2nd Gen is, for all practical purposes, one man: Wajid Yaseen, born in Manchester to an Indian devotional singer. He sang backing vocals for his father as a child, absorbed mid-1980s electro and hip-hop, and then the noise-rock of The Boredoms and Sonic Youth, before relocating to Sweden and forming a thrash-punk band that performed using only damaged and broken equipment. In London he joined the political rap group Fun-Da-Mental as bassist and unofficial noise-maker, touring with them for two years. The thread through all of it is a taste for sound at its most extreme.
The project itself took shape while Yaseen was working at Mute Records, where exposure to Einstürzende Neubauten and NON sharpened an already developing method: manipulating shards of white noise by looping them back and forth through an armoury of effects pedals until, in his own description, the sound almost collapses within itself. The debut Noise Sculptures EP appeared on Flo Records in 1997, an apt title for the heavily processed, sliced material. Mute's interest followed quickly, and the NovaMute imprint released the ferocious Against Nature EP in 1998, which welded hip-hop beats to the noise.
The debut album Irony Is (NovaMute, 2001) is the fullest statement of the approach. Largely instrumental, single-mindedly set on operating outside accepted genre, it fuses caustic intensity with beats and guest voices: the single And/Or features the vocalist Mau, Musicians Are Morons uses New York's Sensational, and there are contributions from Dalek, Cold Kid and Gallon Drunk's James Johnston. The title of that second single is a fair summary of Yaseen's stance, an almost arrogant contempt for what he saw as the artistic cowardice of his contemporaries. A second album, Flicknives, followed on Quatermass.
Yaseen also works under the name Uniform, sometimes as a trio, pushing the same fragmented electronics further into collaboration; the album Protocol (Planet Mu) gathers voices including Lydia Lunch and Alan Vega of Suicide. For this archive 2nd Gen belongs to the lineage of industrial hip-hop and noise that runs out of the Mute and Wax Trax orbit, a British parallel to the American beats-and-noise work of the same period, made by someone who learned the form from the inside of the industrial tradition's most important label.