Growing up in the Pilton area of north Edinburgh, Proc Fiskal discovered Boards Of Canada through his father and grime through the internet. The former was his first fixation, the group that piqued his interest in electronic music, and the latter got him into making electronic music of his own. Through rough-shod uploads of Sidewinder sets, he remembers being able to feel the sound of 2000s London, albeit from afar.
“The internet was just personally very mind expanding for me... I was addicted to that bass and chased it into grime, Slimzee mixes with Jon E. Cash and Wiley’s bass,” he remembers. “That huge bass sound was the best to me when I was younger. It was powerful and aggressive and carried on the anger of all that grunge and punk I grew up with.”
During his teens, Proc Fiskal started making beats and reached out to fellow Scots Polonis and Rapture 4D, grime producers who were creating their own interpretation of the Ruff Sound pioneered by Novelist, on Glasgow’s LVLZ radio; the station was a hub for the small but devoted scene at the time.
His first album, ‘Insula’, was released by Hyperdub in 2018. It’s a refreshing take on instrumental grime imbued with a distinctive Scottish aesthetic, as vocal samples and snippets of phone calls and media broadcasts rumble out in low, accented lilts. Last April, he released ‘Lothian Buses’, which bolsters the early 8-bit sonic palette with post-dubstep synth lines (on ‘Baguettes’) and sparkling, almost junglist percussive elements (on ‘Mullit Madollock’) while maintaining that roughshod grime energy.
This September, Proc Fiskal released ‘Siren Spine Sysex’, his second album for Hyperdub. It’s a unique juxtaposition, unmoored from convention yet engaged with genre tropes. Over 14 exquisitely strange tracks, the producer links two seemingly incongruous styles of British music — grime and folk.
In many respects, Hyperdub is the ideal home for this. The sound of ‘Siren Spine Sysex’ taps into the label’s long-running interest in experimental grime music, and particularly with sinogrime: the sub-genre based around Jammer and Wiley’s sampling of East Asian musical motifs and instrumentation, and pulled through in Kode9’s own sinogrime mixes throughout the 2000s.
For Proc Fiskal, the source material is not East Asian woodwind and strings, but Gaelic, Irish and British folk music, with vocals borrowing heavily from ’80s experimental crossover folk-pop music like The Cocteau Twins, Enya and Kate Bush. “I wanted the name to sound like a pagan incantation,” he says of his choice of album title. “I thought it looked spiky, like a Celtic tattoo, and everyone enjoys alliteration.”