4am is within spitting distance and X-101’s ‘Sonic Destroyer’ has Ormside Projects quaking. Fight-or-flight synth stabs, a basilisk of a bass loop, and that telltale Detroit cosmicity: Regis concedes a “fuck it” moment at the end of a surgical set. 30 seconds later, however, it’s like we’ve hopped dimensions; this is a sound system party now, lazy bass throbbing from the speakers. Up on the mic, Julian Fairshare is hosting and toasting as though he’s been there all night. Everything else has been washed away on a warm tide.
Such instances of sonic whiplash were par for the course at Scram – a now-dormant event series started by producer Leeway (aka Guy Gormley) and Fairshare, who is sadly no longer with us. The evening in question – back in May 2023 – was a collaboration with Lost Domain, the latest label endeavour from Kiran Sande of Blackest Ever Black and Low Company. In its 30-ish months of operation to date, Lost Domain has established itself as the nucleus of a small crew of producers scrabbling about in techno’s grubbiest corners, with a particular emphasis on the mutant “dub-tekno” style for which Scram’s events were a breeding ground. Put crudely, the premise is stepper-type dub welded to freetekno, the breakneck ‘90s free party export. And with the release of Conrad Pack’s debut album proper, Commandments, in February, this mysterious microculture has its most fully formed statement yet; a distortion-charred transmission from the industrial tundra, it’s as captivating a dance LP as any released this decade. Pack kindly agreed to speak to Texture about how it all came together, as well as compiling a mini-playlist of influences – you can find it at the end of the article.
Growing up, he was exposed to a healthy spread of sounds thanks to his record-collecting father. “At that age it's all just quite normalised, so I'd be listening to, like, Kraftwerk in the car to school, and then go home and cook dinner and there'd be Throbbing Gristle on in the background… To be honest, when I moved to London, stuff like that – Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle – I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is parent music! I can't listen to this at all.’” The Clash and Bowie marked his early taste, followed by that rite of passage, an indie phase: “We all had a cardigan, you know, jeans in colours which we won't talk about.”
In the mid-2010s he moved to London to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths, where he started off conceptual (“really boring stuff”) before moving to video art. Around that time he got into dance music and was taken along to sound system events, among them the late Jah Shaka’s legendary sessions, by a clued-in housemate. There, he encountered the danceable 4/4 “stepper” style of dub which would become such a core component of the Lost Domain sound. Pack points to ‘90s UK-based producers like Shaka, The Disciples, Jah Warrior, and Earthquake Studio as representative: “There's just something about that – it's just so driving and heavy – that felt really exciting. And also it had song structure to it. You know, it would have riffs, melodies, bridges, pads, strings.”
It would be some time before the influence filtered through to his own work. Early stabs at DJing and production were in more orthodox spheres; check out his first single, 2019’s The Best / The Truth, for a pristine pair of tech house brain-scratchers. Then, during the confinement of the pandemic, he got a taste for the harder industrial material whose appeal had previously mystified him – in particular through the ultra-abrasive freetekno-derived scene which had been spawning around Chicago label Puppy Tapes. “When that happened I thought, ‘Woah, what the hell is this? This is just amazing’… It's just so physical, the sound. It's ugly. You could imagine people playing distorted bass guitars or something when they're doing those acid riffs.” He found similar inspiration in the hotwired dub techniques of the 90s free party OGs, notably mythic Castlemorton ringleaders Spiral Tribe and adjacent Dutch maverick Curley. Pack credits Nkisi’s DJ sets with introducing him to the latter, whose liberal twists of delay and distortion on tracks like Axe Breaker exemplify that physicality he enthuses about – each flick of the knobs sending you ricocheting further off into the berserk.
On furlough pay and increasingly preoccupied with the dubby and distorted, Pack traded Ableton’s frictionless interface for old-school hardware that could get him closer to the outcomes he wanted. Ultimately, it wasn’t an exact sound but the possibilities implicit in the gear which appealed to him, as he explains: “I've got this Jomox rack, and that's an 808 and 909 clone, but the parameters are set so you can get sound for in-between the two. And that kind of summarises it for me really, because it's got what I want but I can take it somewhere else.”
A period of intensive creativity followed as he got to grips with the tech and found the live recording process liberating. Where before Pack would obsess over each release in a “torturous, masochistic process” (sometimes dreaming up marketing strategies before he’d even made any music), as Covid restrictions lifted he began to make songs at a rapid clip without thought for the end product. Around the same time, he got involved with the dub-oriented Scram nights, having befriended Leeway prior to the pandemic – in fact, Pack handed over the decks to Regis that night in May 2023.
It was in this fertile context that he, DJ Gonz (a pal since Goldsmiths), and Leeway discerned the potential for a crossover style. There was a persuasive logic to it: “The feeling at the time was, dub techno's been done, there's nothing more to do there; Basic Channel went and did it and it was amazing, so don't even bother. But steppers? That hasn't really been explored in the same way. And I think the rowdiness of DJ Valentimes, [DJ] Loser, [DJ] Salazar, all those guys [on Puppy Tapes] – something clicked with all the steppers stuff. Because some steppers stuff, it's quite fast as well... it just sort of gets you energised in a similar way.”
There was at least one salient precedent in John T. Gast’s obscurantist forays into the steppaverse, which had been ongoing for close to a decade by this point. Pack happily admits to the influence, but stresses his own crew’s narrower focus on dance music: “I feel like that was the difference: I was trying to make something more consolidated. [Gast’s] music was maybe more part of a wider expression, which is why it's so good.”
Feeling the need for a dedicated outlet for their experiments in this vein, Pack and Gonz founded SELN (initially SELCHP) Recordings. First release Higher Reaction Sound, from February 2022, set the tone with two tracks from each member of their triumvirate, spanning from heady, effects-charged techno on Pack’s part to straight-up digi-dub.
More than three years on, the products of that febrile period are still being steadily secreted for public consumption. Commandments ranks among them, having been subject to a longer and more deliberate assembly process than most – a joint effort by Pack and Kiran Sande. The result is that even though the tracks come from those same free-flowing live recording sessions (unaltered, Pack says, with the exception of some trifling percussion tweaks on ‘Riget (ft. DJ Gonz)’), stoppered within these 40 minutes is a world that feels utterly self-sufficient.
Ambient pieces demarcate the foggy frontiers of Commandments’ territory: ‘Exile’ breathes sinister intimations for what’s to come, while industrial-style closer ‘Retinue (ft. Leeway)’ could soundtrack the end credits of a supernatural horror flick, its acid spasms like the last ebbs of some malevolent force. The kicks come in on ‘Commandments’, alongside chain-link hi-hats and an insistent electrical buzz. Altogether, it feels like a stress dream set in that clanking towered compound that looms over you on the walk from Surrey Quays to Venue M.O.T. – otherwise known as the South East London Combined Heat and Power plant, depicted in SELN’s logo and presumably the source of the original SELCHP moniker.
Outright stepper ‘Downward’ exhibits Commandments’ peculiar alchemy to a tee: hyperborean, drill-influenced atmospherics; mean-mug grooves striated by bolts of distortion; a climax awash with delay. ‘Deep Distrust (Emotive Mix)’, meanwhile, is a masterclass in dynamics, pounding sections ceding to nostalgic string pads while waves of distortion mount and recede in the background. After a few minutes of give and take, it all comes together in an elegant synthesis.
Across its runtime, Commandments maintains a remarkable consistency and intensity of atmosphere. This music feels bleak, inscrutable, more or less post-apocalyptic – obliquely evocative of dark forces and fearful rites. There’s a degree of worldbuilding involved here, with much of the effect achieved through niceties of the compilation process. “The thing I like about music, dance music, is the world or the headspace it creates for me,” Pack summarises. “It’s not just the actual songs themselves. It’s the sort of, ‘Where does this take my brain?’ And that comes from the artwork, the website of the label, everything around it.” Among the influences we discuss, the Chain Reaction school of dub techno stand out as past masters in this respect: Pack points to Hallucinator’s mesmerising classic ‘Red Angel’, while for me Commandments shares Porter Ricks’s ability to conjure up dystopian mental cityscapes with uncanny vividness.
It’s rare to come across dance albums which pull you in to this extent, often leaning more towards the “tunes” element as they do. In fact, you can forget that these songs are, essentially, meant for the club. That’s partly because the fusion of genres on Commandments is so consummately realised: the music doesn’t jackhammer your nervous system like the harder freetekno Pack was inspired by, but it’s simultaneously possessed of a twitchy high-tempo drive foreign to most dub techno; the stepper DNA and shades of drill, on the other hand, lend it a certain London je ne sais quoi.
It’s that latter component that gives this hybrid style its natural rapport with the smoked-out cotches that populate the south side of the river. And for Pack, it’s clear that those types of venues are ultimately where all roads lead: “Whether it's DJing or performing my live set, that's the thing I enjoy the most… [The music is] so abstract, you kind of need to listen to it loud to feel it. That's the point, and I think in those rooms, that's where it really comes alive.”
Conrad Pack's Commandments Primer Tracklist:
Even if he doesn’t consider himself a part of any wider London dance “scene”, Pack feels privileged to have his little parcel of the underground. As we wrap up our conversation, he reflects on the dynamics he’s observed over the years: “I feel like I got into dance music and alternative electronic music in London just really at the tail end of something – or that was how it felt, you know? Boiler Room was just starting to become more corporate but it was still a thing people were excited by and wanted to go to. Blackest Ever Black was starting to wind down. Hype Williams had kind of happened. So it was a really interesting time, because you sort of experienced the embers of stuff. And I think that's the main thing I can say, is that with this music I just feel very grateful to have experienced all of these artists who just do their own thing. And I think that's the great thing about London, is that it promotes that ideal of doing things your own way.”
With Commandments, Conrad Pack has mapped out an imaginary zone unto itself, at once abstract industrial sandbox and distorted South Bermondsey mirror. To experience it cast into physical dimensions, there’s nothing left but to find him on the dancefloor – where the veil between worlds is at its thinnest.
Conrad Pack will DJ at the SELN label night at Venue M.O.T. on Friday 25 July, along with DJ Gonz, Nkisi, and Buttechno (live).
Words by
Alec Holt
~
Index
Instagram / Soundcloud / Telegram / Mailing List
© 2025 Texture Magazine