The 13th hour

It’s 6:30 a.m. October 2012. Before Brexit, before Trump, before Covid, before Ukraine, before Gaza. I had traveled from Paris to London for Blackest Ever Black’s label showcase at Corsica Studios. Now the party is over. I’m alone on an endless bus ride to my friend’s place. Stop. I’ve just gotten off—but nothing looks familiar. I guess it was the wrong stop. The streets are empty. My phone is dead. Every house in Peckham looks the same. I walk hopelessly in the cold drizzle. It’s daylight now. After almost an hour of wandering, I finally spot the park where I saw a fox the night before—and from there, I manage to find my way to my friend’s place. When I arrive, I see five people gathered on the grass next door, chatting and smoking in the rain. They’re in their 50s—mums and dads, wearing tight white t-shirts. One of the dads looks like King Tubby. From inside the house, dub is blasting: deep, full-bodied bass shaking the windows. The party is still going strong. We chat for a bit, then I go crash on the couch in my friend’s living room. No curtains, full daylight pouring in. The wall beside me is trembling. I fall asleep, rocked by the weight of the bass. That deep, vibrating bass—a lullaby to my intimate relationship to this city.

The first record I bought from Jolly Discs was Export by RAP. When I searched for more information, nothing came up. How do you even name a project like that? Is it self-sabotage? Attitude? Irony? A conscious decision to leave no trace—to stay hidden from enemies when the time comes? Or maybe the name just felt right. The music had a similar effect on me. Elusive. Hard to classify. Music you could cry to, or dance to. The influences felt both sharply specific and completely open at the same time. I remember staring at the photograph on the back cover for a long time: a red scooter and a white scooter parked side by side. There was something uncanny about them, almost human: they seemed to “look” in the same direction. I connected them to the two artists, Thomas Bush and Guy Gormley, whose names were printed just beneath the image. The artwork told its own mysterious story. Something about movement. About a journey. Alone, together.

Now that the label is ten years old, it feels like time to look back; to examine the artifacts, to play a kind of game with the clues. With distance, a wider view emerges. A kind of lived documentary—part archive, part dream. The football jerseys of RAP remind me of some French forensic pictures I saw a long time ago. They bear names of places from parts of London I don’t know. You try to navigate through these fragments, piecing together meaning. They begin to create a place. A kind of invented geography. Westmorland, Peckingham Palace, Wembly—half-real, half-imagined. A hand-drawn map as an alternate universe. And then there’s the flag: an Adidas-like emblem with RAP boldly stamped across it. It’s playful. But like Jeremy Deller’s smiley flag for Thomas More’s Utopia, it’s also political. A symbol of territory. Of claiming and inventing space.

The Mind in Camden series by Enchante lets me go deeper into the psychogeography of the label. Maybe because it’s one the few projects that is not a collaboration, it casts a different light—more intimate, more internal. The drawings are hand-made. They tell a story. Eyes heavy with shadowed tears. A man alone in a cold cell, staring out at us. In the background, through a window—seemingly unnoticed by him—a couple is kissing. Quietly tender. Is it the same man who, having escaped his cell on a fragile wooden boat, now finds himself drifting toward a Blakean dark sun, drowning in its pull? The couple reminds me of the lovers on the Special Occasion cover—two figures entangled, guarding each other. The path I trace runs from the isolation of Mind in Camden, to those lovers, to the mother shielding her children from flames on the Never cover. In those images there’s a sense of urgency, a looming danger. To me, this speaks of solitude, alienation. And of love as resistance. They are all protecting something: each other, their children, their freedom. They stand against the violence of the city, of time itself. Together, they construct something fragile and vital—a new family, a new geography, a new country. One that must stay hidden, or risk being demolished, swallowed by fashion or forgotten by speed. There is dread and melancholy here, yes. But also persistence and courage.

“DESTINATION SET,” says the GPS voice at the start of Mind in Camden 2. What’s the destination for Jolly Discs now? I’d like to think that a clue lies in the cover of Thomas Bush’s The Next 60 Years, the label’s latest release. The artwork shows a clock marked with a 13th hour. An impossibility. And yet, that’s exactly what it feels like: exploring a margin of time that shouldn’t exist. An exploration of other eras, parallel timelines. That’s exactly what Doomed does, the latest project from Jolly Discs co-founder Guy Gormley. In it, he creates dubtekno tracks out of grime edits, freetekno fragments, and hardcore tracks. It’s a different style, darker and faster, but it fits seamlessly within the Jolly continuum (try playing Infrared from Mind in Camden 3 and Demisal from the Doomed ep at the same time!). Doomed is about foraging through the ruins of the music industry, uncovering forgotten sounds and lost possibilities. Not nostalgia—but a reopening of roads that vanished too quickly. After listening to one of those edits, I started digging—and eventually uncovered the source of the track that was blowing my mind. It felt like stumbling upon a lost continent. The artist was Federico Franchi, an Italian hardtrance producer—someone I might have once dismissed with a laugh. He died in 2018. In the mid 90’s he had a short burst of brilliance—just two or three years of incredible music before he too, was swallowed up by the whale. Despite the darkness in the music, pulling him out of the rotting labyrinth of music history is an act of faith. Doing that holds no sanctioned social value. But there’s heart. And an incredible energy. You have to make an effort to really hear it. And that effort becomes its own kind of energy—an energy I recognize, that resonates with me. It’s music for the obsessed. For those who believe that keeping your head underwater is how you find treasures. A network of hidden paths, still glowing beneath the surface. A way to resist global power—through alliance, through long-lasting friendships.

To me, the 13th hour of The Next 60 Years‘ clock represents that energy. It’s the hour you push a little further, stay a little longer. Ten years is a long time for a label—but this isn’t about endurance in the capitalist sense. It’s not about pushing yourself harder, but about pushing time itself. Like the prisoner in his cold cell, who wins milliseconds of freedom when he closes his eyes. It’s about slipping into the margins—into solitary walks under cold rain in the early hours. Into the in-between spaces where, somehow, you find your people. Like falling asleep while the walls vibrate from the bass. It’s not an inconvenience. It’s a womb.

Pierre Edouard Dumora