Meet The Selectors: Tash LC
In Meet The Selectors, we highlight the selectors, DJs and music experts that have presented Listening Sessions at the Devon Turnbull Listening Room in 180 Studios.
Long before Tash LC was digging for Congolese pressings or building her own label Club Yeke from scratch, she was a kid trading CDs with her best friend, working through a childhood soundtrack of McFly, Avril Lavigne, Usher and 50 Cent on sleepovers.
Moving into her teen years, she would gather with her mates around NME every week, poring over who looked cool and who was about to break. "That was really formative for me," she says. "We were doing it all together and talking about it. It was just such a communal thing."
It’ll come as no surprise that Tash LC was a young music nerd. A prominent fixture of London’s music scene as a DJ, broadcaster and label boss, Tash LC is revered for her expansive knowledge and passion. Tash speaks fast and enthusiastically about music, reeling off the genres she loves, from Singeli in Tanzania to Gqom, from Brazilian grime back to UK bass, and onward into pico culture in Colombia. It’s impossible to imagine her in any other line of work.
Tash’s pivot from young fan to a life in music came at Boomtown, watching Afrobeat and funky house outfit Busy Twist blend West African rhythms with sounds she half-recognised from growing up around her family.
"I was like, 'Oh my God, this is sick. I've not heard this kind of vibe before,'" she remembers. "It was literally that moment I was like, I wanna dive deeper into this." She started DJing not long after.
Tash's introduction to vinyl was through an ex-partner, now one of her best friends. She picked up her first records casually around 2015 and 2016, but for years the collection was more conceptual than practical. "I didn't have a turntable," she says. "I was interested in it as an art form, but I didn't have the means to play anything, so I was just more curious. I loved the covers and the designs. It was more visual at that point."
Since then Tash has fallen in love with vinyl and it's a central part of her vast collection. Despite her appreciation for the format, she is candid about the ethics of reissue and rare-records culture, an industry she finds herself implicated in as both a buyer and a curator.
"It feels almost quite colonial in a way," she says, pointing to artists whose music circulates as expensive collectors' items in scenes far from home, often with the original artists not having the means to access themselves.
Whilst she's seen labels that do the work properly, tracking down artists and families to make sure they're compensated, there are plenty of others that don't. "I don't like it, is essentially the answer," she says. "It does make me think a lot about ethics, about who's benefiting."
Independent radio gave Tash her starting point. Her earliest broadcasting days were, quite relatably, a university radio show that almost nobody listened to except her mum, but she fell in love with the research that goes on behind the scenes.
"Radio is so crucial to me because I want to know the stories behind the music," she says. "As a DJ, we often underappreciate how much effort goes into production." Where a club set can start to feel mechanical, "get to the club, play the set", radio gives her, in her words, space to breathe and dig into different scenes. She describes the process as more like “a research project” than a set.
The same research-led approach was what drew her to Devon Turnbull's Listening Room at 180 Studios. As a resident at the Listening Room, her preparation mirrors her radio process where she dives into her mostly Caribbean, African and Latin American collection and looks for a country, scene or thread worth building a session around. She then listens through, taking notes and researching each artist until a story emerges.
"I put a lot of time into it," she says. "Through prepping for the sessions, I've discovered so many bangers on records I'd never clocked before."
Alongside the sessions and the radio work sits her label, which she admits is the plate she finds hardest to keep spinning. "That's the thing where I want to be a bit more on," she says of the more detail-heavy side of running it and how it differs from the "immediate satisfaction" of DJing and digging.
Regardless of how busy its boss may be, Club Yeke has an exciting few months coming up with an EP from producer Theorist and MC 45DiBoss and a Carnival Party on August 30 at Ormside Projects.
Beyond the label, Tash’s calendar is heaving with a run of summer festival dates, more radio, and a winter tour that takes her back to Australia in October.
Whatever the format, wherever she shows up with her record bag in tow, Tash is guided by giving her audiences a new experience.
"I want them to feel like they've come away learning something new, discovering something they haven't heard before, feeling uplifted, feeling curious, like they've heard something they didn't know they needed to hear."
Find out more about the events at Devon Turnbull's Listening Room in 180 Studios here.
