New audio documentary series The Afters begins with Robot84 and a remarkable 35-year story of records, friendship, Ibiza, loss and recovery.
Dance music history isn’t only written by the people standing in the biggest DJ booths. Much of it exists in record shops, small clubs and studios, in friendships formed around music and in records passed from one pair of hands to another. These are often the stories that sit beneath the surface of club culture, particularly when the people involved have spent decades contributing to a scene without necessarily occupying its brightest spotlight.
It’s an area that new audio documentary series The Afters is looking to explore. Rather than following the conventional artist interview format, the series has been conceived around long-form portraits of the people, records and places that have shaped underground music, giving its subjects the time and space to tell those stories in their own words.
Musically, its scope stretches across house, Balearic, downtempo and folk, although genre appears to be less important than the culture surrounding it. The premise is built around the sort of questions that will be familiar to anyone who has spent years digging for music: Who made that record? Where did it come from? What was happening around it at the time, and what did it take for the person behind it to get there?
For its opening season, The Afters turns its attention to Scott Ferguson, better known as Robot84, whose relationship with underground dance music now stretches across 35 years and takes in Scotland, London, Ibiza and beyond.
FINDING THE RHYTHM AGAIN
As Robot84, Ferguson has built a catalogue of productions, edits and remixes that have found support from DJs around the world. Despite that reach, there was one experience he’d never had himself: hearing one of his own records being played in a club.
That detail takes on considerably greater significance when placed alongside the events of the last few years.
On Boxing Day 2022, while in Gran Canaria, Scott suffered an ischaemic stroke. During the long process of recovery that followed, he sent out an edit he’d been sitting on, Robot84 vs The Raff’s “Get It Right Next Time”.
The following month, Jon Sa Trinxa played the track at Café Mambo in Sydney and continued to support it. For Scott, who was learning to walk again at the time, hearing his music finding its way back onto dancefloors became an unexpected source of confidence and focus during his recovery.
It gives The Afters an unusually personal starting point. Scott’s story isn’t presented simply as a retrospective of records made and clubs visited over three and a half decades, but as an examination of the relationship between the music and the life that has existed around it.
The resulting portrait traces the records, rooms, relationships, loss and recovery that have shaped Ferguson’s life in music, alongside his eventual decision to stop holding back creatively. Bill Brewster, Colleen Cosmo Murphy, Pete Gooding and Jon Sa Trinxa contribute to the story alongside Scott’s family and friends, giving the documentary perspectives from both inside and outside his musical life.
There’s also an important relationship between the conversation and its soundtrack. The portrait is scored almost entirely using Scott’s own productions, edits and remixes, allowing the music being discussed to become part of the storytelling rather than simply sitting underneath it.
Scott Ferguson
PRESERVING THE STORIES BEHIND THE MUSIC
That approach is also what makes The Afters particularly interesting to us at KOTT.
Dance music has arguably never been documented as extensively as it is today. Every weekend produces an endless stream of DJ clips, photographs, track IDs, festival footage and social posts, yet there remains an enormous amount of history sitting with the people who made the records, ran the parties, worked in the record shops and spent their lives occupying those dancefloors.
Some of those people became internationally recognised names, while others continued operating around the edges of the mainstream music industry. Either way, the stories attached to the records can tell us as much about underground culture as the records themselves.
It’s something we’ve become increasingly interested in ourselves. Looking back through old DJ charts, magazine features and forgotten records often reveals a much richer picture of dance music history than simply revisiting the biggest tracks from a particular year. Context matters, whether that’s understanding who played a record, where it was heard, the scene that existed around it or the personal circumstances in which it was created.
The Afters appears to be approaching that same history from the people outward, allowing its subjects enough space to explain not only what they did, but what those experiences eventually came to mean.
Robot84 provides a particularly fitting opening chapter. Ferguson’s story connects several generations and locations within underground music, but it also illustrates how the meaning of a record can change over time. “Get It Right Next Time” existed before his stroke, yet hearing that same piece of music being supported by Jon Sa Trinxa while he was learning to walk again gave it a significance that could never have been anticipated when it was made.
For a culture that so often moves quickly towards the next record, the next party and the next summer, there’s considerable value in occasionally slowing things down and listening to the stories that have accumulated along the way.
The Afters begins with Robot84, with the first season available to listen to now here.