Sink Ya Teeth's Maria Uzor on the transcendental power of repetition

In the sixties Andy Warhol created a series of "series" depicting the mundane, the everyday. Soup cans perhaps most famously, and Marilyn Monroe, but also car crashes and Elvis shooting from the hip. Produced largely through the process of screen printing it was, in effect, a form of sampling and looping. As a teenager about to embark on my GCSE art coursework, I was gripped.

Repetition in art and music has always had a strong effect on me. I’m not so much fascinated by it as completely carried away involuntarily on its intoxicating wave. The continuous loop of a bass riff will make me feel as though I’m dropping down two levels, contorting my face in its sweetness (I’ll happily write a song with just one chord). Repetition in music sends me into a trance. I love that feeling of transcendence, of being taken out of yourself to connect to something bigger, of being part of the whole as you dance to the beat of your own drum loop.

Repetitive drums have, of course, been used since the beginning of time in religious rituals and ceremony, to drive out ills and heal communities, to invoke and connect to spirit dimensions, and to rouse. They are a call to arms to take to the battlefield. Drums mean action. A transportation from one way of being to another.

And it’s for this very same reason that 1980s New York City was an influence on me personally in the creation of our album. I love looking over the photography of Jamel Shabazz, which seems to capture perfectly the colour and creativity of NYC at that time. A time of rebuilding, reclaiming and reinvention, it was a period that produced so many areas of the arts that influenced my writing. Early hip hop music and style, inclusive clubs like Danceteria and The Paradise Garage playing a mix of the then new electronic sounds from Detroit and NYC alongside post-punk bands, glam rock icons and funk classics.

I love the spirit of New York back then. It had that element of punk DIY-ness to it where anything goes. People were mobilising, creating new ideas and ways of being.

I always find it interesting that the word "fresh", to depict crispness in style, sprung up in the post gang-fuelled era of the South Bronx at a time when New York was itself going through a period of change. Dark jeans (pre-lycra) with a sharp crease at the front, Dapper Dan turning designer fashion on it’s head with his logo-wear (read: "repetition"), and the obligatory Cazals to me all seem to evoke a feeling of hope, creativity and expression in adversity, and I feel that’s more often than not where the best music comes from.

Freshness in music also came in the form of a shift from traditional instruments to electronic instruments and sampling. I feel like I’ve been plugged in, turned on, and the current is starting to flow when I hear the sounds produced from hardware like the Linn drum, Roland 808 and 909, and Oberheim DMX. It’s definitely evocative of a certain period in time. We use some of those sounds on the album because that’s where a lot of our influences come from.