FABRICLIVE 44: COMMIX Interview (Plus CD Giveaway)!

The first time I heard drum and bass I thought it was, well not god awful, but repetitive and sort of grating. After repeated listens, determined to figure out what the fuss was about, I started to see the weaving patterns and subtle changes that make a drum and bass record intriguing.

When I turned 17 I leaned more toward the London Electrikity, Hospital Records, type stuff and finally was able to appreciate stuff like LTJ Bukem.

And then about 2 years later I could have cared less. I felt like drum and bass was music for jocks who wanted to be DJs or something. A lot of artists I really liked released shit albums in that time period... and I just stopped listening.

After meeting Goldie at WMC a couple years back I pulled out all my d'n'b records (downloaded some Rufige Crew etc) but I still wasn't pulled back into it. It wasn't until I heard the Noisia Fabric mix that I started to really give a shit again.

Commix are a different breed of artists all together. They're the type of duo that'll get you pulling out your old records AND buying new ones. Don't believe me? Pick up Fabriclive 44 (out today in the U.S.)... at least a few of you can skip that step because Fabric and I are teaming up to give 3 copies of the Commix Fabriclive mix away! All you have to do is send your info to put your name and email in the comments and winners will be drawn at random by the end of the week! Just use the soandso [at] whatever [dot] com format to avoid spammers!

Here's a little taste of why Commix are so awesome:


I've been up to my eyeballs in real world work, and illness, or you would have gotten this sooner... but life happens. This is the first part of the interview, expect the 2nd part tomorrow! AND MAKE SURE TO ENTER YOU ADDRESS IN THE COMMENTS, because if you don't enter you can't win!

ISoA: Is it hard to decide on a track list?

Commix: Yeah I think initially we chose about 100 tracks to go through. We had some tracks that we were definitely going to use so we knew, for instance, that "Photograph" at the end of the mix, we always knew we were going to use that at the end. And there were certain old school tracks like the Johnny L track, and the Photek track, that we knew were were going to use. But other than that there was a lot of new material to go through. So it was quite a challenge to get the right mix of tracks on there.

ISoA: Did you do multiple revisions? Or did you just come up with a track listing and say "this is it"?

Commix: No, we kind of grouped together a bunch of different styles of tracks, you know this kind of more minimally, more techy sounding stuff. We sort to tried out some of the, more Calibre, soulful things and grouped it together and then it was a bit of a game like line graphs really whether we started off quite heavy and went down in the middle and back up again...and we tried lots of different ways of doing it. And in the end we settled for the one you listened to. We really wanted it to be really dynamic with a lot of space in it, a lot of ups and downs, and we just about managed it.

ISoA: Drum and bass has been seen as a genre that is stuck? What do you think brought on this perception?

Commix: I think there were lots of things... with everything you get different sorts of subgenres. To a certain extent there are parts of drum and bass, at the moment, that are a bit stuck with people not really experimenting enough. I like to think with what we do, and people like D-Bridge, Instra:mental, Alix Perez, Markus Intalex, we're still trying to explore the groove a lot more. A lot of people say "Well I'm really enlightened and it's still going on" they've got the opinion that it's really stuck and not going anywhere. But as far as we're concerned it's still very experimental music, still got a lot to offer...

ISoA: Where do you think the genre is going in the future?

Commix: We consider it our jobs to try and get it out to... well, there are a lot of people my age who have been scared off by the more garish, sort of jump ups, the wobble bass stuff. I think the future's concerned, there's so much more to be done with drum and bass. We're going to carry on persevering and trying our very best to further it, experimenting, finding new, and one of the things we loved when we got into it is it can be "punky", it can be hip hop influenced, it can be techno influenced, you can pull from so many different things...

And that is it for tonight kiddies because I LITERALLY have to recharge the batteries on my recorder lol. Gonna have A-Trak on the line tomorrow so that's pretty important to take care of! Oh yeah, REMEMBER TO ENTER lol...