Si Begg

London-based electronic music creator Si Begg ranks among techno's most shape-shifting figures. Restless and frequently uncompromising in his approach, he shows scant regard for stylistic limits while his output constantly twists ambient, breaks, U.K. garage, and electro conventions, often yielding results so far removed from easy tags that listeners struggle to place them. His fondness for warped basslines and playful sensibility frequently earns the "wonky techno" label, yet his command of sound design has secured prominent commissions scoring films, television, and video games.

Born in Leicester, England, in 1972, Begg absorbed a broad spectrum of forward-thinking sounds from his teenage years onward, spanning prog rock, metal, electro, and free jazz. After a mutual contact introduced him to Cristian Vogel, he entered the Cabbage Head collective. He took up work as a sound engineer and began DJ'ing in 1991, the same year he relocated to London. Music production started for him in 1993, yielding several experimental cassettes plus a run of techno 12"s with Vogel under the Inevitable Technology name. The pair launched the Mosquito label to issue dancefloor material laced with pronounced eccentricity. Bigfoot releases surfaced on Eukatech beginning in 1995, the alias stretching to Bigfoot Futures Ltd. the next year. Through London's local music community Begg connected with Coldcut's Jonathan Moore and Matt Black. His debut EP as Cabbageboy, Sausage Doctor, arrived on the duo's Ntone imprint in 1995, succeeded the following year by the Planets EP. He launched a string of futuristic electro-breaks records as Buckfunk 3000, with Language, the Crammed Discs offshoot overseen by Moody Boy Tony Thorpe, issuing material from 1996 onward. Begg also began issuing records under his own name that year, the downtempo EP Nothing Is True Zen Say appearing on Mille Plateaux-affiliated Chrome while Opus came out via techno stronghold Tresor. He founded another label, Noodles, in 1997, opening its catalog with the compilation Noodles Part One: The Death of Cool.

The 1998 Buckfunk 3000 album First Class Ticket to Telos preceded a Si Begg full-length on Caipirinha titled Commuter World. Cabbageboy's Genetically Modified followed on Ntone in 1999. Both Mosquito and Noodles stayed active, releasing Begg material alongside tracks from Jamie Lidell, Neil Landstrumm, and Cursor Miner. Begg joined the NovaMute roster in 2001, issuing The Mission Statement as S.I. Futures that year and Director's Cut under his own name in 2003. NovaMute handled the singles "Revolution" and "Revelation," while numerous further releases appeared on Noodles.

In 2006 Begg launched an ongoing sequence of Jetlag and Tinnitus EPs, sustaining his boundary-pushing work through dense, glitch-laden, bass-driven constructions. Proponents of the tougher edges of dubstep and electro-house embraced his sound, and around the turn of the decade Bassnectar, Kid606, and Kanji Kinetic supplied remixes of his tracks. The film soundtracks U.F.O. and We Made Our Own Disaster surfaced on Noodles in 2012, while Addictech issued Permission to Explode, a 20-track full-length accompanied by several associated 12" EPs, in 2013. The ambient album Extreme Environments appeared in 2014, and a series of Refugee Appeal singles was released in December of 2015. These were collected as Music for Refugees in 2016. The same year also saw the release of another experimental ambient album, Extreme Environments, as well as two more soundtracks, Hard Tide and Kicking Off. Shitkatapult released Begg's ambient album Blueprints in 2017.