The stars of PC Music recount its history in 10 key tracks – one for each year of its existence
Welcome to Dazed’s PC Music takeover, a two-day guest edit celebrating 10 years of pop music’s most exhilarating label. Head here to check out exclusive mixes, features and in-depth profiles with some of its key players.
Earlier this year, PC Music announced that they would cease releasing new music at the end of 2023. The record label – which had a huge hand in shaping perceptions of pop, experimental, and club music over the past 10 years – will instead shift its focus to archival releases.
UK songwriter and producer A. G. Cook founded PC Music in 2013, initially with a roster of friends including the singer and visual artist Hannah Diamond and the songwriter-producers Danny L Harle and EASYFUN, and later expanding to the likes of performance artist Hyd, dream-pop band Planet 1999, and leftfield electronic producers umru and Ö. Though these artists all had unique artistic personas, they seemed to speak the shared pop language of ‘Personal Computer Music’: music whose personality is amplified by digital technology.
A decade later, PC Music has made the jump from London art-school experimentation to the centre of modern popular culture. A. G. Cook works with Beyoncé and Charli XCX; Danny L Harle with Caroline Polachek and Dua Lipa. The aesthetic universes built by Hannah Diamond and the wider raft of PC Music’s visual collaborators have clearly appeared on a few moodboards. But PC Music was never exclusively about pop music, and its other artists have all realised unique artistic achievements in this time too, from felicita’s retooled 60s psychedelia, to Kane West’s playful take on house music.
Here, in a list curated by label founder A. G. Cook, the stars of PC Music recount its history in 10 key tracks – one for each year of its existence.
EASYFUN: This track was started in 2012, before I’d ever heard of PC Music, purely for fun and as a distraction from my uni work. I was making it after getting obsessed with Scritti Politti, Rustie, and Jam & Lewis productions. I remember playing it to Alex at my house and him saying he was going to start a label, so we should finish it up. It was a painstaking process – the file was so massive as almost every chord was on a new synth sound; Logic kept glitching, eventually randomly muting a bunch of MIDI notes throughout the whole project. The only solution was to check the hundreds and hundreds of regions one by one. All pretty amateur – but it was the first finished EASYFUN song!
Gus Lobban, a.k.a. Kane West: Alex and I met in Goldsmiths’ Laptop Ensemble and bonded over Perfume, Drexciya, and new jack swing. I was called upon to make a PC Music release after I accidentally won a Beatport remix contest entered under a joke name. To me, PC Music was an example of inevitable generational assertion in pop, as a new cohort expressed their identification with General MIDI and Geocities rather than pirate radio and turntablism. I was sincerely trying to challenge the snobbery and dourness of alternative dance music at the time, just with Casio brass presets and stock sample diva vocals. I built the tracks of my mini-album Western Beats from the ground up depending on the sounds that my chosen keyboards and MIDI modules were limited to, with the most extreme mastering settings achievable enabled before I even made a sound. Apart from a few sound effects, everything in “gameset” is from a Casio CTK-700 home keyboard. I came up with the wonky hook and paired it with the CTK-700’s human beatbox kick, finishing it with an indispensable N64 Super Smash Bros. reference. I remember DJing a packed PC Music night at Miranda Bar in Shoreditch with Björk in attendance when I received the news that Pitchfork had outed me as Kane West, whose identity had hitherto been a secret. It felt like we’d arrived. Kane West lives and I still play tunes from Western Beats. For a joke remix contest entry, I’ll take that.
A G. Cook, co-producer: ‘Hi’ is a real gem of a Hannah song. I see it as a bridge between our first tracks together and the very specific universe of ‘Reflections’. There’s a lot of space in it, the lyrics and melodies are extremely colloquial – but it also has truly epic moments that come out of nowhere. I had just graduated from making music alone in my bedroom, and was finally renting a proper (but partially abandoned) studio, so I was blasting tracks at all hours. I temporarily ended up with this sort of hearing fatigue (basically exhaustion), but we’d already locked in the video shoot and needed the final version ASAP, so I asked Finn to help me assemble everything. Finn and I have worked on a lot together, but never in such a didactic way, with me in the corner of the room, basically trying to listen while not listening! It’s still one of my favourite Bradly & Pablo videos, and it’s also a testament to Hannah’s narrative style. The “celebrity” montage in the final chorus is such a nice tonal shift, and it really captures the contradictions and emotions at the heart of PC Music.
EASYFUN, co-producer: Me and Alex used to both work in this pretty strange studio complex in Dollis Hill. I remember he had some medical issue with his ears and couldn’t work on it and asked me to try and help finish it one night. Most of the material was already there when I first heard it – Hannah and Alex had already built a really clear musical world, I just rewrote the chords and melody at the end of the chorus (with Alex sitting a safe distance from the monitors, just speaking when he heard something he thought was cool). I remember enjoying how the chorus wasn’t that symmetrical but still sort of worked quite naturally. The next morning I added the middle section and worked out the structure. I think he and Hannah wrote all the lyrics later that week, but you’d have to ask them.
“It was an interesting way to enter the pop music space – it felt like we were coming in through the back door, like a virus or a glitch in the system” – Bradley & Pablo
Bradley & Pablo, video directors: The first music video we ever made was for QT’s “Hey QT”. The year before that, A. G. had reached out about making an image for a GFOTY segment in another PC Music featured in Dazed at the time. That was how we started working together and building a body of work that really helped shape our voices in the early years of our career. The music they were making was so unique and exciting, and being able to respond to that visually alongside the other visual artists in the PC Music ecosystem was so inspiring. They really were dream collaborators. We were able to investigate concepts and build worlds in ways that I don’t think would have been possible with any other artists at the time. It was an interesting way to enter the pop music space – it felt like we were coming in through the back door, like a virus or a glitch in the system. Hannah Diamond’s “Hi” was our second music video. It tells the story of a girl who dreams of being a global pop sensation and who lives out those fantasies through the screen from her bedroom/broadcasting HQ. We wanted to push the production values as high as we could for what was a really low budget music video. We loved the high gloss worlds that the music conjured and that Hannah had previously created for herself in her photography work, and we wanted to bring that to life in film.
Lipgloss Twins: The dust is blowing. Young fickle Frank finds Lisa’s photo on the ground and keeps it in his wallet. He fantasises about meeting her, falls in love with her wide gaping eyes and honeyed smile. But his love is unrequited, because Lisa is long gone, secreted away in the Arizona desert, in her giant mirrored castle, concocting colourful explosions for swooning kids. The song sounds like the explosions, like the knock-kneed trot of Frank’s braying mare, like the sweet cotton candy at the fair that visited their town every summer. “Doodle” was released on April 29, 2016.
POBBLES: POBBLES aren’t just toys. We’re your backstage pass to the COOLEST label in town. Just like a rock anthem that NEVER fades away, POBBLES are built to last. Throw us into the crowd, roll us down the stairs… we can handle ANYTHING! Who needs landlines when you can connect with POBBLES worldwide using the INTERNET. Let’s LINK up and jam together. Let’s make THE WORLD our stage. Let’s POBBLES!
umru: ‘popular’ was the first song I made with Laura Les, it was right after finding out about the first 100 gecs EP and noticing she followed me. Looking back it’s almost absurd that she wrote such a good hook over an instrumental with almost no bass line or chord progression, I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing at the time in terms of songwriting or structure. We released it as a single before the full project that ended up on PC Music, but I’m endlessly grateful that the song found a home there. I’d really be a whole different person today without that support from A. G. and artists like Laura who were open to working with me when I had barely any experience doing so. The 2018 release parties for that EP in New York and Chicago were some of the first times Laura ever performed live, so seeing where she’s at now, a nearly constant world-touring artist, is just incredible.
Planet 1999: ‘Spell’ was the first single of Planet 1999. The story: once upon a time Caro was going through the band’s demos on her computer and found the raw loop of the track in a hidden folder. She thought ‘I don’t remember about this one, I’m pretty sure it was not there yesterday.‘ When she clicked Return, a funny little creature appeared on her screen and said, ‘Hi! My Name is Zippy. Thanks for opening this file. I’ve been trapped in here since 1999.‘ And that’s when she realised she herself had been cursed to sing the same vocal loop for ever and ever – ‘under your spell… under your spell‘ – until someone would dare to release this song to the world. A year later, PC Music did, and now the enchantment was broken.
A. G. Cook: ‘Being Harsh’ set in motion various things that I wasn’t immediately aware of. I had played guitar a bit as a teenager, but by the time I really got into electronic music I’d become totally against using musical instruments. I sold or gave away most of my guitar equipment and refused to even use MIDI keyboards. I think I had that outlook for about seven years, and it was quite useful to be so immersed like that, but eventually my interest in songwriting and sound design went full circle.
Working with Jónsi on his album ‘Shiver’ was a big turning point for me, just spending so much time with someone who had their own unique instincts when it came to “acoustic” vs. “electronic” sounds. Around the same time, I also got to know Alaska Reid and witnessed the sheer number of guitar tunings she used. Every time I picked up one of Alaska’s guitars I was completely lost. I got into the habit of writing songs using a couple of those tunings, and ‘Being Harsh’ started in exactly that way. It was written and recorded very quickly in 2019.
”In a music industry defined by plays and uploads, I think it’s nice to remember that songs can never be fixed in place” – A. G. Cook
The lyrics on the final version are still unfinished and partially mumbled, but the riff that anchors the entire song has this quality that I look for in everything I work on — a mix of familiarity and uncanniness. It sounds like a conventional pattern, but the unusual tuning pushes it slightly outside of that. I debuted the song as part of my “Acoustic EDM” set for Secret Sky in 2020, which was really a prelude to the playfulness of 7G & Apple’s “live” lockdown campaigns. ‘Being Harsh’ was never released as a single, but it seemed to immediately find its own audience, and I noticed a lot of covers popping up, all with their own careful interpretation of that guitar part. Oklou ended up including a cover as part of her live show, and to me it felt even more real that my version, with my mumbling melodies finally resolved. I ended up convincing her to officially release her version, and we performed it together once, but it was such a permanent part of her set that I think she must have performed it many, many more times than I ever have.
In a music industry defined by plays and uploads, I think it’s nice to remember that songs can never be fixed in place. It’s why I’m such a fan of alternate versions, mixes and remixes. Occasionally, a song like ‘Being Harsh’ does all the work by itself, and you know that it’s tapped into something strangely communal.
Hyd: ‘Skin 2 Skin‘ came through by mixing tears with gasoline. It was extremely hot in New York and between sweat and fire, a new material ignited.
Ö: It feels like I wrote this just yesterday. It reminds me of my return to Paris after a couple of years in Canada, jumping from one Airbnb to the next with no idea where I’d be at the end of the month when the lease finished. I had lost touch with so many of my friends by being so far away. I felt lonely by myself in this small apartment in the 20th arrondissement. I was messing around with some plugins when I accidentally set a vocoder to a Japanese musical scale called Hirajoshi – a form of pentatonic scale traditionally used for tuning the Koto. The sound it produced was totally in sync with what I felt then, the kind of emotional numbness necessary to cope with negativity. The song begins in a monophonic, robotic tone, but as it progresses, it blossoms into something grand and emotionally charged. A place of quiet introspection to a state of overwhelming emotion. The contrast is quite stark and, to me, quite moving. During the writing of the short movie Hypernormality, we used that same bittersweetness to evoke the feeling of a child forced to leave his mother behind in the hope of securing a better future for himself. This is still one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written.
GRRL: The track began after making my set for the 7 by 7 livestream back in 2020. For that, Alex asked me to make a set that focused entirely on drums and percussion (each set was based on the theme of one of the seven discs in his album 7G), so I made an entirely original set built around that concept. Afterwards, Alex asked if I’d be interested in developing/expanding that sound and those ideas into a full release. You can hear a bit of it crystallising in things like my remixes of ‘Gold Leaf’ and ‘Check1’ by umru, as well as my section in the 10 mix, Bug Mix, my 7 by 7 and Pop Crypt sets, etc. After many experiments and iterations, a bunch of those ideas came together and formed into ‘Honeybee’ and ‘Camber’. I’m so happy I got to release it on PC Music. When I first heard some of the label’s early stuff about 10 years ago, I listened over and over again. It’s nice seeing their influence spread as far and as wide as it has and exciting seeing people from that crew and that era continually sharpen, redefine, and expand their work a decade on. The clarity of vision was there from the beginning and even now it feels as sharp as ever. It also makes me really happy (and thankful) to cross paths in this way – to get to work alongside, play shows with, and release music on PC Music this far down the line.
