With a new FabricLive mix out this month, and a new generation of producers – from dubsteppers like Caspa to neo-junglists like D:Bridge – citing him as an influence, FACT called up veteran DJ/producer LTJ Bukem to reflect on his career in music and the past and future of drum ‘n bass.
What is for you the essence of drum & bass? Is it the BPM, the crowd or maybe the legacy of the acid scene?
“It’s essential that people bring their own meaning to drum & bass but for me it’s just a love for the freedom of expression within the music: it can go off in so many different tangents and yet you can still get so much from it. In fact for me it’s the one form of music that people are just not frightened to do anything within, even when someone’s producing a record they’ll just say ‘that sounds good, I want to put that in there’ and…it works. No one is under the same pressure as in hip-hop where they have to sell a certain amount of albums and so the rhythm has to sound a certain way…”
People react very differently to the music…
“Yeah, definitely. Last weekend I was playing at a film festival in Serbia with about 5000 people in the crowd, so I’m standing there doing my set and I’m seeing different quarters of the crowd doing completely different things: towards the back you’ve got a few hundred people just sitting there with their eyes closed, then right in front of me you’ve got a bunch of kids going absolutely mad, up and down the festival there was the same thing going on so people do their own thing and get from it what they get from it. There’s no standard way you should act or feel and that’s right for me.”
Geographically where do you think the heart of drum & bass is?
“Despite everything I think London still is in my heart the place for drum & bass. It’s where it was created, and still every month a place like Fabric will put a night on and a thousand people will come out and go mad, you can even go to a drum & bass night midweek, everyday you can hear it on the radio, so London is up there in a big way…”
This latest album is all about representing the artists on your label. What motivated you to set up Good Looking records in the first place?
“On first starting out in 1990 I released on Vinyl Mania Records – and I’ve got a lot of respect for what Steve at the label did for me at the time – but personally I just kind of felt on the periphery of it all, a bit of an outsider in the sense of, ‘OK, here’s my record, you take it, I don’t know who you sold it to, I don’t know how you made that track…or how you mastered it…or how it actually becomes a piece of vinyl and where you go and sell it’. Everything there was to know I wanted to know! So in a sense that was the inspiration behind setting up Good Looking Records and releaseing ‘Demon’s Dream’ independently. Being totally in control of your own music certainly seemed like something different at the time but when you look at it now, where every single DJ has their own label, well, its easy to understand why I did what I did.”
What influences you outside of music?
“Love and relationships… you know, I think that life is all about love and relationships, especially the people you can count on throughout life and the people you can develop a lifelong relationship with – and I think that’s a big inspiration for me within music, a good life at home breathes a good life outside of home, you know, the people around me really do inspire me and the good people I’ve been with for a long time. So it comes from allot of things but essentially for me it’s about people the people I’ve related to.”
Do you think drum & bass has had a major impact on culture outside of music?
“I believe music in general is something that brings people together: there’s no written language, it’s the universal language of music. Without a doubt the reason I’ve been involved in music so long is that it brings so many people from so many different places together. I think that in itself is a major cultural effect.”
Pages: 1 2