Interview by Npherno for
www.nubreaks.com who went awol as soon as we sent it back. It was never put on the site...!
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- Your take on breakbeat now, whether or not some of what makes breaks what
it is gets lost when it cross breeds with other electronic (or not) genres,
plod step etc.
- Our take on breakbeat now - it's partly a myth. It only exists to a
fraction of what we are led to believe by the press, which in turn consists
largely of a group of DJ pals too scared to give each other a bad review.
We've seen a lot of things from the inside over the last ten years, studios,
labels, promoters, sales figures and the way these elements interact with
each other is a completely different reality from the one you will read
about.
Maybe it's just us, but we long to see some sort of forward motion. The
boundaries have been closing in rather than expanding. It can't even be said
to be a sell-out because nobody is shifting enough units to justify that.
This would suggest that either breakbeat has become a DJ format which is
fundamentally no more interesting than Iron Maiden, or that the people
involved have run out of ideas.
It's as though we've collectively erased the memory of what this music is
capable of and replaced it with a new sanitised version designed not to get
too exciting. Music has the power to reset human consciousness. Think about
it - you've got crowds jumping up and down screaming because they are being
exposed to sound. They have no explanation for this behaviour even after
years of repeating it. Frequencies forming patterns which interfere with the
human holographic resonance is what has presented itself to us, and yet
nearly everyone you meet under the "Breakbeat" illusion is in some sort of
denial about it, they seem to have bought into something that club land has
given the rather than the other way round.
Breakbeat used to be a very efficient vehicle to explore this territory. It
still is, and our hope is that we can jump start the collective psyche out
of its current lethargic phase. We have to.
Many of the nights that win awards, get features and reviews are incapable
of doing justice to the sound. In fact most of the nights in London are
exactly the opposite of what's required. Weedy sound systems in tiny
basements are not your friend, never mind a bunch of moody security monkeys
finding problems to solve. That may be what's accepted as the standard but
it's a joke. Once again the press would have you think otherwise...
There are exceptions, in our case it would be Trigger. If you value any of
the ideas we've mentioned so far this is the only night capable of
demonstrating them. It operates roughly every two months and offers you six
hours of uninterrupted warehouse fun with a monolithic sound system, tuned
to perfection. It has gathered a strange reputation, many guest DJs have
misinterpreted it as being about "hard" sounds perhaps due to the fact Fuel
have played a seminal part in shaping the sound of Trigger. Neither Fuel nor
Trigger are about "hard" or "heavy" sounds, its about interfering with the
human hologram using sound, and that's a completely different agenda. This
is the point we reached ten years ago and if we are going to ignore it then
its time to come to some understanding of the situation. Those who want the
same tune with the same sounds and same drop you knew was coming all along
can get together and have harmless disco fun, but we want fresh shit - we
need to leave the place with some new thoughts.
The knock-on effect from years of playing breaks in entirely unsuitable
spaces (which I believe are the majority) is that people lower their
expectations, the experience shrinks into some kind of tribute of what we
could achieve. The effect on the general psyche is a dramatic erosion of the
whole mindset. You just can't rely on the night ever hitting the mark, and
if it starts to get going you're probably going to be thrown out at 2am.
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- Is this the end product after fifteen years of rave culture? We hope
not...
- One of the largest tell-tale signs can be found if you look at what
headspace people want to find, more bluntly the drugs they take to get
there. When this thing presented itself we collectively chose psychedelics
or at least had them permanently on the menu. This represents a certain
level of commitment to your night out, i.e. you are actively deconditioning
yourself and allowing the music to reprogram your soul. This was
acknowledged by the DJs and organisers and for a minute things looked
promising.
Forward fifteen years and we are collectively taking low grade stimulants in
disco bars. This is the world that gets reported in the press. Who wants to
journey into any serious form of altered consciousness when there's little
chance of connecting to the sound and a good chance of ending up spangled on
a street corner at 3am? What are we trying to do with these nights beyond a
little PR and a social event? The clock is ticking, we have found ourselves
confronting an opportunity which may never present itself again. Its time to
forget labels, sales and insignificant press in order to make way for this
thing to be brought into full existence, and I can assure you it is not
going to happen if we keep the present illusion in place.
The few free parties that exist and their organisers get completely ignored
because somehow they do not fit the template. That's our problem with the
music press (apart from lovely MOFO!), it's as selective as the BBC in what
it chooses to report and acknowledge. Like it or not, many people build
their view of the scene from these publications and are not contemplating a
world beyond what gets printed. We are still fond of the idea that dance
music is underground, come back KLF pleeese!
There is another worrying element emerging from our non-existent scene. Many
of the DJs, producers and promoters give the impression that they don't
really want people to start seriously connecting to the sound. That they
would rather forget the true nature of this experience in exchange for a
half full bar on Thursday night. When people get a party right it has the
potential to change your life there and then. Politicians we never elected
even passed a law against dancing to music outside. (This is no excuse by
the way...) Our own government is determined to stop it progressing because
in the space of a single night you may discover the government illusion has
been dissolved from your existence. Think of all the taxes paid by labels,
manufacturers and any "successful" artist and then contemplate how the
people we allegedly put into power will use the same money to physically
prevent you from connecting to the frequency, with wooden truncheons and
tazers if necessary.
To listen to the so called players on the breakbeat scene you would have to
conclude they are either totally oblivious to the primary functions of music
or are unable to admit how much it affects them. Pick up a copy of any music
mag with a breaks page, ring up the reviewers and ask them "What's going on?
What are humans and sound all about?" Ring up anyone featured in their top
ten tunes and ask the same question. My own answer - music acts as a
catalyst for our evolutionary progress. It is a way of observing ourselves
far beyond the limits of spoken language. It offers you a brief moment to
connect to the overmind. Jungians would call it the collective unconscious,
others may call it God. It will not be named but beheld. The "DJ - SOUND
SYSTEM - CROWD" trinity forms a perfect feedback loop which is pulling us
towards endless perfection if we simply play ball with it. Music is a pale
reflection of what it wants to be and what it could be. The creative talent
lies in allowing the sounds to take form and not getting in the way because
artists are merely the midwives at our ongoing creative birth. It's you who
belongs to "it", not the other way round. When "it" starts to happen you can
witness social boundaries dissolve, individuals find their own space and
movements, a wave of infectious energy sweeps out from the sound system and
back again forcing people to confront it or physically escape it (which can
also be witnessed). It is pure instinct, a form of umbilical cord from
beyond ordinary reality which starts to remove the illusions put in place to
keep us asleep. It's something we have lost touch with rather than recently
discovered and unless we acknowledge its existence we are quite literally
kidding ourselves.
Our collective response to this phenomenon has been to ignore it. We want to
meet it strictly on our own terms instead of allowing it to take us
downstream. Our preferred intoxicants of late have reverted back to
ego-strengthening stimulants and depressants which severely reduce your
chances of connecting to the frequency. Somewhere along the way you have to
meet this thing at least once. Perhaps simple meditation and yoga (not the
keep fit kind) would suffice. You could almost certainly meet it with 75mg
DMT in the next fifteen minutes. The shift away from psychedelics is a
fitting reflection of our attitude towards revelation. We got a sniff and
backed off once the implications became clear. Psychedelics are not creating
the illusion for you, they are destroying it thus allowing you to perceive
the true nature of humans and sound, something which still remains shocking
to the western mind. We are only on the first page of this story and a lot
of the main characters are trying to write themselves out of it already.
Over the past few years, breakbeat has lost the "break" or broken nature to
the point where many tunes today stick to a preset arrangement and have no
broken elements whatsoever - in fact many tunes banded around as breakbeat
are essentially house or tr**ce tunes with some of the beats slightly moved.
That's the way it seems to have progressed, I just hope the progression
continues and we don't end up going collectively stale.
The likes of Tipper and Begg always understood the power of the break - its
there to be broken, the gaps between the sounds sometimes make better shapes
than the sounds themselves.
With regards to genres and sub-genres, everything could be considered a form
of crossbreed. It all comes down to language and our desire to name things.
English is not really up to the task and there's more of this experience
lies beyond it than within it. Picture this - you are in a field with a few
thousand people and its just starting to get light but the mushrooms are
still kicking hard. You're screaming with everyone else and then you watch
yourself bend as the bassline vibrates you to a new level of tryptamine
madness. Which part of your consciousness is wondering if its plod-step or
dub breaks?
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- What's wrong with the current "DJ friendly" release format?
- Quite simply it panders to the lowest level of creativity in mixing and on
a larger scale it cultivates ignorance of what is a very fine art form.
Basic beatmixing is the cornerstone of all mixing but how often do your hear
any DJs move beyond it? As a technique it is there to be learned and
respected but so many DJs are hard wired into doing a slow crossfade every
four minutes regardless what records are in the box. This is actually a
crossbreed in itself - it's using disco and house techniques in a world
where it doesn't always fit. Hip hop mixing seems the natural way to get
between breakbeats for me. A lot of DJs are slaves to the decks - no
tricks - no ammunition - no real mastery of the tunes or equipment. It's
such a wasted opportunity. Somehow it became accepted that if you can
beatmix tunes without any clangers then that's it - you're a DJ!
I want a DJ to give me sixty minutes of their own sonic universe, sixty
minutes which exists nowhere else, I want to be able to tell you the name of
a DJ by listening to a mix tape. I mainly just want people to find their own
headspace. You have to remind yourself that when stood behind the decks or
sat in your studio you are confronting infinity, any limits are self
imposed. A quick listen to what's doing the rounds would suggest otherwise,
that we don't want to find any new ground, that we are happy to settle for
endless permutations of the various dance templates available. The crowds
are more intelligent than DJs give them credit for but they end up
subconsciously conditioned to expect and respond to a preset DJ format.
Playing it safe is actually the kiss of death and the DJ friendly format is
not our friend in the long term.
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- What you can't do with music and the technology/tools that drive it that
you wish you could, what part of the listener experience you want to change
etc.
The imagination is the only tool that we are really equipped with. Miles
Davis wasn't about the trumpet and Hendrix wasn't about the guitar. They
were both about finding the most efficient method for the monkey body to
download its soul. The whole experience will begin to consolidate itself
when the monkey is bypassed altogether. Our vision is one where we turn up
to a gig with no records or equipment whatsoever but proceed to connect a
neural interface to the back of the neck and then let the soul escape down a
50k sound system. What most DJs do nowadays is the last thing you would do
in this situation. Let's get over the physical aspect of it all. We would
gladly burn the turntables and laptop tomorrow if we could establish a
neural connection to the sound system. The way that sequencers tempt you
into arranging is very much one of adding layers together which I'm sure
isn't how the human imagination works. Once again it comes down to our
needless concession of arranging tunes so that DJs have an easier time
mixing them. If you listen to a lot of pioneering electronic artists they do
not have the clichéd arrangements we have accepted as standard.
Breakbeat home listening is a complete joke. All you can achieve is a
thumbnail of the real thing, a hint of what might happen. I never stick any
breaks on at home because it's like listening to a film dialogue, you get a
certain amount but there's a whole sensory dimension missing from the
equation. That's why our Bass Instinct CD was so cut up, because we bore
easily. We wanted something that would retain a little interest on repeat
plays and lets face it, breakbeat DJ mixes make very boring home listens.
Most of the time you are listening to repeated sections of tunes created for
easy mixing. The crossfade is not sacred, it does not mean you should be
subjected to an extra two and a half minutes of anybody's tune. Get back to
the neural playback idea and think what would you do? Until recently, maybe
three or four years ago, studios always represented a struggle with
technology. Now we have almost reached the point of being able to quickly
create anything we can imagine. The need for technical ability is getting
smaller and we are approaching a point beyond regarding somebody as a wicked
DJ or producer. We are not far from confronting the product of somebody's
imagination - remember that next time you go out to Trigger.
Ultimately it would be nice to see crowds realise they don't have to settle
for DJs doing just the bare minimum. It would be nice to come on after
another creative universe had just downloaded rather than another DJ mixing
slightly different records in exactly the same way. That bit is over, get to
grips with some of the software because it can do it better, let your
imagination do what its good at. I don't know what it would take to get us
to that stage. There's some real headz playing very cheesy sets who, if
pushed to get more creative could start something serious but we have to all
push together. Who cares if we lose a crowd for six months? My suspicion is
that the collective psyche of the dancefloor is infinitely more flexible
than we imagine but is conditioned to expect DJs to deliver in a specific
style. That's what started us thinking about getting out of the DJ format. I
could be having a top night out, hearing some serious new tunes but would
get uneasy about them all behaving in the same way. Nobody was extending
their creativity beyond slabs of five minute wax. Maybe some bits would
sound good coming back ten or twenty minutes later, maybe some bits could
happen only once, what would it feel like to realise that you didn't know
how this was all being mixed together?
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- File sharing, your thoughts, not just on its moral aspects but also on how
it affects the money flow of this business and how you'd expect large scale
distribution & free duplication to affect an artist's exposure?
Well, that's another way of asking "What do you think about the collapse of
the recording industry?" which is inevitable. Either we get screwed by them
and continue to part with silly amounts of money or we get wise. There is no
moral aspect. It's not theft because nobody loses anything. You share a
file - you still have the file. Any deal struck with a label today or fifty
years ago could be considered file sharing except that it has a rigid power
structure controlling who gets a share. I was shocked to see Napster taken
down and totally dumb struck to see Metallica take their own fans through
the courts. What parallel universe is this?
If you could replicate a car or house with one mouse click this argument
would be over. Music is the most eloquent and meaningful language we have,
and our relationship with music through history has been cultivated largely
to recognise it as the mystical experience it is. This was certainly true
for cave dwellers right up to medieval churchgoers. It is only a very tiny,
almost insignificant part of our history that has involved music being
traded. That in itself i.e. the emergence of a recording industry was part
of the dynamic flow of our evolution which we should gracefully allow to
continue. The question is are we going to allow share prices at Universal
Music to stifle our creative birthright? Music has no monetary value, to
think that way is to misunderstand it. The way our recording industry took
shape was due to technological advances in studios and duplication and for a
short while it could be exchanged for money. Fifty years ago there was no
easy way for the general public to locate or duplicate recordings so it made
a certain amount of sense to exchange sound for money. Now we can find and
copy sound for the price of a phone call and blank CD. The very same
technology has now advanced to a stage where the public realise there is
simply no need to pay for music.
Don't get me wrong, so long as there's money to be made from recordings I
think the artists deserves their rightful share. You will notice that the
major labels are still playing the sympathy card, insisting that file
sharing "steals" from the artist while simultaneously ignoring ideas
pioneered by some providers whereby a small charge is made per download
equivalent to the artist's net royalty. This seems like the only sensible
outcome to me.
One day soon either all music will belong to Bill Gates/Sony or all music
will be free. I don't see much middle ground and I'm praying it's the
latter. Hopefully this will be the great leveller and we can reconnect to
what music really is. It's time to co-operate with evolution. Let's work
with the idea of actively destroying the recording industry. Let's
acknowledge that music will outlive money in our society, it's just a
question of how long that particular illusion can be maintained. Let's look
at moving on to a phase involving the rediscovery of our relationship with
sound for purely spiritual values. Let's recognise that music has the power
to make thousands of people jump up and down in deep joy while money does
not. We are approaching a time which, if all goes well, means we can say
good-bye to labels and distribution forever, it will simply be yourself,
your music and your listeners. Once we get this out of the way it comes down
to a simple question of "what are you in it for?" If you're not happy with
the idea of your music being completely free there's always vacancies at
McDonalds.
The whole idea of copyright is screwed from the off. It comes with the vague
notion of somehow existing to protect the artist. It's ultimately about love
of money and stroking the ego. It acts as a beaurocratic stop valve for our
creative output as a species, reinforcing the illusion that these ideas
belong to individuals, reinforcing the illusion that we are all separate. We
don't own any of the music we create because all of our music is written by
everyone who has ever existed and we are merely giving a report, a printout.
Amazingly, many people have still not come to terms with this and prefer the
illusion that music can be bought and sold. Once we stop participating in
this illusion there would be simply no point in attempting to steal music
because it could no longer be stolen. The exposure of an artist is an idea
half born from this money driven period but does have some authentic values.
From my experience the distributors have got most independent labels by the
balls and the sooner we change that the better. I've yet to hear a positive
story concerning record distribution. If all goes well we will see the
distributors accept the fact that their time is over. However, until we can
match the turntable for instant real time control of playback we will still
need vinyl so I guess we still need distribution. I suspect artists could do
just as well if not better with free internet distribution. There's still a
lot of scope for legitimate success, playing live for example, pop stars
could still earn a fortune in sponsorship deals etc. even though their
albums were freely available. Soon it will be the same question for films
and TV channels once the bandwidth reaches that level. Unless we
deliberately retard the technology that has brought us this far, or at least
withhold it from the general public, all of our ideas regarding media and
entertainment will have to change dramatically.
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- How much work getting good samples is?
Most of our vocal samples were either recorded for us in the studio or taken
from other projects we've worked on. I'm always a bit cautious with vocals
because often I find the music is enough without having words getting in the
way. I used to work as a mastering engineer for loads of techno and tr**ce
labels and got so fed up hearing the same samples needlessly plastered over
tunes. I think it's important the track benefits from any samples you decide
to include, so that there's some degree of coherence between what a vocal
sample is saying and what your track is doing. There's plenty of mean scary
samples hanging about on real fluffy tunes. The best samples are home grown,
like Aphex's mum featuring on some of his tunes. It keeps you locked in a
strange universe beyond saying "Oh thats a sample from such a movie".
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- What tools you use most. Tools you wish existed.
We use Macs running Logic, Protools and Live to get most things together
with other bits and bobs. The SH 101 still gets a good caning and Juno 2,
Akais etc but we're becoming a bit old skool in the computer department. A
lot of the programs we run are older versions simply because they do things
that were never carried through to later upgrades. We use programs that are
discontinued, perhaps five or six years old that I'm only now getting to
know inside out. I keep checking what new software is coming out but unless
it's a real quantum leap I try to stick to what I've got because I now
realise I can only truly master about five percent of my studio. The more
you upgrade the more difficult it gets to know exactly what your system is
capable of and where its strong points lie. Ableton's Live has been great
for doing gigs because we no longer write tracks as such, we just add ideas
to the set when they work together. The live show has certain points we
always pass through but it never repeats itself and we can decide how it
unfolds on each occasion. We've had short runs of our scratch vinyl pressed
which together with the laptop allows us to deliver something that is
authentically our own creation. I'd like to see the whole virtual scratch
technology repackaged into a single turntable, becoming one unit with
internal storage and input/recall. I think we are still waiting for a better
physical computer and keyboard interface to be developed that allows full
control of the sound. We need an interface that offers more frequency
control than the 12 note scale and simultaneously offers everything a
turntable does combined with a way to control plug-in effects. A friend of
ours sits in the studio twisting an invisible tube to explain certain
sounds.
We are definitely struggling with the keyboard and mouse, perhaps a good
idea would be modular hardware controllers you could assemble to the
required shape and then assign the various controls to your equipment. The
technology is available but what stands in the way (as is often the case) is
that people refuse to unite their creative energy, the major companies and
developers take forever to establish protocols for communication between
machines. We are still using MIDI for example, a technology that was flawed
from the start and the code cannot be upgraded whereas a single firewire has
enough bandwidth to take care of at least eight channels of audio with all
the control data you could wish for. It's a relatively open ended framework
enabling different methods of transmission to be developed yet we are only
just testing the water with it for connecting studio gear, a task well
within its capabilities.
We would also like to see a device which could be installed at the back of a
room to automatically tune the sound system and adapt to the environment,
that's something else that is quite simple in principle. The combination of
Funktion One sound system with XTA crossovers makes a very efficient and
intelligent system, more or less half way towards this idea if you stand at
the back with your laptop connected. I'd like to get the general awareness
of sound raised a little in our collective understanding so that people
could recognise when a sound system was limiting, ducking or missing
frequencies. It's no more difficult than setting the brightness on your TV
and it's a shame the crowd don't realise they have a right to complain when
the sound system is defective. There's no way a club full of people would
put up with floodlights or terastrobes being left on but they will put up
with the midrange biting your nose off and dodgy subs ducking the system all
night.
There's still a lot to be done with live video. The real trick seems to lie
in connecting the visuals real time to the audio. Kraftwerk proved it can be
very simple and yet totally effective, Orbital had a great effect going with
their oscilloscope projections. The whole visual/music angle pivots on
creating feedback loops and letting the visuals do the thinking for you. We
would like to see a full 3D holographic room projection instead of lights
and lasers. Such a device would enable self transforming droids to emerge
from the sound system and travel the length the dancefloor whilst modulating
inside out to the bassline. Got that?
THERE WAS NO MUSIC YOU HEARD NOTHING TELL NOBODY EVERYTHING IS OK
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