Addison Groove

Emma Warren

Welcome to today’s first lecture. Some of you may have seen Tony, aka Addison Groove, doing his thing last night. If you did, you’re gonna have some idea of who he is and what he does. If you didn’t, certainly by the end of this session you should.

Addison Groove

I hope so.

Emma Warren

So welcome, Addison Groove.

Addison Groove

Hi. [applause]

Emma Warren

Now, over the next hour and a half or so we’re gonna be talking about loads of stuff to do with you as an artist. We’re gonna be talking about your relationship with juke music. We’re gonna be talking about the early days of dubstep and we’re gonna be talking about the music you’re making now. But first of all, we had a conversation yesterday, as it happens at the Academy, in the kitchen, eating food. And I thought it might be a really nice place to start, and that’s you aged seven with your ZX Spectrum +2. This is important, isn’t it?

Addison Groove

I was saying to someone yesterday that when I was about five I had a Spectrum. There was a war between Spectrum and Commodore, but I had a Spectrum, I was in the Spectrum camp. But I read the manual and it taught you how to make music using beeps and – what’s the operating system on a Spectrum? [to participant] What was it? No, it wasn’t. Anyway, it was with the operating system and when you turned it on, the operating system came up and you could select “load a tape” or you could go within the operating system and programme it to make beeps. I was learning from this book, aged about seven or eight, to programme these beeps that made a noise. It took about two hours just to play about five seconds. But I was fascinated by these beeps and knew that I wanted to make beepy music.

Emma Warren

From the beginning you knew you wanted to make beepy music.

Addison Groove

I was fascinated by it, yeah.

Emma Warren

There’s certainly something, when you speak to people who make music, they often tell you similar stories, that, “Right from the very beginning, as far back as I can remember, I wanted to make beepy music.” There’s definitely something in an artist that shows itself pretty early as far as wanting to interact with technology and also, most importantly, wanting to make it do what you want it to do.

Addison Groove

It was weird because I didn’t realize until recently that that was something I was doing, I was making this music. Now I think about it, yeah, I was programming the computer, just like I am now, just in a different way. So you’re into the technology but you’re also into making a noise, so yeah, it’s great.

Emma Warren

Talking of making a noise, it’s really good at the beginning of these sessions to have our guest play something, so we get a real sense straight away of something that they do. Just like you guys did the other day when you sat there and played your 1:59 of your music. I think we could possibly do with more than 1:59, so do you want to give us a taste of something?

Addison Groove

This track is only three minutes. No one would have heard it before so I might as well play it.

Emma Warren

Exclusive.

Addison Groove

Let me talk about that little buzzing noise there. When you use Logic in Ableton. In ReWire, I mean, when you bounce a track, for some reason it has this crazy little buzzing noise just before you record. I haven’t gone back in and edited yet.

(music: Addison Groove – “Rude Boy” / applause)

Emma Warren

Are you able to tell us what that is?

Addison Groove

I made it ages ago when I was getting into more bongo-driven music. This particular track reminds me of jungle in a way, just because of the vocal. I remember when I was younger I would go to drum & bass raves but I was really into jungle from a young age. They would have these voices and pads and stuff and it reminds me of that. But I like the bongo element as well, it’s kind of off-key. It’s really hard to DJ with this track, I don’t play it in clubs, but it’s good for a B-side or something like that.

Emma Warren

Does it have a name?

Addison Groove

Not really. It’s called “Rude Boy,” which is kind of obvious. But yeah, that’s probably what it’s gonna be.

Emma Warren

But is it an Addison Groove track?

Addison Groove

Completely.

Emma Warren

So you talked about getting into more bongo-driven music. Can you expand on that a tiny bit? What do you mean by that?

Addison Groove

What got me into percussive music as such was juke. When I started listening to juke I was amazed at what little use they made of the sounds and how super- percussive it could be with just little elements. Like that track I just played, you’ve got a kick drum and a bongo just working together, even at an offbeat. From listening to juke I was learning about percussion, which got me into African music. Then I was listening to all this stuff from Africa and my current stuff is definitely going that way.

Emma Warren

Now, I’m gonna ask you in a minute about this new interest you’ve got in Angolan music, music from the ’60s and ’70s of certain parts of Africa. But before we go there, we need to stick with your relationship with juke. You were one of the first. I know lots of people were listening to it, but you were one of the first people to bring it to a broader audience through “Footcrab.” It would be nice to know a bit about that, but what’s your current relationship with juke artists themselves?

Addison Groove

I’m good friends with Spinn and Rashad. They’ve toured the UK twice now and I was able to book Rashad when he came to London maybe six, seven months ago. That was the first time I met him, I’d had a few emails before. They’re really nice guys and they have a respect for me, which is really nice. When Rashad played in London he played a remix of “Footcrab” that he did. I didn’t even give him the parts for this. He took the track and just done something with it. I was amazed that they’d given me this appreciation. “We did that for you. Part of the reason we’re out here is ’cause you were pushing our stuff.” It’s true, I was pushing the juke stuff. When I was getting booked to play dubstep, I was playing the really deep stuff. When I was heard juke, I’d try and get it into my sets, I’d play 10 minutes at the start of juke, then go into dubstep ’cause I thought no one’s gonna get it. Gradually, I’d put 20 minutes in and see how much I could get away with. I made the “Footcrab” track and anyone who’d seen me DJ prior to that would’ve had a little idea that’s what I wanted to play.

Emma Warren

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that process of getting the crowd to understand what you want to do. There was definitely a period in dubstep when people were playing jungle records at the end of sets. And I guess you were doing something different, you were playing the different stuff, the future rather than the past, at the beginning, before moving into stuff people knew better.

Addison Groove

Yeah, I just believed in the music. I thought it was really good. I do like simple music usually and no one I knew of was really playing it on this side of the country. There must have been people playing it, people buying it, but I had the ability to use my Headhunter name to play to a lot of people. One weekend I’d be playing to 200, the next 500, 600, 700 people. If 10 percent of the crowd enjoyed the music, then I’ve done something I believed in.

Emma Warren

Traditionally in Chicago, dating back to the ’80s, a lot of people were very nervous about European people coming and taking their music, particularly English people. A lot of the acid house artists – and you’ll be hearing more about that this afternoon – had problems with their music being stolen. Do you think coming in as an artist people treated you differently, or did you encounter any reticence because there’s this historic knowledge of what happens when you let the music get taken away from the city?

Addison Groove

No, I never felt any bad vibes. There’s some things I read online about myself, “Oh, he’s stealing music from Chicago, etc., etc.” Well, who hasn’t used a 909 kick drum? All I tried to do was expand it and I had the ability to do that. I knew I could play to these crowds and push new music on them. Even when I made my tracks as Headhunter I didn’t make direct dubstep, I always wanted to put a little twist on it. I was often put in the same bracket as 2562, even people from Bristol like Peverelist, Pinch. Some people are like, “Yeah, it’s techno-dubstep.” Alright, maybe it is, but it’s not the same style as what was coming out of London.

Emma Warren

You just said, “Who hasn’t used a 909 kick?” The thing is as part of the creative process, how do you take something that’s not yours? You’re not from Chicago, you’re not from the projects, but you’ve taken the music and made it yours. Other people from all around the world have made music brilliantly, but it’s not their music that they’ve made. How do you take something that’s an established scene and make it your own?

Addison Groove

The first thing was to not copy juke. I didn’t wanna sit in my studio and go, “Right, 160 BPM. Let’s play a juke track that can get played in Chicago.” I can’t relate to that, I have no history with that. What I wanted to do with “Footcrab”… it was an accident, a good experiment. My experiment was, “Let’s make this juke-style music at dubstep speed.” One of the reasons I made it, I was doing this juke stuff, I never had anything to go from dubstep to juke, so I thought I’m gonna make this kind of dubstep-tempo juke. So I made the track for that. The first time I played it, it got no reaction so I thought, “Oh well, that’s another one that doesn’t get spoken of.” Then I gave the track to Pinch and Peverelist and those guys were, “This is the best tune you’ve ever made.” “Really? OK.” Then they started playing it, then it caught on and all I was trying to do was just experiment, slow it down, take juke elements and use it in dubstep so I could play it in my sets. That was it.

Emma Warren

Shall we have a little listen and you can tell us something about what you did with it.

Addison Groove

What, “Footcrab”?

Emma Warren

Yeah. Or if you don’t want to play that, then it might be nice to play a juke thing and then something juke-inspired so you can show us what you did with it.

Addison Groove

OK, so I’ll play something by myself first. This track came out on Swamp 81 back in March, I think, it’s called “Sexual.”

(music: Addison Groove – “Sexual” / applause)

Thanks. In that track you can hear the bass go boom, boom, boom. I wanted to make a track like boom, boom, boom. Then the half-time snare was kind of from ghettotech because juke is essentially ghettotech music. So you’ve got a half on there, on the fifth and the 13th on the 808. So it’s doing a 2-step thing. It’s got a vocal sample taken from a scratch record and a lot of the ghetto music was maybe old funk breaks that later went onto scratch records. I’ve got a lot of scratch records and it’s just full of samples, the greatest samples, stabs, and those samples you don’t find on CDs that everyone uses. You just try and think, “What have I got in my studio that I can use?” So I used that for the vocal. The pad, well, a lot of the juke stuff I like to play was very melodic so I wanted to make something with a melody. This track is at 145, so it was a good tempo, to go from something 135-140 up to something that’s 155. There are some juke tracks around that are 155 and the pad is taken from… I played it and it’s sidechained. I went onto Amazon and searched for saxophone music. I just wanted to search for music that only had saxophones in it, no drums, so I’m looking for samples in weird places, not sample CDs. It was a saxophone track that happened to have a Rhodes and I just found this little [makes noise] made the melody. There’s really not that much to it. All the percussion is 808. This track was made a week or two after I made “Footcrab,” which was in 2010. You listen to some of my stuff now and I think it’s better produced, and it’s a bit different, less elements and stuff. But this was me having all these ideas in my head about what I could do with this music. “Footcrab” came out; on the flip of that track was a tune called “Work It” and to follow that was a bunch of other tracks. I had so many ideas in my head that I didn’t think were out there. So it was, “Let’s do this, let’s see how far I can take it.” My Addison Groove thing, I’m playing so many more shows than I did as Headhunter and I’m enjoying it so much more ‘cause I can play so much different music in my sets. Like last night when I DJed, I started at about 135, I went down to 110 BPM by playing some moombahton and within the space of half an hour I was mixing up to 180. I love doing that, I love the variation, people guessing what I’m gonna do, and it keeps me interested as well. If the crowd can follow me I’m happy.

Emma Warren

You mentioned just a second ago the 808. We should talk about this for a minute. This is yours, isn’t it?

Addison Groove

Yeah.

Emma Warren

I read you saying somewhere it was a choice between a new car, ’cause your car was sounding like a tank…

Addison Groove

It was.

Emma Warren

Or an 808. And you clearly chose to go with the tank for a while.

Addison Groove

My car’s alright now, I managed to get a nice one. My agent was like, “I think you should start playing some live shows. There’s people asking if you can play live.” OK, I’ve never done that before, never fully played onstage with one of these. So I agreed on three gigs before I even bought this.

Emma Warren

That’s a commitment, isn’t it? Sometimes you have to say you’ll do something you’re not quite ready to do in order to force yourself to get ready for it. By the way, how long did you give yourself?

Addison Groove

Two weeks.

Emma Warren

That’s a seat-of-the-pants one.

Addison Groove

It was hard to find as well. I took gigs in Finland, Fabric and Berghain. Those are the places you should go as an experienced musician, really. So I was, “Right, I’ve got to locate a drum machine.” And I needed one with MIDI on – if you notice, this one has been modified. It’s got three MIDI ports on and that was essential ‘cause I wanted it to work with Ableton to keep in time, so I could put loops on top of it. Found one, went to look at it in London, it turned out not to work. I went all the way to London to pick this one up, got to this guy’s house and it didn’t switch on. Hmm, OK. Just about to leave London two days later and I emailed this guy on eBay and he lived in Croydon, didn’t hear back from him and I was driving home on the motorway, in my tank, and he called me and said, “You can come and have a look at this drum machine.” So I looked at it, it’s in amazing condition. It was quite expensive, but I knew I needed this drum machine. The gigs that followed, the one in Finland was okay – it was a bit, “Hmm, he’s obviously learning how to do this.” Then I went to Fabric and I did a good job, I think. I really enjoyed myself and it was great. Main room Fabric, first time doing that. I guess you were all on that lecture yesterday when the guy from Funktion One was talking. One of the great things about this is this plugs into a mixer, it goes straight into a PA. It doesn’t go through a DJ mixer, so when you play the bass drum on this it does kick ass.

Emma Warren

Do you wanna show us what you’ve been doing with it live then?

Addison Groove

Yeah. The set-up now is not the best, but I can explain how it works. The drum machine has ten outputs and it has individual outputs on the back. Each output goes into a different channel on the mixer, so that gives me volume control over each one, even though there’s volume control on here. I can EQ it and stuff. When I play live I also use an effects box. This isn’t my effects box, it’s one I’ve stolen from a room. I don’t know quite how it works, but it’s got presets so it should sound OK. I set that up on the auxiliary channels. I don’t have to play the drum machine from the start-stop button. I’ve actually got this Doepfer box that converts a MIDI signal into a DIN sync signal. This MIDI on the side, I don’t need this anymore, I could’ve just bought one with DIN sync on. So it converts the signal, I can set it to Ableton 125 BPM, press play, I see lights going. Then I can choose the sound, a snare, I know snare drums are on number two so I should hear a snare. [snare starts] Then the auxiliaries, there’s a delay. I haven’t gone through this effects unit yet. So that’s a snare, then I can bring a bass drum in. [bass drum come in] Then you’ve got a hat. Hmm, that’s why you do a soundcheck ’cause sometimes things aren’t working.

Emma Warren

Hey, hey, as you’ve already explained to us you are someone who likes to do things on the fly and you appreciate that a mistake can be a happy part of the creative process.

Addison Groove

That’s right. That’s the tom of the 808. Now the problem with the 808 is the bass drum doesn’t have any pitch, so you’re at a loose end now. Stop this. [turns beat off] When I play live I like to sample and put it into the 808 and put it into Ableton, it sounds much better, I can have pitch on it. So when I play live I do some sampled 808 parts with my MIDI controller and then I just play the drum machine ‘cause I’ve got more variation on the bass drum. But I’ll play this bass drum for now.

(music: Roland TR-808 drum machine demonstration)

So hopefully there’s enough effect on the tom. [_music stops] Kind of endless.

I have the drum machine doing that stuff and I also have samples in Ableton, which I didn’t play just then but I’ll give you an example of a sample. [music continues / applause] I get carried away. This is what I do at home sometimes. What can I do today? I’m just going to plug my 808 into my synthesizer, ‘cause this has got Gate/CV on, so if you have a synthesizer that doesn’t have MIDI, you can get the 808 to trigger it via the accent or the cowbell. You don’t even have to have the cowbell turned up on volume to do it. Or maybe you do, I can’t remember. But you can essentially sequence a non-MIDI instrument with this and it’s very good fun, you just get a bit lost. But if you’ve got an effects box like this set up properly – this one’s not set up great – you can just get carried away. The unfortunate thing about doing everything in analog is at the time you’re really into it. But play it against something that’s nicely mastered and engineered with a computer and it doesn’t sound as strong as that. Unless you’ve got the best converters and you’re recording it all in. I find it quite difficult to do everything in analog. I work really fast, I probably make two tracks in a day, take about two to three hours per track. So I don’t like to spend too long. If I spend longer than four hours on a track then I scrap it ‘cause I’ve kind of lost the vibe on a track. I like to get things done really quickly.

Emma Warren

You’ve cracked the idea of accepting stuff can never be finished and you just know when it’s done, that’s enough.

Addison Groove

I feel I make two types of tunes. One is where I want to make a track to play on Friday; I want to go to this club and I can make something that I want it to have a rewind or I want it be something that just flows. Or I’ve had enough of a club, it’s a Monday or Tuesday, and I make something like that first track I played that’s just an experiment, nice. You don’t wanna make club music, you just wanna make something weird but groovy.

Emma Warren

Now, a lot of you guys will understand the similarities and differences between DJing and playing live. But for you, what’s been the most interesting thing about opening yourself up to performing rather than just DJing?

Addison Groove

The first thing is the whole set is my own stuff. Sometimes when I play live I do chuck in the odd, another track. It depends on the crowd. If I turn up to a club and the crowd are young, most of them don’t know who’s on the line-up, they’re just there to have a party, then I’ll chuck in a few tracks that are not my own, just to get the party going.

Emma Warren

Like what? What are your party-starting tracks?

Addison Groove

A track I played last night by Dexter, called “Space Booty.” It came out maybe six months ago. I love this track, it fits really well with everything else, kind of 2-step-y track. What else? Anything by Boddika always seems to work. I try to find stuff that fits with mine quite well. So Boddika stuff does, Dexter stuff does. Not really any of the juke stuff ‘cause I don’t have anything at 160 really, so I try not to play that stuff. However the last six months I’ve been playing the Rashad mix of “Footcrab,” ‘cause it’s great.

Emma Warren

I know some artists like to collaborate and you tend to just be making your tracks. But what about collaborations, in the sense of having compatible people to work with? I guess I’m thinking of the relationships you’ve got with people like Loefah or Martyn, working with them to make music for their labels.

Addison Groove

Anything that was signed to a label was never made for the label. I’m good friends with Martyn and I would sort him out with tracks. We were just talking one day he was like, “I’d love to do a release. Some of these tracks you’ve got, they’re not gonna come out. So if you wanna put them out, by all means.” So I never specifically make a track for a label. But if there’s an interest, then OK, let’'s do that. When Loefah put “Footcrab” out on Swamp it was quite a good fit. He wanted the label to go in this direction and it set things off for his label, which was great. It was definitely a good home for it. Nowadays, I’m not pitching my music to any label, I just like to make my own music. If there’s an interest from someone who appreciates my music and can help it do good things, then I’m all for it.

Emma Warren

I’d like to ask you now about the Headhunter stuff. Because you were there right in the early days of dubstep, when things were starting to become slightly bigger, ’05-’06 era.

Addison Groove

I remember it. Dubstep was a kind of accident because I live in Bristol and around 2005 a friend of mine called Pod came to me and said we’d been offered a radio show. I hadn’t DJed since I was about 20, 19, four years. “OK, cool, let’s do it.” Then we played something cool and I thought, “What do I enjoy that I can play that’s fresh, UK-based music?” And it was grime. So I started playing some grime. A lot of the stuff I was playing I was thinking, “I like it, but I think I could make something similar that would fit more me.” So I started making some tracks and it turned out I was making dubstep, I wasn’t making grime at all. The person who told me that was Pinch, ‘cause I got it him to come over. He was, “Wow, this is really cool. He’s playing this crazy music, I’ve never heard that before.” From that I started to make dubstep and then learn about Skream, Loefah, Mala, etc. In the space of six months, from me going, “Right, I’m gonna make this dubstep stuff,” I was signed to Tempa.

Emma Warren

Tempa at that point was the preeminent label, affiliated with Rinse and FWD>>. That was the only place to be if you wanted to have a dubstep release.

Addison Groove

At the time I was living with Tech Itch and Jakes. I was living with those guys for two years. I was making the dubstep stuff and I made this one track, “7th Curse,” and I gave it to N-Type. That track came out on a label that me and Tech Itch set up. N-Type went to London, to FWD>>, played it. Sarah from Rinse and Tempa, she was like, “What is this track?” Got my phone number, I think she rang me when I was playing paintball. I got this weird…

Emma Warren

So you’re playing paintball?

Addison Groove

I remember it being something like that. “You want me to do what?” I just stopped playing paintball. This is wicked. I’ve got to arrange a bus to London ‘cause I was skint at the time.

Emma Warren

But this is the thing, because at that point all the artists making dubstep were pretty much fresh to the whole thing. There were some people that carried on the stuff that influenced dubstep, like Zed Bias. But those people were in the minority. The vast majority of people making those early dubstep records, this was the first time they’d really done anything.

Addison Groove

Yeah, everyone making dubstep, it was as if they were making music for the first time. Obviously, some were older than others. Someone like Skream, he’s 16 and he’s making massive tracks. “What is this? This kid’s crazy.” So everyone was new to it and that fed into going to play shows. It was you kind of go, “I’ll play a show for you but I’ll have to stay on your sofa ‘cause I’ve never been to Birmingham before?” Something like that. You kind of start touring around, seeing all these places, not making that much money but you’re enjoying it because you love it.

Emma Warren

You spent a year living without a fixed address, not “street homeless,” but you decided you’d spend a year not living anywhere in particular, but touring the world, staying on people’s sofas and sofa surfing.

Addison Groove

I was fed up with living in Bristol, not happy in the houses where I was staying. I just thought, “Oh fuck this, I can go and live around the world.” I can look at my schedule and I had a couple of gigs in Europe and I had Australia coming up and America coming up. I figured I could probably stretch this out for a year and tour around. I kinda made an album on the road. So I’d be in Paris and I’d start a track and the next day I’m somewhere else. An album came out of it called Nomad, which came out in 2008. I remember when that album came out, that’s when I started to get into juke. Right at the tail-end of 2008, 2009 I started hearing glimpses of this juke stuff, the ghettotech version of it. It was an interesting time for everyone involved in dubstep. They’d come from nothing. They didn’t jump on any bandwagon ‘cause there was no bandwagon to jump on, it was just pure fresh vibes. That’s why I liked the juke stuff so much, it reminded me so much of when I was into dubstep. When I first started to listen to dubstep it was the kind of thing where I was like [draws back], “Do I like it? I like it but it’s kind of weird.” ‘Cause you can’t relate to it, you’ve got nothing to base it against. Other music’s been around such a long time.

Emma Warren

For me, that’s always a signifier of when something’s interesting, when you hear something and you go, “I don’t understand it, it’s alien, I don’t even necessarily like it.” But you want to know more. And that demands that you get into it.

Addison Groove

It’s when you see the potential as well, you think, “This is crazy.” And if people are getting down to this then there’s so much room for expansion in this genre of music. The first dubstep event I went to was Subloaded in Bristol and I was blown away. The tune that blew me away was Coki, “Officer.” When I heard that I was, “Oh my god, that’s it, I’ve got to make this music.”

Emma Warren

Can we hear some Headhunter stuff? Obviously, you’ve got this back catalog of older Headhunter stuff you’ve put out on Tempa, but you’re still making stuff as Headhunter now, aren’t you? Can we maybe hear some old Headhunter and some new Headhunter?

Addison Groove

Yeah, I can play you an old track. This is from the Nomad album, “Prototype.”

(music: Headhunter – “Prototype” / applause)

That track took a long time to get going. When I used to make dubstep the only DJ I was really into was Youngsta, so essentially I was making music for Youngsta.

Emma Warren

Do you want to explain who that is, for people who don’t know.

Addison Groove

He was around from the start, pretty much, and he defined himself by playing only four or five producers. When I learned about Youngsta I knew he played tunes by Loefah, Skream, Benga, Mala, D1, maybe Coki. He had his own producers and that was it. He wasn’t accepting anything else, it just didn’t fit into his set. So when I signed to Tempa I broke that mold, I got a track in there, and I remember people saying, “You’ve got Youngsta playing your track.” I’m like, cool, that’s what I wanted. My idea when I started making dubstep, my first idea was I wanna make a style of dubstep that’s Ed Rush and Optical style and that wasn’t around then. That’s why it’s got all these techy noises. And it’s got a long intro for Youngsta to mix. It’s a really good track to mix, this one, you can mix the bass in and take your time with it. It’s kind of like a techno mix rather than a drum & bass-style mix.

Emma Warren

I want to hear a new Headhunter track, but before we play that one, you alluded to the exclusivity that existed in the early days of dubstep. That’s definitely something that’s existed throughout lots and lots of scenes, the idea that you have to go somewhere to hear the music and you have to go and see a particular DJ to hear a certain artist’s music. This is an idea you still believe in and still bring it.

Addison Groove

I do, I still believe in it. So much has gone now. You know, you can go online and download this that and the other even before it makes peoples’ albums. But when you’ve got quite a small scene and you’ve got a track that a lot of people would like to hear, you’ve got to treat it like gold. I’ve currently got a track that people are pestering me to release so much. Every time I play – or most of the time I play – people have got their phones [holds phone up]. I look on my Twitter, “When’s this track coming out?” It’s a remix of Martha & the Vandellas’ “Jimmy Mack.” It’s just the a capella fitted the track, it gets a massive reaction. I made that track six months ago. I didn’t wanna give it to anyone, I knew I was sat on a good track. Jackmaster, I’m good friends with him, he was on my case. “Let me know, when can I have it?” So I gave it to him. Week later, Skream, “I want that track.” OK. Well, I’ve always had respect for Skream and I gave it to Ben UFO as well. They’re the only guys with it. The only way you can hear this track is if you go on YouTube and see people going off to it. I like that, I like the fact that you can’t hear it properly but you’ve got to come to the club to hear it. It’s designed to be played in the club. I didn’t make it to be listened to at home. When people say, “Can you release it?” – well, it’s completely unmixable, it’s got an a capella intro, I made it just so I could play it at the end of my sets. I don’t know why people wanna hear it so much, I don’t know what their thinking is.

Emma Warren

See, we wanna hear it now, but if you play it now then it’s fully on YouTube. Or maybe we can play it after. Unless you wanna do a little snippet?

Addison Groove

Nah, you need the whole thing.

Audience Member

You could edit it out on the video.

Addison Groove

That’s a good point. No, let’s do it at the end. I always play it at the end of my sets anyway, feels like I’m doing a DJ set. Anyway, I’ve got a new Headhunter tune. I made this in December and I made it for Youngsta. When I gave it to him he was, “I can’t believe you made me a riddim and it’s the best track I’ve got now.” It’s coming out on Black Box, maybe in about a month’s time. It’s called “Projector.” It’s not very long, only about four minutes. Again you can hear a minimal intro ‘cause it’s designed to be DJed and mixed.

(music: Headhunter – “Projector” / applause)

Thanks. So all the track does, it has this middle section that does that, and then it rolls out. Didn’t want it to have a second drop or anything like that. I do like making tracks like that because it gives me the ability to be a bit more of a geek than just playing the drum machine stuff. Most of my Addison Groove stuff is very sampled, it’s just putting sounds in the right place. But with this kind of stuff a lot of it is down to engineering as well. You just heard that track and you heard “Prototype” and I think you could hear the difference in the sound quality. “Prototype” was kind of flat ‘cause back then I didn’t have outboard compressors, I didn’t have as much information in my head about how to process sound as I do now. Every sound in Logic, I use Ableton and ReWire. Every sound in Logic goes through a compressor and EQ and everything, even little bits, and then I bust everything off and I put little bits through. I do tiny bits of compression throughout all the stages then tiny bits of compression through my outboard compressor, back into the computer. I find if you do all these bits of compression it adds up to a lot more than one big compression. Tiny bits here and there sum it up; you get stereo-filled punchy sound, nice bass, everything. I use these production techniques in my Addison Groove stuff, but the Headhunter stuff is very synthy and techy. I love doing that, I love being a nerd in the studio, it’s cool. Everyone should. I think every producer wants that, really. They want to get into their equipment, but when they do it’s just too technical and you lose the vibe of the track or something.

Emma Warren

I think it’s perfectly possible to be a geek with a vibe. The two things are not mutually exclusive. You mentioned at the beginning of our conversation something about being into Angolan music and something about searching out tapes from the ’60s and ’70s. Can you tell us a bit more and play us something if you have the sounds to illustrate?

Addison Groove

Yes, I’ve got something here. Basically, the internet is a sample library. It’s amazing, everything’s on there now. I’m using it as a way of finding stuff. There’s so many bloggers out there endlessly uploading stuff that they’re finding and it’s endless, you could go on for ages. There’s quite a few dedicated to African music and I’ve really taken a liking to the Angolan style. The Angolan style, from the ‘60s anyway – what happened was the Portuguese invaded way before that – so you’ve got a mixture of African music and Portuguese music and it sounds really nice. I’ll play you some now. Yeah, the internet is full of all these things. I didn’t know there was Egyptian jazz music until I was like, “Oh, what’s that?” So you listen to it and I don’t think I’m taking ideas from it but you have to open your ears to everything. Because I’m playing dance music at weekends and I’m making it, I don’t actually listen to that much dance music. People’s albums come out and I like this track because I played it, but I don’t spend much time listening to dance music. I try not to be influenced by it all. In my car I’m playing hip-hop or some crazy African stuff.

(music: unknown)

So there’s a genre of music I never knew existed. My education in music was from hardcore, back when I was 10. And Michael Jackson maybe.

Emma Warren

Hardcore and Michael Jackson, a very English combination.

Addison Groove

My goal when I was 10 was to nick these rave tapes off my mate’s brother. I didn’t have an older brother, so the only way you were gonna get these tapes of Fantazia or Helter Skelter – no Helter Skelter, wasn’t around then – Fantazia and Dreamscape, those were the two I was trying to get. Actually, this comes to why I’m called Addison Groove. The reason I chose this name was because Addison was one of the most popular unisex names of 2009 in the UK. I didn’t want any gender specified to my name, so Addison. My favorite DJ when I was younger was Easygroove. He couldn’t mix very well but his selection was amazing, he would go from piano hardcore into playing real hard stuff. I always thought he was the best DJ. I always wished you had Easygroove as selector, but Ratty as the mixer. Ratty was my favorite, the way he’d mix and chop the drums up, I thought his mixing was amazing. But Easygroove’s selection was outstanding and I named my name after him, essentially. I loved that his name was Easygroove, I thought it was a really good name, so I managed to get groove in my name.

Emma Warren

The thing about that era of hardcore is people would see it generally as something that led to something interesting, or kind of had a role to play, but in itself it wasn’t necessarily very “good.”

Addison Groove

Very bashed together, yeah. It’s kind of like how juke is in a way, I suppose. Or grime. People were making music in their bedrooms, going out at the weekends and playing it. The amount of people they were playing this to was unreal. There were raves with 100 thousand people sometimes. Castlemorton was 150 thousand people. It was an illegal rave near Bristol, not far from Bristol, and it made the front page of every newspaper and the police could do nothing about it. They couldn’t stop it ‘cause there were so many people there. Every DJ – Grooverider, Easygroove, so many grooves. Who else? Top Buzz, LTJ Bukem, and they all did this rave. Not just them, the orbital in London has a lot to answer for as well. It’s a big road that goes all the way around London. Orbital, the electronic band, are named after it.

Emma Warren

Good job they didn’t call themselves M25.

Addison Groove

Wow, that wouldn’t be good nowadays.

Emma Warren

The thing about that though, that music wasn’t seen as good at the time. Obviously, the people that were going there were really loving it, but it wasn’t seen as good music. Latterly, I think people have understood that this was really raw, powerful, energy-giving music.

Addison Groove

The front page of this newspaper said, “Illegal acid-taking monsters – everyone’s on drugs.” Can they not realize that if there’s a 150,000 people in one place anywhere in the world, that’s gonna catch on? You’ve got the press going, “This is bad, this is bad.” And five years after they’ve got Judge Jules on The Sun in Bizarre talking about music, saying, “Yeah, this is the cool club.” Shut up!

Emma Warren

Would you like to follow your 1960s Angolan music with some hardcore?

Addison Groove

Oh, yeah. Usually, when I DJ I take some records with me, vinyl, real things.

Emma Warren

Real things.

Addison Groove

Yeah. What hardcore do I have? What would be better actually is if I play a snippet of a Dreamscape rave, because you’ll get the idea of where the MC came from. It was kind of back in ’92. I’m not too sure of the history of the MC in the UK, but it kind of started about ’92, ’91.

Emma Warren

Certainly, the MC as host, as we experience it in a club. It probably has a different lineage if you’re talking from the soundsystem side of it, but certainly the MC who has a place at a rave or in a dance, yes.

Addison Groove

It’s very bad quality, this was recorded a long time ago. It’s crashed. It’s iTunes that’s crashed.

Emma Warren

While you’re doing that do you have a big collection of hardcore tapepacks then?

Addison Groove

Yeah.

Emma Warren

So your 10 year old self managed to squirrel away a few bits.

Addison Groove

Because I moved around from when I was about 16, 17, 18, they kind of got lost. But the great thing is the internet has all of them online. The ones I can remember from younger, I can locate them all online. There’s been a track in my head since I was about 12. I lost the tape, but last week I found the track online, which was really nice.

(music: Dreamscape tape)

It’s just dark messy stuff, there’s no definition, it’s just “take drugs” music. But I wasn’t on drugs when I was 10 or 12, I was just, “This is the shit!” There’s something about it.

Emma Warren

Everyone goes on about being open-minded and you should listen to lots of different music, but when you talk to people about liking, say, psytrance, people are often a bit confused.

Addison Groove

People do get confused. People are, “What?” I like all music. If something has something good about it, even if it’s in the charts or whatever, if it has an element of something I like about it, I’ll listen to it. What I liked about psytrance was the noises, the sound design that took place in these tracks. I really like Hallucinogen, a very obvious person to like in psytrance, but I really like him, his whole crew. He had a label called Twisted and you listen to that stuff it just evolves and evolves, just synthesizers bouncing off each other going crazy. Psytrance is interesting because it’s never gone mainstream in the UK, yet it’s got a massive following around the world. It’s one of these underground scenes that’s always been there, but not a lot of people in the UK are aware of it. I think it’s quite an interesting scene.

Emma Warren

It’s one of those things that signifies something. Sometimes a signifier of an interesting scene can be if everyone thinks it’s a load of rubbish. Everyone being not necessarily the best judge of stuff.

Addison Groove

In the days of dubstep you could play to a room of 15 to 20 people. But all those people knew what potential it had. Even back then the music was so good, it was like you know something and no one else does. Now look at dubstep, it’s huge. Unfortunately you find there’s not much room for the deep style.

Emma Warren

Can you give us a sense of how things were on the dubstep scene when you started and how things are now?

Addison Groove

I don’t really play that many dubstep events anymore. I actually did one on Saturday, which was quite good. It was me and Jakes and I played live actually, but I had to chuck in a few of those tracks that I mentioned earlier ‘cause I knew a lot of the crowd were into Jakes’ stuff. I’m a great friend of Jakes’, I used to live with him, but what he played was what I know Jakes for, it was too aggressive for me. Some tracks I did like, but some were a bit too noisy. That’s what happens. Dubstep has gotten big and it’s because it’s got noisier – to a lot of people that’s the appeal.

Emma Warren

I guess there’s a heavy metal aspect. Some people are obviously very sophisticated in their listening from very, very young, but when you’re 17 all you want is a big noise that makes you feel big and massive because it’s kind of simple.

Addison Groove

When I was 17 I was going out to see Ed Rush and Optical, and the heavier the track, the better. But as you grow a bit older your ear changes.

Emma Warren

But Ed Rush and Optical tracks generally stand the test of time.

Addison Groove

Definitely.

Emma Warren

Can we hear something else from you? We’ll put it out to questions fairly soon, so start thinking about what you wanna ask.

Addison Groove

I recently did a DJ Shadow remix, it’s gonna come out fairly soon. It’s a rewind track.

Emma Warren

Before you play it, do you wanna tell us the story about how the wrong version of it wound up on the internet?

Addison Groove

I made one version, about 125 BPM, and I gave it to Island. They were, “We like it, but can you do something a bit more dubbed out, a bit heavier?” OK, lemme go back to the drawing board. I made another version and the other version was heavier. I thought this one’s probably gonna get a rewind. So I emailed the what I thought was this version to Skream. He replied, “I love it, it’s wicked.” Later I find out the version I emailed to him wasn’t the smashing version, it was the slowed-down version. Yet he still played it, which was kind of nice. So I don’t think this one’s been played online, but I know they gave a promo out of it a week ago.

(music: DJ Shadow – “Excited (Addison Groove Remix)”)

Emma Warren

Definitely feeling that Dreamscape influence in there.

Addison Groove

Yeah. Well, the reason I had the drums on the start, it’s the kind of track that doesn’t need to be mixed, it needs to be dropped. That was the plan. I sat down and that track probably took me two to three hours to make. But what does take time is the mixdown. I can make a tune really fast but the mixdown takes a while.

Emma Warren

What’s a while in your world?

Addison Groove

Hmmm. Three hours? But I do the mixdown the day after, I never do it the same day. My ears become tired, fatigued, so I wake up the next day and get a coffee and it’s the first thing I do in the day ‘cause I know my ears are fresh. It seems to work. I used to do this thing where I’d start a track in the nighttime and in the morning I’d do the mixdown. I did that for a while, but now schedules are a bit crazy and I can’t do that so much anymore. That was a way of working for a while for me.

Emma Warren

So mornings are for mixdowns, afternoons and evenings are for fresh tunes.

Addison Groove

Yeah, generally. That’s how it works in my world.

Emma Warren

What do guys you want to know? Who wants to go first?

Audience member

Hello! This is for both of you, actually. Do you guys see any similarity between the way gabber, hardcore and psytrance was in the ‘90s and the way dubstep is now? Made for maximum impact and really popular amongst young teenagers and stuff like that? Don’t take it the wrong way. [laughs]

Addison Groove

I’ve been DJing this stuff since 2005 and it’s growing and growing. But I’ve noticed the crowds have generally stayed the same age – about 18 to 25. Unless you go somewhere like Berlin where you get an older crowd. I want to make music and don’t look at it as a job, but I want to keep myself in a job. So if I wanna go and DJ, I want to make this music that the crowd can go off to. So like that track I just played, I know that’s gonna go off in a club. But I’ll then go and make something that won’t be played in a club. I’ll balance it out by making different styles. But I know what you mean – it is very directed at that club scene.

Audience member

I’m not at all talking about your music.

Addison Groove

No, but I’m giving you an example of how it would work for me. I’ve seen the crowd stay the same age, so I’ve kept the music as something that other people can play, I can play. Explain what you mean again.

Audience member

You played us examples of hardcore tracks and psytrance tracks from the ‘90s and it sort of makes me think of a Skrillex sound, you know what I mean? Like 15 years removed, but still the maximum impact and high energy and still this simplicity too.

Addison Groove

I wouldn’t have given you this example if I hadn’t grown up on it. When I was younger that’s what I was into, so I listen to it now for nostalgia. But it is high energy and the same rules apply to today’s music, like Skrillex, and to what it was then.

Emma Warren

I’d just add that the main difference is that the roots of those things are different so the fruits of those things are gonna be different. Maybe there are areas that are comparable but I don’t know if psytrance has a deep underground. Skrillex is part of the dubstep world, like it or not, but there’s also stuff which comes from that culture that is very different, which is deeper, more underground, more musically rounded. I don’t know if that is true with psytrance, it may well be, but I don’t know if it is. To me that’d be the difference. There are similarities but the bigger picture would be different.

Audience member

Speaking again of the rave music from the ‘90s, it was prohibited stuff and it added some spicy flavor to this music, because it was forbidden fruit.

Emma Warren

Do you mean not cool, or was it literally prohibited in some areas?

Audience member

It was not illegal, but it was not like nowadays, when the dubstep is pushed and you can hear a lot of tunes every day, every blog. Sometimes I walk along the streets in my city and I see some street dancers, some really young guys, like 15, and they’re trying to move to dubstep. When I hear some commercials, I hear dubstep at the background. What do you think is more effective and important and true, that the music should be prohibited, illegal or open to the whole world? What pushes it forwards more effectively?

Emma Warren

You mean should stuff stay underground or should it be for everybody?

Addison Groove

What exists right now, there’s underground elements of it. The track I played just now, my track, I’d say that’s an underground track, it’s not played by the biggest DJs. I remember with drum & bass, you played it in the clubs and then you started to hear it in commercials. I don’t think it took anything away from the music that I didn’t like about it. It existed there and it existed in the club, it’s a different kind of thing. Do you have anything to say on this?

Emma Warren

No, I agree. You can’t expect a scene that had so much energy in it to stay as it was. Stuff has a life of its own. Everything that’s happened was bound to happen and then that will go off and create other stuff. Scenes don’t exist separately from other things, everything feeds everything else.

Addison Groove

And dubstep is so variable. You can have that high-energy sound and then you can have that very slow-paced track which will fit on a film or a commercial. That’s the great thing about dubstep. When I first heard it, it opened me up to dubstep. I was like, “Wow, the possibilities are amazing.” When I was getting into dubstep I was, “Wait until the Brazilians get into this. They’ll make some crazy rhythms.” Yet to hear it, I think, but that happened with drum & bass.

Emma Warren

You mean like what Patife and co. did with Brazilian drum & bass?

Addison Groove

They took it in a Brazilian style and it reinvented drum & bass.

Emma Warren

Where’s the samba step? It’s a challenge out now.

Addison Groove

It’s just a great tempo to work at so you can do various things with it.

Emma Warren

That was my thing about dubstep, that it wasn’t a genre, it was a community of people making music at roughly the tempo and at roughly the same kind of feel. It wasn’t a genre, and that’s why it can support loads of different types in this very, very broad umbrella.

Addison Groove

It’s the same as this whole movement with what’s going on now with Night Slugs, Swamp 81, you can’t really define what it is. If anything, but it’s dubstep in a way.

Emma Warren

Steve Reich said at the Academy, any artist that talks about genres should wash their mouth out with soap and water. Leave that to the journalists.

Audience member

Hi, I’m probably a similar age to yourself. My first love was hardcore, early ‘90s, maybe a bit later, ‘92, ’93. I perceive it as being this dirty word, all a bit messy. But for the benefit of people who don’t know, can you namecheck some DJs, people worth checking out to hear the good stuff?

Addison Groove

I can give you a record label. Basement Records, almost their whole catalog is great. From hardcore into… it wasn’t officially a genre, but, back to these genre things, some people coined the term jungle-techno. What happened with Basement and a few labels, it started off as a hardcore label and evolved into a jungle label. You listen to all their releases and you see the progression. That’s a great label to understand how throughout the years hardcore into jungle happened. And Moving Shadow as well. Moving Shadow is one of the greatest dance labels ever. They started off as a hardcore label and moved through into jungle. It’s a great transition, you can see it unfold. And it happened very quickly. From ‘92 up until ‘94. You had hardcore in ‘92. Then by ‘94 it was going into jungle. In the space of that time it transformed quite quickly.

Audience member

Just one more, do you see a similarity between jungle music and footwork?

Addison Groove

Oh, yeah. I mixed your track last night into a drum & bass tune at the club. You’re a great example of the drum & bass-footwork.

Emma Warren

Do you wanna tell us the track you’re talking about?

Addison Groove

The Adam F one, “Circles.”

Audience member

Yeah, I did some edits of jungle stuff into footwork.

Addison Groove

Fantastic, I’d say. I’ve been playing it in most of my sets ‘cause I like to finish off quite fast. That particular track mixes well with jungle. I find that footwork stuff is almost the same tempo as jungle. When you put a drum & bass loop underneath a juke track it really works well. It all feels like the same thing to me.

Audience member

It’s interesting what you’re thinking about your love of jungle and now footwork, whether there’s a connection.

Addison Groove

What it’s done for me is given me the ability to DJ jungle again, ‘cause I can bring it into my sets. I love it, it’s cool.

Audience member

I just saw Rashad spin in Berlin and he put jungle into his set, just two songs. I was like, “Whaaat?”

Addison Groove

Excellent. I played with Rashad last week and every time I love it. He’s full of energy, it’s a good energy.

Emma Warren

Is this when you and Rashad were in Poland?

Addison Groove

Yes, we played the Unsound Festival.

Audience member

I was just going to ask if you prefer DJing or playing live?

Addison Groove

I get asked that quite a lot. I don’t prefer any because the way it works, I’ll DJ twice on a weekend and the weekend after I’ll do two live set. It’s fairly balanced, nicely balanced. So, say in a month I did ten gigs, three or four of them will be live. So it keeps that nice element of it still being quite rare. I think if I did it all the time, maybe not so much. I enjoy DJing juke, I like playing people’s music in a club, I like mixing. The DJ sets have that energy that’s higher than a live set. But I like them equally and in different ways.

Audience member

Hi. The thing about juke, a lot of music from different origins is merging into it. It kind of bridges between a lot of things, like the first music you hear when you’re a teenager and you put your anger into it. For some of us, that was hardcore, for others it’s maybe heavy hip-hop or Chicago house music. You’ll find all these things in there. Basically my question was: When was your first contact with juke? For example, I started listening to rap music really late and the first time I heard it in a club was a UK DJ, Martello, and it was a remix of Young Money, “I like every girl in the world,” so there’s a low-pitch vocal at some point. Then it started looping and the tom came. That was the first time I heard fast music for a long time that was actually good in clubs. So was it a UK DJ or did you have it straight from Chicago?

Addison Groove

Early on, maybe 2005, I heard the “Percolator” track. I was like, I like that track.

Emma Warren

Give us a bit more context of what you’re talking about.

Addison Groove

The “Percolator” track was the biggest booty-bass track around. Do you know when it came out?

Emma Warren

Nineties.

Addison Groove

I didn’t learn about it till later. At the time I was really getting into this dubstep stuff. Years later I saw on YouTube these footwork battles, 2008 maybe, and it reminded me of the “Percolator” stuff. I thought this is interesting, kind of ghettotech style but super-rhythmic. I learned about juke the same way I learned Ableton – YouTube. I was watching the videos, listening, and this is the insanest thing I’ve heard since dubstep. It’s simply that, just being a curious YouTuber.

Emma Warren

School of YouTube.

Audience member

Who were the other UK DJs who were into this and spurred this movement?

Addison Groove

There were a few people who were making stuff that were influenced by it. Ramadanman, he had a release on Swamp 81, and Girl Unit, Night Slugs. These tracks came out around the same time as “Footcrab” so we were all aware that juke is around.

Emma Warren

Also Mike Paradinas from Planet Mu, who put out the Bangs And Works compilation. He was very on it as well. He talked about having to search people down on Facebook, he didn’t know what their names were. He found Rashad ‘cause one of Rashad’s old teachers had built a website for someone and he managed to locate these people.

Addison Groove

He basically found these people in Chicago who are impossible to find. There’s this music around, you don’t know anything about the artist, don’t know how to get hold of him. I think that’s what appeals to it as well, that alienness of it. Everything’s open on the Internet. I was saying earlier about keeping tracks just for the clubs, it’s that kind of thing. It gives you a bit of mystery. Like Burial; he became iconic, his music is amazing, but at the same time there was such a mystery around it. You had these two things going on. UK thing maybe. [laughs]

Audience member

I’m curious, you have these two alter egos. How do you decide which one is which? Do you think, “Now I’m gonna work on an Addison Groove track”? Or do you work on a track and go, “This is…”? Do you have a hard time figuring out which one?

Addison Groove

I know what you mean. There’s definition between the two. One is using the drum machine. I do limit myself, and from me limiting myself using the drum machine, it’s made me more creative with it.

Audience member

So you only use the drum machine for Addison Groove stuff?

Addison Groove

Not entirely, I use samples of course.

Audience member

But you wouldn’t use it for Headhunter?

Addison Groove

I’ve used it for a couple of sounds, but the difference is the Headhunter stuff is very half-step style, dubstep; it has that sound to it. Addison Groove style is a bit looser – it could be house-y, techno-y kind of thing, so I never really know what I’m making when I make an Addison Groove track. But when I make a Headhunter track, I know what I want the end result will sound like, I know what I want it to be, how to shape it.

Audience member

Do you ever find yourself working on something and it’s in between, then you have to take it one way or another?

Addison Groove

There’s one track that’s gonna come out on a compilation on Tectonic soon, which is literally half and half. It’s gonna be an Addison Groove thing – it’s quite techy, but it’s using the drum machine as well.

Emma Warren

Do you think there’d be another name on the horizon if you started making music that was radically different?

Addison Groove

Hmm, I hadn’t thought about that. I don’t think so. I really enjoy the versatility and doing things at different tempos. I don’t feel the need to find another one.

Emma Warren

So it’s more like you think this sound will develop, so Addison Groove will develop as a sound. Rather than kind of more like if you look at Mark Pritchard’s records, he marked the different phases of his career with different names, probably for lots of different reasons.

Addison Groove

I haven’t been around for that long really so maybe I’ll change my attitude in a couple of years.

Emma Warren

Two down, see what happens next.

Addison Groove

But it’s nice to have no restrictions on I can do. I like keeping things as Addison Groove because it’s good to build one name. It’s important not to spread yourself too thinly. If you keep one thing, and keep it going… an example of that would be someone like Modeselektor. They released their first album, their second album, their third album, and now they’re on the front cover of all the magazines. They’ve kept it consistent with the same idea.

Emma Warren

Do we have any more questions?

Audience member

You’ve talked about the mixdown being one of the most challenging parts of track making. How much do you see that as being part of the artistry of it? Would you delegate that to someone else or do you take pride in that?

Addison Groove

No, I enjoy it and I enjoy making things sound the way I like them to sound. But you could listen to 100 juke tracks that are produced really, really badly, and they sound amazing because they’re full of this soul and vibe. I’d say to anyone, music composition is far greater than the mixdown. But it does help to be able to sculpt sound and control it the way you want it to be. It’s a good element to have as part of your production. But I’d say the composition part of it is far greater.

Audience member

We’ve been talking a bit about juke and footwork, but we haven’t talked about the dance. I think that should be brought up because the music wouldn’t exist without the dance and vice versa.

Addison Groove

That’s right. It’s the first instance of something like this existing in current time. Obviously, before it was breakdancing, rap and hip-hop.

Audience member

Have you seen any dancing live yet?

Addison Groove

No.

Audience member

It’s hard to come by.

Addison Groove

I wish. I’ve spent some time with Rashad and I said, “Can you show me something?” But there was no time to do that. I’d love to. I think there were some people touring as part of the Planet Mu tour.

Audience member

The music is really good, it’s really weird. And they know this already, it’s just the perils of touring with more than one or two people. It costs money, it’s expensive. And also, the dancers feed off each other, so one or two dancers the entire night is too much, and it’s a difficult dance. I’m from Chicago, I’ve been to a few battles on the South Side. It’s amazing. You can literally be there for three or four hours and hear nothing but footwork, but never once think, “Oh, this is too much.” Because the dancing is so exciting and the DJs feed off the dancers.

Addison Groove

It reminds me of tap dancing.

Audience member

It’s crazy, the battles, they need to take five- to ten-minute breaks after sessions because they go so hard.

Emma Warren

Is the dancing evolving?

Audience member

Yeah, it’s really cool. It’s a very small, small niche. Even in Chicago it’s very small. Most DJs in Chicago aren’t playing footwork or juke.

Emma Warren

What do you mean by small? A couple of hundred people?

Participant

Yeah, a few hundred people. It’s still predominantly very black, very South Side. Chicago is massive and it’s very segregated still.

Addison Groove

Are there dedicated clubs putting juke on? Or footwork parties?

Audience member

The footwork parties happen, but not really in clubs, ‘cause it’s a very young scene. There’s kids like nine, eight, 10 year olds dancing. It’s community-based, too, ‘cause the South Side of Chicago is really hood, really rough. It’s about keeping kids off the streets, instead of selling drugs, gangs, which is really bad in Chicago.

Addison Groove

It’s a positive underground vibe.

Audience member

It’s usually $5 to get in and at a community center. It’s not at nightclubs, they don’t even sell alcohol. It’s at community centers or parks. A lot of times in summer you’ll see it in the street.

Addison Groove

It must be amazing for Rashad and Spinn then to come over and see it in clubs. When you play their music in clubs it sounds really good.

Audience member

They set up whatever speakers they can get their hands on that has some bass and they’ll play, play, play. Dancers will make suggestions, they’ll tease, “Give me something harder, faster.” So Rashad is forced to play something a little faster, harder. Rashad and Spinn are at a certain level now, but then you’ve got kids like Earl and Manny that are 18, 19, that are coming up. They hang out together and make beats on the MPC. They’ll make seven, eight, or nine a day, all day. They don’t do anything but make beats. They’re not DJing, they just make beats all day, it’s crazy.

Addison Groove

I guess people in the UK or around the world, if they make music, they’re making it for the club. But these guys aren’t necessarily doing that.

Audience member

They’re making it for the dances. If they stop making music the dances will stop evolving, and vice versa.

Addison Groove

It’s amazing, it’s really cool.

Emma Warren

I can only second all of that. Are we finished with questions? If you have anything you can come up and talk to each other afterwards. So if we consider ourselves finished we should do our thank-you’s and then have our little secret moment. Addison Groove, thank you very much. [applause]