Music magazines used to rock my world. Now I can't think of one that truly excites me, though I do enjoy writing for RWD. Mostly though I open tepid newspaper supplements and I'm either bored or angry, because I know there's amazing music out there yet they're not giving it to us.
Never is this more noticeable than at the end of the year, when list after list of albums and singles appear, none of which represent the many communities of committed music fans I see online. Surely the Coldplay album can't be everyone's favourite album?
Instead I've decided to do something positive. I've decided to organise the first Blackdown Soundboy End of Year Review - yet it wont be written by me. Last month I wrote to a selection of writers, bloggers, DJs, producers and artists that have excited me this year. All I asked of them was to reply to me with a few words about something they had felt strongly about this year. Not indifferent to, not kinda so-so about, but for better or worse something they really cared about.
I'm going to publish these responses once a day every day for the rest of the year, until they run out. Because fuckitt, I'm bored of waiting for Q, the NME, Mixmag or The Guardian arts review to represent us - we can represent ourselves.
Kicking things off is a grime DJ who's had a massive year.
Logan Sama on what he felt strongly about in 2005:
"People that make grime music are not stars. You can walk down most high streets in London and some people MIGHT just do a double take."
"Yet people are already starting to act like they are Jay Z and the scene is in its infancy. We have spent the last 6 years trying to get heard after UK garage disowned us all. The media is now paying attention and opportunity are there. Unfortunately people are getting greedy and lazy. Maybe they already were greedy and lazy to begin with. Who knows."
"And you know what is going to happen... the UK hip hop scene is going to run off with all the hype caused by a bunch of inner city kids rapping on a beat, use their far greater business, marketing and organisational skills and get all of that money that was headed into the grime scene."
"So if you are one of these guys who has found themselves not willing to do something for some stupid reason like you can't be bothered to get up on time, you don't want to work with this man because you think it is too 'mersh' for you, the promoter won't pay you the four figure fee you and only you believe you are worth or you think you are just too big to do it, check yourself for a minute. Because Sway will turn up and do it for less, probably put on a more professional show than you anyway and collect that realistic money you could have got. That's why he has a sweet P&D deal and you still spit on pirate radio and end up turning up to raves for £150 anyway."
"We've worked very hard for a very long time to get into this position. Let's not piss it away because of egos. By all means retain your artistic integrity, but don't act like a cock just because you got a couple forwards and sold 1000 white labels."
"Big up everyone putting the work in 2005. Here's to everyone seeing the fruits of their labour in 2006."
Check Logan's blog at www.logansama.blogspot.com.
Check his unbeatable vocal grime show on Kiss 100
Friday, December 09, 2005
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
No longtings
A while ago I headed into south London to speak with dubstep pioneer Loefah. This is what got said...
Blackdown: Tell me how DMZ came about?
Loefah: We’ve known each other for years. The common link between us all for years has been music. We used to DJ and MC together. It was literally me, Mala, Coki, Pokes, Millitary Gee and our mate Mandeep. So it’s been years man, playing house parties, making pure mixtapes and dreaming about playing on pirate radio or at Metalheadz.
B: I know Mala Digital Mystikz was involved with Twice as Nice, were you around for the 2step days?
L: That was Mala’s thing. I went to the club a few times but I really detested garage, especially the kind of thing that got played at Twice as Nice. Fucking Dane Bowers DJing there and shit… you know what I mean? But I did go there, I was in his music video. It was all good, we were friends through it but nar, musically I had nothing to do with it.
B: So when did you feel differently about garage?
L: One of the reasons I hated ‘garage’ is because to me, it wasn’t garage. It wasn’t London garage. Jungle raves, back in the day. Do you remember the rave Stush? That used to be held at Chelsea Banqueting Suite, well it turned into a garage rave but it began as a jungle rave. I used to go to that and Dream FM bashes. It was the older lot that weren’t up for the pills. This was a more sophisticated, wise London lot than the Twice as Nice crowd, it was who have been raving, people who ‘still like raving but aren’t into going into all that madness.’ Second room was always a badboy thing. Garage was such a London sound. Garage was real, gritty London bassline shit. Old Freek FM, before that Girls FM – it was ‘aving it man. “House and garage.” Some proper Cockney bird trying to speak posh on the [pirate radio] advert.
L: So we were writing beats, always had been, and DJing had kinda died down. I was with this bird and I wasn’t mixing. I got with her and she actually broke my mixer. Not intentionally but she never replaced it so I stopped mixing. Yeah I did say this on the “Grime 2” album notes – rags! – I let her get in the way. I was in it, that’s where I was at that time of my life. I’d given up on music, I thought ‘that was then’ – because I wanted to be Goldie, man, before this. Basically.
L: But yeah we were writing beats, I was working with Mala at this debt collecting company. Mala was starting to really take the music production seriously. He went to college to learn about it in the evenings. He’s proper dedicated, Mala. He used to come back and chat to me, he’d have a new beat he’d done on Reason, cos that was what we were using then. To tell the truth he was writing a lot of house then, but dark house.
L: Somehow Hatcha had got one of Mala’s tracks, I think Hatcha knew Mala from the garage days. But I’d never heard of him before. So Mala must have said ‘yeah this DJ might be playing my thing’ so I went with him, and it was at Forward>> and I was like ‘rah.’ It was different, it kinda had Metalheadz vibes to it. Some of the tracks were bad. It wasn’t quite what I was on, but it was the nearest thing. As the same time I’d just lost interest in drum & bass, I wasn’t looking to make music on that level. So I heard Hatcha, all the bongos, I heard Youngsta play a lot of 8bar/early grime. I remember him playing one of Wiley’s beatless ‘Devil Mixes’ and that really turned my head. So I went home and made some beats but there wasn’t a name for it, I found out a couple of months after it was called dubstep after I’d written some. We were just calling it ‘138 shit,’ after the tempo. ‘What you writing?’ ‘Some 138 shit.’
L: I started writing beats but just sitting on them. I finished ‘Indian’ in January and gave it to Hatcha in August. Mala used to cuss me hard you know? ‘What are you doing with them? You’ve made them to sit on your hard drive? Go down to Big Apple and pass them to Hatcha.’ And I was like ‘well I don’t know Hatcha, what if he sits there and goes ‘fuck off?’ And Mala said: ‘and what if he does?’ So I went down there and played it to him and I thought they were taking the piss when they liked it. Skream was in there and Chef was in there. I was like ‘rah’ and got a bit shaky over it, and went upstairs to listen to some records and thought ‘fucking hell, what was that all about?’ Next thing I went down to Forward>> and he played ‘Indian’ and it was like ‘rah.’ That was how we got there really.
B: How does it work, with you, Coki and Mala all part of DMZ and all producing?
L: There isn’t any rules. We all write beats. To be honest I usually hear their beats before they’ve been cut - but not always. Now I don’t even ask Mala for beats because I play back to back with him so much. I could spend pure money cutting these wicked Mala beats but he’s only going to play them before me.
B: I get a sense of what your style and Mala’s styles are, and in some ways it’s almost like they’re mirror images of each other. Some of your ultra dark ‘down’ halfstep contrasts strongly with Mala’s energetic ‘up’ vibe. Any idea how that happened?
L: It’s organic. He makes beats that gets him going in the club, so do I. We all come from the same musical background, so the link between our tunes might be tenuous but you can see it. It’s a Norwood thing.
B: The DMZ sets have never got boring because of the different styles you can both draw for…
L: We’ve never discussed them because there’s nothing to discuss. We don’t plan nothing, except the intro. There’s no communication needed. I listen to what he plays then I think ‘bwoy, where am I taking it?’ I swear it’s because of our background at Metalheadz, when we used to go raving in ’96-97. I know Mala loved Randal. You say ‘of course’ but that wasn’t my preference. Mine was Digital or Doc Scott. I remember the baddest Metalheadz set I ever heard was by Digital. It was just halfstep, dubby … and I didn’t know it was ‘dubby’ at the time because I didn’t know what dub was. All I knew was junglehardcoredrum&bass.
B: it’s very strange to hear you talking about Metalheadz because if you trace back the roots of dubstep a lot of it came from El-B going to Metalheadz. He was obsessed, he hung around with them boys but they never let him ‘in’ as a producer. So he was into garage but it wasn’t dark enough like Metalheadz, so he started taking Groove Chronicles and Ghost darker… and that’s the birth of dubstep. It’s amazing to hear now how you were inspired by that club because we’re getting on for ten years since the Blue Note days.
L: It was phenomenal what they started there. I started going out raving when I was 14. I used to go to this under 18s rave in Tollworth in Epsom called Teen Rage, but it was ruff. I saw Kenny Ken, Mickey Finn and Slipmatt, all the top DJs from that year plus the resident DJs Squirrel and Nutty One. The first bigman’s rave I went to was Dream All Night 5 at Labyrinth. I was 14. I was 6 foot when I was 14. I never had a growth spurt, I stopped growing at 13.
B: Is it a fluke that both Metalheadz and Digital Mystikz abbreviate to the same three letters? MDZ … DMZ?
L: Yes … I didn’t even know that… fucking hell. That is uncanny, fucking nuts. I’m gonna bell Mala after this… have you told him yet?
B: What this about DeMilitarized Zone?
L: DMZ doesn’t mean DeMilitarized Zone though. But it does. Do you know about graffiti? Crews? Ever heard of FDC. Ever heard of Sur? A big writer who’s crew was FDC. FDC meant For Da Cause, For Da City and Fuck Da Cunts.
This is the same principle as DMZ because it can mean Digital Mystikz but I’m not Digital Mystikz, I’m not part of that [strictly speaking Digital Mystikz is Mala and Coki on production, whereas DMZ is the night and label, which Loefah is part of], but DMZ can mean DeMilitarized Zone and also anything else. What ever you put in there, it doesn’t matter.
B: What do you feel about jungle people like Klute, Chris Inperspective, Fracture and Amit turning up at DMZ?
L: Well I don’t know their backgrounds but I haven’t experienced turning up to a rave like DMZ with the bass just ‘whooooooooom’ and it’s just one room, since jungle. Other clubs have a nice pretty bar and a chill out zone. DMZ though, is ‘if you don’t like this, fuck off.’ It’s a dark room with true, warm sub bass. It’s not this drum & bass compressed madness, though there is some bass in drum & bass, but we’re talking the stuff that turned me off it, the mid-rangy, nasty noises. But DMZ has a vibe, it just feels young.
L: But of all those producers, Klute is the one I know personally. It freaks me out he comes down because he’s someone I know is a badboy, he someone who’s records I used to buy. He’s asked me to use some of my music for Commercial Suicide, not to put out on a 12” but for a mix CD. He’s cool, he just knows about jungle. We’ve chatted about films, he told me about this [the Star Wars prequel] THX 1138 film, telling me how dark it is and sample-heavy.
B: DJ Shadow ripped it to pieces…
L: I dunno you can always find something, a door opening, anything.
B: Since a lot of people, particularly Horsepower, have done film dialog sampling so exceptionally well, doesn’t that mean it should perhaps be avoided?
L: I dunno, I haven’t done it for a while. I still do use little words, just not long sections. I think it’s important, it references things and sends your mind off on different thought paths. I think this whole rave thing in Britain, which what we’re doing is a mutation of, one fundamental thing throughout virtually all of the styles is that on one level it’s dance music but on the other it’s mind music.
B: Was the dialog in ‘Goat Stare’ from the documentary where the US military tried to kill goats by focusing their minds on them?
L: Sort of, it was. But I didn’t watch it - Youngsta did. And he got scared. ‘What if someone stares at me, and I don’t know about it, and they stop my heart?’ I said there wasn’t a lot he could do about it but it did remind me of a film called ‘Scanners.’ So I decided to sample it, make a tune and call it ‘Goat Stare.’
B: Some of your early tracks, especially ‘Jungle Infiltrator’ were very percussive. Then after that you created a whole batch of tunes – ‘Woman,’ ‘Midnight,’ ‘Goat Stare’ – that defined whole flavour of ultra minimal Loefah halfstep. How did that switch come about?
L: Logic. Getting Logic and getting fed up with bongos. I went into Apple one day and played Hatcha a tune and he went ‘there it is, the Loefah hi hat line.’ And I was like ‘oh’. So I decided from then on to keep things interesting. Then, it was Ministry of Sound, Youngsta played there with a stupid limiter and on my tunes all you could hear was the hi hats. That was it. It was fucking horrible. I realised I needed to sort my production out. I listen back to my Apple and Rephlex tunes and I cringe. I’m glad I did them but after that I thought about learning how this [music production] shit really works.
L: I was listening to beats and thinking I want the loudest mixdown in the world. I want a loud, clean mixdown with the emphasis on the clean. I got a Mac, Logic and went in. I had Kode 9 on the phone for the whole of the first night. My first production was ‘Horror Show.’ I found the ES2 and the siren synth, and the ES1 and found a beautiful bass. Listening to that bass I was like ‘fuck it’ I’m going to do it halfstep. I’m gonna strip it back, I was listening to a lot of Photek at the time. It’s minimal. It’s the placement. Think about the ‘Bleeps’ tune. The beats are still intricate but there’s still space in between them.
B: I always figured that the halfstep idea came through grime, particularly Wonder’s ‘What.’
L: Yeah, blatantly, grime was an influence. I knew of ‘What’ but I couldn’t have named it at the time. So it must have been indirectly. Also, if I’m honest, Missy Elliot’s beats were a factor. Because the way I see it, space is just as much of an instrument as a kick or a snare. You need peaks and troughs.
L: Production: I haven’t clocked it though, I’m still working on it. I’m really looking at getting into using breaks, you know? Not making ‘breaks’, not what they call ‘breaks’ but making my halfstep stuff and adding some little fills, finding a nice take on it. I love a good beat, it fucking kills me.
B: You’ve recently been in the studio with Oris Jay, working on a tune and chopping up breaks. That’s cool to hear because you could argue that perhaps halfstep has gone as far as it can go. You’ve taken beats out to get to halfstep, what else can you take out? You either get to a ‘Devil Mix’ or ‘Sign of the Dub’, which has been done, or you add on. This is interesting because a lot of people have currently adopted the halfstep ideas you came with…
L: That’s the madness man, because people talk about all this ‘no energy’ thing in the scene, and I do feel kind of responsible, but I wasn’t making halfstep because I didn’t like up tempo. I made it because I like it when you have an ‘up’ vibe, then you drop a halfstep and it drops … and you’ve got variety in your sets. This is why I love the Mala thing, what we do in our sets.
B: Increasingly dubstep’s audience isn’t exclusively from London, so perhaps from a distance the city’s parts can’t be resolved, it seems like a homogenous whole. But I know you’re someone who’s quite loyal to south London and subscribes to this tribal, endz view. Is London homogenous or are there exclusive human characteristics in certain districts?
L: I’m proud to live in south London and I do love it. I put ‘SE25’ as part of my remix names because that’s part of me. I do identify that there’s different areas of London, and that it changes from area-to-area. There’s different rules, everywhere. I feel at home in south London - not south-west or south-east - but south of Brixton and north of Croydon. Anywhere in there – the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark or Croydon – and I’m cool. They’re three places I’ve lived in London. Croydon is where I grew up and where I know the best. A lot of Croydon I’m not into but Norwood’s great.
L: The way I see London is that Londoners don’t know where London is. Because when you get into London you don’t live ‘in London’ anymore you live in Norwood, you live in Peckham or you live in Bow. If you’re asked “where are you going?” a lot of people would say “I’m going up London.” What London is basically is a lot of villages. Urbanised, built up, overlapping villages. I suppose because you don’t have physical boundaries, you kinda create your own boundaries. I think it’s more a jovial thing…
B: But you seem to take it very seriously…
L: I wouldn’t want to live in north or east London because they’re a different place. They’re not me, they’re not home. It’s just certain things you get used to. I like south London because it’s a lot more open, even in a lot of the most built up areas there’s still a lot of breathing space. Think about Hackney, or Stoke Newington… they’re all just “on top.” It’s more like countryside in south London, it’s more open.
B: It’s telling about the perceived differences between bits of south London. You mention Peckham and Norwood. To north Londoners they can’t be resolved, they’re all south. But north Londoners would never put consider Hackney and Stoke Newington as similar in a social context. I guess it’s all about familiarity.
L: Blatantly. Because I know about 5% of London.
B: Yeah but that’s what makes it so enthralling. I came off the buss turned down a darkly lit road towards your house tonight and suddenly I was in some part of London I’d never ever been to before. I love that.
L: I love that too. But yeah I love south London because of the familiarity and because of the culture, because of what I perceive in south that isn’t anywhere else. It probably is, but it’s just manifested itself in a different way.
B: Let me ask this then. I really like the link between dubstep and London…
L: … I think it’s essential…
B: … and London is a multicultural place. My feeling is if you get people that grow up in multicultural places, they’ll understand each other better. That’s one of the fundamental reasons why I like urban music. Now we’re at a point where dubstep looks like for the first time the boundaries of some of its producers and fan base have expanding beyond London and the UK and I’m really curious about what’s going to happen next.
L: No one knows what’s going to happen next. As long as I’m writing beats I’m happy with, I’m cool to do that. Other people are free to do what they want, even if sometimes you despise what they’re doing, it’s a free country and you can’t say nothing.
B: I just hope the spirit of that multiculturalism and a lot of the soundsystem and Jamaican culture that you guys have brought through stays with the sound.
L: Do you think it’s understanding of Jamaican culture or do you think it’s an understanding of London culture? Because I would argue for the latter.
B: OK how about ‘soundsystem’ culture?
L: I dunno, I wouldn’t say I know a huge amount about soundsystem culture and what I do I know because of jungle. And I’ve learnt about jungle because of London. I’ve learnt a lot about dub since I’ve been doing dubstep. I knew a bit before but I think we’re writing beats that we would naturally write because of the sounds that have surrounded us as we’ve grown up. You can reference them but I don’t think it’s a Jamaican thing, not for me. Because I’m not Jamaican and I haven’t got a reference to Jamaica. We didn’t chose DMZ to be held in Brixton because of the black population of Brixton, we chose that place [3rd Base part of Mass] because it has been responsible for the badest dances. Soul 2 Soul used to do a dance across the road. St Mathew’s church [aka Mass] is old school from London dub. Seriously though, a lot of dub was written in London.
L: So with good soundsystems – that’s standard. We don’t understand it when people don’t deal with it. It’s what we’ve always been into for years. Every boy in Norwood I swear had a 12” sub in his house and has been blasting out to his neighbours. It’s what you do. Speakers and good sound is essential. Even down to people who get good sets for their cars. You gotta hear your music properly. And we’ve always listened to sub heavy music.
B: You’ve got 12”s coming out on Tectonic, DMZ, Hotflush Remix and maybe Tempa. You pleased?
L: I am but I’d prefer to have good mixdowns. I don’t know… I’m striving for something, I just want this mixdown. This sound. I’m not quite there yet but each track is a step towards it. But then you lose momentum because production ends up being about ‘this noise’ and you spend all day doing it and you won’t have written a beat.
B: It’s something producers get very concerned with, that the sound of their sound is more important than the emotion of their sound or the arrangement of their sound.
L: It’s about striking that balance.
B: What’s it like working with Skream?
L: Wicked he’s the easiest person to work with in the world. His persona in the studio is 100% focused. We’ve got this [new] thing… we’ve just got to arrange it.
B: How did you end up collaborating with Oris Jay?
L: I said ‘do you want to go on a beat?’ he said yes and sent me ‘Mighty Crown.’ It was wicked though. Oris is a badman. He showed me some stuff in Logic, that was sick. He’s old school. He knows, he knows about production I don’t know about. That’s why I love working with him.
B: Is there anyone else you’d like to collaborate with?
L: Yeah, Kode 9. I think he’s just got it. What he does is bad. The vocal, Hyperdub stuff. I love it. His use of space… “Subkontinent,” “Ping” … all the Rephlex tunes. The stuff they chose to do is fucking wicked. It’s complete subversion and it works. I want to write a good bassline for Space Ape.
L: I also want to work with Jay from Vex’d. I’m planning to ring him. He knows his shit. I want to work with The Bug as well.
B: At one point you were trying to both finish a fine art degree and work on an album. What kind of art were you interested in?
L: I was really into documentary photography but that wasn’t what the course was about. It was more of the Goldsmiths school of thought – installation driven, conceptual art. Ideas. It was a lot of theory and written work. It’s weird… it was very interesting. It wasn’t like being as Slade where you’d be painting or life drawing every day. This course was more about what you were going to do than how you did it. It was theoretical than technical. You know Damian Hurst? You know the painting he did that’s just a white background and some dots on it? The dot’s are equidistant from each other, all different colours. He didn’t paint it - but it’s attributed to him. He’s got a team of girls that follow him around, his assistants. It was his painting but he didn’t put any paint on it, himself. He came up with the idea, said ‘this is what it’s going to look like, now crack on and do it for me.’
B: How much of these kinds of ideas overlap with the music you make?
L: There’s a huge overlap, on the conceptual side. It’s the same: it’s creation. You’re making something from nothing. It’s understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If I hadn’t done that degree I’d probably be out now sweating, looking for a career. Because I did that degree I understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. And I’ve got to stick with it really.
B: That’s not to be underestimated. It’s pretty rare that people truly know why they’re doing what they’re doing.
L: Obviously I’ve got to get a job soon, unless music starts paying me. I’ve gotta get something just to pay the rent. A part time somting’. But a career means devoting your life to it, taking work home with you. But I’ve already got work at home, that’s my music. That is my focus. That’s what I do.
B: A lot of people think that if your name is known in music you’re making a career out of it. But that doesn’t seem to be the case any more.
L: Yeah. This is what it is. You either like it or you don’t: it’s not making any money.
B: I guess this way there’ll be no people in dubstep ‘for the money’ like people jumped into jungle or 2step. Because making money out of dubstep… I don’t know anyone who’s ever done it.
L: I could sit down and try and write a pop tune, but that’s not where my head’s at. I like sound. I wouldn’t like to get into pop, though I’d like to be a badboy producer one day. Work with amazing artists but not bubble gum pop.
B: I’m guessing the album project is on hold …
L: Yeah man. When it’s ready it’s ready. It will either be or it wont. I think me doing an album now is running before I can walk. I’m too fussy about my sound and that’s why I can’t put an album together. It doesn’t work for me.
B: You do seem disappointed with levels of quality other people would kill to get to…
L: My sound ain’t there yet. It’s getting there. I want to be better than everyone. I want to have the best mixdown. The best, cleanest mixdown in the universe. Not even to boast, but when I hear it I’m like ‘ahh … that’s crystal.’
B: Do you think that will ever be achievable?
L: Fuckitt, I dunno. That’s how we drive ourselves. We strive for the unachievable. That’s human nature.
B: So how do you feel about Fruity Loops?
L: The affordability and availability of it is good. But I despise Fruity. Skream is the only exception to the rule. He does things that shouldn’t be possible with that program.
B: Skepta said that to me about Skream as well.
L: I’ve given up trying to get Skream onto Logic because he’s just writing bullets. He’s on fire, he’s fucking amazing. He took the piss with ‘Ancient Memories.’ He took liberties with that tune, it’s amazing. Skream is my favourite producer. Seriously right now I couldn’t tell you anyone who comes close. It’s the truth. It’s all about Skream and then it’s all about Coki. I don’t know what happened. Coki was writing bad beats and then something happened and he came with ‘Haunted.’ Since then it’s been next level. Coki’s in overdrive. He’s silly: I’m well into what Coki does.
B: You remixed Nasty Crew. What’s your thoughts on grime?
L: I think grime’s wicked. But it’s not really what I’m about. I’d like to work with a couple of MCs, but literally a couple. But I’d be writing a track for us, not Sidewinder. But yeah, grime I think it’s ruff, I like what they’re doing. I like the energy. But it’s not me.
B: It must be nice having the DMZ rave be so successful?
L: It’s fantastic. Fucking crazy - I can’t even explain the feeling. That night is like coming full circle, from listening to pirates, going to raves, wanting to DJ. Suddenly we’re producing, we’ve been signed, to we’ve go our own dance of our label. It’s real full circle. It’s always been on the cards though: we’ve always talked about putting on the baddest jungle dance on. But we’ve always been about not rushing into things. ‘Nah, that’s not right.’ Things have to be right. Don’t fit a round peg into a square hole with a hammer.
Blackdown: Tell me how DMZ came about?
Loefah: We’ve known each other for years. The common link between us all for years has been music. We used to DJ and MC together. It was literally me, Mala, Coki, Pokes, Millitary Gee and our mate Mandeep. So it’s been years man, playing house parties, making pure mixtapes and dreaming about playing on pirate radio or at Metalheadz.
B: I know Mala Digital Mystikz was involved with Twice as Nice, were you around for the 2step days?
L: That was Mala’s thing. I went to the club a few times but I really detested garage, especially the kind of thing that got played at Twice as Nice. Fucking Dane Bowers DJing there and shit… you know what I mean? But I did go there, I was in his music video. It was all good, we were friends through it but nar, musically I had nothing to do with it.
B: So when did you feel differently about garage?
L: One of the reasons I hated ‘garage’ is because to me, it wasn’t garage. It wasn’t London garage. Jungle raves, back in the day. Do you remember the rave Stush? That used to be held at Chelsea Banqueting Suite, well it turned into a garage rave but it began as a jungle rave. I used to go to that and Dream FM bashes. It was the older lot that weren’t up for the pills. This was a more sophisticated, wise London lot than the Twice as Nice crowd, it was who have been raving, people who ‘still like raving but aren’t into going into all that madness.’ Second room was always a badboy thing. Garage was such a London sound. Garage was real, gritty London bassline shit. Old Freek FM, before that Girls FM – it was ‘aving it man. “House and garage.” Some proper Cockney bird trying to speak posh on the [pirate radio] advert.
L: So we were writing beats, always had been, and DJing had kinda died down. I was with this bird and I wasn’t mixing. I got with her and she actually broke my mixer. Not intentionally but she never replaced it so I stopped mixing. Yeah I did say this on the “Grime 2” album notes – rags! – I let her get in the way. I was in it, that’s where I was at that time of my life. I’d given up on music, I thought ‘that was then’ – because I wanted to be Goldie, man, before this. Basically.
L: But yeah we were writing beats, I was working with Mala at this debt collecting company. Mala was starting to really take the music production seriously. He went to college to learn about it in the evenings. He’s proper dedicated, Mala. He used to come back and chat to me, he’d have a new beat he’d done on Reason, cos that was what we were using then. To tell the truth he was writing a lot of house then, but dark house.
L: Somehow Hatcha had got one of Mala’s tracks, I think Hatcha knew Mala from the garage days. But I’d never heard of him before. So Mala must have said ‘yeah this DJ might be playing my thing’ so I went with him, and it was at Forward>> and I was like ‘rah.’ It was different, it kinda had Metalheadz vibes to it. Some of the tracks were bad. It wasn’t quite what I was on, but it was the nearest thing. As the same time I’d just lost interest in drum & bass, I wasn’t looking to make music on that level. So I heard Hatcha, all the bongos, I heard Youngsta play a lot of 8bar/early grime. I remember him playing one of Wiley’s beatless ‘Devil Mixes’ and that really turned my head. So I went home and made some beats but there wasn’t a name for it, I found out a couple of months after it was called dubstep after I’d written some. We were just calling it ‘138 shit,’ after the tempo. ‘What you writing?’ ‘Some 138 shit.’
L: I started writing beats but just sitting on them. I finished ‘Indian’ in January and gave it to Hatcha in August. Mala used to cuss me hard you know? ‘What are you doing with them? You’ve made them to sit on your hard drive? Go down to Big Apple and pass them to Hatcha.’ And I was like ‘well I don’t know Hatcha, what if he sits there and goes ‘fuck off?’ And Mala said: ‘and what if he does?’ So I went down there and played it to him and I thought they were taking the piss when they liked it. Skream was in there and Chef was in there. I was like ‘rah’ and got a bit shaky over it, and went upstairs to listen to some records and thought ‘fucking hell, what was that all about?’ Next thing I went down to Forward>> and he played ‘Indian’ and it was like ‘rah.’ That was how we got there really.
B: How does it work, with you, Coki and Mala all part of DMZ and all producing?
L: There isn’t any rules. We all write beats. To be honest I usually hear their beats before they’ve been cut - but not always. Now I don’t even ask Mala for beats because I play back to back with him so much. I could spend pure money cutting these wicked Mala beats but he’s only going to play them before me.
B: I get a sense of what your style and Mala’s styles are, and in some ways it’s almost like they’re mirror images of each other. Some of your ultra dark ‘down’ halfstep contrasts strongly with Mala’s energetic ‘up’ vibe. Any idea how that happened?
L: It’s organic. He makes beats that gets him going in the club, so do I. We all come from the same musical background, so the link between our tunes might be tenuous but you can see it. It’s a Norwood thing.
B: The DMZ sets have never got boring because of the different styles you can both draw for…
L: We’ve never discussed them because there’s nothing to discuss. We don’t plan nothing, except the intro. There’s no communication needed. I listen to what he plays then I think ‘bwoy, where am I taking it?’ I swear it’s because of our background at Metalheadz, when we used to go raving in ’96-97. I know Mala loved Randal. You say ‘of course’ but that wasn’t my preference. Mine was Digital or Doc Scott. I remember the baddest Metalheadz set I ever heard was by Digital. It was just halfstep, dubby … and I didn’t know it was ‘dubby’ at the time because I didn’t know what dub was. All I knew was junglehardcoredrum&bass.
B: it’s very strange to hear you talking about Metalheadz because if you trace back the roots of dubstep a lot of it came from El-B going to Metalheadz. He was obsessed, he hung around with them boys but they never let him ‘in’ as a producer. So he was into garage but it wasn’t dark enough like Metalheadz, so he started taking Groove Chronicles and Ghost darker… and that’s the birth of dubstep. It’s amazing to hear now how you were inspired by that club because we’re getting on for ten years since the Blue Note days.
L: It was phenomenal what they started there. I started going out raving when I was 14. I used to go to this under 18s rave in Tollworth in Epsom called Teen Rage, but it was ruff. I saw Kenny Ken, Mickey Finn and Slipmatt, all the top DJs from that year plus the resident DJs Squirrel and Nutty One. The first bigman’s rave I went to was Dream All Night 5 at Labyrinth. I was 14. I was 6 foot when I was 14. I never had a growth spurt, I stopped growing at 13.
B: Is it a fluke that both Metalheadz and Digital Mystikz abbreviate to the same three letters? MDZ … DMZ?
L: Yes … I didn’t even know that… fucking hell. That is uncanny, fucking nuts. I’m gonna bell Mala after this… have you told him yet?
B: What this about DeMilitarized Zone?
L: DMZ doesn’t mean DeMilitarized Zone though. But it does. Do you know about graffiti? Crews? Ever heard of FDC. Ever heard of Sur? A big writer who’s crew was FDC. FDC meant For Da Cause, For Da City and Fuck Da Cunts.
This is the same principle as DMZ because it can mean Digital Mystikz but I’m not Digital Mystikz, I’m not part of that [strictly speaking Digital Mystikz is Mala and Coki on production, whereas DMZ is the night and label, which Loefah is part of], but DMZ can mean DeMilitarized Zone and also anything else. What ever you put in there, it doesn’t matter.
B: What do you feel about jungle people like Klute, Chris Inperspective, Fracture and Amit turning up at DMZ?
L: Well I don’t know their backgrounds but I haven’t experienced turning up to a rave like DMZ with the bass just ‘whooooooooom’ and it’s just one room, since jungle. Other clubs have a nice pretty bar and a chill out zone. DMZ though, is ‘if you don’t like this, fuck off.’ It’s a dark room with true, warm sub bass. It’s not this drum & bass compressed madness, though there is some bass in drum & bass, but we’re talking the stuff that turned me off it, the mid-rangy, nasty noises. But DMZ has a vibe, it just feels young.
L: But of all those producers, Klute is the one I know personally. It freaks me out he comes down because he’s someone I know is a badboy, he someone who’s records I used to buy. He’s asked me to use some of my music for Commercial Suicide, not to put out on a 12” but for a mix CD. He’s cool, he just knows about jungle. We’ve chatted about films, he told me about this [the Star Wars prequel] THX 1138 film, telling me how dark it is and sample-heavy.
B: DJ Shadow ripped it to pieces…
L: I dunno you can always find something, a door opening, anything.
B: Since a lot of people, particularly Horsepower, have done film dialog sampling so exceptionally well, doesn’t that mean it should perhaps be avoided?
L: I dunno, I haven’t done it for a while. I still do use little words, just not long sections. I think it’s important, it references things and sends your mind off on different thought paths. I think this whole rave thing in Britain, which what we’re doing is a mutation of, one fundamental thing throughout virtually all of the styles is that on one level it’s dance music but on the other it’s mind music.
B: Was the dialog in ‘Goat Stare’ from the documentary where the US military tried to kill goats by focusing their minds on them?
L: Sort of, it was. But I didn’t watch it - Youngsta did. And he got scared. ‘What if someone stares at me, and I don’t know about it, and they stop my heart?’ I said there wasn’t a lot he could do about it but it did remind me of a film called ‘Scanners.’ So I decided to sample it, make a tune and call it ‘Goat Stare.’
B: Some of your early tracks, especially ‘Jungle Infiltrator’ were very percussive. Then after that you created a whole batch of tunes – ‘Woman,’ ‘Midnight,’ ‘Goat Stare’ – that defined whole flavour of ultra minimal Loefah halfstep. How did that switch come about?
L: Logic. Getting Logic and getting fed up with bongos. I went into Apple one day and played Hatcha a tune and he went ‘there it is, the Loefah hi hat line.’ And I was like ‘oh’. So I decided from then on to keep things interesting. Then, it was Ministry of Sound, Youngsta played there with a stupid limiter and on my tunes all you could hear was the hi hats. That was it. It was fucking horrible. I realised I needed to sort my production out. I listen back to my Apple and Rephlex tunes and I cringe. I’m glad I did them but after that I thought about learning how this [music production] shit really works.
L: I was listening to beats and thinking I want the loudest mixdown in the world. I want a loud, clean mixdown with the emphasis on the clean. I got a Mac, Logic and went in. I had Kode 9 on the phone for the whole of the first night. My first production was ‘Horror Show.’ I found the ES2 and the siren synth, and the ES1 and found a beautiful bass. Listening to that bass I was like ‘fuck it’ I’m going to do it halfstep. I’m gonna strip it back, I was listening to a lot of Photek at the time. It’s minimal. It’s the placement. Think about the ‘Bleeps’ tune. The beats are still intricate but there’s still space in between them.
B: I always figured that the halfstep idea came through grime, particularly Wonder’s ‘What.’
L: Yeah, blatantly, grime was an influence. I knew of ‘What’ but I couldn’t have named it at the time. So it must have been indirectly. Also, if I’m honest, Missy Elliot’s beats were a factor. Because the way I see it, space is just as much of an instrument as a kick or a snare. You need peaks and troughs.
L: Production: I haven’t clocked it though, I’m still working on it. I’m really looking at getting into using breaks, you know? Not making ‘breaks’, not what they call ‘breaks’ but making my halfstep stuff and adding some little fills, finding a nice take on it. I love a good beat, it fucking kills me.
B: You’ve recently been in the studio with Oris Jay, working on a tune and chopping up breaks. That’s cool to hear because you could argue that perhaps halfstep has gone as far as it can go. You’ve taken beats out to get to halfstep, what else can you take out? You either get to a ‘Devil Mix’ or ‘Sign of the Dub’, which has been done, or you add on. This is interesting because a lot of people have currently adopted the halfstep ideas you came with…
L: That’s the madness man, because people talk about all this ‘no energy’ thing in the scene, and I do feel kind of responsible, but I wasn’t making halfstep because I didn’t like up tempo. I made it because I like it when you have an ‘up’ vibe, then you drop a halfstep and it drops … and you’ve got variety in your sets. This is why I love the Mala thing, what we do in our sets.
B: Increasingly dubstep’s audience isn’t exclusively from London, so perhaps from a distance the city’s parts can’t be resolved, it seems like a homogenous whole. But I know you’re someone who’s quite loyal to south London and subscribes to this tribal, endz view. Is London homogenous or are there exclusive human characteristics in certain districts?
L: I’m proud to live in south London and I do love it. I put ‘SE25’ as part of my remix names because that’s part of me. I do identify that there’s different areas of London, and that it changes from area-to-area. There’s different rules, everywhere. I feel at home in south London - not south-west or south-east - but south of Brixton and north of Croydon. Anywhere in there – the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark or Croydon – and I’m cool. They’re three places I’ve lived in London. Croydon is where I grew up and where I know the best. A lot of Croydon I’m not into but Norwood’s great.
L: The way I see London is that Londoners don’t know where London is. Because when you get into London you don’t live ‘in London’ anymore you live in Norwood, you live in Peckham or you live in Bow. If you’re asked “where are you going?” a lot of people would say “I’m going up London.” What London is basically is a lot of villages. Urbanised, built up, overlapping villages. I suppose because you don’t have physical boundaries, you kinda create your own boundaries. I think it’s more a jovial thing…
B: But you seem to take it very seriously…
L: I wouldn’t want to live in north or east London because they’re a different place. They’re not me, they’re not home. It’s just certain things you get used to. I like south London because it’s a lot more open, even in a lot of the most built up areas there’s still a lot of breathing space. Think about Hackney, or Stoke Newington… they’re all just “on top.” It’s more like countryside in south London, it’s more open.
B: It’s telling about the perceived differences between bits of south London. You mention Peckham and Norwood. To north Londoners they can’t be resolved, they’re all south. But north Londoners would never put consider Hackney and Stoke Newington as similar in a social context. I guess it’s all about familiarity.
L: Blatantly. Because I know about 5% of London.
B: Yeah but that’s what makes it so enthralling. I came off the buss turned down a darkly lit road towards your house tonight and suddenly I was in some part of London I’d never ever been to before. I love that.
L: I love that too. But yeah I love south London because of the familiarity and because of the culture, because of what I perceive in south that isn’t anywhere else. It probably is, but it’s just manifested itself in a different way.
B: Let me ask this then. I really like the link between dubstep and London…
L: … I think it’s essential…
B: … and London is a multicultural place. My feeling is if you get people that grow up in multicultural places, they’ll understand each other better. That’s one of the fundamental reasons why I like urban music. Now we’re at a point where dubstep looks like for the first time the boundaries of some of its producers and fan base have expanding beyond London and the UK and I’m really curious about what’s going to happen next.
L: No one knows what’s going to happen next. As long as I’m writing beats I’m happy with, I’m cool to do that. Other people are free to do what they want, even if sometimes you despise what they’re doing, it’s a free country and you can’t say nothing.
B: I just hope the spirit of that multiculturalism and a lot of the soundsystem and Jamaican culture that you guys have brought through stays with the sound.
L: Do you think it’s understanding of Jamaican culture or do you think it’s an understanding of London culture? Because I would argue for the latter.
B: OK how about ‘soundsystem’ culture?
L: I dunno, I wouldn’t say I know a huge amount about soundsystem culture and what I do I know because of jungle. And I’ve learnt about jungle because of London. I’ve learnt a lot about dub since I’ve been doing dubstep. I knew a bit before but I think we’re writing beats that we would naturally write because of the sounds that have surrounded us as we’ve grown up. You can reference them but I don’t think it’s a Jamaican thing, not for me. Because I’m not Jamaican and I haven’t got a reference to Jamaica. We didn’t chose DMZ to be held in Brixton because of the black population of Brixton, we chose that place [3rd Base part of Mass] because it has been responsible for the badest dances. Soul 2 Soul used to do a dance across the road. St Mathew’s church [aka Mass] is old school from London dub. Seriously though, a lot of dub was written in London.
L: So with good soundsystems – that’s standard. We don’t understand it when people don’t deal with it. It’s what we’ve always been into for years. Every boy in Norwood I swear had a 12” sub in his house and has been blasting out to his neighbours. It’s what you do. Speakers and good sound is essential. Even down to people who get good sets for their cars. You gotta hear your music properly. And we’ve always listened to sub heavy music.
B: You’ve got 12”s coming out on Tectonic, DMZ, Hotflush Remix and maybe Tempa. You pleased?
L: I am but I’d prefer to have good mixdowns. I don’t know… I’m striving for something, I just want this mixdown. This sound. I’m not quite there yet but each track is a step towards it. But then you lose momentum because production ends up being about ‘this noise’ and you spend all day doing it and you won’t have written a beat.
B: It’s something producers get very concerned with, that the sound of their sound is more important than the emotion of their sound or the arrangement of their sound.
L: It’s about striking that balance.
B: What’s it like working with Skream?
L: Wicked he’s the easiest person to work with in the world. His persona in the studio is 100% focused. We’ve got this [new] thing… we’ve just got to arrange it.
B: How did you end up collaborating with Oris Jay?
L: I said ‘do you want to go on a beat?’ he said yes and sent me ‘Mighty Crown.’ It was wicked though. Oris is a badman. He showed me some stuff in Logic, that was sick. He’s old school. He knows, he knows about production I don’t know about. That’s why I love working with him.
B: Is there anyone else you’d like to collaborate with?
L: Yeah, Kode 9. I think he’s just got it. What he does is bad. The vocal, Hyperdub stuff. I love it. His use of space… “Subkontinent,” “Ping” … all the Rephlex tunes. The stuff they chose to do is fucking wicked. It’s complete subversion and it works. I want to write a good bassline for Space Ape.
L: I also want to work with Jay from Vex’d. I’m planning to ring him. He knows his shit. I want to work with The Bug as well.
B: At one point you were trying to both finish a fine art degree and work on an album. What kind of art were you interested in?
L: I was really into documentary photography but that wasn’t what the course was about. It was more of the Goldsmiths school of thought – installation driven, conceptual art. Ideas. It was a lot of theory and written work. It’s weird… it was very interesting. It wasn’t like being as Slade where you’d be painting or life drawing every day. This course was more about what you were going to do than how you did it. It was theoretical than technical. You know Damian Hurst? You know the painting he did that’s just a white background and some dots on it? The dot’s are equidistant from each other, all different colours. He didn’t paint it - but it’s attributed to him. He’s got a team of girls that follow him around, his assistants. It was his painting but he didn’t put any paint on it, himself. He came up with the idea, said ‘this is what it’s going to look like, now crack on and do it for me.’
B: How much of these kinds of ideas overlap with the music you make?
L: There’s a huge overlap, on the conceptual side. It’s the same: it’s creation. You’re making something from nothing. It’s understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If I hadn’t done that degree I’d probably be out now sweating, looking for a career. Because I did that degree I understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. And I’ve got to stick with it really.
B: That’s not to be underestimated. It’s pretty rare that people truly know why they’re doing what they’re doing.
L: Obviously I’ve got to get a job soon, unless music starts paying me. I’ve gotta get something just to pay the rent. A part time somting’. But a career means devoting your life to it, taking work home with you. But I’ve already got work at home, that’s my music. That is my focus. That’s what I do.
B: A lot of people think that if your name is known in music you’re making a career out of it. But that doesn’t seem to be the case any more.
L: Yeah. This is what it is. You either like it or you don’t: it’s not making any money.
B: I guess this way there’ll be no people in dubstep ‘for the money’ like people jumped into jungle or 2step. Because making money out of dubstep… I don’t know anyone who’s ever done it.
L: I could sit down and try and write a pop tune, but that’s not where my head’s at. I like sound. I wouldn’t like to get into pop, though I’d like to be a badboy producer one day. Work with amazing artists but not bubble gum pop.
B: I’m guessing the album project is on hold …
L: Yeah man. When it’s ready it’s ready. It will either be or it wont. I think me doing an album now is running before I can walk. I’m too fussy about my sound and that’s why I can’t put an album together. It doesn’t work for me.
B: You do seem disappointed with levels of quality other people would kill to get to…
L: My sound ain’t there yet. It’s getting there. I want to be better than everyone. I want to have the best mixdown. The best, cleanest mixdown in the universe. Not even to boast, but when I hear it I’m like ‘ahh … that’s crystal.’
B: Do you think that will ever be achievable?
L: Fuckitt, I dunno. That’s how we drive ourselves. We strive for the unachievable. That’s human nature.
B: So how do you feel about Fruity Loops?
L: The affordability and availability of it is good. But I despise Fruity. Skream is the only exception to the rule. He does things that shouldn’t be possible with that program.
B: Skepta said that to me about Skream as well.
L: I’ve given up trying to get Skream onto Logic because he’s just writing bullets. He’s on fire, he’s fucking amazing. He took the piss with ‘Ancient Memories.’ He took liberties with that tune, it’s amazing. Skream is my favourite producer. Seriously right now I couldn’t tell you anyone who comes close. It’s the truth. It’s all about Skream and then it’s all about Coki. I don’t know what happened. Coki was writing bad beats and then something happened and he came with ‘Haunted.’ Since then it’s been next level. Coki’s in overdrive. He’s silly: I’m well into what Coki does.
B: You remixed Nasty Crew. What’s your thoughts on grime?
L: I think grime’s wicked. But it’s not really what I’m about. I’d like to work with a couple of MCs, but literally a couple. But I’d be writing a track for us, not Sidewinder. But yeah, grime I think it’s ruff, I like what they’re doing. I like the energy. But it’s not me.
B: It must be nice having the DMZ rave be so successful?
L: It’s fantastic. Fucking crazy - I can’t even explain the feeling. That night is like coming full circle, from listening to pirates, going to raves, wanting to DJ. Suddenly we’re producing, we’ve been signed, to we’ve go our own dance of our label. It’s real full circle. It’s always been on the cards though: we’ve always talked about putting on the baddest jungle dance on. But we’ve always been about not rushing into things. ‘Nah, that’s not right.’ Things have to be right. Don’t fit a round peg into a square hole with a hammer.
Friday, December 02, 2005
ouch
It's 8am and my eyes hurt. I'm knackered, just like I was the night before... before I'd even been out.
I had one of those moments last night, when really it could have gone either way. 11:30pm, standing in your own warm, dry house thinking: "I've been tired for about 15 hours. I've only been home for about two since someone pulled the alarm on the tube in the carriage I was in and everyone cleared out for fear of having their limbs blown off by a suspect rucksack. Clearly the sane thing to do is to walk the four steps to bed and pass the fuck out."
But somehow compulsive insanity prevails and I find myself jumping in the car, slipping in the Slimzee's Rinse Sessions CD ft. Riko Dan and Gift and slicing through dark, damp streets in the car, heading away from sleep and painless eyes, not towards them.
Then I'm on the dancefloor at FWD>>. The Bug smiles his usual smile, Fiddy's getting lairy, Kode's looking standardly chilled, Mala DMZ's meditating deeply, Target passes through, Skepta's shocking out and the German film crew who've been ringing all week have finally showed up.
Tubby is on the decks, Newham Generals are on the mic - and they're busting up the dance.
Tubby rolls with a 10" record box. You'd have to snap a 12" to fit it in there, which says it all really. He draws for a lush selection of grime, straddling that subtle yet crucial feeling/impact divide. Tunes with mad oboes or pitchbent melodies grab the ears; lyrics and b-lines grab the gut.
"Like birds in the sky..." spits D Double. It's going off. Not in a usual FWD>> 'stand around, muted respect for that immense bass weight' kinda going off, but a 'bumbaclaart, lighters in the air, hands in the just don’t care, screaming, shouting blup blup blup draw for that riddim rightnow blud' kinda way.
Tubby's rolling through.
Jammer needs restraining. Sedating even. A straight jacket at the very least, because that way he won't be able to reload 'Request Line' for the sixth time. Yes, no lie, it got licked back five times in Tubby's set and the tune's flippin' 12 months old. "You're trying to start a riot Tubby blud," jokes Footsie as his DJ abandons trying to mix out of it for the fifth time and simply has to put a brand new riddim on before Jammer breaks the needle in half.
So, all in all, fuck sleep. Myman told me it was the cousin of death anyway... spiritual death.
I had one of those moments last night, when really it could have gone either way. 11:30pm, standing in your own warm, dry house thinking: "I've been tired for about 15 hours. I've only been home for about two since someone pulled the alarm on the tube in the carriage I was in and everyone cleared out for fear of having their limbs blown off by a suspect rucksack. Clearly the sane thing to do is to walk the four steps to bed and pass the fuck out."
But somehow compulsive insanity prevails and I find myself jumping in the car, slipping in the Slimzee's Rinse Sessions CD ft. Riko Dan and Gift and slicing through dark, damp streets in the car, heading away from sleep and painless eyes, not towards them.
Then I'm on the dancefloor at FWD>>. The Bug smiles his usual smile, Fiddy's getting lairy, Kode's looking standardly chilled, Mala DMZ's meditating deeply, Target passes through, Skepta's shocking out and the German film crew who've been ringing all week have finally showed up.
Tubby is on the decks, Newham Generals are on the mic - and they're busting up the dance.
Tubby rolls with a 10" record box. You'd have to snap a 12" to fit it in there, which says it all really. He draws for a lush selection of grime, straddling that subtle yet crucial feeling/impact divide. Tunes with mad oboes or pitchbent melodies grab the ears; lyrics and b-lines grab the gut.
"Like birds in the sky..." spits D Double. It's going off. Not in a usual FWD>> 'stand around, muted respect for that immense bass weight' kinda going off, but a 'bumbaclaart, lighters in the air, hands in the just don’t care, screaming, shouting blup blup blup draw for that riddim rightnow blud' kinda way.
Tubby's rolling through.
Jammer needs restraining. Sedating even. A straight jacket at the very least, because that way he won't be able to reload 'Request Line' for the sixth time. Yes, no lie, it got licked back five times in Tubby's set and the tune's flippin' 12 months old. "You're trying to start a riot Tubby blud," jokes Footsie as his DJ abandons trying to mix out of it for the fifth time and simply has to put a brand new riddim on before Jammer breaks the needle in half.
So, all in all, fuck sleep. Myman told me it was the cousin of death anyway... spiritual death.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Five things you didn’t know about D1
1. He lives in West London. (Dubstep is historically a south London sound).
2. He’s an only child who learnt piano at 7, is grade 8 music theory and can play tenor sax too. His favourite key is either A minor or C minor right now.
3. His dad used to make jungle, techno and made a tune with the late Stevie Hyper D.
4. It was almost two years between when he first started giving Youngsta beats (on tape!) and Youngsta cutting them. That’s graft!
5. When Olive’s ‘You’re Not Alone’ – which D1’s done a dubstep mix of – first came out, he was 9 years old. He’s 18 now.
2. He’s an only child who learnt piano at 7, is grade 8 music theory and can play tenor sax too. His favourite key is either A minor or C minor right now.
3. His dad used to make jungle, techno and made a tune with the late Stevie Hyper D.
4. It was almost two years between when he first started giving Youngsta beats (on tape!) and Youngsta cutting them. That’s graft!
5. When Olive’s ‘You’re Not Alone’ – which D1’s done a dubstep mix of – first came out, he was 9 years old. He’s 18 now.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Draw for the DVD
Muckryfuckryonproducries! Woebot's worked on Practice Hours 2 man! And before you can say disolving class barriers, he's blogged about it. And guess who arranged his Rinse visit... ;-)
FWD>> line up for December
·December 1st: Tubby (aka Newham Generals), Plasticman and Wonder
·December 15th: Youngsta, Geeneus and Skream
Is the 1st the first dubstep-free FWD>> line up? Interesting...
·December 15th: Youngsta, Geeneus and Skream
Is the 1st the first dubstep-free FWD>> line up? Interesting...
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Buzz hunting
It’s important as a producer or blogger, not to just consume music from the scene you’re into. To buzz hunt far and wide as well as deep and narrow.
Recently I bought the Shy FX LP (a one-track CD wonder) and the Calibre album (kinda nice … growing on me but I still think his Signature 12”s are better), but they haven’t really changed my life. I’ve been checking Robbo Ranx (dancehall), Bobby Friction and Nihal’s (desi) BBC shows too. I bought the top five albums off this best of bhangra thread Woebot recommended me. Why? One because I know virtually nothing about bhangra yet as someone who loves Asian influenced dubstep it interests me. And also the bhangra boys, they sell their entire albums for £8, less than most grime 12”s.
So as I was saying, it’s important not to just consume music from the scene you’re into. You need new ideas and places to draw reference and inspiration from. Distance was reinforcing this point to me recently, though in fairness I’ve heard it from lots of other producers over the years and it’s true. There were times this year when I seemed to exist on Roll Deep and Youngsta shows alone, and that is not healthy.
Drum & bass’s influx of new producers have been definitely guilty of sonic cannibalism, where their first and only reference points are Bad Company circa 'Planet Dust' and nothing else.
But this also presents a dilemma for dubstep producers. The sound exists in some ways with sonically such close proximity to other underground sounds like d&b, breaks, broken beat, techno and electronica that it’s fundamental that producers find new sonic definers. It’s not good enough to sample the same old funk breaks (cos like black music stopped in the '60s did it?), to go a bit tepid ‘liquid funk’ or draw for the Reece stabs ie to rinse d&b’s tired clichés. It’s fundamental for the sound that it finds it own unique styles and this is done by new ideas not rehashing of old ones.
You can’t mistake a musical buzz. It’s like being in love, you either completely, indivisibly are in love, or you’re not. The buzz is the same. I either think ‘fuck me I have to tell someone about this tune,’ or not.
Seems like Kode 9 had one of those moments on his show this month. Jason H drops a tune by himself called ‘Forever’ and well, the “faaaacking ‘ell” says it all.
I had one of those moments Thursday. Listening to Cameo on 1Xtra, he suddenly drew for this Wiley vocal produced by Skandalous Unlimited. Cameo’s been losing his mind about Scandalous recently. Two years ago I nearly lost my life with Scandalous, driving to Sidewinder. Stanza they’re called roundabouts because you, like, go round them, preferably braking before haha.
Anyway this Wiley vocal is from the True Tiger mixtape, out in the next few weeks, and is called ‘WD25’ (a Watford postcode reference?). It’s next level grime minimalism, just a few synthy tones and the odd crunchy effect. Drumz? Who fucking needs drums! Rags. This is Skandalous out-Devil Mixing the Devil-Mixmaster. Stanza says there’s versions by Aftershock, Virus Syndicate, K Dot and Ghetto, but Wiley certainly drops some of his best bars:
Everything seems cloudy
I’ve never been robbed in the game, I’m rowdy
Carry on, I’ll take a hammer to your Audi
I’m like a soldier from Saudi
You’re not bad round me
Wanna CD? Try hound me
It’s next week you still ain’t me found me
Phone starts ringing when I drive through Boundary
Where’s Lethal? He ain’t in Boundary
I distribute through Pastels
Just like Rowntree
Now see, why I can handle life in the Deep End
They can’t drown me
Blud I’m a cold kid
Don’t come around me
I’m a city kid
I’m not a towny
Badboy like Mike Laury
I don’t don’t wanna be king
So don’t try crown me
I’m alright just being Wiley, I’m rowdy
Plus I eat lamb curry and roti
I’m a war MC, they can all quote me
And I might punch you in the boti
When you get up, everything seems floaty
I guess you wanna find me, but I move low key
Come into your house with no key
Climb through the window
You know me, my name’s Wiley yeah I’m that brer with the goatee
I’ve got Iceberg suits and Hurrache boots
Not once will you see me in no shiny suit
I’m a rudeboy, still by goods from the loot
Drums layered up with a bass and a flute
I score goals even when the angle’s acute
If I gotta go somewhere take the quick route
Forget the long route
Searching for that number one route, house-in-the-sun route
Dilly dally through badboy valley, I ain’t one to try and act pally
Will start going on aggi if I have to, start getting dark if I have to
Switch if I have to
I only do black-on-black crime if I have to
I know it ain’t good, I hope I don’t have to…
Derived of their intonation, transcriptions doesn’t do them justice but I could still write all month about Wiley lyrics. Check the passion in his flow. Sometimes you can hear Wiley single-handedly willing the entire grime scene forward, and not by the ‘long route’ either. Wiley’s flows are always full of glorious contradictions. He’s a rudeboy, he’ll punch you, he knows black-on-black crime isn’t good but he might have to resort to it. Yet despite being road he’s still looking for the “house-in-the-sun route.”
Also keeping the buzz going round here is the prospect of four very exciting dubstep mixes/compilations due in ’06 … that sadly I can’t elaborate on right now. Yes, I know it’s frustrating and certain other bloggers might blab the details straight away, but trust me, if I was to go on like that, then I’d quickly never have excluses to tell. So you’ll have to trust me when I say big tings a gwann in the dubstep mix/compilation field right now, though it’s all very, very early days.
The week before last I got a completely-out-of-the-blue email from Burial, someone I’d never spoken to. No one had, bar Kode 9. In fact one bigboy drum & bass producer went so far as to suggest Burial didn’t even exist. But he does … and after the heavy Hyperdub 12”, he’s back.
Appearing in my inbox were two brand new Burial tracks, “Distant Lights” and “Shutter.” And how can I put this delicately? THEY’RE F***ING LUSH.
No, it’s no great stylistic departure from the Hyperdub 12”, but when you’ve built yourself a sonic trademark, why bother? If you’ve heard that 12” you’ll know these trademarks. Crunchy, semi-swung intricate beats. Like Horsepower circa 2002 but with the ‘going on differently’ setting at 11. They’re so-wrong-they’re-right. Not forgetting the crackles and pops that suggest Pole … and the entire history of black music left to rot on decaying vinyl.
The other characteristic, which I’m a sucker for, it’s that powerful hint of wistful sorrow. Burial says Foul Play are a massive inspiration. I can see that (a curious coincidence since Steve Gurley’s 98-99 garage output was a massive influence on dubstep godfather El-B). Both tunes make me want to jump in the car and cruise the margins of LDN by night. Burial says he’s been working on lots of new material, in several different directions. Come with it bro.
Talking of lush wistful sorrow, the next Hyperdub 10” is gonna be Kode 9 “9 Samurai” with Spaceape vocal tune “Backward”. Can’t wait.
I’ve also been wondering about two Asian-flavoured tunes Hatcha’s been playing over the last few months. This is a link to the two unknown Hatcha dubs. The first 40 seconds is the tune that sounds a bit like Hatcha v Benny Ill ‘Highland Spring.’ The other is like some Bollywood remix. Lush. Can anyone ID them?
Speaking of Asian dubstep, on Monday I did my dubstep soulja duty and went into Radio 1. Soulja duty comes round now and then. Over the years I’ve sent Kode 9 instrumentals into Kano’s manager (before we knew he wanted to follow the ‘mersh path not the ‘…Lately’ route), been told by Shoreditch dancehall promoters they want a dubstep second room (um, turns out they didn’t really), started the Bleep/Road page, left for dubstep nights in places two hours away by nightbus at 11pm on a Sunday night, written for mags with no hope of ever getting paid or tried to hook up impossibly amazing DJ dates - like the time a friend said they needed some DJs to play at the launch party for Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith in Singapore. These longshots almost never come off, or work out great, but it’s important to soldier on, because just sometimes things come of them.
Anyway through a journalism contact (hold tight Rahul Verma) Nihal from “…& Bobby Friction” got in touch about Asian-influenced dubstep. So I found myself in a Radio 1 listening room checking out Distance’s ‘Fallen’ and ‘Temptation,’ Kode 9 & Spaceape’s ‘Fukkaz,’ Skream and Loefah’s ‘Indian’ and ‘Monsoon’ remixes, L Wiz’ Habibi and Skream’s ‘Cheeky…’ over some phat speakers. It was interesting to see Bobby Friction and Nihal’s responses to how dubby, spacey and instrumental most of those tunes are. To dubstep fans these seem normal qualities of our sound, but it’s easy to forget how others respond.
Bobby Friction and Nihal suggested dubsteppers work with more MCs, a fairly standard response from people in the industry who want to appeal to a wider audience. Sure, vocal tunes can evoke a broader emotional range, but there’s far more to it that that. The entire industry is set up to work vocal tunes and market ‘artists’. The most powerful way to market sound is in fact by sight: music TV, magazines and newspapers break the big acts.
There are lots of people in the industry (predominantly called A&Rs) - though probably less than there were even comparatively recently - who spend their time cherry picking the best of the underground and transporting them to the mainstream, with a few changes on route of course. And so following on from Nihal’s point, people could perhaps theoretically argue that since dubstep is suddenly attracting some heat, it should think about undergoing a transformation.
But why? Sure a dubstep artist could get a PR, spend £10,000 on a video (like anyone in dubstep even has this kind of budget), buy in remixes (probably from an indie band these days lmfao) and enlist a token frontwoman blahdeblah etc. Lots of d&b artists have tried this (Shy *cough* FX … MC *cough*Tali, DJ *cough* SS), but mostly they flop and frankly… I don’t see the point. This really isn’t what dubstep is about. It’s underground music.
If I recall correctly, Simon Reynolds once remarked how much UK hip hop’s ‘undergroundist’ attitude was self-fulfilling. Since its ‘no sell out’ attitude views commercial success as failure, it is stunting its own growth, dooming itself to underachievement and permanent financial pressures. Since Simon lives in New York now, he’s probably acutely well positioned to compare this to the US ‘can-do’ attitude which has made the States’ music industry such a global success.
But even if dubstep adopted a ‘can-do’ attitude and made a bid for the mainstream, I’m willing to argue that it’s now harder to do this than ever before. Long gone are the times when LFO’s ‘LFO’ made the charts. Even the times circa 2000 where underground garage hits like ‘Body Groove’ could become mainstream hits seems distant. Not to say the charts are completely inaccessible (d&b’s Ram Record can break the top 40 with vinyl sales alone), but the gap between underground and mainstream is definitely widening, not least because the ‘charts’ are increasingly marginalised as a measure of success compared to other forms of media ie tabloid coverage. I mean, 2005’s ‘Body Groove’ is surely Bear Man’s ‘Drinking Bear’ or Jammer’s ‘Murkel Man’ – and no one’s touched these two with a barge pole. (And was ‘Pow/The Forward Riddim?’ a fluke or one off? Bobby Friction and Nihal say when they play it in places like Newcastle they get very funny looks).
This suggestion that the gap is confirmed by a major label A&R I corresponded with this week, (someone to whom I will always owe a debt re my early breaks in the music industry five years ago). As one of the perhaps 10-30 people in this country who actually decides what gets signed to a major label in this country he should know what’s currently possible. And his analysis seems to confirm my hunch. Why? Because older consumers now seem to want safer and safer acts (hello Dido! Greeting Jamie Cullum! Howdy James Blunt! …arrrgh!) and younger consumers are actually paying for less music, probably because they download it, share it via IM or just watch it on TV and mobiles. So even if an underground scene like dubstep wanted to sell itself … it couldn’t.
The response to this gap, I’m convinced, it to not watch it. Scenes should build their own media (blogs, fan sites, forums, email lists), start their own labels, run their own download shops and clubs. Which to be fair to dubstep, it already is, which is all fine-and-dandy, except of course no one can make a living. But separating money and music, well, if you look at it in certain criterion (ie aesthetically), that’s no bad thing.
Buzz hunting 10
· DJ Distance “My Demons/Temptation”
· Wiley and Scandalous ‘WD25’
· Jason H ‘Forever’
· Digital Mystikz ‘Intergalatic Dub’/‘Anti War Dub’/’Mighty Zulu Nation remix’ (sadly only heard this once at FWD).
· Kode 9 ‘9 Samurai’/‘Backward ft Spaceape’
· Burial ‘Shutter’/‘Distant Lights’
· Those unknown Hatcha dubs.
· Oris Jay ‘Mighty Wan’
· Appleblim’s ‘Cheat I’
· L Wiz ‘Habibi’
PS Roll Deep have revived Danny Weed and Cage's 'Creeper' inna 'Sidewinder' style. Trim opens it up straight. "Yo I'm oh-gutter/come through stinking of coco butter/the local nutter/Original mad-m-mad Nutta...". Are you stupid?
Recently I bought the Shy FX LP (a one-track CD wonder) and the Calibre album (kinda nice … growing on me but I still think his Signature 12”s are better), but they haven’t really changed my life. I’ve been checking Robbo Ranx (dancehall), Bobby Friction and Nihal’s (desi) BBC shows too. I bought the top five albums off this best of bhangra thread Woebot recommended me. Why? One because I know virtually nothing about bhangra yet as someone who loves Asian influenced dubstep it interests me. And also the bhangra boys, they sell their entire albums for £8, less than most grime 12”s.
So as I was saying, it’s important not to just consume music from the scene you’re into. You need new ideas and places to draw reference and inspiration from. Distance was reinforcing this point to me recently, though in fairness I’ve heard it from lots of other producers over the years and it’s true. There were times this year when I seemed to exist on Roll Deep and Youngsta shows alone, and that is not healthy.
Drum & bass’s influx of new producers have been definitely guilty of sonic cannibalism, where their first and only reference points are Bad Company circa 'Planet Dust' and nothing else.
But this also presents a dilemma for dubstep producers. The sound exists in some ways with sonically such close proximity to other underground sounds like d&b, breaks, broken beat, techno and electronica that it’s fundamental that producers find new sonic definers. It’s not good enough to sample the same old funk breaks (cos like black music stopped in the '60s did it?), to go a bit tepid ‘liquid funk’ or draw for the Reece stabs ie to rinse d&b’s tired clichés. It’s fundamental for the sound that it finds it own unique styles and this is done by new ideas not rehashing of old ones.
You can’t mistake a musical buzz. It’s like being in love, you either completely, indivisibly are in love, or you’re not. The buzz is the same. I either think ‘fuck me I have to tell someone about this tune,’ or not.
Seems like Kode 9 had one of those moments on his show this month. Jason H drops a tune by himself called ‘Forever’ and well, the “faaaacking ‘ell” says it all.
I had one of those moments Thursday. Listening to Cameo on 1Xtra, he suddenly drew for this Wiley vocal produced by Skandalous Unlimited. Cameo’s been losing his mind about Scandalous recently. Two years ago I nearly lost my life with Scandalous, driving to Sidewinder. Stanza they’re called roundabouts because you, like, go round them, preferably braking before haha.
Anyway this Wiley vocal is from the True Tiger mixtape, out in the next few weeks, and is called ‘WD25’ (a Watford postcode reference?). It’s next level grime minimalism, just a few synthy tones and the odd crunchy effect. Drumz? Who fucking needs drums! Rags. This is Skandalous out-Devil Mixing the Devil-Mixmaster. Stanza says there’s versions by Aftershock, Virus Syndicate, K Dot and Ghetto, but Wiley certainly drops some of his best bars:
Everything seems cloudy
I’ve never been robbed in the game, I’m rowdy
Carry on, I’ll take a hammer to your Audi
I’m like a soldier from Saudi
You’re not bad round me
Wanna CD? Try hound me
It’s next week you still ain’t me found me
Phone starts ringing when I drive through Boundary
Where’s Lethal? He ain’t in Boundary
I distribute through Pastels
Just like Rowntree
Now see, why I can handle life in the Deep End
They can’t drown me
Blud I’m a cold kid
Don’t come around me
I’m a city kid
I’m not a towny
Badboy like Mike Laury
I don’t don’t wanna be king
So don’t try crown me
I’m alright just being Wiley, I’m rowdy
Plus I eat lamb curry and roti
I’m a war MC, they can all quote me
And I might punch you in the boti
When you get up, everything seems floaty
I guess you wanna find me, but I move low key
Come into your house with no key
Climb through the window
You know me, my name’s Wiley yeah I’m that brer with the goatee
I’ve got Iceberg suits and Hurrache boots
Not once will you see me in no shiny suit
I’m a rudeboy, still by goods from the loot
Drums layered up with a bass and a flute
I score goals even when the angle’s acute
If I gotta go somewhere take the quick route
Forget the long route
Searching for that number one route, house-in-the-sun route
Dilly dally through badboy valley, I ain’t one to try and act pally
Will start going on aggi if I have to, start getting dark if I have to
Switch if I have to
I only do black-on-black crime if I have to
I know it ain’t good, I hope I don’t have to…
Derived of their intonation, transcriptions doesn’t do them justice but I could still write all month about Wiley lyrics. Check the passion in his flow. Sometimes you can hear Wiley single-handedly willing the entire grime scene forward, and not by the ‘long route’ either. Wiley’s flows are always full of glorious contradictions. He’s a rudeboy, he’ll punch you, he knows black-on-black crime isn’t good but he might have to resort to it. Yet despite being road he’s still looking for the “house-in-the-sun route.”
Also keeping the buzz going round here is the prospect of four very exciting dubstep mixes/compilations due in ’06 … that sadly I can’t elaborate on right now. Yes, I know it’s frustrating and certain other bloggers might blab the details straight away, but trust me, if I was to go on like that, then I’d quickly never have excluses to tell. So you’ll have to trust me when I say big tings a gwann in the dubstep mix/compilation field right now, though it’s all very, very early days.
The week before last I got a completely-out-of-the-blue email from Burial, someone I’d never spoken to. No one had, bar Kode 9. In fact one bigboy drum & bass producer went so far as to suggest Burial didn’t even exist. But he does … and after the heavy Hyperdub 12”, he’s back.
Appearing in my inbox were two brand new Burial tracks, “Distant Lights” and “Shutter.” And how can I put this delicately? THEY’RE F***ING LUSH.
No, it’s no great stylistic departure from the Hyperdub 12”, but when you’ve built yourself a sonic trademark, why bother? If you’ve heard that 12” you’ll know these trademarks. Crunchy, semi-swung intricate beats. Like Horsepower circa 2002 but with the ‘going on differently’ setting at 11. They’re so-wrong-they’re-right. Not forgetting the crackles and pops that suggest Pole … and the entire history of black music left to rot on decaying vinyl.
The other characteristic, which I’m a sucker for, it’s that powerful hint of wistful sorrow. Burial says Foul Play are a massive inspiration. I can see that (a curious coincidence since Steve Gurley’s 98-99 garage output was a massive influence on dubstep godfather El-B). Both tunes make me want to jump in the car and cruise the margins of LDN by night. Burial says he’s been working on lots of new material, in several different directions. Come with it bro.
Talking of lush wistful sorrow, the next Hyperdub 10” is gonna be Kode 9 “9 Samurai” with Spaceape vocal tune “Backward”. Can’t wait.
I’ve also been wondering about two Asian-flavoured tunes Hatcha’s been playing over the last few months. This is a link to the two unknown Hatcha dubs. The first 40 seconds is the tune that sounds a bit like Hatcha v Benny Ill ‘Highland Spring.’ The other is like some Bollywood remix. Lush. Can anyone ID them?
Speaking of Asian dubstep, on Monday I did my dubstep soulja duty and went into Radio 1. Soulja duty comes round now and then. Over the years I’ve sent Kode 9 instrumentals into Kano’s manager (before we knew he wanted to follow the ‘mersh path not the ‘…Lately’ route), been told by Shoreditch dancehall promoters they want a dubstep second room (um, turns out they didn’t really), started the Bleep/Road page, left for dubstep nights in places two hours away by nightbus at 11pm on a Sunday night, written for mags with no hope of ever getting paid or tried to hook up impossibly amazing DJ dates - like the time a friend said they needed some DJs to play at the launch party for Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith in Singapore. These longshots almost never come off, or work out great, but it’s important to soldier on, because just sometimes things come of them.
Anyway through a journalism contact (hold tight Rahul Verma) Nihal from “…& Bobby Friction” got in touch about Asian-influenced dubstep. So I found myself in a Radio 1 listening room checking out Distance’s ‘Fallen’ and ‘Temptation,’ Kode 9 & Spaceape’s ‘Fukkaz,’ Skream and Loefah’s ‘Indian’ and ‘Monsoon’ remixes, L Wiz’ Habibi and Skream’s ‘Cheeky…’ over some phat speakers. It was interesting to see Bobby Friction and Nihal’s responses to how dubby, spacey and instrumental most of those tunes are. To dubstep fans these seem normal qualities of our sound, but it’s easy to forget how others respond.
Bobby Friction and Nihal suggested dubsteppers work with more MCs, a fairly standard response from people in the industry who want to appeal to a wider audience. Sure, vocal tunes can evoke a broader emotional range, but there’s far more to it that that. The entire industry is set up to work vocal tunes and market ‘artists’. The most powerful way to market sound is in fact by sight: music TV, magazines and newspapers break the big acts.
There are lots of people in the industry (predominantly called A&Rs) - though probably less than there were even comparatively recently - who spend their time cherry picking the best of the underground and transporting them to the mainstream, with a few changes on route of course. And so following on from Nihal’s point, people could perhaps theoretically argue that since dubstep is suddenly attracting some heat, it should think about undergoing a transformation.
But why? Sure a dubstep artist could get a PR, spend £10,000 on a video (like anyone in dubstep even has this kind of budget), buy in remixes (probably from an indie band these days lmfao) and enlist a token frontwoman blahdeblah etc. Lots of d&b artists have tried this (Shy *cough* FX … MC *cough*Tali, DJ *cough* SS), but mostly they flop and frankly… I don’t see the point. This really isn’t what dubstep is about. It’s underground music.
If I recall correctly, Simon Reynolds once remarked how much UK hip hop’s ‘undergroundist’ attitude was self-fulfilling. Since its ‘no sell out’ attitude views commercial success as failure, it is stunting its own growth, dooming itself to underachievement and permanent financial pressures. Since Simon lives in New York now, he’s probably acutely well positioned to compare this to the US ‘can-do’ attitude which has made the States’ music industry such a global success.
But even if dubstep adopted a ‘can-do’ attitude and made a bid for the mainstream, I’m willing to argue that it’s now harder to do this than ever before. Long gone are the times when LFO’s ‘LFO’ made the charts. Even the times circa 2000 where underground garage hits like ‘Body Groove’ could become mainstream hits seems distant. Not to say the charts are completely inaccessible (d&b’s Ram Record can break the top 40 with vinyl sales alone), but the gap between underground and mainstream is definitely widening, not least because the ‘charts’ are increasingly marginalised as a measure of success compared to other forms of media ie tabloid coverage. I mean, 2005’s ‘Body Groove’ is surely Bear Man’s ‘Drinking Bear’ or Jammer’s ‘Murkel Man’ – and no one’s touched these two with a barge pole. (And was ‘Pow/The Forward Riddim?’ a fluke or one off? Bobby Friction and Nihal say when they play it in places like Newcastle they get very funny looks).
This suggestion that the gap is confirmed by a major label A&R I corresponded with this week, (someone to whom I will always owe a debt re my early breaks in the music industry five years ago). As one of the perhaps 10-30 people in this country who actually decides what gets signed to a major label in this country he should know what’s currently possible. And his analysis seems to confirm my hunch. Why? Because older consumers now seem to want safer and safer acts (hello Dido! Greeting Jamie Cullum! Howdy James Blunt! …arrrgh!) and younger consumers are actually paying for less music, probably because they download it, share it via IM or just watch it on TV and mobiles. So even if an underground scene like dubstep wanted to sell itself … it couldn’t.
The response to this gap, I’m convinced, it to not watch it. Scenes should build their own media (blogs, fan sites, forums, email lists), start their own labels, run their own download shops and clubs. Which to be fair to dubstep, it already is, which is all fine-and-dandy, except of course no one can make a living. But separating money and music, well, if you look at it in certain criterion (ie aesthetically), that’s no bad thing.
Buzz hunting 10
· DJ Distance “My Demons/Temptation”
· Wiley and Scandalous ‘WD25’
· Jason H ‘Forever’
· Digital Mystikz ‘Intergalatic Dub’/‘Anti War Dub’/’Mighty Zulu Nation remix’ (sadly only heard this once at FWD).
· Kode 9 ‘9 Samurai’/‘Backward ft Spaceape’
· Burial ‘Shutter’/‘Distant Lights’
· Those unknown Hatcha dubs.
· Oris Jay ‘Mighty Wan’
· Appleblim’s ‘Cheat I’
· L Wiz ‘Habibi’
PS Roll Deep have revived Danny Weed and Cage's 'Creeper' inna 'Sidewinder' style. Trim opens it up straight. "Yo I'm oh-gutter/come through stinking of coco butter/the local nutter/Original mad-m-mad Nutta...". Are you stupid?
Friday, November 25, 2005
Screwed but not flopped
Curious about the origins of the hip hop phenomenon 'Screwed and chopped?'
Read a tribute to DJ Screw over at Houston So Real or download the Damage Control radio tribute to him.
Read a tribute to DJ Screw over at Houston So Real or download the Damage Control radio tribute to him.
Mixdown class with Mr Distance
DJ Distance has been very helpful recently helping me learn about the complex black art of mixdowns. And as we all know, its all about sharing the knowledge. So sit down, open your books and hush - mixdown class for beginners is in session.
Distance says: I'm running Cubase VST 5/32 and using Fostex PM1 Monitors, but most of the below will apply to any software-setup.
1. Get yourself a pair of decent monitors. Tannoy Reveals, Alessis MkII, or Fostex PM1's ( if you have a tight budget). If not then take a look at Dynaudio or Genelec.
I recommend getting monitors a soon as you know you want to take producing seriously, it's very hard to adapt after using Stereo speakers for a long time.
2. Mixdown at a low volume: I used to have it pumpin but this didn't do me any favours.
3. Eq-ing is the key! Give every element its own space.
4. Read up on frequencies, this makes a very big difference & obviously goes hand in hand with EQing.
5. Compress your drums and subbass only if you need to.
6. Before using compressors get some info on them, make sure your actually effecting the sound and not just raising the volume.
Check out the Sound on Sound tutorial.
7. It does make a difference in what order you apply your compression, EQ, delay etc. I usually compress first then EQ.
8. Try getting your head around grouping & bussing.
9. Panning certain sounds can open up the whole mix.
10. Listen to your finished mix in as many different places at you can, it might sound good on £300 pound monitors but if it sound heavy on 5 watt stereo system then you know it aint a bad mix.
Check this good book for all round mixing advice.
know your studio shit? got any more tips about mixdowns? add them in the comments sections...
Distance says: I'm running Cubase VST 5/32 and using Fostex PM1 Monitors, but most of the below will apply to any software-setup.
1. Get yourself a pair of decent monitors. Tannoy Reveals, Alessis MkII, or Fostex PM1's ( if you have a tight budget). If not then take a look at Dynaudio or Genelec.
I recommend getting monitors a soon as you know you want to take producing seriously, it's very hard to adapt after using Stereo speakers for a long time.
2. Mixdown at a low volume: I used to have it pumpin but this didn't do me any favours.
3. Eq-ing is the key! Give every element its own space.
4. Read up on frequencies, this makes a very big difference & obviously goes hand in hand with EQing.
5. Compress your drums and subbass only if you need to.
6. Before using compressors get some info on them, make sure your actually effecting the sound and not just raising the volume.
Check out the Sound on Sound tutorial.
7. It does make a difference in what order you apply your compression, EQ, delay etc. I usually compress first then EQ.
8. Try getting your head around grouping & bussing.
9. Panning certain sounds can open up the whole mix.
10. Listen to your finished mix in as many different places at you can, it might sound good on £300 pound monitors but if it sound heavy on 5 watt stereo system then you know it aint a bad mix.
Check this good book for all round mixing advice.
know your studio shit? got any more tips about mixdowns? add them in the comments sections...
Saturday, November 19, 2005
doubleK(ick)
Kid Kameleon drops an epic post about the recent Plasticman, Vex'd, Al Haca and Joe Nice gigs. He goes deep into his take on the scenes v outsiders issue, continuing the dialog we began during an amazing weekend spent in San Fran this summer. He even draws for wave/particle duality. Is deferring to quantum mechanics actually an answer? Just joshing Matt.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Pitchfork time again
Pitchfork time again with thoughts about the next steps for dubstep and an exlusive interview with Rinse FM management.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Big up Benny
Whoah, out of the blue comes an email from Benny Ill aka the mastermind behind Horsepower Production and responsible for a very large part of dubstep as we know it.
Why is that remarkable? Well one, for the four years I've known Ben he's never had a mobile let alone internet access. And two he's escaped Purley to live in NYC.
Seems like he's linked old dubstep friend Dinesh (aka Goldspot - who remembers the lush Vehicle records release? The first ever US dubstep 12") and become a studio engineer.
Now seeing as most of the amazing Horsepower back catalog was made on an antiquated set up - proof it's ears & skill not plug-ins and money you need - I can't imagine what Ben could sound like with some serious kit at his disposal.
I hope Ben doesn't mind me quoting his email. NYC, if you want to get some of the best ears in the business on your production side, read on...
"I am living here in Manhattan now and working as a studio engineer / producer. Why not check out my new studio in NYC, Pictures are on our site: www.sweetsoundsnyc.com If you know anyone who might be looking for studio time out here please get in contact special rates are available for dubsteppers! Our equipment is top of the line Protools 24 bit / fully air conditioned / full lounge w/ cable tv/
refreshments / roof garden available. You can contact me at ben@sweetsoundsnyc.com
respect
Benny ill aka Kid Deli aka Broke Legendz aka aka aka..."
BENNY ILL UPDATE:
"We just updated the studio here and we are now running Pro tools HD 3 (sick!) 192 hz 132 channels. We also got a lot of mad plug-ins for that shit, so expect to here some dope shit coming your way soon!
Anyone that might be interested about the studio, we are able to do remixes / production / mixdowns / editing / post-production and all that shit, so u.k. peeps can even send their shit out here, to be worked on and get that fat sound on their tracks !!! If you send me your tracks, ( seperate audio parts ) we can do a hot mixdown for your shit, make it sound dope, for the folks back home.
Respect
Benny ill"
Why is that remarkable? Well one, for the four years I've known Ben he's never had a mobile let alone internet access. And two he's escaped Purley to live in NYC.
Seems like he's linked old dubstep friend Dinesh (aka Goldspot - who remembers the lush Vehicle records release? The first ever US dubstep 12") and become a studio engineer.
Now seeing as most of the amazing Horsepower back catalog was made on an antiquated set up - proof it's ears & skill not plug-ins and money you need - I can't imagine what Ben could sound like with some serious kit at his disposal.
I hope Ben doesn't mind me quoting his email. NYC, if you want to get some of the best ears in the business on your production side, read on...
"I am living here in Manhattan now and working as a studio engineer / producer. Why not check out my new studio in NYC, Pictures are on our site: www.sweetsoundsnyc.com If you know anyone who might be looking for studio time out here please get in contact special rates are available for dubsteppers! Our equipment is top of the line Protools 24 bit / fully air conditioned / full lounge w/ cable tv/
refreshments / roof garden available. You can contact me at ben@sweetsoundsnyc.com
respect
Benny ill aka Kid Deli aka Broke Legendz aka aka aka..."
BENNY ILL UPDATE:
"We just updated the studio here and we are now running Pro tools HD 3 (sick!) 192 hz 132 channels. We also got a lot of mad plug-ins for that shit, so expect to here some dope shit coming your way soon!
Anyone that might be interested about the studio, we are able to do remixes / production / mixdowns / editing / post-production and all that shit, so u.k. peeps can even send their shit out here, to be worked on and get that fat sound on their tracks !!! If you send me your tracks, ( seperate audio parts ) we can do a hot mixdown for your shit, make it sound dope, for the folks back home.
Respect
Benny ill"
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
lockdown
KANO LONDON GIG – CANCELLED
Following tip offs London’s Scala has had to comply with the request of the Metropolitan Police to shut down the venue on Thursday 27th October and therefore cancel Kano’s sold out show.
METROPOLIS MUSIC STATEMENT
We have been instructed by the police that we cannot go ahead with the Kano concert at the Scala on Thursday 27th October.
The police have acquired intelligence that unsavoury characters intended to cause trouble at the concert. This intelligence was received from Operation Trident.
The police have stated that this is no reflection on Kano and have had no problems at previous events that he has performed at in London
There are no plans to reschedule the show at this time and customers are advised to obtain a refund at point of purchase.
Metropolis Music
Statement from Kano:
“I have performed in London practically my whole career and there have never been any problems. It’s where I started out and for me there’s no better place to perform. It’s a shame that on my first ever UK tour I am unable to play to my home town. I am sorry for my fans that the show couldn’t happen this time round. I’ll be back.”
I've written about this before, with most profile in the NME, but it's the case that ever since the shooting outside the Romeo Birthday Bash at Astoria in 2001 there's been a rumour that the Metropolitan Police have a garage blacklist, used to pre-emptively shut down garage events in Westminster, depriving grime MCs of a vital revenue stream.
In fact this is probably a factor why proto-grime was forced out of clubs and onto radio, and why - freed from the dancefloor - it was able to evolve so experimentally.
But pre-emptive club closing in an entire borough? Surely that's descrimination not just against a major-backed MOBO winner but a whole social group.
Following tip offs London’s Scala has had to comply with the request of the Metropolitan Police to shut down the venue on Thursday 27th October and therefore cancel Kano’s sold out show.
METROPOLIS MUSIC STATEMENT
We have been instructed by the police that we cannot go ahead with the Kano concert at the Scala on Thursday 27th October.
The police have acquired intelligence that unsavoury characters intended to cause trouble at the concert. This intelligence was received from Operation Trident.
The police have stated that this is no reflection on Kano and have had no problems at previous events that he has performed at in London
There are no plans to reschedule the show at this time and customers are advised to obtain a refund at point of purchase.
Metropolis Music
Statement from Kano:
“I have performed in London practically my whole career and there have never been any problems. It’s where I started out and for me there’s no better place to perform. It’s a shame that on my first ever UK tour I am unable to play to my home town. I am sorry for my fans that the show couldn’t happen this time round. I’ll be back.”
I've written about this before, with most profile in the NME, but it's the case that ever since the shooting outside the Romeo Birthday Bash at Astoria in 2001 there's been a rumour that the Metropolitan Police have a garage blacklist, used to pre-emptively shut down garage events in Westminster, depriving grime MCs of a vital revenue stream.
In fact this is probably a factor why proto-grime was forced out of clubs and onto radio, and why - freed from the dancefloor - it was able to evolve so experimentally.
But pre-emptive club closing in an entire borough? Surely that's descrimination not just against a major-backed MOBO winner but a whole social group.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
word is born
There's something odd in the garage air, i can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it's just personal over-saturation, but it feels like we might be in a mini lull.
i'm not the only one who feels this. quite independently, i've heard the same from three other of the dubstep headz. but, to use a maths analogy, if you're at the bottom of the curve, the rate of change is the greatest.
grime's not sitting 100% right - but that a whole nother post. dubstep, after a massive renaissance this year, feels like it's paused for a second, though i'm tipping Oris Jay's 'Mighty Wan' as a potential breakthrough record.
Perhaps this lull is no bad thing. Man can not live on Youngsta and Roll Deep Rinse sets alone, - believe me I've tried.
speaking from strictly personal experience, enthusiasm can never nor should never be faked. to this end i've been trying to actively expand my daily music consumption boundaries.
a lot of the usual dance suspects - d&b, broken beat, breaks, techno, house etc - leave me cold. or cross. or feeling like i'm going backwards.
I've been checking Silverstar and Robbo Ranks' shows on 1Xtra to up my dancehall knowledge, though only Sizzla and Vibes Cartel consistently do it for me. if anyone else knows any incredible dancehall shows, lemme know.
i've also made an effort to learn about bhangra, a genre with vast history i know virtually nothing about.
Lata Mangeshkar and Pannal al Ghosh are two classical asian artists I've been checking recently. And I've long since loved the Asian influence in dubstep. Skream's Indian remix. Horsepower's 'Sholay'. Kode 9's 'Fukkaz/Subkon'. All stone cold classics. So bhangra made sense.
To find out about a scene you know nothing about - when your asian mates don’t answer their persys - you need an entry point. The BBC Asian Network provided that for me, particularly the hilariously entitled Markie Mark.
Within a few weeks he recommended 'Word is Born' by Specialist 'n' Tru-Skool as a classic LP, even though it was only one year old.
Contained inside this £8 CD (stuff your £9 1-sided grime 12"s, now that's value!), are some hooks so deadly i nearly crashed the car on the way to Forward>> this week - and that was 30 feet from my house.
The last CD that did that to me was the first Logan Sama free mix CD last year. How i took that right-angle corner on a dark country road at 70 mph and keep the right side of a tree i don't know.
'Word is Born' slams in with some heavy riddims, laden with the energy and hype so missing from garage sometimes. 'Sanehvaal Chounk' should be a number one record.
'Nashia Tho Dhoor' takes the same riff as the recent Nas hit 'Get Down' and freestyles in some mad asian dialect over it. It's infectious in any language.
Littered throughout the album are patches of melodic genius intermingled with, to these ears at least, glorious dissonance, just like Kano and Wonder's 'Lately' but more severely bi-polar.
But the album's backbone is built from hip hop and bhangra, asian and afro-american vibes. How sad then, in the very week i discover this CD, where the cultures blend so seemlessly, things should turn so ugly in the real world between the british black and asian communities.
i'm not the only one who feels this. quite independently, i've heard the same from three other of the dubstep headz. but, to use a maths analogy, if you're at the bottom of the curve, the rate of change is the greatest.
grime's not sitting 100% right - but that a whole nother post. dubstep, after a massive renaissance this year, feels like it's paused for a second, though i'm tipping Oris Jay's 'Mighty Wan' as a potential breakthrough record.
Perhaps this lull is no bad thing. Man can not live on Youngsta and Roll Deep Rinse sets alone, - believe me I've tried.
speaking from strictly personal experience, enthusiasm can never nor should never be faked. to this end i've been trying to actively expand my daily music consumption boundaries.
a lot of the usual dance suspects - d&b, broken beat, breaks, techno, house etc - leave me cold. or cross. or feeling like i'm going backwards.
I've been checking Silverstar and Robbo Ranks' shows on 1Xtra to up my dancehall knowledge, though only Sizzla and Vibes Cartel consistently do it for me. if anyone else knows any incredible dancehall shows, lemme know.
i've also made an effort to learn about bhangra, a genre with vast history i know virtually nothing about.
Lata Mangeshkar and Pannal al Ghosh are two classical asian artists I've been checking recently. And I've long since loved the Asian influence in dubstep. Skream's Indian remix. Horsepower's 'Sholay'. Kode 9's 'Fukkaz/Subkon'. All stone cold classics. So bhangra made sense.
To find out about a scene you know nothing about - when your asian mates don’t answer their persys - you need an entry point. The BBC Asian Network provided that for me, particularly the hilariously entitled Markie Mark.
Within a few weeks he recommended 'Word is Born' by Specialist 'n' Tru-Skool as a classic LP, even though it was only one year old.
Contained inside this £8 CD (stuff your £9 1-sided grime 12"s, now that's value!), are some hooks so deadly i nearly crashed the car on the way to Forward>> this week - and that was 30 feet from my house.
The last CD that did that to me was the first Logan Sama free mix CD last year. How i took that right-angle corner on a dark country road at 70 mph and keep the right side of a tree i don't know.
'Word is Born' slams in with some heavy riddims, laden with the energy and hype so missing from garage sometimes. 'Sanehvaal Chounk' should be a number one record.
'Nashia Tho Dhoor' takes the same riff as the recent Nas hit 'Get Down' and freestyles in some mad asian dialect over it. It's infectious in any language.
Littered throughout the album are patches of melodic genius intermingled with, to these ears at least, glorious dissonance, just like Kano and Wonder's 'Lately' but more severely bi-polar.
But the album's backbone is built from hip hop and bhangra, asian and afro-american vibes. How sad then, in the very week i discover this CD, where the cultures blend so seemlessly, things should turn so ugly in the real world between the british black and asian communities.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
BAM007?
random voicemail on me persy this week. "bonjour Mr Clark..." It could only be from the infamous Skream then. the message reports that finally, and out of the blue, Big Apple 007, Skream's lost 12" has been pressed and is available in Mixing Records (Big Apple Records the shop, as was). No sign of it on the website so we'll have to take Skream's word for it. Not his best 12" but one of his most sought after (hold tight Deep Thought. your time).
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Friday, September 23, 2005
Thursday, September 22, 2005
inside LDN
“… passively coexisting ethnic and religious communities”
Interesting to see The Commission for Racial Equality’s head Trevor Phillips speaking out against the threat of ghettos. Is it me, or is Phillips the only person in the UK capable of making such warning with such impact? Because when Wiley says the same on pirate radio, no one with the power to affect change listens.
London’s a frustrating and mesmerising city, perhaps the only truly multicultural city in the UK. Thousands of different subcultures co-exist, piled on top, around, through, over and in-between each other. For many years architects and town planners have attempted to mix not segregate, hence why there are council estates just off wealthy areas like Upper Street or the heart of Dulwich.
Yet despite the geographical proximity and intense population density (over 7 million people in 50 square miles), in many ways total cultural isolation is a reality. It’s an endlessly confounding phenomenon. How can one group walk past another incalculable numbers of times a year, and gather no sense of the other’s values?
Canary Wharf and the City are east London’s wealthy business districts, two of the financial centres of the world and places where on a daily basis, sums of money are created, destroyed, flow in and flow out in mind numbing proportions. Commuters in their droves match that flow, washing in from Kent, Surrey, west London, north London, Hertfordshire and beyond.
Canary Wharf, one of only two real ‘sky scraper’ style developments in London, towers over some of the poorest parts of London. You can see it on the cover of Target’s Aim High 2 DVD, just minutes from Roll Deep’s ‘Whilehouse’ base. You can see it from Langden Park school playing fields in Bow, where as a pupil, Dizzee Rascal learnt Cubase while excluded from most other lessons. But just because Canary Wharf is visible from Bow, doesn’t mean Bow is visible from Canary Wharf.
If you asked any of the commuters coming in on those trains each morning about urban culture, you’d get blank looks. Physical proximity means nothing. Values, aspirations, opportunities, slang – there’s no exchange between these two groups. Two groups who essentially live on top of each other, yet are utterly oblivious to each other. Communities - upbringing and background based not location based - are in fact vast webs of reinforcing values, each physically overlaid on each other, yet seemingly seldom touching.
Lots of people grew up to, and still listen to, indie. If you go to those gigs, ignoring the obvious issues with musical formulism and tediously safe rituals, even in this city they are tediously monocultural. A thin slice of people of the same class and race, each reinforcing their overwhelming similarities.
Personally I think this is why I love urban music so much. Through it, a dialog between different cultures is at least possible, because it provides a shared language to bridge the divide. It creates some dialog and awareness, no matter how small.
No one 'on road' uses the word ‘politics’ in the Westminster sense. In grime if you want to hear ‘the news,’ you listen to Roll Deep on Rinse, surely grime’s Today Program. Trevor Phillips hasn’t made it to Rinse yet, instead he was on the other Today Program again this morning. His best point seemed to be that people need to focus on similarities not differences. I’d agree, though in this city, people need to focus on understanding those who are different to them a bit more than those who are similar too.
Interesting to see The Commission for Racial Equality’s head Trevor Phillips speaking out against the threat of ghettos. Is it me, or is Phillips the only person in the UK capable of making such warning with such impact? Because when Wiley says the same on pirate radio, no one with the power to affect change listens.
London’s a frustrating and mesmerising city, perhaps the only truly multicultural city in the UK. Thousands of different subcultures co-exist, piled on top, around, through, over and in-between each other. For many years architects and town planners have attempted to mix not segregate, hence why there are council estates just off wealthy areas like Upper Street or the heart of Dulwich.
Yet despite the geographical proximity and intense population density (over 7 million people in 50 square miles), in many ways total cultural isolation is a reality. It’s an endlessly confounding phenomenon. How can one group walk past another incalculable numbers of times a year, and gather no sense of the other’s values?
Canary Wharf and the City are east London’s wealthy business districts, two of the financial centres of the world and places where on a daily basis, sums of money are created, destroyed, flow in and flow out in mind numbing proportions. Commuters in their droves match that flow, washing in from Kent, Surrey, west London, north London, Hertfordshire and beyond.
Canary Wharf, one of only two real ‘sky scraper’ style developments in London, towers over some of the poorest parts of London. You can see it on the cover of Target’s Aim High 2 DVD, just minutes from Roll Deep’s ‘Whilehouse’ base. You can see it from Langden Park school playing fields in Bow, where as a pupil, Dizzee Rascal learnt Cubase while excluded from most other lessons. But just because Canary Wharf is visible from Bow, doesn’t mean Bow is visible from Canary Wharf.
If you asked any of the commuters coming in on those trains each morning about urban culture, you’d get blank looks. Physical proximity means nothing. Values, aspirations, opportunities, slang – there’s no exchange between these two groups. Two groups who essentially live on top of each other, yet are utterly oblivious to each other. Communities - upbringing and background based not location based - are in fact vast webs of reinforcing values, each physically overlaid on each other, yet seemingly seldom touching.
Lots of people grew up to, and still listen to, indie. If you go to those gigs, ignoring the obvious issues with musical formulism and tediously safe rituals, even in this city they are tediously monocultural. A thin slice of people of the same class and race, each reinforcing their overwhelming similarities.
Personally I think this is why I love urban music so much. Through it, a dialog between different cultures is at least possible, because it provides a shared language to bridge the divide. It creates some dialog and awareness, no matter how small.
No one 'on road' uses the word ‘politics’ in the Westminster sense. In grime if you want to hear ‘the news,’ you listen to Roll Deep on Rinse, surely grime’s Today Program. Trevor Phillips hasn’t made it to Rinse yet, instead he was on the other Today Program again this morning. His best point seemed to be that people need to focus on similarities not differences. I’d agree, though in this city, people need to focus on understanding those who are different to them a bit more than those who are similar too.
Two great mixes online. dont sleep.
Hatcha with loads of new dubs.
And Joe Nice dropping some amazing riddims. L Wiz is on fire (twice). feeling that tune by 23HZ & Numaestro called Galleon Dub. Respect for playing 'Triplet Tablas' too.
Hatcha with loads of new dubs.
And Joe Nice dropping some amazing riddims. L Wiz is on fire (twice). feeling that tune by 23HZ & Numaestro called Galleon Dub. Respect for playing 'Triplet Tablas' too.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Sunday, September 04, 2005
DMZheeheehee pt 2
got that post-dmz glow again.
warm. tired. fuzzy. happy. emotive. lush.
all about joe nice rocking the Rocky towel and deep L Wiz dubs. shame he didnt play phil collin's 'in the air tonight' like he threatened to.
all about mala's 'new life' and 'anti war dub.'
bigup Coki 'doesnt dj' DMZ for taking to the decks.
can't forget Skreams Ancient Memories remix. ave' some of that!
warm. tired. fuzzy. happy. emotive. lush.
all about joe nice rocking the Rocky towel and deep L Wiz dubs. shame he didnt play phil collin's 'in the air tonight' like he threatened to.
all about mala's 'new life' and 'anti war dub.'
bigup Coki 'doesnt dj' DMZ for taking to the decks.
can't forget Skreams Ancient Memories remix. ave' some of that!
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Skream
Croydon's Skream has has a massive impact on dubstep since he first appeared in Hatcha sets three or four years ago. But with his "Midnight Request Line" (Tempa) currently being rewound by Roll Deep on their Rinse show the hype around his music has never been bigger. So this is Skream, in his own words and sounds...
THE MIX
all tracks original Skream productions unless stated
Tortured Soul
Sound-trak
Bullseye
Sunship "Almighty Father (Skream remix)"
Hag
Fairytale
Groovin
Midknight Requestline
Herb
Smiling Face
Lightning Dub (Elektronica)
Digital Mystikz "Ancient Memories (Skream remix)"
Loefah "Indian Dub (Skream remix)"
Basstrap
Where Am I?
Glamma
Rutten
Deeper Feelings
Untitled (a little taster)
THE INTERVIEW
Blackdown: to start at the beginning, when did you begin making music?
Skream: At about 15, I started with Benga. I met him through his brother. I was working in a record shop, at Big Apple, and he said his brother was making beats, I said I was making beats. We used to ring each other up and play beats down the phone – we didn’t even know each other. I met Hatcha through my brother, because my brother was working in Apple on the jungle floor and Hatcha was working downstairs. He started playing all the El-B and Horsepower stuff, and that’s what got me into it all. That was around 2000. I’ve been making tracks since Forward>> was at Velvet Rooms.
I used to work at Apple on the weekends. At school I was like ‘yeah I want to work in a record shop’ but when you get there it’s just boring man. Standing there all day or taking the post out. All these kids go down shops asking for a job, and I’m like ‘you don’t know shit!’ Plus it used to be lively but record shops are dead now.
B: Can you explain to people how important Big Apple records was to Croydon? Because without it, there may not have been dubstep.
S: Yeah because Jon from Big Apple was pushing the sound so people picked up on that dark vibe early - from people like El-B. He wanted to sign the El-B “album” – that legendary album. That shop was important, the centre point where everybody used to go. Benny Ill (Horsepower) was there, El-B , Artwork/Menta worked upstairs…
B: Do you mean the “lost” El-B album he never released?
Yeah. Fucking hell, I never got a copy of it. It was sick: the El-B and Juiceman track Buck & Bury, that’s an all time favourite and the original never came out.
S: If you look back, you and Benga, through Hatcha sets, built the link between the dark 2step days and the modern dubstep sound. Do you agree?
It was the time when it all went a bit quiet, around the time of Musical Mob’s [proto-grime] ‘Pulse X’ people weren’t buying so much garage. But we developed a style, with the 404 basslines. I dunno it was just what we were feeling. We wanted to do darker, but our own sort of darker – round the El-B style but it never ended up sounding like them . It ended up something with a twist. I look back to those days. I’ve got a pukka tape of Hatcha at Forward [at the Velvet Rooms].
B: Your early minimal, modern, techy style – how did it come about?
S: That was just us. We just loved those b-lines. We just wanted to get darker and darker, and make movie-sounding shit, deep sounding. It was different at the time.
B: It was, because those 2002-3 Hatcha sets were just another level.
S: Hatcha had a lot to do with the sound. He used to suggest trying things. I did tracks with him too.
B: How did it come about that he had you and Benga 100% exclusive?
S: Those were the early years, when the Big Apple label was starting. It got right political, because I couldn’t give a CD out to anyone else … and it was around then it started going quiet.
B: Looking back though, it was crazy that at one point Hatcha had you, Benga, Skream, Digital Mystikz and Loefah on exclusive. That’s a lot of control.
S: He broke us all really, so it was fair. He just wanted to be on top. He used to be the only one with loads of dubplates – it was looked upon as kind of ridiculous.
B: If you look at that clipped, dark minimal style of you and Benga around 2002-2003 and compare it to now, there’s so much more colour in dubstep...
S: Yeah I want to get onto the musical stuff, because you can only go so far with just beats and bass. I’ve been getting more melodic. You can work easier ... I’m on the computer all day long, I can’t leave it.
My computer wouldn’t turn on, something went wrong for a couple of days and I was pacing the house: I couldn’t sit down. Three days: it was horrible. Torture.
B: Do you feel like you’re addicted?
S: Yeah, I am. I can’t leave it. I’d eat my dinner there… it was like my home. Work and just roll into my bed. But then I’ve got so much material indoors.
B: When I interviewed you for Deuce three years ago, you said you had hundreds of tracks. And that was three years ago...
S: On that old drive I had 600 files. On my new one I’ve got 800. it gets ridiculous, I can’t remember them all.
B: So why don’t you use email?
S: I don’t want internet on there. That’s how I nearly lost all the old stuff I’d made. It had 11,000 viruses. I always used to fall into the trap of opening them emails up, then my hard drive started fucking up, the computer wouldn’t turn on and then I was in bits. It was like someone was in hospital, I kept ringing up the computer engineer fixing it going ‘how’s it going?’
B: Is Big Apple records the label coming back?
S: There’s rumours, but no, it isn’t. I’d love it to though.
B: Did your Skunkstep EP ever come out on Big Apple?
S: There was TPs, ten TPs. Did you get one?
B: Yeah ...but they’re not your best tracks.
S: Someone offered me £70 for one.
B: So what is the best Skream track that never came out?
S: “Cape Fear remix.” I dunno, I just loved it. it used to go off. Kode 9 loved it. I remember it going off [ upstairs at the True Playaz night] at Fabric. Juiceman and Sarah Ammunition were like “that’s heavy.” I must have been 16 or 17.
B: How old were you when you started making music?
S: 15. My last year at school, or was it year 10? Because I remember first listening to Wiley when they were blowing up with Pay As U Go. It started getting more MC-orientated and I went off it. but I don’t mind doing the grime-ier stuff now because people are feeling that style.
B: It’s strange because when we first spoke for Deuce in about 2002/3, in terms of innovation and sound dubstep was miles ahead, and grime was behind. But out of that early grime came the most incredible music. Has the progress of grime had much of an influence on you?
S: Yeah that’s why I started to get more melodic. You can kinda get away with more stuff. Dubstep is going to be looked as an offshoot of grime now, for people who want instrumental stuff.
B: Yeah except that dubstep pre-dates grime by a couple of years, at least. The first dark garage tune I ever heard was Groove Chronicle’s Masterplan or 1999, and there was no grime then. Was there a point where you began to enjoy grime more then?
S: Terror Danjah’s stuff. Geeneus’ What remix. Jammer’s good. I’ve got a couple of grime releases coming out, on Southside as Mr Keys. Then there’s “Midnight Request Line” on Tempa.
B: Is that your biggest tune to date?
S: Definitely. I started it as a grime tune. I didn’t get that tune at first. There’s a formula to it. I’ve been trying to study it. But I can’t get it.
B: Do you wanna know my 1pence worth? It’s big because it’s got chords and a key change in it. And key changes move people.
S: It’s hypnotic. It’s minor. I learnt all my chords and scales when me and Plasticman went to music college . I still use Fruity, FL5, with loads of VSTs and synths.
B: I guess the time you started making beats was the first time you didn’t have to pay £2000 to start to make studio music. You could download Fruity Loops for free – technology was in the hands of the people.
S: It sounded a bit cheap at the beginning but it sounded different, that’s why we got away with it.
B: Lots of people think because you’ve got your tunes played out you’re rich and famous, but it’s not like that. Do you struggle between money and music?
S: I’ve got my mum and dad on my back. I’ve been making music for four years but they say ‘where’s it going?’ Fair enough you do magazine photoshoots but where’s the money? I say I’ve got this and that coming out, but it’s not enough to live on. It’s a struggle. I’ve hardly earned anything in the years I’ve been doing it.
B: Which is frustrating considering how many tunes you’ve made and how much you’ve changed the sound.
S: I would have loved to get on them Rephlex compilations. They brought more people into the scene, which is good because it is technical music, you can listen to it.
B: It’s funny because a lot of the Rephlex audience hate the word garage but like dubstep, but we’ve seen the sound come out of garage.
S: It was an outcast for a bit. “Garage” - you can’t say that word wherever you go.
B: So where did you go to school?
S: West Wickham, near Bromley. Not that far from Croydon. It was a catholic school. One of the teachers robbed all the money – she was in The Sun . We had no heating in the winter, substitute teachers – it was fucked man. I got suspended about eleven times. Anything that would happen, if they didn’t find someone, it would be on me. First time I got suspended it was for not picking up rubbish in the rain. That’s ridiculous, you’re not going to do it are ya? Because it was the headmistress she wanted to abuse her rights.
S: Me and my mate Tel got chased once, when bunking, because they thought we were burglars. They had the police helicopters out – we were terrified. They chased us for hours. They became the laughing stock of the police force, because we were just bunking. But I finished school, I didn’t want to get chucked out, because it looks bad on paper. I have no idea what I would be doing if I didn’t do music. I just want it to become a job. It’s not like work for me.
B: Croydon is part of greater south London but it has it’s own vibe...
S: It’s looked on as really bad now. It never used to be. It’s cast as a bad place. When we go out to Rochester or places like that, if they see “Croydon” on your ID you can’t come in. Or Brighton – you have to go into clubs in ones or twos. Then they start clocking and say “nah there’s too many people from Croydon.” I swear.
B: Do you remember being in Black Sheep Bar in Croydon at Digital Mystikz’ “Dubsessions” night when there was nobody there? Do you remember Mala DMZ playing “Forgive?”
S: I love that tune.
B: Did that kind of big, melodic DMZ sound influence you?
S: Big time. It gave me a kick up the arse, that’s what it did. I was slacking, badly. Last summer I was slacking. But since then I’ve been doing stuff I’ve been happy with again. The Mystikz have brought the whole music side in, it’s more than just bass and beats. It’s heavy. Loefah, Coki and Mala – they all have their own styles.
B: What do you make of halfstep v traditional dubstep beats?
S: I try and do halfstep with energy. It’s still dance music. A night of all that half stuff does get a bit much. A bit dead. But that’s what I like about dubstep. You can do something really abstract and get away with it. You could even do a big vocal dubstep tune and get it in the charts. Except then you’d get people jumping on it – for now people are only in it for the music.
B: What was it like for you going to the early Forward>> at Velvet Room days?
S: Mad. Mental. Hearing my tune getting played in a club and people liking it: it was the maddest buzz in the world. It was a lot older back then. Bit more of a Champagne garage crowd too, but it was good.
B: Is the rumour about the Croydon limo true? That you lot all used to go to Forward>> in a limo?
S: Yeah. Everyone used to get mashed and go up in a limo. It weren’t looked at as weird.
B: So albums, what’s the plan?
S: I don’t wanna rush it. I could have had thirty albums by now but I want it to be good. But I’m trying to make eleven tracks I’ve really put a lot into. But I don’t have an album deal. I’d also like to start a label too though.
B: Is there a difference between Ollie and Skream?
S: There used to be. Skream used to be the chilled out one, I didn’t use to say anything, back when I smoked lots. I used to smoke lots when I was younger 14-16. It’s horrible though, you just waste years. It’s like ‘what have I don’t this year? Smoke.’
B: So can you name the best mashup times by Skream?
S: Ah haha. There’s a top 10! Were you there when I was sick in a speaker at Forward>>? That was humiliating.
B: You being arrested at Plastic Man’s Filthy Dub must be in the top 10…
S: Nah but that wasn’t my fault. I swear to god. My mate gave me a tenner in the toilets for a pint. The bouncers have gone ‘come here. Go upstairs!’ They pushed me out the door going ‘you’re a dealer mate.’ They didn’t find anything obviously but they still wouldn’t let me back in. Someone twisted my arm, I said ‘get off’ and it was a policeman. He threw me up against a window. I told him to ‘fuck off’ so he threw me on the floor. All people like Mark One are like ‘you alright, what’s happened?’ and I’m like ‘what does it look like’s happened? I’m being arrested.’ It was humiliating. It had looked like I’d done something really bad.
B: Shame because Filthy Dub was good...
S: Did you come to the first one when me and Chef played? Do you remember how busy it was? That was a proper one-off one. You wont ever get that again in Croydon. Dubstep don’t appeal to promoters here, all they think about is money. It’s all commercial music in there.
B: Do you feel like Forward>> is a family? Like you’ve grown up through it?
S: Yeah. I’ve met a lot of people through it, trust a lot of people too. It’s good, everyone gets on and when you go out there’s loads of you having a good time.
B: Have you got a big family?
S: Nah I’ve got one brother, he plays house. He’s Hijack: he used to be in [legendary south London raving crew] Internatty with Bailey, Grooverider and all that. That’s how I met Loefah, he came up to me and said ‘was your brother was in Internatty?’ My brother was on Energy FM and Kiss before Kiss was big, doing jungle sets. I’ve got a wall of ’89 to ’96 dubplates that have never been played, just clean and that.
B: Were you into jungle at the time?
S: Nah it’s when I got older. I love dark music, not just bass but deep stuff. I think it’s because I make beats I appreciate how well they’re made. When I listen to Photek now I freak. But I only started listening to all my brothers jungle later, though I don’t majorly listen to it.
B: Most of the darkness in garage can be traced back to El-B having been to Metalheadz and going ‘I’m gonna make garage, but dark’ with Groove Chronicles and the Ghost.
S: I was always on the El-B stuff from day. They were different, music with style. They were classy tracks, man.
B: Did Benga do the Hatcha VIP dub?
S: The one that’s just beats and bass? Yeah that’s Benga, a tune called “Star Wars.”
B: What’s Benga doing these days?
S: He’s doing production work with Artwork and working with some of the grime boys. He’s done two tracks with Crazy Titch, one of them I reckon could be quite big. And he’s done about four new dubstep tunes.
He’s cool though is Benga, hilarious. He laughs like a bird. And he’s got a slick afro. You see him walking through Croydon with a hairdryer – he’s had to go borrow one cos his hairdryer’s broken. It’s nutty. It was blazing heat the other day but he had to put his hood up because he was embarrassed of his hair. He was so hot. He looked like he was wearing a scuba diving outfit.
THE MIX
all tracks original Skream productions unless stated
Tortured Soul
Sound-trak
Bullseye
Sunship "Almighty Father (Skream remix)"
Hag
Fairytale
Groovin
Midknight Requestline
Herb
Smiling Face
Lightning Dub (Elektronica)
Digital Mystikz "Ancient Memories (Skream remix)"
Loefah "Indian Dub (Skream remix)"
Basstrap
Where Am I?
Glamma
Rutten
Deeper Feelings
Untitled (a little taster)
THE INTERVIEW
Blackdown: to start at the beginning, when did you begin making music?
Skream: At about 15, I started with Benga. I met him through his brother. I was working in a record shop, at Big Apple, and he said his brother was making beats, I said I was making beats. We used to ring each other up and play beats down the phone – we didn’t even know each other. I met Hatcha through my brother, because my brother was working in Apple on the jungle floor and Hatcha was working downstairs. He started playing all the El-B and Horsepower stuff, and that’s what got me into it all. That was around 2000. I’ve been making tracks since Forward>> was at Velvet Rooms.
I used to work at Apple on the weekends. At school I was like ‘yeah I want to work in a record shop’ but when you get there it’s just boring man. Standing there all day or taking the post out. All these kids go down shops asking for a job, and I’m like ‘you don’t know shit!’ Plus it used to be lively but record shops are dead now.
B: Can you explain to people how important Big Apple records was to Croydon? Because without it, there may not have been dubstep.
S: Yeah because Jon from Big Apple was pushing the sound so people picked up on that dark vibe early - from people like El-B. He wanted to sign the El-B “album” – that legendary album. That shop was important, the centre point where everybody used to go. Benny Ill (Horsepower) was there, El-B , Artwork/Menta worked upstairs…
B: Do you mean the “lost” El-B album he never released?
Yeah. Fucking hell, I never got a copy of it. It was sick: the El-B and Juiceman track Buck & Bury, that’s an all time favourite and the original never came out.
S: If you look back, you and Benga, through Hatcha sets, built the link between the dark 2step days and the modern dubstep sound. Do you agree?
It was the time when it all went a bit quiet, around the time of Musical Mob’s [proto-grime] ‘Pulse X’ people weren’t buying so much garage. But we developed a style, with the 404 basslines. I dunno it was just what we were feeling. We wanted to do darker, but our own sort of darker – round the El-B style but it never ended up sounding like them . It ended up something with a twist. I look back to those days. I’ve got a pukka tape of Hatcha at Forward [at the Velvet Rooms].
B: Your early minimal, modern, techy style – how did it come about?
S: That was just us. We just loved those b-lines. We just wanted to get darker and darker, and make movie-sounding shit, deep sounding. It was different at the time.
B: It was, because those 2002-3 Hatcha sets were just another level.
S: Hatcha had a lot to do with the sound. He used to suggest trying things. I did tracks with him too.
B: How did it come about that he had you and Benga 100% exclusive?
S: Those were the early years, when the Big Apple label was starting. It got right political, because I couldn’t give a CD out to anyone else … and it was around then it started going quiet.
B: Looking back though, it was crazy that at one point Hatcha had you, Benga, Skream, Digital Mystikz and Loefah on exclusive. That’s a lot of control.
S: He broke us all really, so it was fair. He just wanted to be on top. He used to be the only one with loads of dubplates – it was looked upon as kind of ridiculous.
B: If you look at that clipped, dark minimal style of you and Benga around 2002-2003 and compare it to now, there’s so much more colour in dubstep...
S: Yeah I want to get onto the musical stuff, because you can only go so far with just beats and bass. I’ve been getting more melodic. You can work easier ... I’m on the computer all day long, I can’t leave it.
My computer wouldn’t turn on, something went wrong for a couple of days and I was pacing the house: I couldn’t sit down. Three days: it was horrible. Torture.
B: Do you feel like you’re addicted?
S: Yeah, I am. I can’t leave it. I’d eat my dinner there… it was like my home. Work and just roll into my bed. But then I’ve got so much material indoors.
B: When I interviewed you for Deuce three years ago, you said you had hundreds of tracks. And that was three years ago...
S: On that old drive I had 600 files. On my new one I’ve got 800. it gets ridiculous, I can’t remember them all.
B: So why don’t you use email?
S: I don’t want internet on there. That’s how I nearly lost all the old stuff I’d made. It had 11,000 viruses. I always used to fall into the trap of opening them emails up, then my hard drive started fucking up, the computer wouldn’t turn on and then I was in bits. It was like someone was in hospital, I kept ringing up the computer engineer fixing it going ‘how’s it going?’
B: Is Big Apple records the label coming back?
S: There’s rumours, but no, it isn’t. I’d love it to though.
B: Did your Skunkstep EP ever come out on Big Apple?
S: There was TPs, ten TPs. Did you get one?
B: Yeah ...but they’re not your best tracks.
S: Someone offered me £70 for one.
B: So what is the best Skream track that never came out?
S: “Cape Fear remix.” I dunno, I just loved it. it used to go off. Kode 9 loved it. I remember it going off [ upstairs at the True Playaz night] at Fabric. Juiceman and Sarah Ammunition were like “that’s heavy.” I must have been 16 or 17.
B: How old were you when you started making music?
S: 15. My last year at school, or was it year 10? Because I remember first listening to Wiley when they were blowing up with Pay As U Go. It started getting more MC-orientated and I went off it. but I don’t mind doing the grime-ier stuff now because people are feeling that style.
B: It’s strange because when we first spoke for Deuce in about 2002/3, in terms of innovation and sound dubstep was miles ahead, and grime was behind. But out of that early grime came the most incredible music. Has the progress of grime had much of an influence on you?
S: Yeah that’s why I started to get more melodic. You can kinda get away with more stuff. Dubstep is going to be looked as an offshoot of grime now, for people who want instrumental stuff.
B: Yeah except that dubstep pre-dates grime by a couple of years, at least. The first dark garage tune I ever heard was Groove Chronicle’s Masterplan or 1999, and there was no grime then. Was there a point where you began to enjoy grime more then?
S: Terror Danjah’s stuff. Geeneus’ What remix. Jammer’s good. I’ve got a couple of grime releases coming out, on Southside as Mr Keys. Then there’s “Midnight Request Line” on Tempa.
B: Is that your biggest tune to date?
S: Definitely. I started it as a grime tune. I didn’t get that tune at first. There’s a formula to it. I’ve been trying to study it. But I can’t get it.
B: Do you wanna know my 1pence worth? It’s big because it’s got chords and a key change in it. And key changes move people.
S: It’s hypnotic. It’s minor. I learnt all my chords and scales when me and Plasticman went to music college . I still use Fruity, FL5, with loads of VSTs and synths.
B: I guess the time you started making beats was the first time you didn’t have to pay £2000 to start to make studio music. You could download Fruity Loops for free – technology was in the hands of the people.
S: It sounded a bit cheap at the beginning but it sounded different, that’s why we got away with it.
B: Lots of people think because you’ve got your tunes played out you’re rich and famous, but it’s not like that. Do you struggle between money and music?
S: I’ve got my mum and dad on my back. I’ve been making music for four years but they say ‘where’s it going?’ Fair enough you do magazine photoshoots but where’s the money? I say I’ve got this and that coming out, but it’s not enough to live on. It’s a struggle. I’ve hardly earned anything in the years I’ve been doing it.
B: Which is frustrating considering how many tunes you’ve made and how much you’ve changed the sound.
S: I would have loved to get on them Rephlex compilations. They brought more people into the scene, which is good because it is technical music, you can listen to it.
B: It’s funny because a lot of the Rephlex audience hate the word garage but like dubstep, but we’ve seen the sound come out of garage.
S: It was an outcast for a bit. “Garage” - you can’t say that word wherever you go.
B: So where did you go to school?
S: West Wickham, near Bromley. Not that far from Croydon. It was a catholic school. One of the teachers robbed all the money – she was in The Sun . We had no heating in the winter, substitute teachers – it was fucked man. I got suspended about eleven times. Anything that would happen, if they didn’t find someone, it would be on me. First time I got suspended it was for not picking up rubbish in the rain. That’s ridiculous, you’re not going to do it are ya? Because it was the headmistress she wanted to abuse her rights.
S: Me and my mate Tel got chased once, when bunking, because they thought we were burglars. They had the police helicopters out – we were terrified. They chased us for hours. They became the laughing stock of the police force, because we were just bunking. But I finished school, I didn’t want to get chucked out, because it looks bad on paper. I have no idea what I would be doing if I didn’t do music. I just want it to become a job. It’s not like work for me.
B: Croydon is part of greater south London but it has it’s own vibe...
S: It’s looked on as really bad now. It never used to be. It’s cast as a bad place. When we go out to Rochester or places like that, if they see “Croydon” on your ID you can’t come in. Or Brighton – you have to go into clubs in ones or twos. Then they start clocking and say “nah there’s too many people from Croydon.” I swear.
B: Do you remember being in Black Sheep Bar in Croydon at Digital Mystikz’ “Dubsessions” night when there was nobody there? Do you remember Mala DMZ playing “Forgive?”
S: I love that tune.
B: Did that kind of big, melodic DMZ sound influence you?
S: Big time. It gave me a kick up the arse, that’s what it did. I was slacking, badly. Last summer I was slacking. But since then I’ve been doing stuff I’ve been happy with again. The Mystikz have brought the whole music side in, it’s more than just bass and beats. It’s heavy. Loefah, Coki and Mala – they all have their own styles.
B: What do you make of halfstep v traditional dubstep beats?
S: I try and do halfstep with energy. It’s still dance music. A night of all that half stuff does get a bit much. A bit dead. But that’s what I like about dubstep. You can do something really abstract and get away with it. You could even do a big vocal dubstep tune and get it in the charts. Except then you’d get people jumping on it – for now people are only in it for the music.
B: What was it like for you going to the early Forward>> at Velvet Room days?
S: Mad. Mental. Hearing my tune getting played in a club and people liking it: it was the maddest buzz in the world. It was a lot older back then. Bit more of a Champagne garage crowd too, but it was good.
B: Is the rumour about the Croydon limo true? That you lot all used to go to Forward>> in a limo?
S: Yeah. Everyone used to get mashed and go up in a limo. It weren’t looked at as weird.
B: So albums, what’s the plan?
S: I don’t wanna rush it. I could have had thirty albums by now but I want it to be good. But I’m trying to make eleven tracks I’ve really put a lot into. But I don’t have an album deal. I’d also like to start a label too though.
B: Is there a difference between Ollie and Skream?
S: There used to be. Skream used to be the chilled out one, I didn’t use to say anything, back when I smoked lots. I used to smoke lots when I was younger 14-16. It’s horrible though, you just waste years. It’s like ‘what have I don’t this year? Smoke.’
B: So can you name the best mashup times by Skream?
S: Ah haha. There’s a top 10! Were you there when I was sick in a speaker at Forward>>? That was humiliating.
B: You being arrested at Plastic Man’s Filthy Dub must be in the top 10…
S: Nah but that wasn’t my fault. I swear to god. My mate gave me a tenner in the toilets for a pint. The bouncers have gone ‘come here. Go upstairs!’ They pushed me out the door going ‘you’re a dealer mate.’ They didn’t find anything obviously but they still wouldn’t let me back in. Someone twisted my arm, I said ‘get off’ and it was a policeman. He threw me up against a window. I told him to ‘fuck off’ so he threw me on the floor. All people like Mark One are like ‘you alright, what’s happened?’ and I’m like ‘what does it look like’s happened? I’m being arrested.’ It was humiliating. It had looked like I’d done something really bad.
B: Shame because Filthy Dub was good...
S: Did you come to the first one when me and Chef played? Do you remember how busy it was? That was a proper one-off one. You wont ever get that again in Croydon. Dubstep don’t appeal to promoters here, all they think about is money. It’s all commercial music in there.
B: Do you feel like Forward>> is a family? Like you’ve grown up through it?
S: Yeah. I’ve met a lot of people through it, trust a lot of people too. It’s good, everyone gets on and when you go out there’s loads of you having a good time.
B: Have you got a big family?
S: Nah I’ve got one brother, he plays house. He’s Hijack: he used to be in [legendary south London raving crew] Internatty with Bailey, Grooverider and all that. That’s how I met Loefah, he came up to me and said ‘was your brother was in Internatty?’ My brother was on Energy FM and Kiss before Kiss was big, doing jungle sets. I’ve got a wall of ’89 to ’96 dubplates that have never been played, just clean and that.
B: Were you into jungle at the time?
S: Nah it’s when I got older. I love dark music, not just bass but deep stuff. I think it’s because I make beats I appreciate how well they’re made. When I listen to Photek now I freak. But I only started listening to all my brothers jungle later, though I don’t majorly listen to it.
B: Most of the darkness in garage can be traced back to El-B having been to Metalheadz and going ‘I’m gonna make garage, but dark’ with Groove Chronicles and the Ghost.
S: I was always on the El-B stuff from day. They were different, music with style. They were classy tracks, man.
B: Did Benga do the Hatcha VIP dub?
S: The one that’s just beats and bass? Yeah that’s Benga, a tune called “Star Wars.”
B: What’s Benga doing these days?
S: He’s doing production work with Artwork and working with some of the grime boys. He’s done two tracks with Crazy Titch, one of them I reckon could be quite big. And he’s done about four new dubstep tunes.
He’s cool though is Benga, hilarious. He laughs like a bird. And he’s got a slick afro. You see him walking through Croydon with a hairdryer – he’s had to go borrow one cos his hairdryer’s broken. It’s nutty. It was blazing heat the other day but he had to put his hood up because he was embarrassed of his hair. He was so hot. He looked like he was wearing a scuba diving outfit.
Friday, August 26, 2005
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Ohmydiddy!
“You get smoked like Philly
Think you’re big but you’re just a little willy
Load magazines like Chantelle Fiddy
Make a man say ‘oh my diddy!’”
Skepta,
Meridian & Roll Deep,
LDN 2005
It’s late at Rinse FM station party. MCs, DJs and headz are rammed into a small (literally) underground east London venue. A scream goes up at the bar. Skepta’s just dropped his new bars that name-check Chantelle, and that scream says she’s feeling them.
When I first heard those bars, if I hadn’t been sitting down, I probably would have fallen over. I was in a hotel room in California, but even 5000 miles from home, their impact and significance weren’t lost on me.
Ironically I first met Chan in west London, at some waste showcase. She was smoozing some major label a&r. The PR I was talking to for some reason already had taken a severe dislike to Chan. It wasn’t the best beginning of a friendship.
Through Deuce magazine (RIP), we soon found we had common ground. More than that, we had a common mission. It was 2002/3 and 2step garage, in the eye of the industry and the media, was officially “dead.” Unaware of the efforts of a few co-pioneering bloggers, we looked around us at UK magazines. We saw a garage-free medium. Contrast that with the explosion of new sounds to be found flourishing around us on London’s streets, and you have the essence of what in effect became a full time quest.
Three years later and things look a little better. Sure, there’s an obvious glass ceiling to the majority of MCs’ careers and only a few will ever sign to a major, but at least grime artists are playing in New York, Brussels and Tokyo. Wiley and Skepta look out of place at V Festival, but at least they’re there. Lethal B, Roll Deep, Kano, Dizzee x2, Wiley and Statik have all dropped albums. Run the Road is on volume 2.
So what’s so special about a Skepta lyric name checking Fiddy?
Firstly freelance journalism is a thankless task. For ages MCs felt they didn’t need journalists, probably because their peers don’t read magazines (bar RWD or the Source), because on the whole they’re written by and for middle class white audiences. Also print criticism is, to them, akin to verbal on-road merkery – something to strike back against.
It’s also a thankless task because there’s no money or long term future in magazine journalism - I’ve never found a landlord that will accept rent paid in promo CDrs. It’s hard work: the only reason to do it, bar none, is because you believe in the words you write. All other motives are aberrations. All this considered, thanks from an MC is a gratefully accepted gift. Wiley said my name on the mic at FWD>> once - it made my week. But Skepta writing bars about Chan: that’s next level.
The second reason why that lyric is so big goes deeper into the essence of grime. Dizzee and Wiley, back in 2002/3, had the vital vision that grime would be about artists not MCs, about culture not DJs. But post the Rephlex “Grime” compilations, and with the snide Grimm Dubz series for sale online, a lot of people, especially the new Rephlex/IDM recruits, want to confuse a culture with a sound.
I’ve debated definitions of grime before. The grime scene, in the strictest sense of who that means, is a particular London generation. Their lyrics, their language, their reference points and their attitudes are distinct. Though it has changed a little in the last year, with labels interacting with grime artists than ever, on the whole to outsiders, the scene is remarkably impenetrable. You can have their digits, you can meet them and visit their studios or their estates, but largely over time, you won’t even register as part of their world. Just listen to all their lyrics: they’re about their acute local micro environment.
So when Chantelle’s name is being used, it means she’s crossed a line very few non-members of generation grime ever achieve. And that’s so big, it had to be said.
Think you’re big but you’re just a little willy
Load magazines like Chantelle Fiddy
Make a man say ‘oh my diddy!’”
Skepta,
Meridian & Roll Deep,
LDN 2005
It’s late at Rinse FM station party. MCs, DJs and headz are rammed into a small (literally) underground east London venue. A scream goes up at the bar. Skepta’s just dropped his new bars that name-check Chantelle, and that scream says she’s feeling them.
When I first heard those bars, if I hadn’t been sitting down, I probably would have fallen over. I was in a hotel room in California, but even 5000 miles from home, their impact and significance weren’t lost on me.
Ironically I first met Chan in west London, at some waste showcase. She was smoozing some major label a&r. The PR I was talking to for some reason already had taken a severe dislike to Chan. It wasn’t the best beginning of a friendship.
Through Deuce magazine (RIP), we soon found we had common ground. More than that, we had a common mission. It was 2002/3 and 2step garage, in the eye of the industry and the media, was officially “dead.” Unaware of the efforts of a few co-pioneering bloggers, we looked around us at UK magazines. We saw a garage-free medium. Contrast that with the explosion of new sounds to be found flourishing around us on London’s streets, and you have the essence of what in effect became a full time quest.
Three years later and things look a little better. Sure, there’s an obvious glass ceiling to the majority of MCs’ careers and only a few will ever sign to a major, but at least grime artists are playing in New York, Brussels and Tokyo. Wiley and Skepta look out of place at V Festival, but at least they’re there. Lethal B, Roll Deep, Kano, Dizzee x2, Wiley and Statik have all dropped albums. Run the Road is on volume 2.
So what’s so special about a Skepta lyric name checking Fiddy?
Firstly freelance journalism is a thankless task. For ages MCs felt they didn’t need journalists, probably because their peers don’t read magazines (bar RWD or the Source), because on the whole they’re written by and for middle class white audiences. Also print criticism is, to them, akin to verbal on-road merkery – something to strike back against.
It’s also a thankless task because there’s no money or long term future in magazine journalism - I’ve never found a landlord that will accept rent paid in promo CDrs. It’s hard work: the only reason to do it, bar none, is because you believe in the words you write. All other motives are aberrations. All this considered, thanks from an MC is a gratefully accepted gift. Wiley said my name on the mic at FWD>> once - it made my week. But Skepta writing bars about Chan: that’s next level.
The second reason why that lyric is so big goes deeper into the essence of grime. Dizzee and Wiley, back in 2002/3, had the vital vision that grime would be about artists not MCs, about culture not DJs. But post the Rephlex “Grime” compilations, and with the snide Grimm Dubz series for sale online, a lot of people, especially the new Rephlex/IDM recruits, want to confuse a culture with a sound.
I’ve debated definitions of grime before. The grime scene, in the strictest sense of who that means, is a particular London generation. Their lyrics, their language, their reference points and their attitudes are distinct. Though it has changed a little in the last year, with labels interacting with grime artists than ever, on the whole to outsiders, the scene is remarkably impenetrable. You can have their digits, you can meet them and visit their studios or their estates, but largely over time, you won’t even register as part of their world. Just listen to all their lyrics: they’re about their acute local micro environment.
So when Chantelle’s name is being used, it means she’s crossed a line very few non-members of generation grime ever achieve. And that’s so big, it had to be said.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
sounds like fumin
does anyone know the name of the playground game that Fumin appropriates on his new tune that inserts new sylables into the middle of words, twisting the English language yet further?
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
pitchfork 4
brand new pitchfork grime and dubstep column from me, inc my photo of riko and skepa at the Rinse party. go on then!
Monday, August 15, 2005
plasticman mix
Shout to Plasticman for this mix, first broadcast on the 1Xtra UK M1X show with DJ Q but exclusively available here for download. It's all about new dub A Walk In The Carpark. Deepness.
tracklist:
Plasticman featuring Shizzle, Fresh, Napper - Cha Vocal (Terrorhythm Recordings)
Plasticman - Cha (Benga Remix) (Terrorhythm Recordings)
Chase & Status featuring Roll Deep - Top Shotta (Dub)
Macabre Unit - Killer Bee (Dub)
Emalkay - Gut Feeling (Dub)
Wiley - Merkle Instrumental (White)
Wiler - Colder Remix (White)
Dexplicit - Bullacake (Dub)
Plasticman - Cha VIP (Terrorhythm Recordings)
Plasticman - Brassbeat (Dub)
M.I.A. - U.R.A.Q.T. (Plasticman Remix Instrumental) (XL Recordings)
Karnak - Flutes (Dub)
Unknown - The Low Riddim (Dub)
JME - Low Baraka (Dub)
Chunky Bizzle - Diss Me Like Dat (Dub)
Caspa - Home Sick (Storming Productions)
Wonder - Undertaker (Dub)
Wonder - It's All (Dub)
Plasticman - The Jackal Riddim (Dub)
Plasticman - Still Tippin Remix (Dub)
Plasticman - Export (Dub)
Wiley - Untitled (Dub)
Slew Dem - Grime (Slew Dem Productions)
Dreama - Stigma (Dub)
JME - Earth's Core (Dub)
Plasticman - Symptomatic (Dub)
Virus Syndicate - Slow Down (Plasticman Remix) (Dub)
Plasticman - A Walk In The Carpark (Dub)
tracklist:
Plasticman featuring Shizzle, Fresh, Napper - Cha Vocal (Terrorhythm Recordings)
Plasticman - Cha (Benga Remix) (Terrorhythm Recordings)
Chase & Status featuring Roll Deep - Top Shotta (Dub)
Macabre Unit - Killer Bee (Dub)
Emalkay - Gut Feeling (Dub)
Wiley - Merkle Instrumental (White)
Wiler - Colder Remix (White)
Dexplicit - Bullacake (Dub)
Plasticman - Cha VIP (Terrorhythm Recordings)
Plasticman - Brassbeat (Dub)
M.I.A. - U.R.A.Q.T. (Plasticman Remix Instrumental) (XL Recordings)
Karnak - Flutes (Dub)
Unknown - The Low Riddim (Dub)
JME - Low Baraka (Dub)
Chunky Bizzle - Diss Me Like Dat (Dub)
Caspa - Home Sick (Storming Productions)
Wonder - Undertaker (Dub)
Wonder - It's All (Dub)
Plasticman - The Jackal Riddim (Dub)
Plasticman - Still Tippin Remix (Dub)
Plasticman - Export (Dub)
Wiley - Untitled (Dub)
Slew Dem - Grime (Slew Dem Productions)
Dreama - Stigma (Dub)
JME - Earth's Core (Dub)
Plasticman - Symptomatic (Dub)
Virus Syndicate - Slow Down (Plasticman Remix) (Dub)
Plasticman - A Walk In The Carpark (Dub)
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Run The Road Volume 2
1. Low Deep Feat. Kano, Ghetto, Big Seac, Demon & Doctor – Get Set (Run The Road Edition)
2. Doctor And Davinche – Gotta Man?
3. JME – Serious (Run The Road Remix)
4. Big Seac – Nah Nah
5. Sway Feat. Bruza, Skinnyman, Pyrelli, Bigz & Triple Threat – Up Your Speed Remix
6. Ghetto Feat. Katie Pearl – Run The Road
7. Plan B – Sick 2 Def (Acoustic)
8. Kano Feat. Demon & Ghetto – Mic Check Remix
9. Crazy Titch – World Is Crazy
10. Lady Sovereign – Little Bit Of Shhh! (DJ Wonder Remix)
11. Klashnekoff – Can’t You See?
12. Mizz Beats Feat. Wiley, Jammer, Earz, JME & Sier – Saw It Comin
13. Trimbal – They Gave Him A Inch
14. No Lay – Unorthadox Chick
15. Bear Man Feat. Doctor And Fender – Drink Beer Remix
16. Dynasty Crew – Bare Face Dynasty
Compiled in-house by 679 Recordings. On road 5th September.
2. Doctor And Davinche – Gotta Man?
3. JME – Serious (Run The Road Remix)
4. Big Seac – Nah Nah
5. Sway Feat. Bruza, Skinnyman, Pyrelli, Bigz & Triple Threat – Up Your Speed Remix
6. Ghetto Feat. Katie Pearl – Run The Road
7. Plan B – Sick 2 Def (Acoustic)
8. Kano Feat. Demon & Ghetto – Mic Check Remix
9. Crazy Titch – World Is Crazy
10. Lady Sovereign – Little Bit Of Shhh! (DJ Wonder Remix)
11. Klashnekoff – Can’t You See?
12. Mizz Beats Feat. Wiley, Jammer, Earz, JME & Sier – Saw It Comin
13. Trimbal – They Gave Him A Inch
14. No Lay – Unorthadox Chick
15. Bear Man Feat. Doctor And Fender – Drink Beer Remix
16. Dynasty Crew – Bare Face Dynasty
Compiled in-house by 679 Recordings. On road 5th September.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Friday, August 05, 2005
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
dust and sun
I’ve been in the San Francisco and Bay Area for the last two weeks, being baked by a brittle sun in dry heat.
Despite two brief forays into US waters, I’ve never been to America before. Despite so much of it being comfortably familiar – thanks to blanket global media exports – there’s still so much to take in.
Naturally, Americans, particularly in shops (“stores”) and restaurants are as ludicrously friendly as expected. But contrary to expectation, the darkside Londoner in me doesn’t find it ridiculous. Or want to hit them. It must be the weather.
Their friendliness contrasts interestingly with their government, though not really California’s government, a point not lost on me while bashfully reading Philippe Sand’s Lawless World (America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules) in restaurants, hoping no one notices the cover. Sitting in the US I’m a little outnumbered. Outgunned too.
Over ten chapters, Sands – a respected international law expert – describes how in 1941 Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt built the cornerstones of global law as we know it by writing the Atlantic Charter, which the UN Charter went on to be based upon. As the chapters unfold, it describes how in recent years the US has cherry-picked the international laws it wants to honour. Trade agreements, Geneva Conventions (when US citizens are captured) and prosecutions of foreign ex-dictators like General Pinochet: yes. Kyoto Agreements on greenhouse gas emissions, Geneva Convention (when foreign citizens are captured), UN resolutions and the International Criminal Court: no. Doesn’t explain why people are friendly in shops (“stores”) though.
I do however understand why Bush starts war for oil. It’s a scale thing. One morning I walked from the local train station to an office in the same town. It took an hour. In that hour not one bus passed me. The road lead into an industrial park. With tech firms to the right and US Air Force and cruise missile manufacturers to the left, the road was five lanes wide. Each way. Dammit even the roads got supersized here.
When the first bombs went off in London this summer I was on the tube. London’s all about immersion but that was far too close for comfort. When it happened again I was out of the country. Expats kept saying they felt removed. To me it was beyond that, like it was happening to someone else’s way of life, while I was in a place where the lights had been turned on too bright, the hills bleached to dust and the weather gage jammed to “scorchio.”
Skanking round my hotel room to Skepta on Rinse started to feel weird. If you can’t feel the tube dirt in your lungs and your blood simmering down from some east London road rage, grime make less sense. Given this, how can grime have any US following?
As a teenager I dreamt of Detroit. Carl Craig and Robert Hood, Underground Resistance and Derrick May. But beyond the mournful melodic synths, my lasting impression is of a curiosity for a city far removed from my birthplace that had given us Motown and P Funk, Planet E and the Model T. Detroit wasn’t a sound, it was a narrative. Why else would I be daydreaming of deserted streets decorated with junk by local artists or of the white-flight phenomenon or decaying buildings? Like Kid Kameleon describes, I was an outsider looking in.
It was around 2002-3 that I felt the same should be assembled for London (if jungle hadn’t done it already), and in particular for Croydon too, so that Londoners didn’t have to be the outsiders looking to other cities. That thought set me on the journey towards learning to produce, and ultimately, to launch Keysound Recordings, a label that in essence acknowledges that it’s our surroundings that influences the feel of our sound. An essence that explains why dancing round my Californian hotel room to Skepta on Rinse felt weird.
Gazing out of the Caltrain to San Francisco felt weird too. American buildings: they’re all so large, cubic and flimsy. Flat roofed, square, stocky industrial units spreading as far as the eye could manage in the bright sun’s glare. Impermanent. Modern. Different. How could dubstep or grime ever make sense here?
Part of grime’s importance is that it threw away the rule book. It was ejected from garage. It in turn rejected garage. Its one big “fuck you” to the establishment, a multicultural punk revolution. And within this movement of change, the life cycle is punishing. To its young fans, 2003 is “old school.” On the RWD forum the other day no one could remember Wonder’s anthem ‘What,’ only Wiley’s recently released cover version “Morgue.” The past is irrelevant to grime. It’s not where you’re from it’s where you’re at.
But staring out across rows of Bay Area dusty industrial units zipping by, it occurred to me grime, whether it overtly acknowledges it or not, might be nothing without it’s past. Grime owes the Victorians, for row after row of terraces houses, or experimental 1960s city planners for ugly concrete brutalist towerblocks. Dubstep owes Croydon too, for it’s flyovers and motorways. Grime owing the Victorians, well I never. Well I never thought I’d think that.
Despite two brief forays into US waters, I’ve never been to America before. Despite so much of it being comfortably familiar – thanks to blanket global media exports – there’s still so much to take in.
Naturally, Americans, particularly in shops (“stores”) and restaurants are as ludicrously friendly as expected. But contrary to expectation, the darkside Londoner in me doesn’t find it ridiculous. Or want to hit them. It must be the weather.
Their friendliness contrasts interestingly with their government, though not really California’s government, a point not lost on me while bashfully reading Philippe Sand’s Lawless World (America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules) in restaurants, hoping no one notices the cover. Sitting in the US I’m a little outnumbered. Outgunned too.
Over ten chapters, Sands – a respected international law expert – describes how in 1941 Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt built the cornerstones of global law as we know it by writing the Atlantic Charter, which the UN Charter went on to be based upon. As the chapters unfold, it describes how in recent years the US has cherry-picked the international laws it wants to honour. Trade agreements, Geneva Conventions (when US citizens are captured) and prosecutions of foreign ex-dictators like General Pinochet: yes. Kyoto Agreements on greenhouse gas emissions, Geneva Convention (when foreign citizens are captured), UN resolutions and the International Criminal Court: no. Doesn’t explain why people are friendly in shops (“stores”) though.
I do however understand why Bush starts war for oil. It’s a scale thing. One morning I walked from the local train station to an office in the same town. It took an hour. In that hour not one bus passed me. The road lead into an industrial park. With tech firms to the right and US Air Force and cruise missile manufacturers to the left, the road was five lanes wide. Each way. Dammit even the roads got supersized here.
When the first bombs went off in London this summer I was on the tube. London’s all about immersion but that was far too close for comfort. When it happened again I was out of the country. Expats kept saying they felt removed. To me it was beyond that, like it was happening to someone else’s way of life, while I was in a place where the lights had been turned on too bright, the hills bleached to dust and the weather gage jammed to “scorchio.”
Skanking round my hotel room to Skepta on Rinse started to feel weird. If you can’t feel the tube dirt in your lungs and your blood simmering down from some east London road rage, grime make less sense. Given this, how can grime have any US following?
As a teenager I dreamt of Detroit. Carl Craig and Robert Hood, Underground Resistance and Derrick May. But beyond the mournful melodic synths, my lasting impression is of a curiosity for a city far removed from my birthplace that had given us Motown and P Funk, Planet E and the Model T. Detroit wasn’t a sound, it was a narrative. Why else would I be daydreaming of deserted streets decorated with junk by local artists or of the white-flight phenomenon or decaying buildings? Like Kid Kameleon describes, I was an outsider looking in.
It was around 2002-3 that I felt the same should be assembled for London (if jungle hadn’t done it already), and in particular for Croydon too, so that Londoners didn’t have to be the outsiders looking to other cities. That thought set me on the journey towards learning to produce, and ultimately, to launch Keysound Recordings, a label that in essence acknowledges that it’s our surroundings that influences the feel of our sound. An essence that explains why dancing round my Californian hotel room to Skepta on Rinse felt weird.
Gazing out of the Caltrain to San Francisco felt weird too. American buildings: they’re all so large, cubic and flimsy. Flat roofed, square, stocky industrial units spreading as far as the eye could manage in the bright sun’s glare. Impermanent. Modern. Different. How could dubstep or grime ever make sense here?
Part of grime’s importance is that it threw away the rule book. It was ejected from garage. It in turn rejected garage. Its one big “fuck you” to the establishment, a multicultural punk revolution. And within this movement of change, the life cycle is punishing. To its young fans, 2003 is “old school.” On the RWD forum the other day no one could remember Wonder’s anthem ‘What,’ only Wiley’s recently released cover version “Morgue.” The past is irrelevant to grime. It’s not where you’re from it’s where you’re at.
But staring out across rows of Bay Area dusty industrial units zipping by, it occurred to me grime, whether it overtly acknowledges it or not, might be nothing without it’s past. Grime owes the Victorians, for row after row of terraces houses, or experimental 1960s city planners for ugly concrete brutalist towerblocks. Dubstep owes Croydon too, for it’s flyovers and motorways. Grime owing the Victorians, well I never. Well I never thought I’d think that.
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