FEATURE:
Spotlight
Anz
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A wonderful D.J., artist and producer…
PHOTO CREDIT: Terna Jogo
I wanted to include the wonderful Anz in this Spotlight feature. An epic talent that NME have tipped for greatness this year, I will end with a review of her magnificent recent E.P., All Hours. It is a sensational release that everyone should play! I am going to quote some interviews, so that we can discover more about an amazing human. I will start with some biography from Ninja Tune:
“Anz is a DJ and Producer based in Manchester, renowned for her genre-spanning productions and mixes. Across her work, she unearths the links between Electro, UK Garage, Jungle and more, underpinning a versatile take on contemporary UK club music as bright as it is unpredictable.
In the summer of 2017, Anz’ self-titled debut EP was championed by fellow UK club figures for its playful high energy sound. Distinguished by her unique style and an unparalleled danceability, she refined the formula for her second EP ‘Invitation 2 Dance’ (2019).
Alongside compilation contributions for Discwoman and remixes for Houndstooth and XL Recordings, in 2020 Anz joined UK club stalwarts Hessle Audio for her third full EP. Three tracks of dark hoovers, wiggling basslines and sharp vocal cuts, ‘Loos In Twos (NRG)’ was a ruffneck ode to the club, working its way into countless DJ sets and end of year lists.
Since then, Anz has been busier than ever. A salvo of standout mixes and her acclaimed NTS Radio residency saw Anz scoop DJ Mag's 2020 ‘Breakthrough DJ’ award, and an invitation to join BBC Radio 1’s Dance Residency line-up in March 2021 soon followed. Taking on monthly shows with two of the UK’s most respected broadcasters, Anz has cemented her position as one of the UK’s most exciting young selectors.
But, as a producer, nowhere is Anz’ prolific workrate better demonstrated than her annual ‘dubs’ mixes. Now in its 6th year, each edition is comprised entirely of original productions running the gamut of UK and international styles - always mixed with her trademark laser-focus and tempo-warping trickery.
After self-releasing the fifth edition of S/S Dubs in a deluxe cassette bundle in December 2020, Anz unveiled her label OTMI in early 2021; a home for her as-yet-unreleased tracks and stylistic counterparts from friends and family across the electronic music spectrum. With the physical release selling out in a day, and lead single ‘Unravel in the Designated Zone’ championed by Danny Howard and Resident Advisor alike, Anz spoke to Crack Magazine about the nascent label and her masterplan in her June 2021 cover feature debut.
Showing no signs of slowing down, Anz joins the Ninja Tune family with the announce of her 4th EP ‘All Hours’. Due for release this Autumn, the record is a full-throttle trip through the history of dance music and underground culture – tracing lines through sun drenched electro into club-focused breakbeat, classic UK garage and jungle - all seamlessly pieced together in Anz’ infectiously joyous style.
From her dubs mixes to her award winning NTS show, guestmixes for Mary-Anne Hobbs to her recent Radio 1 Dance residency, her OTMI imprint to the forthcoming ‘All Hours’ EP, Anz mashes down disparate styles with mystifying ease. Expect nods to seminal scenes and plenty of vibes”.
Heading back to 2019, and THE FACE profiled a rising talent who was already a club legend. Anz’s story and progress is fascinating and interesting. It seems like, even by 2019, she had found her place and groove:
“Anyone who’s crossed paths with Anz knows all about her passion for the club. The London-born, Manchester-based artist spends her weekends shelling in venues across the UK, and you can hear her blend bass, UK funky, breakbeats, ghetto tech and electro selections once a month on her NTS Manchester show. Anz recently dropped the playful, high-octane EP Invitation 2 Dance – dedicated to “the boys who used to muscle me off the decks at house parties” alongside a long list of friends, family and fellow northern nightlife legends.
How did you first develop a passion for raving?
I first went clubbing around 16, sneaking into clubs in East London with my doctored 16 – 25 railcard as ID – I switched the numbers on Microsoft paint, ‘laminated’ it with clear tape and hoped for the best. But I think university is where I really honed in on the craft of raving. In and around Liverpool, I vividly remember clattering downstairs into the unknown with my partner-in-crime Jess (while I’m here, hold tight Jess). We mainly cut our teeth in warehouses around Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle, before they had been done up all nice with gin menus or whatever.
What’s special about Manchester’s club scene?
Entirely different scenes converge to support each other’s hustle. You get hip-hop and soul heads posting about the latest jungle releases from the city or people from ambient labels front and centre at a hard techno night. There isn’t that tangible sense of competition – I guess everyone is just working to make this thing happen. I think the geography of the city also helps; people might be less inclined to roll to each other’s nights or radio shows if it was a 3.5 hour night-tube round trip.
Other than London and Manchester, where’s your favourite place to go out in the UK and why?
I think Leeds and Sheffield are the ones at the moment. Leeds feels so exciting, the city has a wealth of small DIY spots and people who are passionate about building sound systems, pushing music forward and having a wicked time. Sheffield is similar, but with more hills and greenery. Lovely”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Paula Abu
I have loved learning about Anz and reading about her sheer passion and drive. Mix Mag interviewed her in 2020. This was near the start of the pandemic. For someone who is use to playing at clubs and around people, it must have been heartaching and stressful for Anz to have her plans and normal routine disrupted a lot:
“What would your dream scenario for the first proper party post-COVID be?
First and foremost, there’s a COVID vaccine in place. Then, I think probably just somewhere familiar like The White Hotel or Soup Kitchen in Manchester with loads of familiar faces. No particular line-up or specific genre or anything, just friends and family back together again.
You shared a helpful Twitter thread of tips about your production process. What do you think is the most valuable recommendation you have to help producers facing writer's block?
I'd say there's two. The most important one is that there's no sense in forcing it, and understanding that resting and taking the time away is ok. I've been in situations where I've really tried to push through a block to the point where I'm getting more and more frustrated and then that makes me even more blocked. Especially now that there's reduced pressure with no clubs and no feeling that you need to have the hottest banger to play at X night or Y event, you can try and use that reduced pressure to take time, do nothing, absorb life. Because I feel like once you've absorbed all your surroundings and taken time to just be, it makes it a lot easier coming back to music.
The second one is trying to make something bad, which I mentioned in the thread. It's probably the most surprising experiment that I've ever tried. I don't know what happens but something kicks in in your brain when you're trying to make something bad that starts injecting it with bits of you and your style or personality. It's weird, but it seems to work.
A lot of the tracks were used in your fifth annual production mix which came out recently and absolutely bangs. Can you share any further plans you’ve got coming up for them - are there releases on the way?
I've got a really big, exciting release later in the year at some point. The masters just came back last week. I probably can't say what it is yet because I don't want to jinx it even though I know it's happening. But it's absolutely mad to me.
How’s lockdown in Manchester been?
It's been interesting. I live in the city centre and for the beginning it was sort of a ghost town, it was really strange to see all these hubs of activity completely dead, which I'm sure everyone has been noticing when going for their sanctioned exercise. I get the sense that I'll maybe never see the city like it again in my lifetime which is quite a heavy feeling.
With making the 74 odd tunes, I haven't really spent that much time outside anyway so I probably couldn't tell you much more. The inside of my flat has been cool”.
Last year, Resident Advisor were excited to speak with an artist who was breaking through. I love D.J.s and producers who are more used to having their music played and heard in clubs rather than the radio. That said, Anz’s music is perfectly fit and ripe for international airplay, as it is so energised and inspiring:
“In her family home, where boogie and funk chimed effortlessly with Afrobeat and Ghanian highlife, Anz was drawn to four-part harmony bands and lush basslines—think Dynasty and Earth, Wind & Fire. Her parents carried the familiar sounds of their Nigerian youth over to the UK, bringing a sense of home to their new surroundings. After a series of moves, the family settled outside of London, where things felt a little less like home.
"I didn't really clock on to exactly why I felt uncomfortable and why my parents really encouraged us to make friends with other black kids in the school," she said. "At the time it felt kind of corny, but I don't think I really got the weight of it and why they really encouraged it so much." It was in the quiet moments on the house computer, watching performances by the likes of The Prodigy, that Anz began imagining a new world of sound. By 2015 she was ready to share.
"I didn't really see production mixes all that often from my peers," she said, "and there were moments where I thought 'is this weird? Am I being extra?' But I just felt so compelled to document it all, including the wonky mixdowns and patchy blending. I just needed to try, and to document it, and it's ended up being a really affirming part of my process, for lots of different reasons."
PHOTO CREDIT: Jungle Joe
Although Anz has always been prolific, the first UK lockdown precipitated an especially intense period. It's clear from our conversation that music has a certain grounding quality. "Whenever I'm feeling sad or upset, there's two ways it will go," she said. "I either completely disconnect, do something that brings me comfort without any kind of expectation, or I start a project. There's no real in-between. It's overdrive or absolutely nothing."
She takes a similar approach to DJing, bringing a few tracks to frame the evening and leaving the rest up to the crowd. "I try to put myself in their shoes, because I've been in their shoes so often," she said. "If I've just had a super-melodic, airy fairy tune, I'd probably want a little bit of pressure, something a little bit tougher. It's a conversation—people tell you if they don't like something, especially if they're moving to the smoking area."
There have been a number of international or high-profile gigs—Lady Gaga booked her for a Marsha P. Johnson Institute online fundraiser in June—but for Anz there's nothing like playing to a home crowd. She likens away-sets to delicate trust-building exercises, whereas in Manchester she's free to roam and hone in on sounds. "At home they understand the broader me, have heard me play in the same basement however many times," she said.
"I don't feel I need to be like, 'Oh, and by the way this and this and this is how we get to here.' They already know that, so I can go as mad, moody, dark or as ecstatic as I want to. They trust me with it." And what about her parents? What do they make of her musical evolution, and the decision to stay up north? "I played a gig for Gal-Dem at the Tate once and they came for that. I think it all kind of made sense—it wasn't a sweaty rave." She leaned into the camera and looked away, pensive. "Maybe I'm trying to do what they were doing at the time, find that comfort in home”.
Prior to the wrap-up and getting to a great review of All Hours, there is a more recent interview that I want to include. The Guardian featured Anz in October last year. As the pandemic is dying down a bit, I know that Anz will have a busy 2022 planned:
“This narrative arc is the inspiration for her new EP All Hours. Bookended by a bright piano intro signifying the waking morning, and a dreamlike synth outro designed to sooth you into sleep as the sun comes up and strangers have passed out on your sofa, each track corresponds to a time of day so listeners can “choose their own adventure” through 24 hours.
Lead single You Could Be is a bubbly, sunburst number with vocals from London singer George Riley, meant to reflect an optimistic afternoon feeling. Anz’s music often features vocal snips and samples, she considers them instruments that make the track feel human, but she wanted to find a proper singer for You Could Be, which meant a five-year search before she connected with Riley over Instagram.
Other tracks include a swinging garage cut meant for the evening, an electro/drum track for the dancefloor and a heady, proto-breakbeat and jungle tune for those early hours, lights-on moments. Each track contains a little sonic element of the track before it as well as the one after it; Anz not only connects parts of the day, but shows how dance music history is sewn together too. It’s masterly stuff, demonstrating the 29-year-old’s far-reaching knowledge.
“As I was building the record, I realised it could be about who I am as a producer, what’s gone into me to create the output,” she says. The record channels various UK electronic styles – rave, breaks, garage – and black music more generally, influenced by the vitality of The New Dance Show, a Soul Train-style dance music TV show that aired in Detroit in the late 80s and early 90s. Today’s dance scenes are rooted in black creativity – a fact often underplayed, now being reclaimed. “It’s music for all hours, and music that’s all ours too – all ravers, but also, for black people. I don’t just mean one set of people, I mean all of us.”
Before this release, Anz’s discography consisted of a few club-ready 12” singles, colourful and propulsive, unconstrained by genre: “I maintain this stuff should be fun. I think discourse merchants get caught up in being purist about genre. Is that fun? No!” The same vision is present in her DJing. “There’s a specific kind of fun that comes with mixing up genres,” she continues. “Music deserves respect, but it doesn’t mean that it needs to be this chore, this fight where we’re warring over the semantics of it rather than appreciating it. This is black electronic music and it doesn’t have to be serious, it can be joyous.”
Residencies for BBC Radio 1 and NTS and her own recently started label OTMI aside, she’s renowned for her annual mixes of her own productions: forthcoming singles, sketches and exclusive tracks blended together into the most potent potion of tomorrow’s new sounds. “I hadn’t really seen other people doing it, and I thought: ‘Am I being extra?’ But this feels like a special thing that I can do … It reminds me of the excitement and wonder I felt when first trying to make music.”
All these efforts have built up into a sudden surge in profile. “The strangest thing was coming back after the pandemic and stepping out in front of a crowd – suddenly it’s not a 200-capacity basement any more, it’s thousands of people staring at you.” Now planning or performing several sets over a weekend while trying to keep her material constantly fresh, she’s busy adjusting to the new balance.
Taking inspiration from the EP concept, Anz considers her dream day: “Every perfect day starts with a lie-in, no alarms, just sunlight. No one texting, calling or emailing me. Garage in the evening. A party with me and my friends playing, no pressure on anyone. A good afters, and the next day in the park. It’s like when I went to uni and first realised I wouldn’t get in trouble if I didn’t go in, and literally watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off instead.” Ferris would be proud, but with the packed new schedule, her perfect day might prove elusive”.
All Hours is an E.P. that should be played loud. It is so colourful and full of memorable and interesting textures. There have been some very positive reviews for one of last year’s best releases. Pitchfork noted the following when they sat down to experience All Hours:
“The nightlife concept behind All Hours is explicit but not overbearing. Anz calls the EP “dance music for people who are up all hours,” and the record’s opening and closing tracks—“Decisions (AM Intro)” and “Quest Select (AM Outro)”—reflect their positioning in the theoretical small hours. The EP’s six songs surge and relax as the record traces the course of 24 hours in clubland, building from the contemplative welcome of “Decisions (AM Intro)” to the brutalist rave frenzy of “Last Before Lights,” and finally mellowing off into the nervous energy of “Quest Select,” a song that suggests tired, twitching feet and brain waves hovering between retreat and attack.
Within this loose framework Anz offers a freewheeling—and very entertaining—callback to the club styles of the last four decades. The giddy “You Could Be,” featuring George Riley, takes the listener back to the early days of Madonna’s career, when she was riding high on the New York electro-funk style of Jellybean Benitez; “Real Enough to Feel Good” nods to G-funk, UK garage, and Baltimore club, while “Inna Circle'' splits the difference by introducing Mantronix-style electro to Baltimore breakbeats. “Last Before Lights,” meanwhile, is a tribute to pretty much everything, throwing Beltram hoover sounds, staccato trance riffs, a chest-bursting bassline, and rousing Italo pianos at a track intended to capture that last, glorious surge of energy before the club lights come on.
While this genre pick ’n’ mix is not exactly standard practice for electronic producers, All Hours is notably less experimental than Anz’ 2020 EP for Hessle Audio, Loos In Twos (NRG). With the possible exception of “Real Enough to Feel Good,” the music on All Hours walks with a straight back and winning smile quite different from that EP’s wobbly strut. The production is bright and welcoming, like an unexpectedly friendly pat-down from security.
More importantly, All Hours brings to the forefront a melodic tendency that Anz has only hinted at in her previous work. The piano intro to “Decisions (AM Intro)” teases the kind of ambiguous emotional journey you might expect of a particularly winsome movie soundtrack, while “You Could Be” is simply a wonderful pop song, shining with romantic sass. The way that the EP’s six songs flow into each other, with sonic elements artfully bridging the divide between tracks, evokes a well-crafted DJ set. The twisting synth riff that connects “Decisions (AM Intro)” and “You Could Be” brings a smile to my face every time, a perfect sleight of hand that never seems to tire.
Like the very best nights out, this EP is simultaneously fleeting and impactful, a brief moment of joy that promises to resonate for years. All Hours feels like an effortless step up to the major leagues for a producer who can find magic in the murkiest nightclub corner”.
A simply remarkable D.J., artist and all-round wonder-talent, go and check out Anz’s socials, and check out her incredible music. She is someone who, one hopes, will be at many festivals through the summer. I love what she is doing – as do so many other people. She has a very long career ahead. Go and throw your support towards…
THE tremendous Anz.
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