Thanks for doing this! How's it all going?

I'm great thanks, enjoying the summer. how about you?

Good to hear, and alright here thanks! Let's jump right in. Could you elaborate on how you got to this point in your musical career?

I've been making music for 10-11  years now. My background was actually a musician. I used to play guitar and be in a couple of bands when I was back in high school. Then I moved to London to go to Uni, and I met this guy, DJ Syte, who got me involved. He made me listen to the first, basically, dubstep tune that, for me, set the whole thing in motion, which at the time was Biome Propaganda.

I'll never forget hearing that 140 gritty dubstep sound and being like, "What the hell is this? Show me more, show me more." Then, I eventually graduated into getting into production and started transcribing all the stuff that I knew from playing music and trying to organize all of that into the computer. That was the big first obstacle. From there on, I've just been experimenting and evolving.

That's great. It's fascinating that just listening to a couple of tracks can hook you into an entire genre like that. Biome, especially, is good at doing that. He actually lives around the corner from me; he's a great guy.

I've seen him play live, but I've actually never met him.

Oh, he's good.

Congrats on the release, by the way. I think it's a really well put together EP, and you've definitely pushed a certain sound nicely, so it's fascinating to see what you've done there.

Tell me if you've got any inspirations that went into this, or anything from outside music, specifically.

I mean, if you listen to all of my other stuff, I tend to make a lot of soulful jazzy kind of stuff, and I've always been in that kind of spectrum because of my musical background. But as I said, I really enjoy the gritty, deeper, heavier sound system kind of bangers. Every time I've tried to make them in the past, they never really come out the way I wanted to.

It starts out dark and gritty, and then I'll end up putting some keys or a melodic synth, and then all of a sudden, it stops being this deep thing and it just becomes a soulful thing. But with this EP, somehow I got in the zone, and first, I made Iceman. After that was finished, I was like, "Okay, I can definitely make music like this, more on this register." From then on, I just started pushing and focusing on trying to make that sort of deeper, more minimal sound. I basically made those three tracks all in a row, all within a space of like two months.

Wow, great. That's cool, man.

I guess the inspiration was trying to make something a bit darker, a bit more dense, floor-oriented, I guess.

Nice. It's always good to make something new and try new things. I always say this is the best way to develop yourself as an artist, to make things you've never made before. Whether that's new genres or new styles or even just changing the BPM can completely introduce a bunch of new problems that you have to interface with, and being able to tackle those different issues is what helps you grow as an artist. I appreciate that.

I'm a huge fan of the low-end control that you've put in place, and you've done something interesting with the transients, I noticed, where they're not too snappy, and it definitely pushes up very swampy UK, like 140 sounds. So if you've got any tips or special processing or any tools that you've used to achieve that.

I never really do the same thing, at least not with these tracks. I never used the same sound or anything twice, and I don't know, sometimes I didn't even use a sine wave or something to make the low end.

I would just be fiddling with synths and pads, and I'll just hit a low note on the keyboard and some synth that was sounding very happy and melodic now sounds like a deep sub. I just found that it had a fascinating, low end in there. So, I just ended up using just that little bit of just those low notes from that synth, and then with some EQ and some tweaking, I managed to basically make a sub out of it. But I don't over-process a lot of stuff. My mixes and stuff are spotless. I don't have loads of effects and loads of stuff. I like to keep my tunes with a lot of dynamic range. Sometimes, for me, less is more

Interesting, that's cool. I've been playing around with a few transient shapers myself recently. I don't know if you know who William Light is, but he's quite a small plugin developer.

I think he used to work with Native Instruments and a few other big companies. He's kind of gone solo, and he just released his own multi-band transient shaper. It's really cool. It's very simple. It's just a band split up, and then you've got like two or three knobs per band. It's really, really cool to see what he's done with it. We actually had a two-hour interview a couple of months back, and we spent the entire call just talking about transient processing and how he coded it. I was just like...

Really technical.

When you talk to a programmer who also works in audio, it's like being on acid. It's crazy.

Yeah, I wish I could get that technical like those guys.

So, what would you say the biggest challenge was in putting this all together? Whether it's the timeline, trying the new sound, or whether it was the actual production of each track itself.

Definitely the production of each track. I find it really hard to make stuff like this that sounds interesting because when I make my normal kind of music, I'll put melodies and then I'll get something to lead over it, and that's how I build a tune. For me, it's easy to build a tune like that, but when you're making something that's dark and gritty, there aren't going to be many melodies.

There'll be a lead sometimes, but for me personally, it's hard to make something interesting just with darker sounds and still make it sound punchy and cold. So, yeah, definitely the production aspect for each.

It's a strange one. Knowing how to approach an EP — for me at least — when I put a few tracks together, I never have an EP in mind until I end up with enough tracks to think, “Oh, maybe this can work.”

Matt was kind enough to catch up with me last week, and we jumped on a call together. It was really nice. It's the first time we've properly spoken, and he seems like he's got a lot of cool ideas for the label.

His general ethos for the label is everything you would expect. He wants to help the artist develop, and he doesn't just want to be a catalogue label. He's asking different questions in terms of what he should be providing on the label. So, I wanted to ask what your experience has been like with him.

Yeah, he's so focused, so dedicated to the label and to the artist. I couldn't be happier working with him. I've worked with many labels, and working with him, he really makes you feel like a close friend. He's always checking in, always keeping up with you. I'm really happy working with him.

That's nice. A ten out of ten TripAdvisor review right there. Nice. It’s always good to work with a label that actually cares about the music. I've worked with both, unfortunately. Sometimes you work with a label, and they might have the numbers and the social media game, but there can be very little contact with them. You feel like you're just being pushed out as another release on their catalogue.

You don't feel like, for me at least, if I'm releasing something, there's growth as an artist, and I want to make sure that something comes off the back of it that's not just related to increasing followers or getting money. There's got to be something else there. I think labels like YUKU, and Satellite Era, these are all really cool. I'll send you some links afterward if you want. For me at least, they all have a similar ethos on what they think they should be providing for the artist. So, yeah, that's cool.

Can we expect any more stuff in this style, or is there anything you're working on right now that you can share in terms of the direction you're going?

Yeah, I mean, I'm always making different stuff. I can make a 140 tune like Iceman today, and tomorrow I'll make a hip-hop, jazzy, lo-fi kind of beat. At the moment, I'm on a kind of dub techno vibe thing.

Wow. Okay, tell me more.

Sure, I'm working on something for Moth Club out of Bristol. It's headed by the Mystic State fellas.

Oh, nice.

It's a dub techno label, and I'm working on a release there with the Versa remix on the flip side for a vinyl release.

Yeah, that sounds promising!

I've been on that techno wave recently. Maybe it's the summer vibes.

I feel like dub techno should be bigger than it is in Manchester. At least it kind of died down a bit, but all of my friends are still into it, which is really cool.

I've never heard techno at a party or on a night out, I swear.

Oh, yeah, you have to come to Manchester. There are quite a lot of small events in the Northern Quarter, which is one of the districts here, and you never know what's going to happen. There's always just going to be a few small DJs. But it can be crazy. It could be anything from halftime stuff to 140 techno, like super underground dub techno garage stuff. It's really interesting.

That's amazing, man. I wish we had that in Amsterdam.

Yeah, I mean, there's some good stuff that I see happening in Amsterdam. I'm actually going to Dekmantel next month, which should be fun.

Yeah, you should hit me up, man. We'll go somewhere. I'll take you around.

Yeah, that'll be wicked, man. I'll have to see what dates I'm there because I'm going with all my housemates who are just going to the festival. But if I have a day or two outside the festival dates, I'd love to come and hit you up. I don't actually know how far Dekmantel is from the actual central Amsterdam itself.

It's on the outskirts, I think.

Is the line-up good?

It's very techno-orientated. I think it should be fun. It looks really cool. There's a lot of hard techno.

Yeah, I can be there for like an hour and enjoy it, but then after that... laughs

I definitely favour multi-genre festivals more than specific genres because I feel like even if it's something that I really like, I'm going to want some diversity in the taste and the styles. But it should be fun. We're all camping, and we'll see what happens.

Yeah, it's more about going with friends and stuff.

You'll have to let me know about your dub techno developments because I definitely want to hear some of that stuff as well.

I'll send you some stuff.

Nice, cool. Finally, are there any other artists, labels, or events that you're feeling right now?

Artists? Yeah, I was really enjoying this. Do you know this label called Temple of Sound?

Temple of Sound?

Yeah. Do you know Sub Basics? Tom? No, that's his label. And there's this guy on his label, whom I only found out about the other day, also makes drum and bass stuff called Javano. I'll send you the link. It has been really surprising me. Just this one, EP.

It goes from techno to dub techno to garagey UKG stuff. It's so good. And labels, you know, Radio Juicy. No, I really like that stuff. It's all beats, like jazzy, lo-fi beats kind of thing, but super well-produced. And the quality of the artists they have on there is amazing.

Yeah, we're good. Come on. All right, cool. Thank you very much for answering the questions. Before we jump off, is there anything else, maybe, that you want to talk about?

No, I just want to say thank you for reaching out and giving us this opportunity.

You can buy/pre-order the full release here.