Bozzwell – the enlightenment – article by the Guardian
David Boswell makes more exciting, challenging techno than most hyped electronic acts. So why haven’t you heard of him?
Sheffield is a city that incubates musical mavericks, but even by the Steel City’s standards David Boswell, aka Bozzwell, walks alone.
Older, very attentive readers may recognise Bozz as the singer from late 1990s chart-bothering Sheffield collective, All Seeing I, but, since that brief mainstream interlude, he has spent the intervening years largely hidden away in his tiny studio at Stag Works, making highly individual, idiosyncratic electronic music – first as Hiem, with Nick Eastwood, and, latterly, as Bozzwell. Perversely, such has been his trajectory that, in 2010, Bozz is now better known in Cologne and Berlin than he is in Sheffield.
If, in Britain, Bozzwell’s highly enigmatic, poetic brand of vocal post-minimal techno doesn’t quite fit in anywhere, in Germany that is seen as a positive advantage. His new album, Bits & Pieces, is released on Cologne’s Firm label and sees him collaborating – on the marvellously wry, spry I Can’t Be – with the likes of Kompakt’s Popnoname and Heiko Voss.
That Bozz is more likely to be found DJing at Watergate in Berlin than over the Pennines, at the Warehouse Project, is depressing for a number of reasons. On one level, he simply deserves to be heard. Even at his most prosaic, on a track like the growling, ominous Voodoo, his work is crisp, powerful and insidiously sonically unpredictable. A track like that could more than hold its own on the latest Cocoon compilation, which, at a time when Britain’s most talented producers are generally working on dubstep’s fringes rather than in techno, itself makes Bozzwell notable.
It’s on his less mechanical, more idiosyncratic songs, however, that Bozz comes into his own. In the melancholy lovelorn likes of Marlena’s Eyes and Fiona’s Song, he creates a highly personal, emotionally vulnerable electronic music which is uniquely his. Who else but Bozz (who comes from a Romany family, incidentally) would write Escape 5, a dark, unsettling piece of dancefloor techno, in which a group of mysterious escapees are chased across foggy, boggy landscapes by barking dogs and clattering machine guns.
Like the Knife or We Love – only more obviously influenced by after-hours techno – Bozz is, perhaps, ultimately less interested in functionally filling the dancefloor at 4am than in synthesising the latest iterations of club music with songs, choruses and melodies to produce a modern, futuristic even, kind of pop music. Not that he is ever going to be a pop star. He’s a big hairy bear of a man who lives a hermit’s existence in his Sheffield studio. He is as scruffy as Hurts are neatly pressed, as awkward as Little Boots is amenable. He is 42 years old. No one is going to him up as a next big thing. Luckily, he moves in circles – techno, Cologne, underground nightclubs – where none of that superficial detail matters.
Nonetheless, it is undeniable that Bozz is making the music that you wish all those much-hyped British electro acts were. Where in Silver Columns and La Roux electronic music has enjoyed a distinctly hollow victory – moderately talented people rehashing 1980s synth-pop in inane ways – Bozz is gestating a far more complex pop music. The latest wave of electro-pop acts pose as edgy, arthouse originals. Bozz is true to the spirit of 1982, actually producing music which challenges the listener.
If that’s too ethereal for you, incidentally, there is always the occasionally genius – Hiem. A rum mix of lissom disco, acid northern observation á la John Cooper Clarke, brutal Sheff-tronics and glittering crystalline electro, the duo’s much-delayed debut album, Escape From Division Street, will finally be released early next year. Featuring Roots Manuva and (of course) Phil Oakey, it is a minor classic in the annals of South Yorkshire electro which surpasses, even, I Monster or Fat Truckers’ work.
If Bozz is a prophet unrecognised in his own land, he is not alone. You’ve heard why I think he is an unsung musical hero, but who do you think is similarly criminally overlooked? Whose marginal status mystifies you?