How Hudson Mohawke Became One of Dance’s Most Exciting Auteurs
Pale, sheepish, boyishly profane Scottish bloke Ross Birchard, a.k.a. Hudson Mohawke is the rare producer to bridge the hip-hop elite (he’s on retainer with Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music) and the DJ jet set (as one-half of EDM boom-bap, er, “trap” duo TNGHT), while still maintaining his own artistic vision. For the past year, Birchard, 29, has eased back on outside gigs to finish up his second album, Lantern — though he and West did knock out the single “All Day” at London’s Healthfarm Studio, a.k.a. HudMo Heights, to which the G.O.O.D. guys reportedly laid waste. It’s an album that should put Hudson Mohawke next to the names of other electronic producers — Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Flying Lotus — who have evolved into paradigm-wrecking eclectic auteurs.
A quick study who’s immersed himself in various types of music going back to his pre-teens in mid-Nineties Glasgow, Birchard imagined Lantern, at least in part, as an homage to the emotions stirred up in his youth. “The core feeling I wanted to create with this album was how I felt when I was 9 or 10 years old,” he says earnestly, “something uplifting, something that took euphoria as far as it could go, without turning into total cheesiness. Obviously, it’s a fine line, but I wanted the core of the record to be songs that pick you up when you’re down or when you’re lost, like certain songs did when I was a kid first getting into music.”
Early on, Birchard was encouraged by his father, Los Angeles-born stage actor/raconteur Paul Birchard, who actually recorded a rap track before his son, rhyming on the 1986 novelty “Diamonds Rap (We Are the Diamonds),” which promoted the Glasgow Diamonds football team. Dad bought him two turntables, and hip-hop was always in the mix. But Glasgow was a techno town, and the rage of young Scotland in the Nineties was the boundlessly bouncy genre of “happy hardcore,” a warp-speed bliss-burst that was a reaction to hardcore jungle’s shift toward a bleak, stoned drone. Birchard craved happier stuff and churned out mixtapes, got a “Z” shaved into the back of his hair to rep Edinburgh mega-rave Rezerection and exulted in boing-ing breakbeat flurries like DJ Vibes & Wishdokta’s “Feel Good” and Force and Styles’ “Simply Electric.” Amid happy hardcore’s sunny frenzy, “cheesy” was no slur. It signified a willingness to go for it, to risk a gooey mess.
By 13, Birchard was doing a radio show at a local university, diggin’ in the crates, and intensively honing his turntablist skills under the name DJ Itchy. At age 17, he’d become a beat-juggling fiend and reached the finals of the DMC U.K. DJ Championships, finishing second with a witty, surprisingly nuanced routine. But the scene’s technical swordfighting became tiresome, so he moved on. From 2006’s delirious mixtape Hudson’s Heeters Vol. 1 to his slaphappy debut album, 2009’s Butter, Birchard furiously unraveled his tangled roots, “trying to cram in 800 ideas at once,” as he puts it now. In addition to his studio grind, Birchard was part of an emerging hothouse crew of Scottish DJs, producers, label owners and promoters — Rustie, Koreless, Jackmaster and the Numbers collective, et al. — who were turning the path from Glasgow to London into the most exhilarating pipeline of talent in dance.