COMIN’ UP
COMIN’ UP
and also (then) pirate station Rinse FM. Sarah and Neil
asked Hatcha if he wanted to mix a compilation out of
all this dubby two-step he was curating, and between
them they came up with the name ‘Dubstep Allstars
Vol 1’. “At the time I was about the only DJ in the world
playing the fucking music,” Hatcha laughs. “There wasn’t
really anyone else to do the CD! When it came out, it had
massive feedback, it was the new thing as such. It just
kinda built up a cult.”
Ryan Hemsworth
he genre-crossing
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in Australia a menacing jam-packed tour. Still
off the hype from
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the underground to the main
stream is at no surprise. His remix list is extensive and diverse - from Quadron, to
Mikky Ekko to Waka Flacko Flame. The Canadian will take you on tangents throughout
his sets, providing you with raw emotion, ambient electronica - to straight up rap.
You may recall hearing a record he produced called ‘Perfectly’ the type of track that
pulls all your friends closer together, while you ride the happy cloud. The production
seems to represent what some might call his signature sound, but even defining his
sound can be tricky - simple complex and euphoric at times. As you deluge deeper
into his collection, you start to levitate on your true emotions and realize you’re riding
the Hemsworth nu-wave.
Once a notable blogging journalist, who once interviewed Girl Talk and… It’s easy to
see what Ryan is so likable amongst the dance community. His wit and knack for
finding talented people to surround him, is super evident – take his blog ‘A Half
Warmed Fish’ for example. He finds the time as a young journalist, to interviewing
people like Girl Talk, Twilight Sad, Theopilus London and Bangs. It seems Ryan has
always had a sarcastic and fun way about him, which also shows through his style of
music stage presence. His blog is worth a read and so will his tour dates, as Future
Classic and Brown Bear Entertainment present ‘Ryan Must Be Destroyed Tour’
Feb 21 - Oh Hello! - Brisbane, Australia
Feb 22 - Star Bar - Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
Feb 25 - The Hunter Lounge - Wellington, New Zealand
Feb 26 - The Powerstation - Auckland, New Zealand
Feb 28 - The Flinders Social - Townsville, NSW, Australia
Mar 1 - Ivy Pool - Sydney, Australia
Mar 1 - Secret Garden Festival - Brownlow Farm, Australia
Mar 2 - King St Hotel - Newcastle, NSW, Australia
Mar 5 - The Corner Hotel - Melbourne, Australia
Mar 6 - Sugar - Adelaide, Australia
Mar 7 - Hand-Picked - Perth, Australia
Mar 9 - Trinity Bar - Canberra, Australia
Ben Pearce
(Chinese Laundry)
014 djmag.com.au
Unlike the ‘Pure Dubstep’ comps he does every year now,
Hatcha put together ‘Dubstep Allstars Vol 1’ in a day. “I
didn’t even have a tracklist, cos there was such a limited
amount of tunes,” he says. “It was like, ‘Do a mix for me
out of the music you’ve got, let’s put it out’. That’s exactly
what we done. One take — straight in my bedroom, done.
In them days there were no CD recorders, there was no
laptops with Ableton on and shit like that.”
Kicking off with the skittery beats, dubby echoes and
twangy bass of ‘Babylon’ by Kode9 featuring Daddy G,
the mix soon moves through cuts by El-B, Horsepower,
Benga & Skream and Benny Ill. Hatcha pops up at various
points with tracks himself such as ‘Highland Spring’
(with Benny Ill) and, towards the end, ‘Dub Express’
and ‘Conga Therapy’. While there are warped two-step
stylings to many of the tracks on the comp — mainly
culled from the Tempa and Big Apple labels — there are
beginnings of wobbly basslines on some cuts. “Little did
we know what it would lead to,” says Hatcha. “
Horsepower records, Zed Bias stuff, Madd Slinky, El-B,
Phuturistix, I was giving these kids all these kinds of
records and saying that I wanted this kind of style.
I started incorporating all this into my sets on pirate
radio. The next thing I knew, I had a couple of hours’
sets every week of all this new music.”
WORDS: JACK CARTER
DJ HATCHA
W
ho would have thought when first hearing Ben Pearce’s music,
that his main musical interests revolved around metal and punk
music in his early teens? When Ben reached his later teenage years, he
began to change his musical taste, being influenced by artists from more
electro and deep house scenes. In early 2011, Ben began to be noticed
throughout the Underground club cauldron within Manchester, his
hometown, and throughout the United Kingdom, working with the likes
of Chris Farnsworth under his label Purp and Soul Recordings. 2012 was
a year to remember for Ben, as his infectious release “What I Might Do”
brought some serious damage to nightclubs around the world, with the
song going platinum in Europe.
Despite having claimed world recognition for the track, people who have
decided to follow Ben Pearce, will find that he has so much to offer to
the underground deep house scene. This is has been noticed with his
remixing abilities, with remixes of Le Youth’s track “C O O L”, and an EP
released with Real Connoisseur titled “Just Enough/Nobody’s Fool”
released July last year. This has continued with new spins of artists tracks,
such as Quincy Jones and Kwabs “Wrong or Right” single.
These remixes and new tracks not only define Ben Pearce as an extremely
talented Producer and DJ but also demonstrates how he can still be able
to bring such organic and versatile sounds after having set the bar with
his track and EP “What I Might Do”. Having been supported by the likes
of DJs David August, Solomun, Jamie Jones and Maya Jane Coles, it’s fair
to say his CV speaks for itself.
Having had such an amazing tour throughout Europe playing at world
renowned clubs such as Fabric (London), Watergate (Berlin) and Space
(Ibiza); Australia is now lucky enough to see Ben Pearce in the flesh.
Pearce will be heading down under, to do a debut tour here, in February
this year. He’ll be playing all over the East Coast, with his tour starting
in Melbourne on Friday the 7th of February. From there he will go on to
play in Wollongong and then the highly anticipated gig in one of
Sydney’s most famous clubs: Chinese Laundry on the 8th. Concluding
the tour Ben will travel down to Canberra on the 14th and finish in
Brisbane on the 15th. This is a tour not to miss, as it will surely set the
bar for an amazing 2014.
‘Dubstep Allstars Vol 1’
(Tempa)
The Game Changer is taking a slightly different form
this month. Usually it focuses on seminal tracks, but
when it comes to the emergence of dubstep it was a
compilation — mixed by DJ Hatcha from Croydon’s
Big Apple record shop — that truly kick-started the
scene...
BUDDING young garage DJ Terry Leonard, aka Hatcha,
was just 16 or 17 when he started working in the Big
Apple record shop in Croydon in the early noughties.
He’d been visiting the store for years, buying tunes,
hanging out and getting to know the guys in the shop —
like Artwork, and Skream’s junglist older brother, Hijak.
Skream, aka Ollie Jones, would often visit, and started
saying how he was making tunes on the PlayStation
program Music 2000.
“We kept encouraging him, staying positive towards
him, and Benga was on the same tip — he had Music
2000 too,” remembers Hatcha. “They was making music,
bringing in tapes and Minidiscs of little ideas they made,
and then someone introduced them to a program called
Fruity Loops. Once they had that, they was off!”
Caspa started coming into the shop too — “he was just
getting into producing and DJing, I think he worked in
a trainer shop at the time, and the same with D istance
and Mala and Coki and Loefah,” says Hatcha. “All of these
boys started to bring in music. It got to the stage where I
had an arsenal of fucking beats.”
The stuff Hatcha had been increasingly playing out when
he DJed was the dubbed-out B-sides of UK garage and
two-step tunes. “It was a deeper kind of garage, a tribally,
more ambient kind of sound,” he says. “I was giving them
Like Detroit, Croydon — about 10 miles south of
central London — was known for car manufacture in
the early part of the 20th century before becoming
a service economy commuter town in the 1960s and
seeing assorted office blocks spring up everywhere. It
boomed for a while, but the last couple of decades have
seen Croydon experience urban degeneration. Hatcha
is unsure what part the nature of Croydon itself had to
play on the emergence of dubstep, however. “I think it
was just timing,” he says. “There’s not a lot for the kids
in Croydon to do — or there wasn’t really at the time. It
was the right kids at the right time finding something
that interested them, that captured their attention —
ie. music production.
“Kids like Skream and Benga were 13, 14, 15 at the time
— they were young, keen and eager,” he continues.
“Croydon’s not Chelsea, it’s not a big money-orientated
city, we’ve got council estates around the area, we’ve
got big high-rise blocks of flats, 80% of kids that
come out of Croydon haven’t been gifted with a silver
spoon at birth... so for them to get their attention on
something, it’s always going to be things like music.”
The Big Apple shop was the big meeting point for young
dance music headz as the new dubstep sound began
to coalesce. “Everyone would be passing through
Big Apple Records on a daily basis — right across the
genre,” explains Hatcha. “From Zinc to Hype to Bailey
from Metalheadz — he used to work in the shop as well.
We had a bit of everything in the shop, then we had the
new labels starting like Tempa, and we had our own
label starting as well — Big Apple Records — which is
where we launched Benga, Skream, Digital Mystikz...”
Neil Jolliffe had started Tempa Records in the year
2000, initially putting out dark garage by people
like Horsepower Productions. He teamed with Sarah
Lockhart, aka Soulja, to start Ammunition Promotions,
and out of this sprang the club-night FWD>> at Plastic
People on Curtain Road in east London’s Shoreditch
Dubstep started becoming the cool new underground
sound, but it took a few years before it reached tipping
point. “I spent a good few years flying around the world,
doing the gigs for fifty quid, playing in front of 10 people,”
recalls Hatcha. “Just before Skream’s ‘Midnight Request
Line’ came out, that’s when it blew up — when Benga
released ‘Night’. When them tracks started crossing over
the commercial line, that’s when it went stupidly out of
control. Once it crossed that border, it blew up extremely
quick — because of the internet.”
As we all know, America jumped on dubstep, the
basslines and driller-killer beats got a bit ridiculous in
some respects, and now there’s been a backlash. “It went
silly,” Hatcha concurs. “People started only associating
dubstep with the drill stuff. But it was nothing to do with
Skrillex, it was nothing to do with Datsik and Excision
and all these people that are making tear-out angry
dubstep. It’s to do with the internet and YouTube. People
are putting up videos of nothing but this repetitive
chainsaw sound. So kids are like, ‘Hmm, what’s dubstep?
Let’s go onto YouTube’, and all they can see and hear is
‘Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner’
for six minutes. That’s not dubstep, that’s just another
aspect of the dubstep genre.
“You’ve got the Mala sound, you’ve got the Benga
techno-y sound, you’ve got the Kode9 sound, you’ve
got the Skrillex-y sound... there’s all different sounds of
dubstep, which you can incorporate into one set, which
has always made dubstep so cool,” he adds.
Hatcha starts talking about people slating the dubstep
scene at the point that they leave it, and that most
of dubstep’s main playas still have full diaries every
weekend. “We’re still here,” he says. “The boys that were
here from the start — bar a couple of people who have
gone elsewhere — are still representing. They were there
at the beginning when we had nothing, and they were
there at the height when we had everything, and they’re
still here now – at the time when we’re just ticking over.
It’s all fucking cycles — swings and roundabouts. You
can’t always be at the top of the foodchain. We’ve got all
them days to come back around again. I’m just grateful
to be a part of such a brilliant scene.” CARL LOBEN
djmag.com.au 015