Unique style makes waves on the music scene in Asia

One reads: “His Chinese wave grime fusion couldn’t be more refreshing if it shoved you under a waterfall with a mouthful of extra strong mints.”

And with his first album under his belt and two EPs on their way, 2017 is shaping up nicely for Jamie Charlton.

Raised in Hexhamshire and a former pupil of Queen Elizabeth High School, his voyage to China was made via a three-year sojourn in London and a degree in sound arts from the London College of Communication.

Son of Hexham businessman Angus Charlton, who has been known to dabble in music management in his time, Jamie revealed his true vocation while at the college that specialises in all forms of modern communication, from journalism and advertising to photography, film, television and sound.

“Dad is musical – he plays the drums,” said Jamie. “He also taught me some guitar and I played in bands with my mates at QEHS, so I was always interested in music.

“When I went off to university it was to study sound arts, though, which is music but more on the experimental side.”

There he learned the art of producing conceptual music, the type that occasionally crops up in art galleries as an installation piece, but more often than not provides the soundtrack to much of our lives through film, video and, increasingly for Jamie, on the nightclub scene.

He said: “You didn’t need to play an instrument (on the course), because it was more about the production element – making sound tracks and sound effects.

“It made me realise why I did music. For a lot of people it was about the sound design aspect, but for me it was about making music that was emotionally fulfilling.”

By the time he graduated in 2014, one thing was clear: he couldn’t afford to stay in London. Seven of them were sharing a house and it was still too damned expensive!

He decided to take a bit of a gamble and give Shanghai a whirl. His father was living there at the time and he’d visited on several occasions.

“I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Shanghai,” he said. “At first I really didn’t like it, but over time I started to see how cheap it was to live there and what a good city it was to be young in.

“You can establish yourself there in a way you can’t afford to in London.”

Accommodation, food and transport were all ridiculously cheap, although the smog and the poor quality of the food in general were the price you paid in return.

“It’s not exactly a healthy place to live,” he admitted.

“The water in China is highly chlorinated and I remember getting into a shower in Singapore and just being really happy I could open my eyes without them stinging.”

But living in China allows him to spend his money on what he really wants to: the equipment to make and disseminate his digitally-produced music.

Operating under the moniker of Swimful, a name that came to him in a dream, his sound is really catching on. And he likes the fact ‘Swimful’ reflects the flowing, melodic quality of his music.

Hooking up with peers and potential collaborators through Twitter and SoundCloud, sometimes working with them, sometimes working on his own, he has been steadily building a reputation upon the foundations he’s laid in Shanghai.

“Eventually I met some of the owners of clubs and bars around the city and started to get some bookings,” he said.

“It was slow to begin with, because I wasn’t playing at places that fitted my music – it was often bars where they were expecting ‘top 40’ records rather than my own sound productions.

“Then after a year, I got a booking at a club called The Shelter, a legendary place for music in Shanghai based in an old bomb shelter.

“Once I started playing there, I really started to make connections, because the people who go to The Shelter are there to listen to the music.

“I got bookings at other places and the owner of the club, who also runs a record label, offered to release an album with me.”

The album, entitled PM 2.5, duly appeared in January last year and is available on most download sites, including Bandcamp.

The two EPs he’s recorded so far, Caged Butterfly and an as yet unnamed compilation he’s produced for the Svbcvlt label, will be released in the next few weeks.

Between them, they bear witness to a style that has evolved markedly in the past couple of years.

Jamie said: “There’s much more of a Chinese influence now and you can hear it in the album – I’d been living in China for 18 months by the time we made it.”

You can also hear it in Caged Butterfly which, in a departure from his previously all-instrumental productions, contains the vocals of a Shanghai singer.

While the hallmark of his work post-graduation was the combination of wrap-around sounds with recognisable, catchy refrains borrowed from music already out there, today he is focused on writing his own from scratch.

“My work is a weird mixture,” he laughed, “because I like using a lot of Chinese sounds, but my approach is very western.

“I get a lot more press coverage in the West than I do in China, and I get plays on Radio 1 and Rinse FM, among others.

“I suppose I have been in quite a lot of Chinese magazines – one called Juzhen and another, Time Out Shanghai – but the music I make is quite new to Chinese audiences.”

He has three paid jobs nowadays, as a part-time English teacher, a freelance writer on the subject of the local electronic music scene, and as Swimful, the DJ playing his own music to increasingly appreciative audiences.

That third one is beginning to take him all over eastern Asia.

“There’s a sort of community in Asia and Europe that listens to the type of stuff I make,” said Jamie. “So I’ve played in Beijing and in Singapore and Japan.

“I’m playing in Tokyo in April, so hopefully I’ll make a few more connections while I’m there too.”