Sunday 2 October 2011

Matt B of RND interview


1. Which artists/clubs inspired you to form this electro-dub act?

The obvious answer would be DUB of course even tho my very 1st contact with playing live music was punk music. Dub is a quite simple music still very complex at the same time. I myself being interested with music production and sound engineering since day 1 , dub literally opened a new way to look at it. Also on a composition level and of course when it comes to performing a piece of music live. The mixing desk becomes an instrument itself with an endless number of possibilities and tricks. Dub was my foot in the door with electronic music. From there I was lucky enough to live in London during the time labels like WARP and REPHLEX were leading and inspiring the underground music scene.in the 90s. Which were a very interesting time for me and being in UK when bands like Prodigy and Meat Beat Manifesto were making history I was very lucky indeed.

From then on, there have been so many outstanding artists that directly or not inspired me I would find very hard make a comprehensive list .
Lee "Scratch" Perry, Twilight Circus, Mad Professor , Creation Rebel, Rhythm & Sound, Scape music, Soul Jazz Records are some of the artists and labels that I feel particularly attached to.

2. You appear to be a bit of a globe trotter residing in Italy, London and now Tokyo as well as touring widely. Where do find seems to have the most innovative music scenes at the moment?

I think you can find innovative music a bit everywhere really,the problem is wheter or not that music is coming to the surface and as consequence being approached by the masses. Right now Montreal is definitely somewhere to look at , with the Turbo Crunk crew doing some awesome stuff.

I have always been a bit of a fan of some of the Canadian hip hop since back in the 90s actually.Here in Tokyo the Made In Glitch crew is basically the only party existent in Japan offering something trurly different from any other promoter. We have been working hard trying to build this scene with our trademark Made in Glitch blend of hip hop and glitch, powered by laser basses .

3. Were you aiming to combine the electronic with the organic for the live tours? By adding Viscount on bass & programming and Shinsuke Inoue on tablas to the act and even featuring the Londonreggae m.c. Brother Culture.

Viscount: I think these days audiences want to see more of a live act than a few guys behind laptops. Although live digital manipulation is a fundamental part of dub, we also wanted the feel and energy of a live bass (probably the essence of dub itself), and of course an m.c to cheer things along. Any percussion or drums are basically the icing on the cake......

4. D.J.'ing wise do you prefer decks, cd decks or laptop software?

Dj'ing wise I prefer vinyl's simply because that’s what I started with and I'm ok using CDj's. It's honestly not much fun doing a djset on a laptop. Myself I prefer using laptops for live sessions.

5. What was the first record/c.d. you brought with your own money?

It was a tape and it was Kick by INXS in the ‘87
I still quite like some aspects of that album.

6. Do you have any current releases and where can people hear the music?

As for RND ,there is the full length album Ask The Dust that came out last spring. There is also ‘Tortuga’ , an RND’ track we wrote in collaboration with recently released on this compilation called Brixton Session out on Celestial Dragon.

And we just finished recording some new tracks with Mikey Murka.Currently doing the mixdown.

7. Your also involved in glitch and dub-step projects do you see these scene's fizzling out or as a whole new generations underground scene that will eventually become part of popular music?

I don’t know if we can talk about a scene as a whole. I mean a scene is made up by people, people do their things, grow up and pass away. The regeneration of a scene will always lead to a shift from the original purpose/direction, so I am not sure how any scene is truely existing as a whole or a passing fad. Dub-step has been out there for 10 years almost, it is morphing into something different from what it was but that really applies to any other style of music.If you listen to some 90s dub is very different from a classic ’70 plate and really that’s the way it should be.It's evolution and it is a natural process.

glitch-hop is something that interest me also, being a fan of hip- hop. I especially got the 90s sounds (Six Too, Latryx, Company Flow, Anti Pop Consortium). I see glitch-hop as the combination of hip-hop with some sort of idm'ish sounds and some electro-punk feel ; the results is something definitely accessible to the masses. More of a party vibe, especially compared to something like dub-step.

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