have got completely matted together across the pergola over a pebbly bit out the back where I’ve got a swinging basket egg chair from Aldi that I like to work in sometimes. I stick things into the muddle from time to time, like the fig tree which was a present and some mad giant alliums which my wife hates. The lawn, if you can call it that, is mostly clover and moss, but that’s fine as we have pet rabbits who are out in a run during the day and they love it and keep it trimmed. I did put in railway sleeper raised beds on the lawn (lockdown project of course!), one’s got some really thriving rasberries in, the other has a threadbare thyme bush and daughter and I have managed to coax some splindly but sweet carrots out of it this year too.

Got any growing tips?

Move into someone’s house who is amazing at selecting hardy perennials.

When’s the last time you brought a plant/seeds, and what was it?

I think it was probably the carrot seeds actually. My wife has been on a houseplant bender lately, and they’re looking good.

You’ve won the plant lottery! You can choose anything you want. What is it, regardless of climate or growing zone? 

I really really love pines and firs, my first thought was the mad idea that I’d actually like a Giant Redwood but that would be my entire garden just for the trunk – slightly more realistic would be a big wide, weathered, mature Lebanon Cedar.

What types of plants do you enjoy growing the most, and why?

As before it’s that tangle of vines – the jasmine, honeysuckle, roses and passiflora all getting in amongst it and overwhelming whatever trellises or roofs they’re put near.

What do you find most challenging about caring for new plants?

Remembering to do it at all. ADHD, see? I definitely do need “fire and forget” type things if they’re to have a hope of survival.

What sounds from your childhood still bring you peace, and how do you weave them into your daily rhythm?

Wood pigeons. Takes me back to my grandparents’ garden in particular. Don’t really need to incorporate it as they’re around and cooing more oftent than not round here, it’s just a matter, like so much else of getting out of my own thoughts and paying attention.

What is your favourite season, and how does that influence the way you listen?

Even split summer and winter. Having speakers out on the lawn or somewhere public is such a privilege and pleasure, and especially since I bought The Midlife Crisis Soundsystem (a lovely RCF Evox 12 PA rig) I don’t take that for granted – getting to play records at our local brewery in a farmyard, or a tapas bar in the evening is just vibes upon vibes and a great social connector. But I also massively love the wrapped-up, safe feeling of winter listening, especially around Christmas, alone or with friends/family, but also when I used to have a SE London pub residency, the early part of the evening when the weather was cold and/or bad was a special joy, the feeling that when someone came in and got out of their wet coat or stamped snow off their boots, a record I was contributing to their sense of stepping into a little haven was always wonderful.

What does it mean to you to create space for stillness in a world that rarely stops moving?

It’s everything. I just wrote at length about this for the We Out Here in-festival magazine under the banner of my “soft music for hard times” idea. I got so many great quotes on the topic from musicians / DJs playing at WOH, but in particular this stood out from Abigail Ward, who as Ghost Assembly makes some of the greatest dancefloor music around currently: “As a neurodivergent person, I often crave solitude and emotional connection at the same time. Music holds both. It’s a mid-place. To withdraw into quiet music is not escape – It’s refusal. In the stillness it gives, I find rest, thought, and the kind of companionship that asks nothing of me. In today’s society I consider this an act of rebellion.”

And also, from the experimental MC Lex Amor: “The sweet and tender doesn’t scream or dominate our screens or feeds… we all need a balm – another route. Retaining tenderness in these times is choosing to exist above chaos – I think there’s revolution in that.” For me all of this also relates to our definitions of what “grassroots” are and how and why we should protect them, all of which brings in food and drink intergenerational relationships, spaces that provide genuine welcome instead of trying to squeeze money out of you… I constantly think about Paul Gilroy’s conception of “conviviality”, the way society does or doesn’t actively create meeting places for cultures, classes, age groups etc. If you check out my clip of We Out Here on my Instagram, I think you’ll probably agree even from just a few seconds, that the vibe was quite convivial.

Anything else we need to discuss?

I’ve actually got a bunch of articles coming up about ambience and related stuff, so keep an eye out, and do please support bassmidstopsandtherest.substack.com and theartsdesk.com where there’s always a ton of good stuff happening. Supporting independent culture journalism is as important as any other part of the infrastructure. There’s a big archive of my ambient shows of very different sorts on ROVR, Worldwide FM (with some mindblowing guest mixes), NTS (the “Love Drain” series of shows) and Solid Steel (still don’t know how I pulled that one off – someone told them made them feel closer to a dying friend because it helped them understand what it must be like to be in a coma… and meant that as a compliment). And I’ll be going double ambient at Hidden Notes festival next month, as part of KiF’s “Still Out Room”.

Tracklist – 

Dr Rod Octopus vs Kirsty Hawkshaw – Ghost Town
Coby Sey – Eve (Anwummer)
Om Unit – Springdub Meditation
Wombo – Spyhopping
Ada – 25 or 6 to 4
Omara Portuondo – Tabu
Aswad – Ethiopian Rhapsody
Nwando Ebizie – Shadowland (In the Dreams of Others)
Muito Kaballa – Like a River
Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes – Theem Prototype
Ego Ella May – The Morning Side of Love
Minnie Riperton – Minnie’s Lament
Julee Cruise – She Would Die for Love
Ennio Morricone – Messico E Irlanda
Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas, Misha Mullov-Abbado – Tonada De Luna Llena
Resavoir – Sunset
Durutti Column – Grace
Scrimshire, Stac – Pep Talks
Brandee Younger – Dust (feat. Meshell Ndegeocello)
D’Angelo – Unshaken
Sabrina Bellaouel – Clémence
Bill Frisell – Sing Together Like a Family
Bobbie Gentry – Something in the Way He Moves
Frederic Galliano – Niamien Kinkeling (feat. Cissé Diamba Kanouté, Koko Ouadjah)
Underworld – Dune
Rufus Wainwright – Tiergarten (SuperMayer Lost in the Tiergarten Mix)
Talaboman – Dins el Lit (Superpitcher Remix)

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Music To Watch Seeds Grow By on Bandcamp | Instagram | Substack