Live photo by Emilyo Arias
There may be no true Jamaican soundsystem scene in the Twin Cities, but that never mattered to industrial dancehall duo Feel Free Hi Fi. In 2016, Shawn Reed and Derek Maxwell combined their respective abilities in music-making and sound system construction to bring the spirit of Kingston to Minneapolis basement parties. That early vision eventually spilled over into to the studio, as the duo became pen pals with Jamaican vocalists and producers who would then bless their experimental rhythms. “We were doing these parties and eclectic sets that were rooted around reggae music and things like jungle that spawned out of it,” Reed says. “We’d have really killer parties, and then we’d have ones that weren’t very good. It was a grind. It started to make more sense for us to put way more energy into trying to make our own music.”
Before teaming up with Maxwell and launching the label Digital Sting, Reed was known for his Iowa City-based indie label Night-People Records and his experimental/noise and post-punk bands Raccoo-oo-on and Wet Hair. The conclusion of Night-People and move to Minnesota coincided with Maxwell leaving Brooklyn after the closure of the celebrated Williamsburg venue Glasslands, where he had been a sound engineer. In Minneapolis, Maxwell worked with sustainable community organizations like Beyond Repair and engineered warehouse parties, improving their sound systems—which led to him being known as the guy who’d take in old gear that was otherwise destined for the dump. “People had stuff that had sat in basements forever, like bass bins that cats were living in,” he says. “We were doing these parties in a basement space and the sound system just took it to another level.”
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The duo stepped away from the party scene in 2018 and focused their energy on building a sound system for Reed’s basement studio. There they could hone their rhythms as Feel Free Hi Fi. Reed says the arrival of their industrial dub sound, which takes influence from UK grime and digital dancehall, was largely built from two holy grail performances he could not stop watching on YouTube: The blippy, metronomic backbone of Throbbing Gristle’s “Discipline” live in San Francisco in the early 1980s, and Cutty Ranks at the Stereo Mars PNP Rally in 1986, toasting over a DJ deconstructing the Sleng Teng rhythm. In live sets, they even played a Throbbing Gristle meets Cutty Ranks mash-up pressed to dubplates. “The energy and the sonics,” Reed says. “I just put them together in my mind that this was our sound.”
Maxwell and Reed toiled privately at their recordings, producing hundreds of orphan versions or rhythms (often stylized in Jamaica as riddims). Built mostly in Ableton, the duo infused a homier sound into the recordings using the Roland MC-505 Groovebox and Roland SH-101. They shared demos with Cam Stallones and M. Geddes Gangras of Duppy Gun, who circulated the versions among the Jamaican vocalists in the crew. Feel Free Hi Fi intended their first record to be versions only, but the record evolved after playing a show with Flatbush ragga rapper Eddie Hill and singer Manic Times (aka Jeffrey Eaton of the hardcore band Modern Life Is War). It was also around this time that Jamaican digital dub crew Equiknoxx released Bird Sound Power with Demdike Stare, an early influence on Feel Free. “I was like ‘Oh, this is the merger of more experimental music with dancehall’,” Reed says. “I feel like they are the vanguard of that.”
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Reed connected with Time Cow of Equiknoxx over Instagram and soon received a cryptic DM reply that read: “I am not a robot.” In March of 2021, the connection led to the Equiknoxx meets Feel Free Hi Fi 12-inch released in tandem with the Prophet Noir 12-inch featuring Manic Times and Eddie Hill. Equiknoxx and Feel Free bounce off one another’s versions, and the “aww aww” vocals and programmed minimalism of Gavsborg’s “11 am with Frankie Bubbler” become jerky echoes of hyperdub in the Feel Free version. Elsewhere, Time Cow reworks the dancehall traditionalism of Feel Free’s “Chipheads” into a hollowed out nightmare reminiscent of a John Carpenter synth score.
A collaboration album with Duppy Gun vocalists IJahbar, King Geineous, and Tokeeno arrived the following year; thanks to all the goodwill Feel Free had built with Jamaican artists, the music began traveling to European distributors and DJs. It speaks to an issue that has always been consequential to musicians from the island. “Equiknoxx are very savvy,” Reed says. “They are participating in music beyond the dancehall music of Jamaica. Their music is more esoteric so they don’t really fit into the dancehall pantheon.”
That savvy led to a remix of Thom Yorke’s “Not The News” in 2019, but much like Feel Free Hi-Fi in the Twin Cities, there’s little room for Equiknoxx’s experimental styles in Jamaica. Gavsborg told Reed in an interview for Third Rail Quarterly that it’s a common mistake to think of Jamaicans monolithically, or that dub artists like King Tubby dominated the island radio in the 1970s. He said Jamaican radio is more likely to play “Celine Dion-type music.”
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“Jamaica, like most other countries, has a structure that pushes pop music,” Gavsborg says. “And with a population of under three million, you can imagine the underground scenes are quite small. We’re also not totally underground, but are a bit more fluid with what we do, and from time to time, tunes make it out to the big stage on their own.”
Feel Free Hi Fi are determined to break into the dancehall mainstream, and the duo keeps finding fellow weirdos who share their leftfield principles, leading to West Coast tours with Exotic Gardens (Aaron Coyes of Peaking Lights’ new project) and releases with G Sudden, Gunilla of Kyoto, Japan, and a cassette called Time Splitters I by Deskulling (of hardcore industrial duo Prison Religion), who traveled to Jamaica to record with the Duppy Gun crew.
Feel Free Hi Fi’s full-length debut reflects the duo’s outsider status in its title: I Was So Far In I Was Out. The album returns to their instrumental roots, while continuing to push outward into more esoteric soundscapes—like using the sound of croaking frogs on “Gateless Barrier” to keep the rhythm. Reed says their experimentations are sometimes by design, to consciously get beyond dancehall comparisons in the recognition that they are cultural outsiders who don’t want to appropriate Jamaican music too closely. “There’s a big side of Feel Free Hi-Fi that is like ‘we make underground electronic music’,” he says. “Even the title of the record is about being so deep in underground music that we’re simultaneously outside of it.”
