Here comes the lick again

Zed Bias and friends at the Neighbourhood 09 photoshoot. How many legends can you clock?!

It’s nearly a decade since UK garage was at its peak and decade is, well, several lifetimes, in the hyper evolution of UK urban music genres. Put it this way, if you can be can be a grime MC younger at 14, then you could have been 4 when Architechs “Body Groove” came out.

But despite this chasm of generations, there seems to be some kind of collective memory causing a yearning not just for new vocal funky anthems, but ‘99’s vocal anthem in ‘09. The older smart-and-sexy crowd, 30 in 99 are in their 40s now, and the youngers were in pre-school, yet somehow the demand is there.

How else can you explain the phenomenon of 09 funky remixes of 99-02 garage classics? OK so there’s an obvious cash-in angle but Zed Bias said he was so bored of Facebook requests for the parts and bootlegs having their go anyway, he was forced by demand to reissue it. With that, to date I’ve clocked:

· Zed Bias “Neighbourhood (09 remixes)”
· DJ Zinc “128 Trek”
· Brasstooth “Celebrate Life (Footloose funky remix)”
· So Solid “21 Second (Roska + DVA remix)”
· Brasstooth “Pleasure” (Paleface remix)
· Tina Moore “Never Gonna Let You Go (funky Mix)”
· Heartless Crew “Heartless Theme (Superglue Riddim) (funky remix)
· S.I.A. “Little Man (Wookie remix) [Lil Silva refix]
· Baby D “Let Me Be Your Fantasy (DJ Q mix)”
· Zed Bias "Spare Ribs (Roska's year of da ox mix)"
· Mike Dunn Feat MD Express "God Made Me Phunky(DVA refix)"
· DEA Project's "Love Me (Smasher funky remix)"
· Musical Mob "Pulse X (Lil Silva funky remix)"
· Lennie De Ice "We Are IE (funky remix) - unconfirmed

Geeneus has just gone even further back and cover Inner City’s “Big Fun,” a house classic in the late ‘80s! Monster Boy “I’m Sorry” already got brought back. Drum & bass outfit Nero have done a wobble remix of MJ Cole’s “Sincere,” but that doesn’t count.

Given all this, I think it’d be fun to speculate what garage classics are ripe for a relick. Who knows, perhaps someone from funky will read this and have a go! My longlist includes:

· Reach and Spin “The Hype”
· Double 99 “RIP Groove”
· Amira “My Desire”
· Pay As U Go “Champagne Dance”
· Agent X “Decoy”
· Jameson “Urban Hero”
· Maxwell D “So Serious” – or will his funky vocals negate the need for this?
· S.I.A. “Little Man (Wookie remix) [funky refix]” [not really into this tune tbh but it is inevitable]

Leave comments below: what ones am I missing? Surely no one want’s another version of apparantly they do Baby D “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” do they?

The re-appropriation of these urban anthems bares all the hallmarks of the hardcore continuum: consuming, mutating and taking ownership of great riffs and moments in raving history so that it can be loved again by a new generation.

Grime MCs have been doing this of late too, over a much shorter times span: not unexpectedly given grime MCs, trading in a ghetto reputation economy, seem to feel they only exist or matter for as long as the words are coming out of their mouths and their name is on everyone’s lips.

Dizzee bars are a favourite, probably given the absence from the scene his success has caused. P Money, currently everywhere with his “Money Over Everything” mixtape, did it well on “P is a Rascal” on his previous CD, taking classic Dizzee bars, so embedded in anyone’s consciousness who saw him at this time, and remixing them line by line. In truth, so dense is the language that the grime MCs engage in dialog with each other, that they’re regularly remixing and re-appropriating their own bars. It’s just a fine line between a send (named, direct diss), "in-di-r" (unnamed, indirect diss), tribute (attributed) or remix.

I’m not saying funky doesn’t have anthems with identity of its own, it does in abundance from Kyla “Do You Mind” to the “Migrane Skank.” But I guess this all goes to show the strength of Simon Reynold’s “sceneius” idea, where a scene contains the collective gene pool of ideas, rather than one lone genius. The funny thing is, given the way scenes cluster so tightly around a few ideas (tempo, beat patterns, aesthetics, track goals etc), it’s amazing that the collective memory can last this long.

I suppose this phenomenon has existed since rave and before, with garage remixes of jungle classics etc, but what’s striking here that how within funky there’s acute memory of ’01 UKG anthems but selective amnesia as to ’02 proto grime classics (dubstep didn’t exist til 2007/8 in “road” eyes), like there’s some kind of membrane short-circuit from one bubbling, smart-and-sexy-yet-soon-to-be-ruffed-up-with-‘skank’-youts scene to another, almost ten years on.

Here come’s the lick again, it may taste familiar.

PS Bassjackers & Apster "Klambu" = the Azzido da Bass for 2009?

Kowton

Exclusive Kowton mix

Download it HERE.

STL - Bird Art (Something)
Andre - Moments in Life (Mahogani Music)
WBeeza - He So Crazy (Third Ear)
Soundstream - "Live" Goes On (Soundstream)
Kowton - Stasis (G mix) (Keysound)
DJ Abstract - Touch (Tempa)
Kowton - Looking At You (unreleased)
Pearson Sound - Wad (Hessle Audio)
Kowton - Countryman (Keysound)
Emvee - Nocturnal (Wireblock)
Kowton - Metronome (LV Remix)(unreleased - Nakedlunch forthcoming?)
Joe - Grimelight (Hessle Audio)
Peverelist - Bluez (unreleased - Punch Drunk forthcoming)
Guido - Beautiful Complication (Punch Drunk forthcoming)




Blackdown: So Kowton, tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you currently based? Where did you used to be based?

Kowton: I’m in Bristol now, I’ve been here a year or so and its working out well. There’s a lot of good things going on here, I’ve probably been to more decent nights this year than in the rest of my adult life. Under_Score, Tape, Crazy Legs, Dubloaded, Focus and SeasonFive have all been putting on forward thinking acts regularly. One of the best things I’ve seen was Bruk’s night where all sorts of quality music went down ‘til 4 in the pitch-black windowless basement of what at street level looked like a dead normal cafe. St Paul’s Carnival was magic too.

K: Before I moved down here I was in the Lake District and you don’t really get much in the way of nights up there, if something good happens its usually because someone’s stepped up and put the time and effort into organizing an outdoor rave or a party in a village hall or whatever. It’s pretty fucking parochial! Most music I’d hear up there would be either sat smoking in cars or playing records round people’s houses. If we wanted proper nights out it was always a question of driving down to Manchester or across to Leeds which was always well worth it but just didn’t happen that often.

B: When you first started sending me tracks, it must have been about 2005. Your take on the dark Youngsta halfstep sound stood out. Can you tell me about the music you were making then?

K: About that time I was living in a box room in Manchester and in retrospect pretty ridiculously depressed over very little, I was going through a stupid amount of skunk and only really going out to go to college or to the pub. When I heard tracks like Loefahs’s “Horror Show” or D1’s “Crack Cocaine” or even melodic bits like Cyrus’ “Indian Stomp” it was just like an echo of my mood, all dark and melancholy and smoked out. I guess making tunes like that gave me a sense of purpose so I put a lot into them, I wish I’d been a tighter producer back then though so maybe I’d have been better at getting my ideas out. It was like a fucking compulsion though – I’d stay up ‘til six or seven every morning, pass out with the computer on, get up at 2 and see if anything I’d done the night before had worked. I wrote a lot of tunes but it was a pretty horribly isolated loop to live in.



B: Where you used to live, I remember you sampling the clanking of boat riggings and singers on the ends of piers, how did these experiements turn out and do you think they had value?

K: I think they turned out ok. There was a track called “the Gift” that I gave away a while back that had some of the recorded vocals in it and it sounded alright, but then it might have sounded just as good with an Beyonce acapella or something. That latest track “Looking at You” has a recording from an indoor market in Bristol that I did in the background and I think it definitely adds something, most probably just helps keep things sounding grounded in the real world.

Probably when I was recording stuff originally it was in some vaguely pretentious “oh I’m recording stuff this will make things good” fashion, rather than being about the value using recordings could add to a tune. I still think its important to source original sounds though, films are amazing for them. Someone has spent months with best gear on the planet just building this artificial world of noise and all you have to do is spend half an hour recording and chopping and those sounds are yours. Its an advantage of the decline in music sales that no ones ever going to chase you up for sampling anymore unless a track goes massive.

B: These days you've, ahem, dropped the bpms and upped the groove, moving to housier realms. Can you tell me about how you got there?

K: Just a slow change in listening habits really. As the number of what I saw as essential dubstep releases started to wane a bit I started buying loads of Berlin and UK techno and a bit of US house after not really buying any 4/4 records for a few years. After a bit I began to try and incorporate various aspects of techno into the music I was making - automating reverbs and delays and fading levels rather than dropping elements straight in and out the mix.

Obviously at the same time as this loads of heads were on the techno/dubstep thing and I’m not too good at working when there’s too many people doing the same thing from the same angle. After a bit I figured rather than making dubstep using techno production styles I’d try and flip it and make techno or house using the same sounds as I would were it a dubstep track, Countryman and a tune called Headaches were the first examples of this.

In some respects having the kick on every ¼ note gives room for the rhythm and the groove to be a little wilder, the kick acts as an anchor for it all and if the tempo’s slower that equals more space to swing the percussion. If you start pushing the kick out of time a bit too then it gives thinks a nice lolloping feel, Theo Parrish plays a lot of shit that just kind of falls along really gracefully.

I want to get more into this cos I find the idea of groove proper interesting, this notion that you can have exactly the same elements in exactly the same order but by moving any of the hits a fraction of a second in either direction you can create a very different feel. It gives so much possibility, it’s like adding another dimension to writing music.

Grievous Angel taught me years ago about capturing grooves so you don’t have too switch the grid off, you just fuck it up. Since then its become a bit of an obsession, sometimes it gets in the way of song writing cos the grid is so stupidly off-kilter that even though the drums sound good its impossible to sit a decent bassline in there and the tune gets lost and I’ll have wasted a day.



B: Your current productions seem to fit in with both house and techno, yet still have that darkness, a dubby edge from dubstep...

K: I think though no matter what I try and make it comes out sounding dark, it’s just a reflection of my personality unfortunately. Hopefully though most of my stuff has a little a bit of light once in a while.. A lot of the stuff I love has that dark/light thing going on: if you’ve got the bass and the drums grinding away beneath then you get the balance with some colour on top. From people like Slam and Two Lone Swordsmen through to classic Dillinja, even Villalobos or Surgeon. Shit where they make you wait for the “good bit” where the tunes really rolling and all in the elements are bouncing of each other.

B: Is this deliberate? Do you strive to have a tension between the elements in your tracks?

K: If there’s tension its just because I try and make sure everything goes together. The bit I enjoy most about writing music is auditioning sounds through the sampler, I’m not a musician so I don’t get off on writing hooks and I’m not that interested techy stuff to be too clinical about mixdowns, that end of things is just very much a case of do what needs doing.

For me it’s just about putting together sounds that compliment each other and trying to give that space I just created some motion, sometimes that’s about switching things, sometimes its about changing the levels or whatever. I use a lot of delays and reverb because that’s how I’ve always done things. In contrast I really like the Pearson Sound tracks for being so sonically dry, they sound sick on a big rig, same with the new Untold bits – I reckon that’s the way a lot of people are going to be headed.



B: How do you feel about UK funky?

K: I don’t know enough about it to be honest. I was slow getting on it and though I know about the big tunes and bought the 12”s but that means nothing really. I dug the Marcus Nasty rinse sets from last year and the Cooly G Fact mix and the bits that you and the Hessle gang play but its dumb to pretend I know too much about it. Roska was good when I saw him Bristol.

B: How do you feel about Berlin/minimal?

K: I’m not as interested as I was in the linear Berghain type tunes or the dub-techno end of things, but the Ancient Methods 12”s have been great and I really love the Anstam tunes, T++ is still a big influence. The bit I’m most interested in though is the kind of slow house Workshop have been putting out because it’s heavy and got a shit load of groove to it. I’ve been buying up the STL 12”s on Something since they’re absolutely brilliant. On a similar tip, I caught Move D twice at Free Rotation, once in front of about 40 people in the café tent on Sunday afternoon and that was a real treat to behold, the shit he plays just seems to make people smile.

The stuff that gets labeled “minimal” I’m generally not into but then I don’t go looking for it and so I’m not that informed. Discussing what exactly “minimal” designates is a bit of a nightmare in itself I find. I’ve seen some dull sterile music this summer that I guess fits that description though – it’s not really minimal in the true sense of the idea though is it? From reading Sherbourne I hear identikit deep-house is all the rage now..

B: Is minimalism ultimately a dead end? Or not... :)

K: Psuedo-minimalism is a dead end for sure, its all too easy to slip into though. I love the Puritanism of the concept of minimalism, though I think it requires some serious concentration to execute with conviction.

Rob Hood, Loefah, Basic Channel all did fucking amazing bodies of work as minimalists and its some of the most emphatic and enveloping electronic music created. Tunes like Artwork’s Basic G too, its incredible and yet less happens in the course of the tune than in the intro to most tunes.

The problem is its just so often the idea is used as cover for lack of ideas of laziness. I think in a club its nice too mix it up too – an hour and a half of Dettmann’s skeletal techno was too monotonous for my tastes though I dig his records as individual works.

B: What or who musically inspires you right now?

K: I’m not really into lists of names but everyone I’ve mentioned so far, generally anyone who’s making involving, grooving and occasionally colourful music. I really like what Guido’s doing with female vocal tracks, and Peverelist’s Bluez is a percy at the moment cos its heavy as fuck and emotive. Geiom is pretty seriously under-rated I think. Mala always. FXHE.

Also good DJ’s who build sets properly are inspiring me massively right now, some people are just next-level and I’ve got a lot of respect for that.



B: What drives your musical direction these days?

K: Listening to new and old music, its literally fucking endless how much there is to go through. I used to have these phases of just shutting myself off from new things in case they were doing what I was trying to do better or something stupid but there really isn’t time for that. Everytime I hear something done in a new way I have to stop the track that’s playing and boot up Cubase. What I end of making generally sounds nothing like the thing that inspired it still.

B: Can you tell me about "Countryman" and "Stasis (g mix)"...

K: Countryman came straight from the film – me and a flat mate had been working through his collection of Reggae influenced films and he was egging me to make a tune from it. There’s a “Babylon” too which is a bit shit, “Rockers” never made it past the sampling stage.. Anyway, sampled every standout noise in it and built it up from there. It started out as a proper bongo workout using a loop from one of the percussive tracks on the soundtrack but after a bit though we chucked that. I was listening to the T++ 12”s a lot at the time I filtered everything down and just let the layers ride over each other. It took about a week to balance the automation out. The room it was mixed in has weird acoustics so I mixed the kick way too loud but I guess that’s what makes it a bit different.

Stasis started of as an experiment trying to build a vocal pattern like in Cassy’s “For You” where the different snippets get increasingly more involved with each other, then cos I’d just got some demo of a new echo plugin ended up all dub-techno sounding. The original Stasis is a techy post Rhythm and Sound tune, its nice and stuff but.. With the mix that’s on the record I was going for an Artwork meets Todd Edwards vibe – the drums are definitely 2-step but the variation is subtle and they just go on. If I’d done it proper there’d have been no breakdown I guess. I definitely want to take the garage drums at slower tempo thing further still.

B: Your music has an edge in it, like '05 loefah/youngsta halfstep but isn't as comically aggressive as a lot of 09 dubstep - do you exercise restraint in your aggression?

K: I’m not sure restraint is the right word – I’m not holding back on the nastiness, rather just starting off with the intention of keeping things sounding low and rolling. I read a good quote on FACT from Regis where he said about how he wouldn’t try to make anything deliberately dark and aggressive, yet his stuff certainly sounds that way to most people. In the same the way I’m not about aiming to sound ‘dark as fuck’ or whatever – space and movement are the important aspects. With the mid-range stuff it seems to be concerned only with the tear-out to the detriment of everything else.

B: Is it important to understand scene's lineages when you're consuming new music or do you enjoy the excitement of finding new music without being aware of its exact context?

K: Yeah I think it has to be important to understand where things come from a bit, obviously not down to every last detail but if you feel you’ve got an interest in a scene or a sound I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to check what came before. Its just the best source of inspiration there is, you start to see lineages in styles and method and patterns emerge. Idea’s getting echoed through different generations of producers.

At the same time finding stuff out of context is so often like a breath of fresh air. After a while obviously that scene or sound just becomes part of what you’re about but its definitely one of the most satisfying things about being deep into music. I’ve been listening to some of the WBMX radio sessions the past month and I’ve no-idea what a lot of the stuff they were playing is, same with a lot of the UK Funky I hear and like. I think for a while I was too concerned with knowing everything all the time - I’m trying to see stuff from a broader in perspective now. It’s daft being too limited to one thing.



B: How do you think things have changed in the last ten years where the consumption and creation of music can be so separate in an internet era? as you say "dark garage in the lake district..."

K: I think the key thing thats changed is the reach and effect of influence - the options regarding what you choose to expose yourself to have just been blown wide open, at the same time its now possible to have an input from a remote location was in what might have otherwise been a very localized scene. When the only way to know about new things happening was via print obviously word about scenes that were low to the ground wouldn’t spread until it was deemed hype enough to be worth column inches, and by that point you could argue that the peak of creativity might have been passed anyway. Now it’s instant. Obviously you need to be open to finding new things, but if you are its so much easier to find things than 10 years ago. As kids we used to ride an hour on the bus to go to Our Price ‘cause that was how you got new music in the Lakes.

B: How has the ubiquity and cheapness of music production software changed music scenes in the last ten years?

K: Its certainly made it easier to get involved, I mean the financial threshold you have to step to in order to get professional quality has dropped by thousands of pounds. A lot of people have access to a computer and that’s the only bit you need pay for really. I’m guessing there’s probably a fuck load more music being written than there was and I presume the number of tunes is accommodated to an extent by the number of digital only labels and so on. It’s effect is diluting but perhaps that’s irrelevant, talent always surfaces I hope. Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t have got into music without the opportunity things like cracked software present, me included.

All photos taken exclusively for Keysound by badgyal Bristol photographer Liz Eve. Find her at www.lizeve.com and on Flickr.

Kowton's "Stasis (g mix)/Countryman" is out October 19th on 12" and digital on Keysound. Hear it here.

Rinse September

We were back on Rinse FM Thursday 24th at 11pm.

DOWNLOAD it here.

Tracklist Dusk + Blackdown Rinse September 2009

Slackk "Fire Flies" (unreleased)
Lethal B and Donae'o "Flap Your Wings" (unreleased)
Ozzie B "Maybeee Ting" (unreleased)
Roska "Without It" (unreleased)
Dusk + Blackdown "Dasaflex" (unreleased)
Maxwell D "Iron Monkey" (unreleased)
Unknown "Because of You (Zed Bias club mix)" (unreleased)
Geiom "Luna" (Soul Motive)

Silkie "The Horisons (Funky Hackmann refix)" (unreleased)
Mark Pritchard/Blen "Africa Hitech" (unreleased)
Hard House Banton and $tush "We Nuh Run" (unreleased)
Grievous Angel "Move Down Low" (Souljazz)
Geeneus ft Katie B "Good Life" (unreleased)

Desto "Cold refix" (unreleased)
Sully "The Loot remix" (forthcoming Keysound)
Geiom + Dawn Treader "Toscani" (unreleased)
Basement Jaxx "Scars" (Sbtrkt remix)" (unreleased XL)
D1 "Just Business" (unreleased)

***LHF Showcase part II ***

"???"
"Blue Steel"
"???"
"???"
"???"

Kryptic Minds "768" (unreleased Tectonic)
SP "Taiko" (Tempa)
Peverelist "Jarvik Mindstate" (unreleased Punch Drunk)
Skream "Sweetz" (unreleased Keysound)
Starkey "Black Monolith" (unreleased)
Starkey ft Badness "OK Luv" (unreleased)
Ikonika "Fish"(unreleased Hyperdubstep)
Lethal B and Silencer "Don't Run It Up" (unreleased)

Destination Desto

One of the many things about doing a radio show is that it forces you to seek out and listen to new music. Over the last two years we've come across some great producers I didn't previously know and one of them is Desto. His productions have be consistenly great since "Disapearing Reapearing Ink" turned our heads, so it seemed only right to ask the guy for a few beats and words of his own.

**Desto mix for Blackdown**

Download it HERE.

Desto "Broken Memory" (forthcoming Ramp Recordings)
Jtreole "The Loot [Sully remix]" (forthcoming Keysound Recordings)
Asylum Seekas "Magic Words [TMU remix]" (dub)
Tes La Rok "Mandem" (dub)
Desto "Ice Cold" (dub)
Desto "20/20 Hindsight" (dub)
Sully "In Some Pattern" (forthcoming Keysound Recordings)
Desto "Disappearing Reappearing Ink" (forthcoming Ramp Recordings)
TRG "Strobe Lick" (dub)
Tes La Rok "Inta" (dub)
Desto "Dark Matter" (forthcoming Noppa Recordings)
- "Wizard Of Wor" tease-
Khid "Emptying The Ghost Of Her" (dub)
Desto "Can't Take It" (dub)
Desto "Overkrookd" (dub)
Computer Jay "Maintain [Ikonika remix]" (forthcoming Ramp Recordings)
Clouds "Napalm" (dub)
Desto "Stay Strong" (dub)
Desto "Gremlinz" (forthcoming Noppa Recordings)
Desto "Cold [refix]" (forthcoming Noppa Recordings)

Blackdown: So Desto, tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you currently based?

Desto: I'm 28 years old, based in Helsinki, Finland. I started dabbling with music production in '93 with a 386 PC and tracker software which was the only cheap option for sample based music production for a kid at the time. The sound quality was much worse than the samplers back then so it was by no means going anywhere but it was a lot of fun. Sample size was very limited and to work around that took some creativity. Sometimes we'd make tunes of all styles that were called chiptunes that were less than 10kb in size, some of them sounded decent still. This taught me things like how to construct a variety of sounds from a single cycle of a sine wave.

The sound at the time was on the hardcore tip and me and my friends were crazy for it. In '94 I met the fella later known as Tes La Rok. I remember we bumped into this record store in '94 with a Moving Shadow compilation playing and walked out with a copy each. We were mad for the Metalheadz, Photek and the Bristol guys. Tes lived in the east and i lived in the west 1.5h away so we just talked about music a lot and exchanged tunes trying to produce jungle. This was in the days of no internet but there was a vibrant tracker scene supported by guys running BBSs on their home computers. What it meant was kids had files hosted on their computers and you could access them by using an extra slow dial-up connection. People were sharing their tunes of different styles uploading and downloading stuff one at a time and making up what could be described as tracker music labels. It was all good fun.

The music making started getting a bit more serious and around '98 Tes got his first release while i was falling off producing as I couldn't really afford any studio gear and felt DnB was getting boring with everyone jumping for the roller beats instead of the complex rhythms and aesthetics of the early days. The next years went by with me buying soul & funk breaks and hiphop, playing them at b-boy (breaking) events and actually breaking and eventually travelling the world with it which i've been doing for 12 years now.

Dubstep was really the first genre of electronic music that awakened my interest again in '06. I'd kept producing on a dated platform and at a slow pace but hearing the new sounds i started getting back into it. I had a lot of injury time from breaking and had to think of something to do. I called up Tes who i'd not had too much contact with for the past years and he told me he'd already been whipping up dubstep rhythms for a while. My studio was very dated so it took some time for me to get my hands on a new laptop and Cubase in late '07 which was a big step forward. I 'launched' the Desto project then. I felt i'd made music for long enough without making anything out of it apart from a couple of small releases and i thought i'd give it a go. Early inspirations include Youngsta & Tasks sets on Rinse. The tunes Youngsta used to play still make the hairs on my arm stand up. The people behind these tunes get my utmost respect.

B: In the last year or so your productions have been consistently great, starting with "Disapearing Reapearing Ink", can you tell me a bit about your sound and where you're going?

D: My sound is really a mixture of all the influences I've had since I started listening to Kraftwerk at the age of three. It ranges from the hiphop of the 90s to Warp sounds of the same era to jungle to soul. I go back to my old records for inspiration. I feel it took me a while to get used to Cubase and not being too concerned by genre definitions which at the time I got into dubstep were somewhat more vague than the 'recipe' that seems to be popular nowadays. Back then it felt like dubstep was welcoming producers to come in and bring their own influence with them. For a while I tried forcing myself to the halfstep style but I later realized there were enough clones around (and they were doing a better job than me as well) so I decided to go with what ever I felt like doing. I just get up in the morning, down a pint of strong coffee and see what happens.

B: You're played by dubstep-affiliated Rinse DJs like myself, Dusk and Oneman but to me your sound is more like grime or w*nky, more HyperGrime than Hyperdub: is grime an inspiration at all?

D: Grime is definitely one of my inspirations. I'm not the biggest grime connoisseur at all but I have a little section of old Alias, Black Ops & Eski stuff in my record shelf. I've actually bought my best grime records long after it was originally released, a lot of it from Dead-O and the other heads out here who were into grime in it's golden days but I heard it back when I started getting into dubstep. I just recently listened to some of my earliest '06 productions and found one of the tunes having the exact same drum pattern as Ice Cold which is one of my recent more grimey tunes so the influence has been there all along. Then again I'd say hiphop has had a much greater influence on my sound so it's hard for me to pinpoint where it all comes from. The biggest part of my record collection is still soul, funk, jazz and hiphop.

It's fair to say my sonic travels have taken me rather far from the 'core dubstep sound'. I think it gets more interesting when there's less boundaries. I like to keep it around 140bpm though as I'm still very much attracted to the DMZ nights type of dubstep aesthetic although my tracks might not directly imply this. I feel the possibilities with this sound are still endless. It might just take some coffee to realize it.



B: A lot of dubstep is trying to be dark now, almost comically so (except the joke isn't funnny). Your tunes, like lots of synthy, grimey, w*nky stuff is full of melodic light and colour: do you see music in this way too?

D: When a sound gets popular and more producers get into it the clichés are bound to get emphasis - indeed even to a comical extent. After EZ Rollers and the others pushing the effective straight roller beat in the late 90s DnB was never the same again. When every producer and DJ went for it the effect was gone. Being dark for the sake of dark in dubstep works in a similar pattern. But there's still great dark dubstep around.

I love the aesthetic of - for example - Mala and Loefah... I'm really glad these guys are back into their production after a bit of a break. With my music I always try to bring something of interest to the table (with varying results obviously) and lately it has been a lot of the synths i've finally afforded and dry sounds instead of dub echoes and dark atmospheres. Like you mentioned above dubstep has plenty of that. I've been trained as a classical pianist for 10 years when I was a kid so I guess to an extent the melody comes from there. And Kraftwerk. The 'wonkiness' (or post-Dilla sound as I see it) comes from the hiphop. I'm not that great at doing spacious tracks either so I've played with melodies instead as it comes naturally. I've been experimenting with space a lot more just lately though so we'll see what comes out of that. As for visual arts I draw inspiration from anything from Style Wars to old PC CGA graphics to Dali to Commodore 64. I try to approach music differently each time to keep it interesting, it can be drawn from visual arts to dance to just audio.

B: You're based in Finland, right? Can you tell me about the scene where you live, what nights go on, what DJs and producers should we know about...

D: Firstly, Helsinki inspires me. I love the city. It's streets and dwellers are a big part of my music and my part of the city, Vallila is just sheer inspiration. I could write a book on this but moving on...

I'm lucky to live here. The scene here is vibrant and Helsinki was one of the first places that for example N-Type, Chef and Pinch played outside the UK. This is due to Tes La Rok, Dead-O, RPK, Sire and others pushing the sound at an early stage. Nights like Slam It and Alas have been pushing the sound forward and doing the groundwork when the turnout for the parties wasn't that big. They've always made sure the soundsystem is weighty and provided the Helsinki dubsteppers with the full spectrum of the dubstep styles from eyes down vibes to the dubby to the techy to the ravey to whatnot. Due to this the artists they bring over can genuinely do their own thing during their sets without having to worry about playing the biggest bangers. Unless of course playing bangers is their thing.

A guy called Didier (of the Soul Investigators fame) bought dub cutting equipment from Jason at transition a few years back and at the beginning of 2009 opened Timmion Cutting Laboratory here in Helsinki. It's been great for the dubstep scene here, we can get direct feedback on the tracks and cut fresh dubs on the day we have a set. It's like having our own little Transition studios over here which is just a lot of fun. I cut all the music I play out so not having to order from the UK has been a big help. The smell of fresh plates before a good night is priceless.

There's a lot of good producers out here. I included tracks from Tes, Clouds, TMU and Khid in my mix, other producers include Non Person, Late, RPK, Teeth... The list goes on and I'm happy to say more and more producers are stepping up. It's lively out here I tell you.

B: What music (producers, DJs, scenes) are inspiring you right now?

D: All my old records, special mention to RZAs production on Tical which I keep going back to. The positive vibes of the finnish dubstep scene. As for dubstep producers there's too many to mention... Guys like Tes, Clouds and the rest of the local fellas, Mala, Kode9, Loefah, Coki, El-B, Benny Ill, Cyrus, Sully, Untold, Skream, Benga, Peverelist, Fantastic Mr. Fox & Rich Reason, Zomby, Joker, Silkie, TRG... The list goes on. As for DJs, seeing and hearing Oneman mix out here was a big inspiration. The whole thing him, Brackles, Shortstuff and them got going on is interesting. ASE in general and the Transition show is always a pleasure to listen to on Rinse. One of the most important inspirations has been the trips to London for DMZ and Forward. The trips have been very inspirational. I got a lot of love for London streets as well.

B: You've got a release forthcoming on Ramp ("Disapearing Reapearing Ink"/"Broken Memory") and had a release on Argon and BoomBap. What imprints inspire you?

The ones coming out very soon are a 12" on Ramp and a double pack EP on Noppa. There's more to come from Argon hopefully and others but more on that later. As for labels I'm feeling apart from the ones mentioned, Hyperdub, Deep Medi, Wireblock (for releasing Rustie, bless them!), One Handed Music, Lucky Me, Hemlock and Keysound definitely. And no, you didn't have to extort me with dirty gossip for that one, Keysound has been a buy on sight label for me for a while. There would be so much more but an endless list of music would be pointless.

Photos by Anssi Räisänen http://www.chiefgarage.com/.

Upcoming

On the 26th of September, I'm going to be talking at UCL as part of their Creative edge: Reconceiving Suburban London program. I've been asked to talk a litte about our album and video, but most excitingly I'm going to be chatting with photographer Nico Hogg about his work. I think George Infinite and John "Woofah" Eden will also be there.



Following that Dusk and I will be DJing back in Bristol at Monster Bass 3, on an insane line up that includes Mala, Heatwave and Warrior Queen, Mungos Hi Fi and Monkey Steak. We're preparing an extra-bashy, no f**king about set... I can't wait.

Finally We're playing at the ManSedanse festival in Tampere, Finland on the 9th of October alongside Desto, Appleblim and Clouds. Woyyyy Ooooiiii!

Blackdown ft Durrty Goodz Concrete Streets

Blackdown ft Durrty Goodz "Concrete Streets (Vocal, instrumental, Zomby remix)" out now on 12" vinyl and digital. Shout to Zomby: badman.

Marcus NASTY interview

Blackdown: So when did you start DJing?

Marcus NASTY: It was about 2000, because I was playing garage, 2step garage.

B: Obviously you’re pretty well known as the head of N.A.S.T.Y. Crew, but in those times what were you playing as a DJ personally?

MN: The 4x4 stuff, Sticky, Jameson and then it kinda evolved into grime because Jammer stepped in with his tunes.

B: So when did you start getting interested in house?

MN: Well basically, when the grime scene died there was nothing for no one to do, everyone started playing old school garage and stuff. People were playing house but it was taking ages for everyone to get into it. I thought, ‘hang on, this ain’t us, this aint our music,’ because we came from grime, jungle, garage. So to go to house it was like ‘whoah, this is a bit too, erm, soft.’

MN: So I started asking all the UK producers, ‘have you started to make house?’ and they said, ‘we have but it don’t sound like house.’ So I said ‘just send it to me, let me see what it sounds like and I’ll see where you’re going wrong.’ So they sent me all their stuff and bit by bit I started playing it all and I ain’t looked back since. I just took everyone’s stuff and started playing it on radio and I’m taking from Donae’o, to Crazy Cousins, Naughty: everyone. Even down to that Apple tune “Mr Bean”: originally that was made as a grime tune.

B: Yeah “Mr Bean” and “Seigeliser” were a bit a head of it’s time y’know?

MN: Yeah yeah, definitely and it’s still one of the top tunes right now. There’s a vocal of it about this year, “Are You Gonna Bang Doe” by Funky D.

B: Are you playing that tune at the moment?

MN: I do but that’s because there’s a little hype for it in Napa but to be quite honest I don’t rate it because it’s like, it’s so simple it’s going to encourage other MCs who ain’t got no talent to talk shit on good tunes. Screaming “Oi you/are you gonna bang?” isn’t really saying anything. And I think it’s quite rude as well. But because there’s a hype around it, I will play it.

B: Yeah, I much prefer the original instrumental. So, when you said ‘the grime scene died’ what year did you mean?

MN: Well I wouldn’t say it died but the MCs involved weren’t getting much help from certain DJs. In a grime rave you’ll find the artists arguing on stage. It’s not the ravers. Nine times out of ten they’ll be up on stage warring each other, that’s what killed the grime scene. Added to that it turned from a dance music into a hip hop sound. That is what killed it. So it turned into more about the MCs than the music. You’ll go to a grime rave and there’ll be 20 minutes of jumping about and telling each other to ‘suck their mums’ and that will be it. And then the rest of the rave will be bashment and r&b.

B: Or it will get locked off haha…

MN: And everyone has a part to play from Wiley to Lethal B – all those little wars just fucked everything up. No one wants to see big arsed men arguing on stage. That is what killed it, nothing else. There’s no one else to blame for it. It’s not the industry: it was all our fault.

B: It’s weird because a lot of those artists think that’s exactly what grime should be. And a lot of grime fans think that’s grime at its best.

MN: Yeah but that’s because that’s what they’ve grown into. But what it was before was we could go down raves, hear a couple of lyrics, couple of bars. But then it just changed.

B: How do you see MCs in funky?

MN: Some of the grime MCs can not make the crossover. Like Ghetto does not sit right on funky. But at the same time Skepta, JME and Frisco do. So I dunno, that’s a tricky one. I think the way everyone’s jumped on this electro thing and tried to crossover, that is going to be the nail in the coffin.

B: Funny you say that because I much prefer grime MCs on funky than when they do electro. Most electro with grime vocals, with the exception of Wiley “Wearing My Rolex,” just feels wrong.

MN: It is. I think it is wrong. I think they should stick with it and get on with it. You see like with the bassline scene, all the MCs fucked up the scene, but now they’ve gone backwards, made it more vocal and now it’s coming back up and that’s what grime should have done but they didn’t. They chose to jump ship instead.

Who didn’t help the most, was Cameo. He was classed as one of the top guys in the grime scene and he just jumped ship straight away. Westwood is now the number one grime DJ, imagine that?

B: Not Logan?

MN: No, Logan don’t even come close. Westwood’s doing more for the grime scene than Logan all day long.

B: Haha. Westwood is pretty big but I rate Logan more for grime.

MN: Everyone rates Westwood because he doesn’t jump from scene to scene. He hasn’t done what Cameo’s done, going from scene to scene. Westwood’s tried to help every scene. He’s even tried to help the funky scene. He done a Westwood TV and he made me bring all the funky, grime, dubstep and bassline MCs in one room (part 1).

B: So how do you look back on the early N.A.S.T.Y. Crew era?

MN: I think I made a lot of mistakes. I went away for a little while and then came back. Instead of dealing with things diplomatically and listening to each individual member and their problems, I listened to the original members who were in fact jealous of the new members, who were in fact doing better. I acted on what they said and I shouldn’t have. Me kicking Jammer out of N.A.S.T.Y. Crew was a big mistake, and I will say that happily. Everyone who was in N.A.S.T.Y., I’m now friends with. We’ve all sat down and spoke about it. For the break up of N.A.S.T.Y. I still blame Sharkey because of jealousy. But in any crew you can only have two top merkers who get bookings – and that causes the rest of the crew to have bad feelings.

B: So everyone who was in N.A.S.T.Y. you’re cool with? D Double, Footsie, Ghetto, Kano…

MN: D Double was at my birthday bash but the one I haven’t seen in a couple of years is Kano.

B: But he’s on a different path these days…

MN: I think he tried to be a diva and I think it worked against him because now he’s not really doing much, at all.

B: But it’s cool that you get on with the rest of them…

MN: Yeah I’ve been with them all in Napa, well Jammer’s gone back now, but we can talk to each other and where we went wrong. All the grime lot do work together, apart from the ones who kinda blew up… Wiley, Lethal kinda keep themselves to themselves now. Dizzee.. but Dizzee does come back and try help everyone.

B: That’s good because one of the problems with the grime ‘scene’ is the members often don’t help each other.

MN: Everyone was against each other. “Let’s clash.” And even I went along with that and that is not the way, that is what killed grime. All the ‘let’s go and merk’ shut down the scene. But I always say this: we are to blame. There’s no one else to blame. It’s no one else’s fault: it’s our fault. Entertainers who were doing shit raves: the last big Eskimo dance in SE1 ended in total mahem because we were all fighting on stage. Wiley threw bottles at the bouncers, the bouncers tried to beat up Kano, we were fighting SLK: it was just pandemonium. The crowd got involved, they started throwing bottles at the bouncers, they rushed the bar, they rushed the cloakroom. It was just out-and-out war, I swear there were three different rooms full of fights.*

B: Yeah, Eskimo dance was pretty legendary.

MN: It was the biggest and the last one. That was the end of the grime scene right there.

B: I think it would be unfair to only talk about grime with you as you’ve done a lot in funky recently. So how do you feel about all the attention funky is getting right now?

MN: I think it’s good. Personally I think we need to differentiate between the vocal funky stuff and this new MCing on funky stuff, because that is what is kinda putting people off funky at the minute. The “Migrane Skank,” “Oi You Are You Gonna Bang,” “Head Shoulders Knees and Toes” – all that stuff it’s just rubbish. It’s people trying it: there’s no future in what they’re doing. Peope like Versatile and Donae’o, they’re the future in what they’re doing, they’re actually making tunes they’re not just making up nursery rhymes and sticking them on tunes, so I rate them guys.

B: I agree with you on the nursery rhyme thing but also just making UK funky sound like US house is a really hard route to go down as well, because it’s really hard to compete with them boys as they’re already established.

MN: What I think is we need to keep it to ourselves which is a house base but it’s got influences from grime, jungle and garage. All the influences that were there before and that’s what makes our sound, our sound. That’s why it will grow and we’ll be able to play our music in other countries. All those other DJs who think they’re gonna get somewhere playing house or minimal-tech, they’re not going to get no where. They’ll only ever be big in England, because they’ll never book us to play US or German music, they’ll just book their top guys. And that is now even more obvious because me as the first person who just played strictly UK funky – I play all over the world whereas the others don’t and they were the so-called top boys before.

B: Yeah I agree 100%: it would be hard to be bigger in US house than Masters At Work or someone…

MN: Exactly. You’ve got a lot to compete against, and as I said, it’s not our music. I think everyone should stick together and… you see Cameo, he’s a major problem. He’s the guy that will take your tune, play it no matter of the quality, and wont even try to tell you ‘you should do better.’ When that “Oi You…” tune came out, because it had a little hype he jumped straight on it, bringing the geezer in. Fair enough, he’s improved a bit now but that is not the way forward because it encourages people to not bother, so just come up with any random crap. I got a tune in the post the other day called “Lipsing,” about kissing girls and people who deny kissing girls, and it’s quite fun, I think it’s better than “Migrane Skank.”

B: Is that the Scorcher thing?

MN: Is that Scorcher? Ahhaha… that is actually quite funny. People will go mad. But I dunno, all the nursery rhyme stuff needs to stop. All the MCs just talking about themselves and their cars on tunes needs to stop. Just need to make. Proper. Tunes. And then this ting will go on and we’ll have our own worldwide scene. There are people in the US. People send me tunes from Toronto. Spain… all over the place. So people are getting involved with the funky scene. It’s a big movement we just need to keep it constructive.

B: Obviously you were on Déjà Vu before, what made you want to join Rinse?

MN: Basically Deja had looked after me for years but when I started playing UK funky, they weren’t supporting it. Even when they were having raves, I was the number one DJ on their station and they recognised that but they wouldn’t put me on their flyers. They were like ‘oh we don’t do UK funky events.’ I was like ‘have you even heard me in a rave?’ there isn’t any such thing as a UK funky event. Their aint, their aint at the minute. There’s just house events and what happens is people book me as the difference so you have different kinds of DJs playing different kinds of stuff but Deja wouldn’t recognise that. So because of that I left them as I knew Rinse pull push anything new and anything that’s going on and they will help you. So I just thought: Rinse. They were offering a lot more.

B: You’ve done well to walk into Rinse, which is the strongest radio line up, and be one of the top boys as well…

MN: There was always that: people kept saying to me ‘don’t go to Rinse’ there’s loads of top guys on there, you’re just gonna be a little fish in a big sea, and I was like ‘no, I’m gonna do my thing.’ And I done it, I got back to number one on another station within a month or two.

B: So tell me what it’s like to do your Rinse show…

MN: You see Rinse yeah, it’s a big difference. Deja’s London based whereas Rinse is worldwide. So when you get people from all over the world just sending you messages about your show while you’re on there live: it’s big. I love it. Rinse is a big difference. Their station sounds different to other stations. Rinse have had this… sound, for years! It’s like an echo kinda sound. Compared to other stations it sounds different. And they’ve got the best system, ever. I actually love it, I can’t get enough. I try and go on Rinse as much as possible. I ring [management] at 8 a.m. every morning ‘is there a show? Is there a show? Is anyone not turning up?’ I ring them 3 in the morning ‘is there show, can I go on?’ I just love DJing. But Rinse for me, out of all the stations I’ve been on, they’re the best. I’m 100% happy with the move I made. I actually tell myself off for not making it sooner. I love Rinse. I’m 100% Rinse: they’ve done it. They make the difference. Deja is about Deja: Rinse is about the scene. And they’ll support that scene. And they listen to me: I give them advice as to what DJs are good and they’ll go and get those DJs and get them on the station. I can respect that. Deja would let me go on there all the time but they wouldn’t let me have no input. Deja they just want your money: Rinse is a business. Straight up and down business and I like that. Deja they’d let anyone have a rave, it was just so over-familiar, friends and that.

B: So tell me about Napa: describe it for those who haven’t been, because it’s quite important to funky…

MN: I think all the little holiday places are important to funky. The only one that got to Ibiza this year was Crazy Cousinz but I would like to take it there, and Dubai – but people have been calling me from Dubai to go there so I’ll be there soon I think. So I’ve done Gambia, Berlin – got Toronto coming up. I’ve done Northern Cyprus, the Turkish side. I was meant to do Malia but I missed my flight.



B: Gambia’s interesting because people talk about the African or Afrobeat influence in funky…

MN: I went there and they’d never heard UK funky before. I went with As It Is TV and like when I played “African Warrior” they went mental. They actually went real mental, they went crazy: it was a lot. I was quite surprised because they were well into the music, straight away: nothing long.

B: So where do you think funky can go next?

MN: It can go big on an international level and for other DJs to play on an international level. I’ve never tried to just keep this scene to myself. I’ve pushed other DJs and given tunes to other DJs, showed them where they can get tunes and educated bare people. They will tell you I share my stuff. They way I see it is one man can’t make a scene big. The more people involved the bigger the scene gets. I’ve actively encouraged some of the grime DJs to cross over. Shame on me but I did haha…

B: What, Mak 10?

MN: Mak10, even Spyro I got playing funky. Vectra, Maximum: loads of them.

B: All those DJs who play with Pioneer CDJs [which have massive pitch range, up to +100 rather than +8 on vinyl Technics, and pitch correction algorhythms], it’s quite possible to blend the tunes together.

MN: Yeah if you listen to Spyro he plays a full on mixture.

B: Yup, Spyro and Maximum are pretty incredible DJs.

MN: Yeah definitely.

B: So tell me about the mix CD?

MN: Rinse has mixed listeners so I wanted to do what I do on my show, which is just a mix of everything. Just do me. I’ve done a mix CD for someone else, and it’s just all commercialised crap. Whereas the Rinse one is what I like, underground and a mixture of both. It’s more of what I’m into.


· Marcus NASTY plays Beyond at Plastic People on Thursday 3rd September. His show is Wednesday 7pm-9pm on Rinse. Marcus NASTY’s mix CD is forthcoming for Rinse, release date tbc.





* Footnote: While researching Eskidance flyers, I stumbled across this, Woebot's review of Eskidance which correlates exactly with Marcus' account. Respect!

Rinse August

So we were back on Rinse FM last Thursday at 11pm. Audio to come on the Rinse FM site, here's the tracklist:

Dusk + Blackdown Rinse FM August 09

Download it HERE.

Zomby "Float (Skream's I was at infant school, where was you in '92 remix)" (unreleased)
Funky Hackmann "Always the Same" (unreleased)
Atki2 and Dub Boy "Tigerflower" (unreleased Steakhouse)
TJR ft Xavier "Just Gets Better" (Sbtrkt refix) (unreleased)
Funky Hackmann "Pistol in your Pocket" (unreleased)
Kascade "Angel on my Shoulder (Zed Bias instrumental remix)" (unreleased)
Maxwell D "Long Tingz" (unreleased)
Shortstuff & Hyetal "Don't sleep" (unreleased)
Jeremih "Birthday Sex (Donae'o remix)" (unreleased)

Cooly G "Weak" (Dub Organiser Vol 4)
Kowton "Looking At You" (unreleased)
Kowton "Stasis (g mix)" (forthcoming Keysound Recordings)
Sully "In Some Pattern" (unreleased Keysound Recordings)
Shortstuff "Relapse" (Formant)
LV "Don't Judge (Fantastic Mr Fox remix)" (forthcoming Second Drop)
A Nie Dvamata S Bobi Piem Kafe (Ramadanman refix) (unreleased)
Ramadanman "Something Happened Along the Way" (unreleased)

***LHF showcase***

??? "???"
??? "???"
??? "Inferno"
??? "???"
??? "???"

Kryptic Minds "Assembly Line" (unreleased Osiris Music)
MC SP "Bad Dreams" (unreleased)

Desto "Can't Take It" (unreleased)
Sully "Toffee Apple" (unreleased)
Bloom "Love Phaze" (unreleased)
JME "Over Me" (unreleased)
Joker "Taste the Rainbow" (unreleased)
OGs "Passin Tru" (unreleased)
Zomby "5emt3x" (unreleased)
Starkey "Knob Twiddler" (unreleased)
Untitled "Untitled" (unreleased)
Tempa T "Boy of da Ting" (unreleased)

The greatest rhythms in dubstep part 1

Late last autumn, I began a foolish task: writing about the greatest uses of rhythm in dubstep. There are several reasons why. Obviously dubstep's become a bit rhythmically stagnant of late, especially in the core of its club-orientated producers.

But more than that, as a producer I've always loved the science, or moreover dark black art, of programming beats, extracting the groove from the grid. Explaining why certain tracks stand out seemed like fun, not least when so much music blogging these days seems to be about taking tangential references from track names and implying/fabricating layers of narrative bolted into larger pre-formed philosophical/political agendas.

Recently I realised what a foolishly large task it was, so I've broken it into pieces. Here's the first of many (hopefully): the greatest rhythms in dubstep.

Hold the front page - music-blogger-in-actually-talking-about-the-music shocker.



Exemen
"Far East"
[Manchu]

To call Wookie "dubstep" is to do him a disservice, but equally by "Far East" (circa 2001/2) it was more than just the UKG scene that had accepted him and got played regularly at the Velvet Rooms era of Forward>>. But this dark garage roller is as proto dubstep as they come. Also finding favour with breakbeat garage DJs, it's beats were smarter, more detailed and more dread than the Bingo rollouts that surrounded it at that time.

Take for instance the drop on "Far East." Every other drop known to DJ-kind has been a whole integers of bars; "Far East's" is a fraction or quite possibly a decimal. It slams in like a sucker punch: DJs who mix over the drop beware.

Being needlessly contrary with your beats is easy: anyone could program a dubstep track in 7 bar cycles or in 78/3 time signature. It's getting away with it which is hard. By getting away with it, this means: does the track still retain some sense of groove, however abstract?

And therein lies the glorious challenge of drum programming and a theme that will return in all of these pieces: you have confines - somewhere between predictable bore and unlistenable freakout - in which to work, can you find an untried variant?

But back to "Far East." It's other great joy is something which is found on many Wookie tracks of this era. It's the timbre of the hits he uses. Somehow, where ever they're sampled from, they seem to have picked up a gritty, dirty feel to them that makes them feel raw and organic. So the greatness of the drum sounds here aren't just thanks where they're placed, with exquisite neat fills and dense variants on a 2step groove, but the sound of the sounds. Wookie: he cracked the rhythmic puzzle. He's a don.

LDN012 Blackdown ft Durrty Goodz - Zomby remix, vocal and instrumental

So while Keysound 11, Grievous Angel's VIP of Soundclash 1, is having a few technicals (release date still tbc), I'm not gonna let that stop the Keysound 12"s. Next up is Zomby's remix of my Concrete Streets, with the Durrty Goodz vocal and the unreleased instrumental on the flip. You can hear them all in the YouTube video above. Release date: 7th of September.

The art, shot by my friend Simon again, is the place in Waltham Forest E11 where Goodz got his hair cut as a kid. Don't forget Goodz merks this track in our video too.

Following "Concrete Streets" there will be Grievous Angel's Redux of our album on CD, which I may preview on our Rinse show on the 27th.

After that is LDN013, a 12" from Kowton and something a little different but a crucial part of our sets this year: two tracks called "Stasis (g mix)" and "Countryman". The 12" after that will be by one of two artists, depending on which art gets finished first, both of whom's names start with an S... Onwards and upwards for 09.

PS: I was on YouTube uploading the "Concrete Streets" video today and damn this is weird.

PPS: this is me on Twitter.

August update

Just a few quick updates. First news is there’ll be no more Pitchfork dubstep/grime/funky columns until October, sadly, as Pitchfork are concentrating on a big editorial push. Kinda frustrating but that’s their call.

More positively Dusk and I filled our “15 things you didn’t know about...” questionnaire for Rinse’s birthday, which is live here on the lovely new Rinse.fm website. The images in rotation on the front page are sick.

We had to have a think about this but I can assure you that eating your entire DJ wages in cake and dressing up as the Flight of the Conchords is just the tip of the iceberg of the antics Dusk gets up to. Other gems include...

· Our respective kryptonite-like weaknesses.
· What person with two number one's I'm not the press officer for.
· What indie chancer bouncers think Dusk looks like.
· What footballers would we be, if we were, erm, footballers.
· The most famous person I've interviewed.

And yeah, we’re calling Skream out because he and I have been talking about doing a disco clash with me and Dusk live on Rinse for about six months (Pokes as the ref) but he won’t commit to a date. Apparently he’s busy DJing or something.



"Watch out, W.E.A.S.E.L. Crew about..."

Anyway I warned him this list of 15 will mention his name and he called me a “W.E.A.S.E.L.” Fine fine Mr Skream, less Mustela-based merkage, more “D.I.S.C.O.”! Unless you’re... shook? Mwhahaha.

We’ve also mentioned we’d like to clash Joe Nice on a Lost Dubs show, but Joe has a, ahem, half decent excuse for this not happening yet, since he lives in Baltimore, but when he’s next over this will happen. The first person to draw for a released dub loses: everyone’s a winner.

Finally it’s been a funny week. Came back from holiday with my batteries recharged and found myself possessed by Keysound, despite "Soundclash 1 (Grievous Angel VIP)" still being delayed. I thought I was pretty focused on it before but I seem to have fire in my belly. Best of all I think I’ve come across a hoard of something pretty special. More news when things are finalised, but I thought I’d share the positivism: when you look hard, and I always am, there’s some very fresh sounds being made.

PS Looks like I'm going to be talking at UCL on the 26th September on a program about "recent cultural histories of suburban London." I'll let the organiser, Andrew Harris, reveal the lineup but I've been asked to talk a bit about the tracks on Margins Music and also perhaps talk to Nico Hogg, the photographer I interviewed here. Come down if you're about, should be fun.

Rinse July

We moved our Rinse FM set forward this month. It was this Thurs 16th at 11pm GMT and it went funk > 2step/dubstep > grimewonk. Setlist to follow at some point.

July 09 Rinse Tracklisting

DOWNLOAD it here.

MJ Cole: Volcano Riddim (unreleased)
Maxwell D: So Bad Mind (unreleased)
Zed Bias: To The Left (unreleased)
TRG: See Want Get Now (unreleased)
Skream: Funky Stepper (unreleased)
Geeneus and Ms Dynamite: Get Low (Crackish) (unreleased)
Doctor: Move Down (unreleased)
Zed Bias: Neighbourhood (Roska Remix) (forthcoming Sidestepper)
Grievous Angel: Move Down Low VIP (unreleased)
Pearson Sound: Wad (forthcoming Hessle Audio)
Alison Hinds: Roll It Gal (a little bit funky VIP) (1720 Entertainment)
TRG: Tribal Flex (unreleased)
Funkystepz: Bounce (Original Instrumental Mix)

Brackles: Air Pie (forthcoming Planet Mu)
Sbtrkt: Wrong Move (unreleased)
Shortstuff: Stuff (forthcoming Ramp)
Maddslinky: It Was You (unreleased)
Sbtrkt: 2020 (unreleased)
Sully: 94 Remix (unreleased)
VVV: 335 (unreleased)

Kowton: Countryman (forthcoming Keysound)
Kowton: Stasis (G-Mix) (forthcoming Keysound)

Guido: Korg Back (unreleased)
Terror Danjah: Zumpi Hunter (Swindle Remix) (forthcoming Planet Mu)
Untold: Stop What You're Doing (James Blake Remix)

Trim: Skeng (unreleased)
Zed Bias: Blaow (unreleased)
Blackdown: Concrete Streets (Zomby Mix) (forthcoming Keysound Recordings)
Zomby: Digiflora b (unreleased)
Zomby: Cluster Formations (unreleased)
Zomby: Su5hi (unreleased)
Terror Danjah: Stealth Mode (forthcoming Planet Mu)
Rapid feat. Ghetts: One Way Road (unreleased)
SRC: Dinobore (unreleased)
Desto: 20-20 Hindsight (unreleased)
James Blake: Sparing the Horses (Hemlock)
The Nextmen feat. Ms Dynamite and Andy Cato: The Lion's Den (forthcoming Universal)

Pitchfork July

New Pitchfork column from me on Joy Orbison and the impact of the funky explosion. For a wider discussion check the debate in the comments box of the post below this one.

where do u call it

I’ve just written my column for Pitchfork this month, it should be out on Wednesday. It features Joy Orbison, who’s “Hyph Mngo” track is just overly-sick. Ben UFO was playing it when I walked into FWD last weekend and I nearly ran from the back to the front to pull it up. (I didn’t, because I having just arrived I wasn’t sure if Ben had already licked it back once already.)

The piece explains what’s great about “Hyph Mngo,” which I’d love to see become an anthem, the influence of funky and some of the DJs that connect to this sound: Ben UFO, Oneman, Brackles etc.

What it can’t and won’t mention is me and Dusk.

I’ve been thinking a lot about our sound lately, production, DJing and label wise. It’s been three years since dubstep blew up and truth be told I’m finding it harder each month to get hold of “dubstep” I like for our Rinse show (I’m not talking about the satellite producers like Zomby or Joker here btw or eski gems from Untold, but dark subby dubstep).

I think it’s probably also pretty clear from my writing, which I’ve tried to keep positive, that I really can’t stand the direction the majority of dubstep is heading in. Mid range distorted heavy metal is a total betrayal of everything we tried to build as a scene, whether the DJs/producers in question invented it themselves or cloned it off someone else. I still believe deeply in what dubstep is and can be, but if that’s it, count me out.

I guess it’s become clearer to me recently where Dusk and I stand, musically summer ‘09, and that is some kind of intersection between dubstep, grime, funky, wonk and 2step. And where is that? London.

Finding inspiration in London is hardly a new idea; it’s hardly even a new idea to us, who wrote a flipping album about it last year! But as I see so many of the dubstep DJs take dubstep global on ever increasingly large stages, I increasingly feel that kind of scale is not for me. Don’t get me wrong, if Yankee Stadium calls, I’m man enough to step up to the decks, but realistically I enjoy Forward and Rinse, both as a punter and a DJ, far more.

When I look around the Rinse roster, as well as the funky selectors, it’s DJs like Oneman and Brackles, who share our Thursday 11pm slot, who I increasingly feel musical affinity with. Dusk and I take a different approach to how we use old school on our show, and I sure would love to mix like Oneman, but selection wise I think there’s common ground.

Hyperdub have been an incredible inspiration in the last two years, but it’s nice to now see a collection of likeminded producers/DJs like Ben UFO, Oneman, Brackles, Braiden, Alex Bok Bok, Grievous Angel, Shortstuff, Martin Kemp and Joy Orbison using Hyperdubs, funky and old school grime ‘n’ garage sensibilities to find a way that isn’t either wobble, dub techno or dull commercial house. To find a way that preserves the quintessential London elements of feminine pressure, rawness, rudeness and all the other nuum factors, without coalescing into just one thing or becoming something unlistenable or unlistenably dull.

In practical terms, this may be as much a question of bpms as selection. Funky rides at 130 bpm, 2step-badman Sully flexes at 134ish and grime's at 140bpm still. I've seen harder dubstep DJs pushing 150bpm. To me, with the gravity of the mass creativity of funky right now, I feel an urge to drop the bpms and up the groove. If this approach is adopted by others this may or may not have the effect of decoupling a large number of the most creative producers, away from the anthem-bashing, endlessly revving wobble guys who really want to turn dubstep into post-d&b noize (and are proud of it).

So there we are. All this won’t be news if you’ve been checking our Rinse shows, come to our sets or buying our Keysound 12”s. But perhaps it was worth saying. Praps not. Either way, let’s roll...

LDN011 Grievous Angel

"I know I'm fallin'... I hear the cry."




Followin Starkey ft Durrty Goodz "Gutter Music" and DVA "Bullet A'Go Fly ft Badness, Riko, Flowdan and Killa P", comes Keysound LDN011.

Naphta "Soundclash 1 (Grievous Angel VIP)" b/w Grievous Angel "Harpy"

Out on vinyl and digital July 27th.

Following that will be LDN012 Blackdown ft Durrty Goodz "Concrete Streets (vocal, instrumental and Zomby remix)".

There will be other 12"s following that but we should also see Dusk + Blackdown v Grievous Angel "Margins Music Redux" on CD later this year, where Grievous mutates our debut album.

We've got had our Rinse FM show this last thurs. Michael Jackson passed away while we were on the way to it, which was a bit odd. People kept saying about "MJ" but we thought they meant "MJ Cole."

Dusk + Blackdown on Rinse June 09

DOWNLOAD DAT ISH HERE

MJ Cole "Sincere (Wookie remix)" (Talkin' Loud)
Maxwell D "Serious (Jameson remix)" (4 Liberty Records)

MJ Cole "AO" (unreleased Prolific)
DVA "God Made Me Phunky" (Fantastic 4 EP)
Roska "Elevated Levels" (Elevated Levels EP)
Maxwell D and Sticky "Gully and Hype" (unreleased)
So Solid Crew "21 Seconds (DVA + Roska remix)" (unreleased)
Donae'o "Watching Her Move" (unreleased)

Roska "Holograph" (unreleased)
Roska "Our Father" (unreleased)
Princess Nyah "Big Things" (unreleased)
Martin Kemp "Aztec" (unreleased)
Shystie and Ill Blue "Pull It" (unrleased)
Blawan "Jackal Ter9's" (unreleased)

Skream "Repercussions of a Razorblade" (unreleased Swamp 81)
ID and Skinz "Blue" (unreleased Earwax)
Untold "Flexible" (unreleased)
Ramadanman "Oity" (unreleased)

** Zomby eski showcase**

Solar Ashes
Untitled
Waterfalls of Ice
Untitled
When It Rains it Pours
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
Zomby v Actress untitled

Joy Orbison "Hyph Mngo" (unrelased Hotflush)
Untold "Never Went Away" (unrelased)
Sbtrkt "Rundown" (unreleased)
Chef, Coki and Doctor "Stages" (unreleased)
Joy Orbison "Wet Look" (unrelased Hotflush)

BD1984 "Spaceboots (Starkey remix)"
SRC "Ryoku" (unreleased)
Silencer "Final Lap ft Stutta and Ghetts" (unreleased)
Silencer "Peakish" (Run the CD)
SRC "Goomba" (unreleased)
Plastician ft JME, Skepta, Tinchy Stryder, Fury "Tippin UK" (unreleased)
Unknown "RubiDubZ (Stagnant Remix)" (unreleased)
Ghetts "Don't Phone me remix ft Griminal, Little Nasty, Fumin" (unreleased)
Tinchy Stryder ft Ruff Sqwad "100%" (Star in the Hood)

Naphta "Soundclash 1 (Grievous Angel VIP)" (forthcoming Keysound)
DVA "Bullet A'Go Fly ft Badness, Riko, Flowdan and Killa P (Dusk + Blackdown remix)" (Keysound)
D.O.K. v Blackdown "D.O.K. v Blackdown" (dubplate)


NB: Don't forget to check the video Zomby made for "Mercury's Rainbow."

DVA

Photo: Scratcha/DVA in Cable Street Studios, Limehouse

Blackdown: Where did it all start with your producing?

DVA: Bwoy, I used to knock about with Terror Danjah, making tunes from then. Going down to Music House from when it was Holloway, begging people to cut tunes and that. It was in the mix where it was going from jungle to garage: them times there.

B: Did you know Terror from the jungle days then?

DVA: Yeah man, I used to go round his house, stay round and make tunes. Reckless Crew… Rinse FM… from then. I used to go up there and see people like Geeneus mix, so my face was around from then. Then I started making tunes and it just moved up a couple of notches from then. Then people started going more into garage and I stayed in drum & bass, which wasn’t really working out. And so I sat back and then come with some new stuff. When the grime sound came in I thought ‘yeah, I could definitely come into this.’ I started making some hard stuff and Slimzee was supported my first tune from then.

B: Wow, what tune was Slimzee playing of yours?

DVA: It’s a tune called “Kurb Krawl” it’s the second tune I ever put on vinyl. He smashed that dub dry. I ended up putting that out and sold just under 900 copies, easily. That was when you could press up 300 straight away, no problem: they’d fly out. Press up another 600 for the distribution: fly out. Those were the days when things would fly out if Slimzee was banging out a tune.

That tune was co-produced. Obviously I’m Scratcha and DVA started out as two people. That’s where “DVA” came from, it’s an abbreviation of “Diverse Arts.” DVA was just the catalogue name. But I took on that name after and my production partner lost faith in music a bit and cut out. So I continued to use the name and carried on doing stuff, just hooking up with different people, here and there. That was it. Next minute I landed a show on Rinse and was making more tunes.

B: You didn’t do a show on 1Xtra too did you?

DVA: Yeah that was when I was working with Terror, because I was actually in Aftershock with people like Bruza and Triple Threat. You see all those people there – I’ve known for years, from jungle days. Triple Threat was Lethal. Bruza’s name was Trigga, and I was in that crew from then and it’s funny because still today, people don’t know I was in Aftershock. And that’s why I had to remove myself from it because I was in it for two years or whatever but nobody knew and nobody cared. If Bruza wasn’t spitting on your tune, then nobody cared. So I started doing my own thing and hooking up with people.

Everyone knows I was an engineer for all the people in east London, the artists. I had artists on tap at the time with Media Gang studio in E3. I actually started engineering years ago, this guy brought me to a studio and needed someone to work there, I had a music B-Tec diploma course so I knew how to use some equipment, Logic, Cubase and stuff like that. He said I could use the studio if I did some work for him and it started from there. I was working in a bhangra label and I had to record all their live instruments but in down time I was bringing in MCs and doing my own stuff. At the time there wasn’t a lot of studios where people could just go and do stuff so MCs were coming down and it was enabling me to work with different people and get my links up.

B: What was the bhangra label called?

DVA: Orange Productions. I don’t even know if they’re still there now. They were based in Ilford. But this is when I was in Aftershock but no one really wanted to know what I was doing, know what I mean? There was people like Magnum and Big E-D who used to get little bring-ins here and there but I was always the cast-out one. I really shone through presenting on the 1Xtra show and that’s how I got heard. The music wasn’t really getting heard until I was separated from the whole Aftershock thing.

I started working with Wiley shortly after and y’know that Wiley’s the sort of person that if you work with him everyone seems to want to know what you’re doing. I happened to get on his album and things started moving from there with the grime thing.

B: Which album were you on?

DVA: “Playtime’s Over”. He put a lot of work into that. I know people might think he rushed it and all that but he put a lot of work in. As I was engineering for him I recorded 90% of it as well. So I was there for the whole thing and there was no way I could really not get on it. At the time I was working with a lot of singers – I’d just finished a CD called “The Voice of Grime.” It had 22 singers on it. Now I know Davinche and Terror brought that whole singers-on-grime thing and I got influenced by it a lot but no one had ever done a product that all the singers on grime. So I done that, produced 11 of the tracks. The other 11 were produced by people like Davinche and True Tiger. So Wiley was on there and he did a track with Shola Ama “You and I” which I produced. From that he was like ‘right I want a singing track on my album’ and I gave him the only r&b grimey style track on there.

B: “Voice of Grime” reminds me that there’s definitely a lot less women about in grime now…

DVA: Yeah there was a lot back then and I thought it was great, the way forward. I thought at the end of the day people just want to hear songs, so why can’t this whole grime-and-songs thing happen? But then it seemed like the singers were just dropping off left right and centre. One minute Gemma Fox would come in and make a banger, then she’s disappeared. Sadie would come along then disappear. No one just stayed there, doing that whole sound. And that’s where it fell apart. Then people started calling it “r&g” and I dunno what happened… it just disappeared.

But that’s the thing about me. DVA = Diverse Arts. It’s diverse, I’m diverse. I listen to all so much different types of music so it wasn’t something I was going to do forever. I make all different types of music. Artists can come to me and take whatever they want because I do everything.

B: Who else have you engineered for? Goodz? Trim?

DVA: Trim: I recorded a lot of the Soulfood series, up to volume 3. He’s like a nightmare in the studio man but he’s really good as well to work with. Actually out of all of the people in the studio, he’s the funniest. You can have the most fun with him. At the same time I can have the worst time with him because he can be really rude and annoying. He’s really cool too: Trim’s really open to new sounds. I got those CDs which helped me out as Trimbale has a nice name in the scene.

Engineering definitely helped but I’ve stopped doing it now because the thing about engineering is you can’t completely concentrate on your own thing. People are always ringing you going “where’s my PA mix of this? I need this mix. I need that mix.” And all I wanna say is ‘go away, I’ve got my own thing to do.’ So that kinda what happened and that’s where I’m at now.

B: Can you tell me about your new CD project?

DVA: It’s called “No Right Turn,” it’s pretty much finished and ready to go out there. It’s another one of my crazy developments, I can’t say it’s any one type of music. It not no bandwagon thing either because some of the tunes were made in 2003-4. There’s producers out there who will vouch for me when they hear the tune. It was just ahead of its time. When I was in Aftershock I was making this crazy music. It’s kinda like Prodigy-style electronic whatever… I dunno? Terror particularly was, “what the hell is that? I can’t play this to no-one.”

Now times have changed. People are doing albums and they’re looking for that freaky electronic track to throw on there – and I’ve got them because I made them time ago. So I thought right, I’ll do a little project, it’s leftfield so I’ll call it “No Right Turn”. It’s got Wiley, Durrty Goodz, J2K but it’s on this crazy next-left stuff. I’ve got the project sitting there that a couple of people want to throw out for me but I’m just waiting for the right time. I’ve got indie artists on there too called Temporarily Blank on the Wiley track. I’ve got a band on there from Liverpool called Soft Toy Emergency. It’s just really different and that’s just the influence from my Prodigy days, because I used to listen to a lot of Prodigy.

B: So what it’s like doing a daytime Rinse show, where the focus is on presenting?

DVA: I’m on three hours a day, every working day of the week. 8am - 11am. I cant just go there and play tunes and go “this is by DJ reh reh reh… And it’s a great track” that overnight DJs can do because people just want to hear the music. It’s morning, people are up and they want to know what’s going on, in life. They might not have read the papers yet to I’ll read out the news. It’s breakfast innit. I’m old school, I used to listen to Steve Jackson when Streetboy just started and that used to really make me laugh. I used to put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. So I said why not bring that vibe to Rinse… well they put it to me. I used to do a night show but they said ‘this needs to go on in the morning.’ And I love it now.

B: You do features don’t you? There was the ‘burial’ thing (where he invited people to ‘bury’ someone…)…

DVA: I bring features in and then take them out. Because I’ve got so many ideas: people think I’m mad but a lot of them work! I did Mystic Scratch with the horrorscopes. I done things like ‘blowouts.’ Over the summer time I do things that are more relationship based because it’s a time when people split up or get together. You see someone nice across the road so you go and chirps it. So I try and bring features like that and ‘blowouts’ was where I made a fake MSN of this girl, I got one of my listeners to donate a picture of her breasts and that. Then I made this fake name up and started chatting to guys, adding guys and chatting to them. There was this hungry guy who was on it and I made him go and stand outside Plaistow Station. I rung him up and told him he’d been blown out: it was all fake.

There was another one. Obviously sometimes people try to dump their partners and go off to Napa and get good loving or whatever. So we did ‘live dumping’ where people could ring up and dump their partners. That was fun!

I caught up with bootleggers, because I hate bootlegging. People taking your tune and next minutes it’s on some site and you ain’t even put it out yet. There was this one guy, he was renound, his name was Risky – not Risky Roads, they always get confused – he was just a guy who got up, turned his computer on, went to bed. All day, all night. So I asked him down to the show to explain why he does what he does.

He comes down and he’s like ‘yeah, I buy the CD, upload it so everyone can have it.’ I explain to him what he’s doing wrong. Funny thing is the last thing he bootlegged was a Frisco CD “Peng Food.” What I was going to do was put live Frisco on the phone, so he could switch on Risky and everyone could hear. I ring Frisco while this guy is there and Frisco is like ‘yeah, yeah – gimme five minutes, I’m in the bank.’ I ring him back and he’s like ‘I’m still here in the bank you know, gimme ten minutes.’ When I ring again he goes ‘OPEN THE DOOR BLAD, I’M OUTSIDE!’ He ended up sorting him out there and then. Everyone loved that show, ‘the leakers debate.’ Getting a big bootlegger on the show and sorting him out. Frisco made him go, live on the show, onto the computer to see how many downloads his CD had got. Then he had to pay for all of it back. At the end of the show, I’m packing away my CDs and I’m thinking ‘where’s Frisco, where’s Risky?’ And they’re in Frisco’s car, driving him to the bank.

So these are the things I try. People in grime wanna hear from bootleggers. People see their name scome up on the username – I just wanted to show it was real people. I’m always open to mad ideas.

B: What about the ‘burial’ shows?

DVA: They were mad. That came about because in the office where I work, Gee and that are always saying ‘right, I’m gonna bury him!’ So I thought, lemme just see if I can turn it into something. So instead of cussing people like I do on the show I’m going to do a section where you can just ring up and cuss anyone you like, with the actual burial music, Chopin or whatever, playing. So people could just get something off their chests. One girl wanted to bury her child because she wouldn’t stop crying. It was nuts but then it started getting out of hand because people like Marcus Nasty were making really serious burial’s and people weren’t liking it so I locked it off for a bit.

B: How much heat did you get with the burials?

DVA: Ahh, people loved it man! But a lot of the time people were burying other people and I’d get the phone call. Obviously if they ring management they say ‘ah, well we’ve had a complaint so don’t talk about them no more…’ But they understand the funny-ness of it. I could continue doing it but I also don’t like rinsing things until they get boring.

B: So tell me how funky came into your life recently?

DVA: For me I like funky house music, just like a like a lot of music. For me it was when I made a funky tune ‘I’m Leaving ft. Alana’ and it kicked off from there. It was a breaky garagey 130ish tune. Mans just jumped on it, certain DJs – Supa D, Footloose – started playing the tune and you know how it goes from there. If people like Supa are playing it everyone else wants to play it. It gets circulated and next thing I’ve got one foot in the funky scene. It went from there and I started hooking up with names like Roska and D Malice, done a couple of co-productions with them and remixing. Next thing you know I’m getting funky bookings and I’ll take them. I’ll never do something I don’t like and at the moment I don’t feel grime enough to go out and play enough. So I wont. People try to book me for grime and I won’t take it.

B: But you still like making grime don’t you?

DVA: Yeah I make loads of grime and doing remixes, but I just wont play it anywhere other than radio. The funny thing is me getting funky bookings is getting me grime bookings. I never got grime bookings – I never got no bookings! It’s just weird how it works innit! But I don’t take them anyway. Right now I can play a funky house set and I’m dancing more than the people in the dance: I like it that much. So that’s where I’m at right now. But it’s DVA: it’s diverse man, you don’t know what I’m going to do next!

B: So how did “Bullet A’Go Fly” come about?

DVA: It was ‘06 when I made the beat. It came about by me engineering in the studio, loads of MCs about, Badness was a regular. The thing about Badness is he’s cool. He’d ask me to voice a beat for him and the next thing you know we’re doing a track as well. He’s really cool like that so I had a lot of his vocals. I just rummaged through them and thought that – even though it’s really violent – I just thought that’s a great thing to say, how he said it. So I put it in a beat and made the beat as angry as possible. I was probably in a bad mood. And that’s how that one came out.

Next thing you know I played it to Wiley. This is the good thing about Wiley: I said ‘do you like the beat?’ and he said ‘no, who will…’ Next thing you know you’ve got five MCs on the tune. He must have taken it upstairs to Flowdan and Riko [in Roll Deep studios] and they’re bussing bars. I actually tried to get God’s Gift on it but he was being long so Killa P ended up on it and I’m happy about that because Killa P destroyed the track. That was all recorded up in Cable Street Studios in Limehouse where a lot of music used to go down.

DVA: Roll Deep studios were just upstairs, you had Smasher and Lewi White’s studio just across the way. There was a lot of people in there and a lot of stuff could happen. You could make a beat in there and by the end of the day you could have a hit because there were so many artists floating about.

Then you heard this tune from early and saw something in the tune, because you know what, I did say to Badness ‘I don’t want nothing to do with this tune, it’s too violent’ because I don’t go saying to people: ‘bullet a’go fly.’ It’s not something I’d say normally. But then I saw it play it and the reaction it was getting on forums and I thought ‘do you know what, I’d be silly if I don’t roll with it.’ And obviously you could see the energy from that.

B: To me it’s an artistic expression of an observation of what actually goes on not a command to do so. Anyway… Cable Street is where we shot the 12” art isn’t it?

DVA: Yeah yeah, Cable Street is somewhere I’ve always wanted to take pictures. Even though it’s dark and dingy, for me it’s got so much life in it. People like Tippa Irie is in there, bare radio stations have been up there. It’s a place where I can feel the music as I walk through the gate. So pictures in there were great for me to do. There were clubs in there. I remember being in the studio at 4am and they’re having a rave in the front. Not even in a club but decks out the back of a van out in the car park, raving until like 8 in the morning. You come out of the studio in broad daylight and there’s all just drunk people and transvestites: it’s just life, just culture. I used to love it there, I really did!

B: So finally, what do you have coming out next?

DVA: The producer I originally started DVA with has got himself back in the studio along with another producer who’s always been around so the DVA team is looking to grow as planned from the beginning. Tina Moore’s Never Let You go has been covered and I’ve remixed that for Marco Del Horno’s label. There’s also Roska and Aaron Ross remixes. There’s a remix of So Solid’s “21 Seconds” by myself and Roska. That’s on a weird dubsteppy-funky vibe. I’ve done a remix for Bless Beats, Estelle, Enter Shikari’s “Juggernaut” with J2K on it. But I can’t wait to release “Bullet A’Go Fly” because I never thought that tune would see the light of day. I thought it would be one of those tunes that smashes it but no one ever comes along and says ‘yeah, I’m going to take this somewhere else.’ So I cant wait to see what happens because I know Keysound has got some next-stylee people listening to what it’s doing…

• DVA ft Badness, Riko, Flowdan and Killa P (original and Dusk + Blackdown remix) is out now on Keysound Recordings on vinyl and digital. Hear clips on YouTube here.
• For DVA DJ bookings email: djscratcha.bookings@live.co.uk
• For remixes email: dvaonline@gmail.com
• www.myspace.com/scratchadva
• www.myspace.com/djscratcha