Staying Interesting Without Too Much Planning: Introducing, Sam Binga

With elements across the entire drum & bass spectrum seemingly taking a definitive leap forwards over the past year or so, the high-powered, spaciously technical sound is once again becoming a vital component of people’s collective audio intake (not that it ever really stopped being part of ours; week in week out for nearly 14 years we’ve tried to represent some of the best of all styles of d&b). Record labels like Exit and Critical (run by dBridge and Kasra respectively) have done a lot to push drum & bass in different directions but titan imprints like Metalheadz and Shogun Audio are also releasing music that directly alters the shape of the box the genre is currently put in. Sam Binga is one of those artists whose work is helping re-mould a little, specific bit of d&b with his collaborative releases alongside Om Unit and Addison Groove and his recent ‘AYO’ hot pink 10” release on Critical’s sidearm Modulations. Fast emerging and yet with a wealth of production behind him under differenet aliases we caught up with the Bristol based artist ahead of his appearance in the Critical Sound Room Two this Friday night. You can enter a competition to win a copy of ‘AYO’, here. You've released a number of collaborations with Om Unit. What's it like working with him and Exit? Do you have anything else exciting in store? Pretty much all the tunes we've made together have been produced while heavily hungover from whatever happened the night before - in fact, a lot of the stuff I've done that's come out best has been done while hungover. I wonder if it's some kind of guilt-related motivational technique I could sell to Jim Robbins and those other motivation speaker types? Or maybe it's a bit more Brian Eno - you know you're feeling pretty ropey, so you don't have any expectations of making a decent beat, which in turn frees you up creatively from self-inflicted pressure? Anyways, most of the beats were started at my studio in Bristol, with Jim taking stems back to London, working on them some more, sending them back to me for tweaking, and so forth. Again, that's probably a good way to work in hindsight - all you're trying to do in the studio is capture a quick vibe in a limited time frame, and the agonising and tweaking can be left til later. We do plan to get in the studio again, but as with all these things, it's a question of timing. Exit are great to work with - we were massively stoked when they decided they wanted to go for an EP, and then the fact that they were willing to not only consider, but actually go beyond, our ridiculous ideas regarding packaging was pretty amazing. I've had a pretty good run recently of well-presented 12"s, but that is my only clear vinyl release, the only hand numbered release, and the only one with a reversed cardboard sleeve. I think it looks great. And then when you look at the level of detail that went into the Mosaic Vol 2 compilation… Wow! You've associated yourself with a lot of different genres, with releases on the likes of Critical, 50 Weapons and Exit, as well as releasing on a whole heap of other labels under various aliases in the past. What made you go back to your d&b roots? Did anyone/anything in particular influence this decision? As with a lot of people, jungle/d&b was - along with loopy techno - the first dance music I really got into as an impressionable youth, and when I was playing more 'bass music' type sets, I always enjoyed the bit at the end where I got to rinse it out… But it wasn't something I'd ever really considered making, until round about the time I started working with Om Unit. Those sessions going well, and seeing how receptive people were to the different sounds he was playing out, really gave me reason to think that there was something new and interesting happening at that tempo, at about the same time as I was getting a bit disillusioned with 'bass music'. Since then it's been a fairly organic process of making tunes, either on my own, or working with people like Addison Groove or Fracture, who were naturally in a similar place musically - I'm trying to avoid putting any pressure on the whole project, and keep things unforced and enjoyable. The recent influx of house and techno dominating the scene has forced a lot of artists that initially produced d&b/jungle to almost take a vacation from d&b or at times, move away from the sound completely. Do you think this is a genuine creative decision or do you think a lot of producers are being encouraged to jump on the musical bandwagon in order to keep up with the electronic music scene? It's impossible to speak for anyone else, so it's hard to answer this without creating straw men, or attributing motives without any evidence. If you make something for a long time, it's natural to get to a point where you want to change what you do to prevent it becoming stale, and I think if your love of music is retained, people will respond to that whatever style you're making. In terms of bandwagon jumping, that's always going to be present in such a transient musical world, and yeah it can be frustrating when you hear what you perceive to be - for example - a totally bog standard 90s house pastiche suddenly being held up as the future of electronic music. But if you spend your time watching that kind of thing, all you end up doing is embittering yourself and taking your focus away from what you're meant to be doing, so it's a bit pointless. All you can do is try to retain your own integrity. I feel that sometimes, d&b can be slightly misunderstood… There's always been a degree of misunderstanding, and partly it's unavoidable due to the tempo of the music and the lack of a steady 4/4 kick drum. I think there's more understanding or enjoyment of jungle than d&b though - I can't imagine an after-hours in Bristol that wouldn't go nuts for a set of classic Suburban Base, and if you go and watch the Sex Tags crew, they will often drop in a bit of jungle into what are mostly house-based sets, and people love it! Maybe that's because once the 2-step beat became so entrenched in d&b and the focus on dark atmospheres and extremely high production levels got so intense, a degree of fun or cheekiness got lost, perhaps. I think it's opening up to a wider audience at the moment, and that's possibly because it's going through a bit of a 'dubstep' moment - by which I mean, when the minimal/halfstep thing happened with Digital Mystikz or Youngsta and it was a totally different approach to rhythm and space in garage-influenced dance music, which really caught people's ears. I think the way people like Om Unit or Dub Phizix have approached the space and shape of their beats has been a real breath of fresh air aesthetically, and it seems like that is resonating beyond strict drum & bass worlds. Drum & bass does seem to be surfacing across the scene once again with artists such as dBridge almost closing the gap between the different genres. Where do you see it going in the next couple of years? First up, dBridge deserves a huge amount of credit for reminding people of the links between the various different strands of dance music, both in terms of reminding people that music at 170bpm could still be interesting and challenging, and showing people who were maybe totally absorbed in d&b that there were influences and directions readily available beyond that. That said, I'm not sure I feel comfortable pontificating about where drum & bass will or should go, as there are a lot of people who have invested much more time and support into the music, and I really don't want to come along as some johnny-come-lately and be all like 'nah this is how it should be' - but for me personally, if people continue to emphasis interesting sonics, different rhythms and a variety of aesthetic approaches, stuff will stay interesting without too much planning. I would like to see a switch of emphasis away from 'loud' or 'technical' production towards 'sonic interest' though. So much interesting house and techno has come about recently from people digging out old synths and drum machines, or running sounds to cassette tape, or overdriving whole mixdowns through valve EQs to add character and dirt to their tracks, and it feels like a lot of d&b mixdowns still value clarity, crispness and loudness over sonic character and weirdness. Which hasn't always been the case - jungle sounds mental obviously, and stuff like Dillinja 'Hard Noize' has totally mashup distorted drums, in a really good way. I think that's something that juke/footwork has brought to attention again as well - a lot of those mixdowns are not as 'technically perfect' as the latest over-engineered neurofunk banger, but they are so much fun, and their aesthetic is much more 'get the girls shaking' rather than 'soundtrack the impending technological apocalypse'. As a club and musical institute, it's obviously important for us to stay at the forefront of underground music and London's clubbing culture. Do you think clubs are getting it right these days in terms of providing a platform for artists such as yourself? To be honest, I've been amazed by the reaction to what I'm doing - although I think a lot of that is down to good timing as much as anything, in the sense that people like Om Unit, Fracture, Moresounds, Stray, Mark Pritchard, Danny Scrilla, Machine Drum etc. have all been approaching the d&b tempo in a different way around the same time. There's a huge amount of people who love music at these tempos - which is testament to the strength of the original ideas this is all built on - and I think a fair few of them are interested in the ways it can be twisted and reworked and pushed into new shapes. Additionally, having labels like Hyperdub and Planet Mu pushing the juke sound here in Europe has probably opened a lot of ears who maybe came from dubstep or funky, to higher tempos, which again helps build bridges between the various dance music worlds. I think there are a lot more mixed-tempo nights happening at the moment - I'm typing this on the way to a gig with Kidnap Kid - and that's something I will always back. I like the idea of people being into a range of dance music, and being open to the different body-feels you get from different beats and tempos, rather than just going out for one thing that they can predict in advance. And that's obviously something that happens naturally at fabric - there's three rooms, you tend to wander between them over the course of the night, and they're all programmed really well, with different but complimentary flavours in each. You're playing at FABRICLIVE on 18th October as part of our Birthday weekend. What can we expect from your set? Probably a bunch of music from all the people I've mentioned in this interview, various new bits I've been working on, and maybe a couple of classics! Hopefully mixed together in a way that doesn't end my career there and then, and is worthy of being asked to perform on fabric's Birthday. I'm not sure Londoners - as in, proper born and bred Londoners - understand how mind-blowing the concept of fabric was when it first opened. Growing up in Hull, I was blown away by the idea of there being a state-of-the-art club dedicated to state-of-the-art underground music, showcasing the best stuff around week in, week out - whenever I play at fabric, I have that memory in the back of my mind, that sense of 'yeah, this is pretty amazing really!'