“People don’t like to reveal their pasts, as it brings up questions of authenticity. But do you really think your favorite DJs were born discerning? We all came from somewhere, and we’ve all played some regrettable records in our time…” explains Casper whilst sitting next to me on a Friday-evening train from London’s Paddington Station to Oxford. Commuters all around us are rushing home to their lives, talking to their other halves or playing mind-numbing games on their iPhones. There’s a distinctive feeling of a seasonal change as the crisp September air breezes in. We’re headed towards Field Maneuvers, a 500-capacity micro-festival at an unannounced location one hour from the capital, where he’s scheduled to DJ later in the night.
Visibly excited and anxious about the evening ahead, Casper carefully explains his viewpoint that the longer one spends with music, the more discerning they one becomes, just like with anything else. “One also figures out more about what actually motivates and inspires them. I started out playing alongside DJs such as Erol Alkan, Justice and Simian Mobile Disco. That’s where I cut my teeth and learned how to be a warm-up DJ… I played some really bad records and also learned about a lot of really good records.” He pauses to remark on the color of the sunset as the train shoots into the countryside. “The Volte-Face name is supposed to be taken humorously, but I don’t expect anybody to know that instinctively. I quite like things that seem pretentious from the outside but in reality are a bit goofy or funny to nobody but me, and maybe my closest friends, if I’m lucky.”
There’s been many a chance moment in Casper’s career so far. One of those was putting three to four months of serious work and planning into launching a new 600-capacity music venue in Hackney where he would have been the creative director and sole booker. “I would have put my money where my mouth was and lived that job seven days a week.” In the end the spiraling state of the Hackney property market caused this vision of grandeur to double and triple out of reach. “When it fell through, it was a piece of the jigsaw in me realizing that I had other ambitions left unfulfilled.”
The turning point in his career came the morning after an event that didn’t exactly go according to plan—he took a financial hit, losing a large sum of money. “I woke up the next day. I wasn’t bankrupt, and I could have dusted myself down and carried on regardless, but it was enough of a shock that my brain immediately went onto a new track and I said to myself, ‘why not find some time to finally get into the studio?’” The biggest setbacks are often the most valuable ones: “If you’re walking down the street and you trip up and stumble a little, you don’t learn anything. But if you fall flat on your face and you’re blinded on impact, then your life changes. I never did BleeD to make money. I had to lick my wounds, but the payoff was that a different hemisphere of my brain awakened as a result.”

Casper took his foot off the gas with BleeD as a club night and dived headfirst into the world of production. In little over a year, BleeD the record label has spawned three releases, and Casper has contributed to Svreca’s Semantica imprint, which he stands by as one of his biggest influences. The invaluable musical connections and friendships he’s established over the years have helped make this process a fluid one. Living and working from his home in Clapton, North East London, which he shares with his girlfriend and cat, what does an average day for Volte-Face look like? “Mondays can be a bit groggy, but I’ll go straight to the computer. I’ve got an office space-slash-studio at home. So I roll out of bed and into there. Label stuff doesn’t take up a great deal of time at the minute to be honest. It’s a low-level operation—we print 300 records each time.” He spends a solid two or three days a week working on music, averaging seven to eight hours at a sitting and treating it like a day job from morning to evening and it’s a routine he’s happy with. Feedback and guidance from his peers is crucial—he trusts in the support of an engineer friend to ensure everything sounds up to scratch.

A multitasker by nature, Casper has moonlighted as a promoter for experimental events such as Donau Festival and Krakow’s Unsound over the past few years. “I actively booked for the former, and helped to shape some of the club programming for the latter. They’re two of the foremost experimental festivals going, so it’s an honor to be involved in any way, shape or form.” These endeavors developed naturally from being a core member of the team behind Field Day festival since its inauguration in 2007. His role there has evolved considerably over the years. “I was booking a small tent, which got bigger over the years and was eventually branded as BleeD. Aside from that, I send a shopping list to the main bookers and try to have an influence on the overall direction in any way that I could, especially if I felt there was a groundswell around a certain artist or sound.”
This office tenure was where he first encountered Daniel Avery, a close friend whom he often DJs alongside. The second BleeD release is a collaborative effort from the pair under the guise of “Rote”, a term that elicits something happening mechanically by repetition. “If you used the expression that the record happened ‘by rote’ it means that it happened automatically. I think there’s something about making hypnotic dance music that’s about finding that place where it becomes automatic. Instinctive rather than overly contrived. That’s why we dance in clubs, isn’t it?”

He plans his every move in the “game” of DJing, an activity that remains his top priority, in a calculating manner. Having been on the other side of the fence as a promoter for so long, Casper understands the value of making oneself scarce. “I don’t want to play twelve times a year in London—I want to play five or six times a year in London… Hunee is a good example of this—I gather he moved abroad during a perceived lull in his career, and suddenly the demand for him
in Europe went through the roof. It was arguably the sudden scarcity that fueled it. As long as you’re putting records out, the fewer gigs you do, the better, I’d say.”

A bag of Japanese lagers down the hatch and we’re getting quite merry; the train’s behind us and we’re in a black cab driving down narrow country roads, roaring directions from a map to the driver through a robust plastic shield. Casper is slightly anxious that he should be sober for his set, but the excitement is prevalent. We pick up where we left off at the station, talking about the artwork on his releases, which all feature distorted imagery of faces. “The philosophy is quite similar to that of my name—it looks enigmatic at first until you find out what it is. The first sleeve, for example, has a distorted image of Rupert Murdoch’s head on the front, no one seemed to notice that. The image fits the Charlatan theme of the record, although I wouldn’t necessarily expect anyone to join the dots.”

The third BleeD release and his second solo EP is titled All Grown Up. “I like the idea that two records in, I’ve gone from being a charlatan to being “all grown-up.” The expression is also semi-widely known to be Daily Mail shorthand for a young celebrity coming of age. It’s quite literally a public pronouncement that such-andsuch is now sexually available.”
He’s intrigued by the way the press manipulates stories and it’s another reason why he started with Murdoch. “Once you start learning about the way newspapers are written they become a whole lot more interesting—if you look carefully enough, the answers are there but they’re writing it in a covert manner… the sleeve for the third record comes from a common memory from my childhood. Your football would go in a bush, you would go to retrieve it and there would be a discarded porn magazine sitting there in the shrubbery—it was like a mirror into this life that you’re not ready for yet, like the end of innocence.”

“Nobu DJs in a really meditative way, channeling energy in a way which is almost shamanic. It’s something that I aspire towards more and more—to have the confidence and the convictions to direct the energy of the audience through a more mind-bending, you might say psychedelic trajectory…”

While we approach the festival site, the point is raised that most of this material is geared towards the big room with a distinctive Berghain feel to it. Having had ties to avant-garde artists such as Demdike Stare, Raime and Holly Herndon in the past, surely the experimentalist inside must want to express himself? “I think it’s fair to say there’s a difference, although my love of and experiences with more experimental sounds remain with me to the present day. I apply a lot of textural detail to my music. It’s so far been more about texture than melody, although that’s something I’m also working on,” he explains further. “I think that the relative power of my records so far is as much to do with the fact that I’m still developing in the studio as anything else.”

As the night goes on we wander between stages, watching other acts and acknowledging the on-site production, the general setting and chatting with elated punters. Amongst all of this we come to discuss the role a DJ plays in making people dance. In this sense DJ Nobu is something of an idol for him: “Nobu DJs in a really meditative way, channeling energy in a way which is almost shamanic. It’s something that I aspire towards more and more—to have the confidence and the convictions to direct the energy of the audience through a more mind-bending, you might say psychedelic trajectory… I know full well as a raver as well that I don’t need to be jumping around the room to be having a good time. I can have my eyes closed, bobbing my head in deep concentration. I hope over time that I’ll get closer to achieving that.”

Discussing the program in detail, we eventually progress to what lies ahead for BleeD events: “I know full well that not all of the people I’ve built up in the BleeD database over the years are going to be fully interested in my current musical direction, but BleeD has only ever been a reflection of one person’s music taste at the time. I still spend a lot of my time listening to some pretty out-there music, and will still get behind an artist every now and then if they excite me enough. Alessandro Cortini is a good example—we hosted him at Cafe OTO last week. If someone comes along that I want to promote, whether it’s a hot new techno producer or an elderly man playing a banjo—if I want to put it on, I will!”

He’ll never really be finished organizing events. Before My Eyes is BleeD’s sister event with Raime and Demdike Stare as residents. “The biggest record at one of those nights could be something by Tropic Of Cancer, it could be a Steve Albini rarity, it could be a reggae record— it’s all over the place and I love it. My friendship with the guys was formed there and every couple of months we like to get together and do it again. The Haxan Cloak and Powell played at the last one, it was totally informal with them being booked the day before. It’s just that kind of party. There’s only ever going to be 100 people there but it feels like a very like-minded crowd. Why try to go bigger when you feel you have something special already?”
Casper’s set that night was tight with just the right amount of curvature. Being able to make connections between his playing style and his pensive nature seemed completely natural. Afterwards we hung around and danced to Daniel Avery’s set before all jumping in a car and bombing it back to London with the radio switched off, discussing the evening’s happenings with gusto. It was a very fluid process with the entire expedition materializing in less than twenty-four hours. Let’s just say it happened by rote…