Is there anything you regret doing in your career as a producer or DJ?
“No, no way, as a DJ and a Producer you tend to put yourself out there to be criticised, you’re never going to please everyone so whatever you’re doing you can’t keep thinking about regrets or something you should have played or a track you should have made – if you do you’ll become a sad person, really. Instead learn to enjoy every moment of it…”
What made you consider teaming up with MC Conrad?
“For starters, people like me and MCs had been around and had been getting involved in the reggae scene since the mid-80s. There were the huge soundsystems in the streets all around the place and MCs became an integral part of that process from the word go, so I was thinking, well, this is just kind of natural. To get someone like Conrad be around you and do that, be the vocal element in a DJ set, becomes integral to feeding that tune. It’s the same as hip-hop having the rap element, it adds a completely new layer to the music, so why not have it in drum & bass? The FabricLive mix you hear today was born out of a 100% natural process.”
In a recent interview Caspa said his favourite record was your ‘Atlantis’. Do you see parallels in the way in which the atmospheric sides of drum & bass and dubstep have come about?
“There are parallels with all music. Personally I’m a big soul head and people often look at me weirdly when I tell them this, but what I see is that there’s a parallel from soul to jazz to reggae to eighties soul to hip-hop, early house to hip-house to the early acid to techno to drum & bass. In that way they’re all connected, in a massive way…”
Wouldn’t you agree that drum & bass started with a faster, more fierce sound and over time evolved into something more subtle, as is now the case with dubstep?
“Well I think the opposite, I think Dubstep has always been there as an element. For example, if you take drum & bass when it first started it looked like you had one track but then you’d find within that track another four tracks, and so you might have a ragga element which then began going into a dark element only to slow down into some beautiful strings and then come back out with some kind of techno-y style and then eventually breaks or whatever, so what you heard were people cramming one vinyl with as much as they could. As we’ve progressed through the years I think that people have been taking those individual elements and forming their own styles around those elements. That’s not saying they haven’t still been maintaining a drum & bass feel but that’s just my take on where we’ve been and where we’ve gone… [laughs]”
Your latest compilation for Fabric has been billed as the future sound of drum & bass – what do you think are the elements that make this the case?
“Really? [Laughs] Well, yeah okay, I’ve always been on the cusp of future music with whatever I’ve been involved in so the mix is no exception to that but I just believe that what I’ve always done in terms of music is like jazz, rather than what people call drum & bass. It’s just always been changing and moving forward. That’s exactly the position I want to be in with my music and no matter what I’m listening to the music cannot be a cheap gimmicky thing, for me it’s life, it’s something that brings in wherever I’ve been involved in with stuff. When it’s to do with music I like to say, in twenty years time I can still hear that and say that it means something to me, so in that sense I agree, defiantly.”
Would you then say there have been breakthroughs with the recent artists that you’ve worked with on Good Looking Records?
“To be honest I think the artists themselves are the breakthrough in terms of what they’ve worked at and what they’ve made. I’m just the producer putting it all together… but with music now, especially drum & bass, were in a prolific period, there’s just so many people making this music, so you have to find the people who are going to be taking things forward, I’m lucky enough to have a really good collection of people involved in music who are constantly doing what they believe in and pushing the boundaries.”
Maks Fus Mickiewicz
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