about c90
c90's been born out of LOVE and FRUSTRATION. Boredom can be productive - we're a bunch of friends who listen widely but found that there was never anything particularly interesting to go to in the city, just a lot of very similar 'club nights' and a few independent events which didn't quite match up to the kinds of things we listen to. When it started there was 1, then 3, then 4 of us, and now we're up to about 6ish. Each of us have pretty different tastes, but we all converge around a certain core of music that shares roots with lots of Sheffield's groundbreaking electronic heritage, especially the noise&experimentalism of Caberet Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle and the bleep'n'bass of Warp.
So it's never the case that one c90 is similar to the last - on each night we're trying to emphasise the unique bits of whatever style of artist we're putting on, whether it's heavyweight dancehall, shimmering krautrock or chaotic breakcore. We get a venue, two artists of different styles, and a potential audience, and we shove em all together and see what happens.
The audience that turns up isn't quite sure what to expect; the thought is that going to c90 is different from other club nights because you're there for a sort of sonic experiment, perhaps in a space that you've not visited before, I guess on that score we're opening a few new horizons on the sheffield club scene. It probably boils down to a couple of things: the audience don't just dance, they also talk a lot and they drink a lot - it's a lot more of a party than a show - like having some people out in the kitchen catching up with people they haven't seen for ages, and others down in the basement where the lights are off but the vibrations are heavy. Maybe you don't know much about the music that's on, but maybe that's not what you're there for.
Who is involved? Well, first up credits go to the Dust crowd - without studio dust turning out their beautiful artwork we wouldn't have a night - they've managed to capture something of the playfulness along with left-field aspect to our nights on each image. Moreover, Rare'n'Racy are as much c90 as any of us are - without Sheffield's longest-running and most wilfully-independent purveyors of fine recorded and written material I'm not sure that we'd have the constant reminder that there are more things to listen to out there than the usual fodder.Yep, that's it - we're emphasising the collaborative spirit of the night, whilst sliding in a cheeky advertisment for some of the best graphic design you ever saw and the best record and bookshop you ever stepped into.
So, there's Juliun c90, who's plays out regularly in the city, blitzing together incredibly hot-off-the-presses dubstep with exotic strains of viral electronica. There's Tom c90, he used to run Dropping Science in the city back in the day, and he's got a compulsion for classic bleep-era warp-esque electro. Then there's Will c90, who's a scratch-dj but prefers to bang on something uncompromising, some edgy grime, eldritch techno or straight-up hardcore.. There's Ambrose c90, he's really the spokesperson for our shared love of minimal tech and house, as well as being the personification of the idea that a club night should feel more like a party than a show, and Rich c90, who has a single-minded dubstep obsession, actually, he thinks of it as a religion - when we put on Digital Mystikz it was like he was worshipping in his private cathedral of bass. And then there's Joe c90 - dividing his interests between the abstractly academic drone stuff, and the high-school-drop-out tearaway jungle/breakcore stuff.
