Kowton on new LP Utility and the Livity Sound crew

It's certainly a bold move to title your debut LP of grime-tinged techno Utility, a word that inevitably calls to mind tersely worded press releases and moody black-and-white publicity shots taken under a concrete overpass. Thankfully, for all his success as one third of cult label and renowned trio Livity Sound, Joe Cowton (aka Kowton) is remarkably free of pretension: "It's quite loaded, isn't it!" he laughs.

A glance at the producer’s Twitter reveals he is often the first to chuckle at the disparity between the air of haughty mystique surrounding techno and the stark, Ibis Hotel reality, but he is forthright and engaging when defining his sound. "I was having this discussion about 'What do you want from music right now?'" he explains. "I decided I want music you can play time and time again. You've got to have this idea of utility to it. It's practical but it's also relevant and interesting. All the classic records like Robert Hood’s Minimal Nation, Shed’s Shedding The Past... these are records that could work on the floor.

"That's what makes the music so vital. It's not some bits thrown together for an album. You’re crossing between something you want people to listen to at home, and something you want people to listen to on the floor, but hopefully it gets close to both of those things."

A new approach

Like that of many producers, Cowton's sound developed and refined across a series of wide-ranging 12''s and EPs. The task of translating that breadth to an album format and taking it further is never easy, though he says it was necessary.

"As a producer you can only do so many singles until you start to repeat yourself. That's when I started thinking about challenging myself to do a full LP. Where we're at with Livity Sound, it makes sense for the label. We're 18 or 19 records in, so it kind of felt like, what's next?"

Cowton's close relationship with Tom Ford (Peverelist) has also proved useful: "Tom's been quite mentor-esque in his patience, as have guys like Pariah and Ben [UFO] when playing it out and giving me feedback on what works and what doesn't. That's the most helpful feedback I could wish for. I'm lucky to have some mates [with] exceptional taste!"

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All that thinking and feedback from playing out has certainly paid off. Utility may be fashionably stripped-back for these austere times, but it already feels like it could happily sit in someone's DJ bag for the next two decades. Built on Cowton's classic spartan rhythms, it simultaneously ventures down more colourful, futuristic paths established on releases such as 2014's Whities 002. This could feel simply like a nice summation of his broad career to date, but whereas those releases were all characterised by certain trademarks – machine-engineered percussion, roughshod bursts of bass, and mixing-desk atmospherics – here, Cowton explores another kind of negative space through melody.

"In fairness," he says, "having done all these austere kind of tracks that were really just drums, I kind of felt like, first I’ve got to learn something. I need something melodic in there. I kind of tried to read up on theory and learn a few scales, tried to get my head around doing harmonies and stuff like that."

Fortunately, this didn’t lead to a tropical house interlude: "A lot of the things on the LP that sound remotely harmonic were embedded in a far richer harmonic structure and ended up being deleted. Some Cats, that little ARP was the backbone of a tune with a big piano riff and a big pad that got deleted. You forever hope for it to get resolved (in a classical sense) but it doesn't and I find that quite interesting."

Working with Livity Sound

Somewhat ironically, much of this dedication to subtraction was forged through collaboration, specifically the experience of working with Peverelist and Asusu for Livity Sound live performances. "In the live show you learn so much about repetition, the way you can sustain interest with very little for such a long time," Cowton says. "You can see how much material you have, and you're just going at the hardware... you've got one machine, one set of samples. That approach has transferred to the album insomuch as it's very repetitive and it's made with the same sounds over and over, but hopefully phrased in a way that sounds interesting.

"I'm sure if I went to art school I could describe it a bit better but it's essentially ploughing the same furrow. A lot of it is being limited to the same tools. I've got the one reverb, the one delay!"

For all Livity Sound’s associations with Bristolian sound system culture, Cowton's releases have been remarkably amorphous, moving from the bleak dubstep missives of his early Narcossist moniker, through UK funky and house to the swinging rudeness of more recent material like Des Bisous. Perhaps this mercurial quality could be attributed to formative years spent in the Lake District and Manchester, far away from the birthplace of UK bass.

"It's a classic tale," he says. "We came into [it] from an older brother that was into good stuff. He used to give us tapes, and pass 'em down. And they were all like Jeff Mills, people like that. In fairness it was mixed in with Moving Shadows CDs and Wu-Tang albums and all of this late 90s shit that everyone had! We'd go to raves in quarries with bad UK hardcore and bad UK techno. I remember Greg Wilson played Kendal Town Hall and that's where we all took our first pill.

"Then I moved to Manchester and was obviously a bit more informed by then. Just by going to Boomkat, Eastern Bloc and Piccadilly Records I had my preconceptions of music re-arranged, and [was] taught quite unequivocally to listen to Basic Channel, listen to this, listen to that. That coincided with the beginnings of dubstep. That was very lucky really. I've got so many of those early grime tunes on white label just 'cause Boomkat was one of the few places that got them."

Roots in grime

Cowton's music is certainly miles away from those formative days spent listening to bad hardcore, but it's interesting to note that his profile has rocketed just as UK dance culture has turned its gaze on grime again:

"I think one of our main aspirations we've had with Livity stuff is to try and get close to that brutal energy that that stuff has… it's music that's moving you along," he says. "That's quite key."

Now living in south London, Cowton has continued to branch out, lending his pummelling percussion to Hyetal’s glowing synths and collaborating with Julio Bashmore for an unusual EP of hybrid house-techno on All Caps. "The record we did is one of the easiest records I’ve ever written," he says. "It's just a Jupiter, a TR-909, and a couple of other bits. We wrote it in a day, and I'm still quite happy with it. Compared to working with Pev, who's such a perfectionist, it's quite nice to bang something out in a day!"

With Utility set to take his name even further, it will be interesting to see what Cowton does next. Don't go expecting a Kygo remix any time soon, though.

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Utility is out 14 Apr on Livity Sound. Kowton plays Gottwood, 9-12 Jun