At the pinnacle of the late 1980s UK club scene, when places like the Blitz and people like Steve Strange ruled a Gomorrah of 24-hour gender-bending pop excess, the truly rebellious were breaking into abandoned school buildings in Brixton, wiring the places up with admirably jerry-rigged sound systems and shaking the windows with music that didn’t suck.
Paul Adair was a 20-something college radio DJ from small-town New Zealand. He had come of age on New Order, The Smiths, Cabaret Voltaire and early UK electronica. London was the fount of all music. Vinyl was the substrate.
“The ’80s,” says Adair, who spins under the name Dr Wahwah, “is completely underrated. A whole lot of people associate it with bad haircuts and the music videos that all came out, but look: it was a time when a lot of musical genres that dominate now came to the fore.”
Untethered in the Big Smoke, Adair quickly fell in behind the turntables at London squat parties. Twelve-inch wax became his currency. His collection grew from a few dozen discs in the beginning to more than a thousand by the time he returned home in 1993.
Adair’s collection has been mostly closeted since, more a souvenir from his colourful youth than any actively curated library. But he got the jones again recently and started buying records, hence Vinyl Mania, a party at Meta House for Dr Wahwah and wax lovers to spend the night together.
The culmination of a two-year buying spree, Wahwah’s newest additions are “predominantly dance” he says, but there’s lots of eclectic obscurata there too: Japanese funk, limited-edition underground disco, minimalist African house.
From Japanese DJ COS/MES comes the textural dream-pop track Like A Virgin (Dr Dunks Shredding). Manchester underground spinster Ruf Dug offers Sorta Rican, a dubby nu-disco cut from the hand-numbered, lollipop pink 10” Porn Wax 6. Afrikan Basement submits Medicine Man Drinks From the Well of Spirits, a mid-tempo house beat flavoured with double-time congas and ghostly jungle sounds.
There are hundreds more, too: all of them heavy-in-the-hand vinyl-only releases complete with full-sized album artwork and liner notes.
And Dr Wahwah isn’t the only one.
Nico Mesterharm, aka DJ Nicomatic, the well-known documentary filmmaker and patron saint of celluloid at Meta House, brought his vinyl collection from Germany to Phnom Penh two years ago. Combined with Dr Wahwah’s set, the library pushes 3,000 titles.
Meta House opened in 2007 and over the last six years it has emerged as one of the capital’s most active movie rooms and exhibition halls (it was voted Best Arts Space by readers in The Advisor’s Best Of Phnom Penh 2013 poll). Captained by Mesterharm, a journalist and renowned authority on underground German culture, the venue recently began trying less-artsy-more-nightlife type of events. He talks about bringing in overseas DJs and pushing the independent music groove. “We’re already known as the best arts space,” Mesterharm says. “Now we want to be known as Phnom Penh’s number one underground music venue.”
It’s a niche that’s wide open.
“In Australia,” says the doctor, “I would play 95 to 99 percent vinyl. When I came here I started playing CDs because nowhere had turntables, or if they did have a turntable, they usually weren’t set up to play records; they were set up to play Serato.” Serato comprises a time-encoded vinyl disk and computer software used to simulate playing digital tracks through a turntable. The package is a staple among hip-hop turntablists who use records, turntables and faders like percussive instruments (just Google ‘DJ qbert crab scratch tutorial’, you heathen).
The burgeoning Phnom Penh hip hop scene (to use the term loosely), if not so large or mature, at least cultivates roots that reach into last century. Not so these new sounds of the European underground, a newcomer in the capital’s electronica desert. But unlike those abandoned buildings in the Brixton heyday, at least the doors are open, the power is on, and no one dresses like Boy George anymore.
WHO: Dr Wahwah and DJ Nicomatic
WHAT: Vinyl Mania
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Boulevard
WHEN: 9pm November 22
WHY: Sounds from the European underground have never been so accessible
