my new song, an attempt at the genre of weightless grime on novatone's OGC 2025. Unsure how well it fares against the rest of that compilation but regardless I think I had a cool idea, at least
With the news of a new Rabit album coming out in October, I thought now would be a good time to republish this WIRE interview from 2015.
Over the series of EPs he has been releasing since 2012, Texan producer Eric Burton aka Rabit has become a keystone in a burgeoning instrumental grime scene, alongside UK producers like Slackk, Logos, Dark0 and Mr Mitch, all the while drawing in influences from Jersey club, footworking, OG dubstep and beyond. Getting foundational MC Riko Dan to voice his “Black Dragons” rhythm provided one of the most convincing bridges between that scene and grime’s origins.
More recently, his DJ sets have taken on a strong Coil influence, expanding the empty spaces of grime into vast abyssal ambient voyages. He has just streamed, via Soundcloud, a 38 minute salvo, The Great Game: Freedom From Mental Poisoning (The Purification of The Furies), with multimedia artist Chino Amobi, while releasing Rabit’s debut album Communion on the Tri Angle label. Both combine crushing post-industrial weight with infinitesimal detail, extraordinary discomfort with balmy ecstasies.
In contrast to the fearsome, ultra-precise nature of his music, Burton comes over like a laconic all-American stoner when speaking on Skype from his Houston home. His constant use of kindas, likes and so on conceals both a dry wit and patiently analytic trains of thought. Asked about his cultural background, he says, “I just wrote graffiti, hung around doing a bunch of drugs and listening to music, and just once in a while went to raves. Sounds pretty good huh?”
In fact, he always hoped he’d become a visual artist – he was sent by his parents to Disney sponsored afterschool classes, but the expense of American higher education put him off taking it further. “That and me just not being really a school type!” he laughs.He began making rap beats “as an extreme fan, just trying to work out how it was done”.
He was initially influenced by Pete Rock and RZA, but when it became apparent he’d be dependent on rappers or singers to pursue this style, “it felt like I’d taken that as far as I could, so instead I just started taking everything a lot weirder a couple of years ago… and here I am, so to speak!” He’d been aware of jungle from raving in the late 1990s. He also followed dubstep and, later, labels like Keysound and Diskotopia into picking up an altogether more diverse UK bass palate. Around 2010, he recalls, is when things got interesting.
At the same time he was exploring this zone, he says, “there was a period where I just stayed inside with my roommate and just did drugs and listened to music. That’s when I started listening to Coil – though that really didn’t impact on my own music until much more recently.” Out of all this emerged a complex expression of alienation and a desire to connect with other artists who are “alien”. An out gay man in an often macho milieu, Burton says his music is about escaping allotted roles – like “masculinity cast in the heteronormative mould”, a theme explored by the track “Ox” on Communion. In his hands, starting points “like feeling anxious, bothered or upset about something” become “feelings that take control of the process and dictate the forms”.
However, he shies away from political screeds. “I think action is better than whining on Twitter all day,” he declares, citing his new label Halcyon Veil, which focuses on “artists who aren’t getting released, who are non-white, or who otherwise fall between the cracks”. In conversation he constantly returns to the idea of actions like “strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface” – as emblems of action taken through art as opposed to neat conceptual or political categories. He sees Coil’s existence as “mythical personalities, people I felt I was meeting and even having dialogue with through their music, not through this perpetual social media interaction that artists are expected to have now”.
“The Great Game and Communion are good companion pieces I think,” he says. “Chino does is much more direct with his political expression, so Great Game is a more direct hit on contemporary society or culture or however you define it, and on the politics of microscenes too – while the album is much more feeling based. It is political too but that is expressed through this feeling based stuff. It’s intimate.”
His only ambition now is to “let people have enough music to really engage with. What’s annoyed me about doing press the last couple of years is this overriding sense of ‘WHAT IS IT?’ And you get this pressure from certain artists to be dark, political, angry – but this is what I’ve been about since day one, so now the best way to manifest what I’m about is just to do it, to try and find that place where music can take you that doesn’t really need to be defined
