Domu

Nick Dwyer

He’s Dominic to his mum, but you might know him as Domu, you might know him as Rima, with Enrico aka Volcov who you saw earlier, as a DJ, as Sonar Circle, the drum & bass producer – and I’m not even going to try and list the others ‘cause there’s millions and I’d get lost. Are you well?

Domu

I’m okay.

Nick Dwyer

I think a good idea would be to play a Domu track you’ve done, that would be a good way to show people what you’re about.

Domu

Well, I’ll play the vocal [version] of this.

(music: Unforscene – “Don’t You Worry”)

Nick Dwyer

As you said before, you’re a breakdown man and you said you’re a bit of a rave kid. Going right back for you, it all came from the DJing side of things, and you started DJing very young, at 14years old. Tell us about those times.

Domu

Well, I wasn’t really into anything as a teenager. I was really rubbish at sport and generally quite quiet at school, so DJing was a great thing you could learn on your own and not have to show anyone until you were kind of good and you’re kind of happy with it. So when I was 14 and there was nothing else really going on, I pushed myself into music, and really before that I had no interest in music at all. I’d played with toys until the age of 12 and I was just in fantasy world, and then DJing and music came along, and it was jungle and hardcore and rave and it was a really exciting time in British music, and I was just at the age where I understood it completely. It meant something to me. It had elements of teen angst and it had this drug culture thing with it as well, it was all quite rebellious. Because in the late ‘80s there was the acid thing that happened, and I read about in the newspapers about the acid house parties, and the middle classes were up in arms about it, and it had a kind of teenage rebellion appeal to it.

Nick Dwyer

So ‘92, ‘93, musically within that whole spectrum, what were the labels, the DJs, and the parties that stood out for you?

Domu

It started as illegals from the late ‘80s, but into the early ‘90s, around the M25 [motorway] outside of London, there was a big middle England commuter belt of young people that started doing illegal raves in warehouses, like Exodus and Raindance and things like this, and they were all free parties. I’m from Bedfordshire, which is around London, it’s a shire around London, and this scene was really created out of lots of young people who didn’t have any clubs or anything relevant to themselves. The DJs who were playing at these illegal scenes just became household names for the kids who were swapping tapes at school. So the first tape I had was a Grooverider tape from what was that club he used to do with Goldie?

Nick Dwyer

Rage.

Domu

Yeah, Rage. A Grooverider Rage tape. And then it went on from there, because ‘92 was the summer of the big raves, Dreamscape and all the big things like that. And also you had the rave stuff in the charts like The Prodigy and Altern8, so it was all there to piece together and become part of it.

Nick Dwyer

Was this the stage where you had people like Carl Cox?

Domu

Well, then there was no boundary, but now we have jungle, drum & bass, tech-step, happy hardcore, whatever — everything is genre-fied and put into a little box. But back then, in those golden days [laughs] it wasn’t as segregated. Carl Cox used to play a rough kind of Amen [break] bleepy rave track and then play a really stupid chipmunk record [sings high-pitched melody], you know, with fast pianos, and it was all the same thing because it was a primitive music and it hadn’t been established. Though there is some rubbish in that, it does make for a quite honest scene.

Nick Dwyer

For you as a producer now, your palette is wide and varied. Was this born out of this whole early rave ethos – whether it was four-to-the-floor or some dirty Belgian R&S style thing, you were all into it?

Domu

Thing is, I’ve never really done drugs. And I was 14 or 15 at this point, so I wasn’t doing acid or doing Es and going off my head and raving, because I was too young. I was just interested in the fusion element of it, because I grew up listening to my mum listening to soul, Tamla Motown and reggae, and my older sister listening to electro and hip-hop. I could hear that these things were included here, and this whole acid thing that I’d heard a bit of, and there was just a point where they all met, but it was none of them. It was something truly new, and that’s a point in music, a point in time that it’s hard to hit. I mean, maybe it’s happening now for young people, but because I was young at that time, it meant something to me.

Nick Dwyer

Now you’ve got a record here, a 4hero one, that’s a good example of this whole time, this whole era.

Domu

In a way it’s past this era. I wouldn’t mind starting before that, actually. I’ll start with this Ragga Twins, because there was a fusion – there was hip-house in the late ‘80s, which was kind of relevant to people who liked jacking Chicago and New York house music with rapping over the top, like Doug Lazy and things like that. But the British version was to be a bit more ragga and a bit more jumpy.

(music: Ragga Twins – “Juggling”)

Then on the same record… [cues up B-side]

(music: Ragga Twins – “Wipe The Needle”)

It’s all quite primitive stuff, but that was a time when there was no name for it, it was just music for music’s sake.

Nick Dwyer

That’s on Shut Up And Dance. How influential was Shut Up and Dance at this point in time?

Domu

Well, Reinforced is a label that means a lot to me, and I think if there wasn’t Shut Up And Dance, I truly don’t think there’d be Reinforced. I think they looked at each other at that time, in the early stages, and vibed a lot off each other. “Mr Kirk’s Nightmare” was the big 4hero thing, but Shut Up And Dance were around in ‘87, ‘88 and were experimenting with a similar sort of thing, and it’s this kind of north-west London sound.

Nick Dwyer

When did you make the transition from 14- or 15-year-old eager to rave it up to actually getting on the turntables and getting active DJing?

Domu

It was the height of the jungle thing, like summer of ‘92. I was 14 and I just got some Soundlab [decks] and a basic two-channel mixer and just stayed in and learnt it, listened to the jungle tapes and bought jungle records. But then I found Reinforced, and Reinforced really opened my eyes to a world away from ragga jungle, with their kind of scientific angle. It was a lot more grown-up.

(music: 4hero – “Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare”)

I’d listen to that and would think, "How the hell did they do that?”

Nick Dwyer

Time-stretching?

Domu

It’s time-stretching. But in 1992, it wasn’t time-stretching.

Nick Dwyer

That was one of the first records that...

Domu

They had a Harmonizer. They hired this machine called a [H-3000] Harmonizer, which just played it up at different pitches. With time-stretching you can achieve the same thing, which I later found out. But equipment then was so limited and so basic. I mean, everyone here has access to a computer with umpteen [gigabytes] of memory. The samplers they were using then, the Akai S950, had two-and-a-quarter megabytes. Maximum. That was flat-out, fully loaded. And people who made music before then will tell you, “Yeah? Well, I used to use a sampler that you had to pedal to use,” and things like that. [laughs] “Yeah, well, I didn’t even have a sampler, I had to make it all on a guitar.” But, you know, everyone has a tale whereby they were more hard done by than the generation [after]. But it was really, really difficult to make technical-sounding, advanced music. They were a real inspiration to me, because they were just taking it [further]. They had all these jazz-funk and space-funk influences that I had no idea what it was, they had all these Detroit influences.

Nick Dwyer

For people out there that don’t know, tell us about Reinforced Records and its importance.

Domu

Well, Shut Up and Dance was very influential, DJ Hype was with them at the start and it was very early breakbeat-ragga-fusion-electro-acid music, and Reinforced was really a very similar thing. Reinforced had some big records that charted, like [Manix’s] “Head in the Clouds” and things like that, and they sold a lot of records, like 20 or 30,000. They had a 7” single that went in the charts. I mean, “Mr Kirk’s Nightmare” sold hundreds of thousands, but they got a bit ripped off with that. But it was the template for me, for the attitude and the direction of British breakbeat music at that time.

Nick Dwyer

Ironically enough, that was the first label you released stuff through. How did you go from DJing [to producing]?

Domu

Well, at this stage — this is late ‘92, early ‘93 — I’d just got an Amiga 500 or something. At that time it was Atari STs and Amiga 500s. And I had an 8-bit sampler soundcard thing that you could plug into the back and you could make demos on it, you know? I used to get Amens and Apaches [breaks] and loop them up and get tone basses and start learning how to chop breaks on the dirtiest imaginable 8-bit... Actually, it might have even been 2-bit sound, literally [laughs].

Nick Dwyer

Still dirty, though.

Domu

Oh, it was a dirty sound. But there was a guy, Bizzy B, who used to release records made on an Amiga, and Mickey Finn and Aphrodite had a big tune made on an Amiga.

Nick Dwyer

There’s also a guy, Paradox, who still uses one.

Domu

It’s very basic stuff. But I made some demos, sent them to Reinforced. Well, I sent them to three places: Reinforced, Vinyl Distribution, which was a big hub for lots of hardcore drum & bass labels, and La Bello Blanco, which was another kind of biggish label. Reinforced and Vinyl got back to me and said, “OK, come in for a chat,” and Reinforced were just the most down to earth. Vinyl were saying, “Right, we need you to learn how to play the keyboard, and we need you to cut your hair, and you need to be like this.” And I was 16, I just wanted to make records and put them out.

I realized quite young that making records was the only way to get on DJing. All I wanted was my own music to swap with people and to get into the circle. Because the drum & bass scene, the jungle scene, to me as a kid… I wanted to be in there doing it. I wanted to be on the scene, on the circuit. I wanted to be a superstar DJ making rinse-out tunes and living the life, like Andy C, and I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen. Andy C did “Long Dark Tunnel,” which was a massive jungle tune everywhere, and that kind of allowed him into the scene. “Right, Andy, you’re in!” And that was it. But from then on, I don’t remember anyone, up to maybe Alex Reece or Ed Rush & Optical, being allowed into the scene to DJ on the strength of a record. Certainly not just a DJ making it up through the ranks to be a superstar drum & bass DJ. That’s all I wanted, and I realized quite early on that wasn’t going to happen. So I just started making music, and the people at Reinforced, 4hero, were very honest about the music you made. I mean, I’ve had my dreams shattered by them, with a piece of music that I’ve thought was the best in the world. I’d take it into them, sit there and play it to them — “Nah, I don’t like it.” And I’m like, “Right, what do I do now? I’m just gonna give up.” Because they were my heroes, they were my inspiration, they were like everything, and they were taking the time to give me criticism and put my records out. All I wanted to do was to get on in there.

Nick Dwyer

Was it refreshing to see Marc and Dego didn’t have this whole drum & bass circuit attitude?

Domu

Well, that made me realize I wasn’t going to make it, because Reinforced was this outside thing. Reinforced was Reinforced, and then there was the rest of the drum & bass scene. So their attitude really rubbed off on me, and to sort of say, “You know what? I can just be one of those people and make those rinse-out tunes and go that route, but you’re not going to make a mark, and you’re not going to get in there, because you’ll just be doing the same thing.” So from that point I kind of realized you have to go against the grain if you want to be noticed.

Nick Dwyer

Tell us about Sonar Circle, obviously you took a few more tracks to them and they noticed.

Domu

Yeah, I had one 12" and then a year passed trying to find what that sound was, and that didn’t work, so I found another one. So that was a year later and another 12", and I had a track on Enforcers, which was the big Reinforced compilation that they did sporadically.

Nick Dwyer

Nice picture disc, too.

Domu

Yeah, nice picture disc, that made them quite famous. But at this stage, I was trying to make drum & bass with a different edge and it became increasingly hard, because the scene was changing. DJs weren’t playing what Reinforced was making, and we were just becoming more and more obscure. It wasn’t drum & bass anymore, we’d sort of become something else. But I’ll play you a track from that period. This is called “Us And Them.”

(music: Sonar Circle – “Us and Them”)

Nick Dwyer

You say this got released in 1998, and around this time the whole drum & bass scene had become very formulaic – the whole tech-step thing. Whereas Reinforced was always coming from that breakbeat science point of view of editing drums.

Domu

Also fusing live instruments. [4hero’s 1998 album] Two Pages had happened and I was obviously very influenced by that, and I wanted to seem like I was being more musical and more thoughtful. But with equipment limitations and knowledge limitations, I don’t feel like I got it across at that point. I mean, I’m happy about how it all went, but that whole album is peppered with different tempos and tempo changes.

Nick Dwyer

What’s the album called, for people out there?

Domu

The album was Radius, an album I did on Reinforced. It’s long gone now, you’ll never find that [laughs].

Nick Dwyer

Was it disheartening to see an entire scene, that you had invested so much time and passion and late night trips to some rave three hours from Bedford, go down this narrow-minded route?

Domu

I was shattered. I was a fan. I was a DJ and a fan of this music, and it was like six or seven years of my life that just doesn’t mean anything anymore. I had a huge collection of drum & bass and jungle records that I just looked at and thought, “That’s it, I’ve cut it off. I’m gonna cut that point there and it stops and I’ll move on my way, ’cause there’s nothing…” Well, there’s the odd tune now. There’s artists like Paradox, Fracture & Neptune, Cartridge, Marcus Intalex and people like that that are still kind of pushing it, but pushing it within a kind of frame. There’s always this tempo barrier, always this structure barrier that makes drum & bass what it is.

Nick Dwyer

The breakdown goes there...

Domu

Exactly, and that’s really my problem with it. If you’re influenced by other music, you’re not really free to make all of the different music or include all of the different music you like at one point. So, I couldn’t be part of it, I couldn’t try and kid myself that I was just going to let it go.

Nick Dwyer

Obviously this album takes a wide range of influences, and at this point in time you’re using live instrumentation

Domu

A little bit, yeah.

Nick Dwyer

Was this period still strictly Sonar Circle?

Domu

That was the point that I started to think, “You know what? I don’t think I can be just Sonar Circle.” Because I’d had seven or eight records out, I can’t remember how old I was – six years ago I was 20 and I wanted to make more of a go of it. And I met Enrico through Dollis Hill and Enrico had just done...

Nick Dwyer

When you say Dollis Hill...?

Domu

Dollis Hill was the base of Reinforced Records. Enrico was going there, that’s when he lived in England, and Dego was about to start 2000Black and Enrico had just started Archive and he’d heard Radius, and he said, “Well, I like this midtempo, weird stuff that you’re doing, why don’t you do some for my label?” And I did one for Dego, for 2000Black, which is the first Domu thing. Shall I play that? And then shortly afterwards, I did one for Archive and kind of found a base in Archive.

Nick Dwyer

And Archive as we learnt before is Enrico’s label. And this came out in 1999?

Domu

1999, yeah. And it’s called “Dressed To Ill.”

(music: Domu – “Dressed To Ill”)

I look back at that and kind of keep that as the benchmark for what I’m trying to achieve. There’s a certain amount of naivety in that. My thing is beats, I program beats a lot of the time and that’s what I started doing, but playing keys is another element, writing songs is another element. But the keys thing... The key playing in that is quite naive, but there’s something about it that I like, its rawness and its untutored-ness, which is really what I’m about. You can know too much about music, you can know too many rules, and that’s really what this whole thing is about, it’s about rules. You can start to break rules once you understand them, but I think you have a far wider scope if you never actually learn the rules – because there’s never a boundary. And once you start saying to yourself, “OK, it doesn’t really sound like house,” well, then that’s what it is. There should be more of that with modern music making.

Nick Dwyer

Was it pretty strange feeling for you at this stage going from doing Sonar Circle, and you’re even struggling to get people to play this form of drum & bass, to making this record that sounded so fresh and new, and all of a sudden you’ve got people like Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge going, “Oh yeah!”

Domu

Well, not all of a sudden, I’ll hold you up there [laughs]. It was quite a long and arduous journey. But yeah, a whole other world started to open up to me from that point. There were people who were open-minded, there were DJs that had spent their adult life fighting for a cause, which was this type of music, which is eclectic music. I was lucky to be around at that time when people from lots of different genres were breaking away from whatever their genre was because of the closed-mindedness of it. You know, you have people like IG Culture who was in an acid jazz, hip-hop thing, he worked with Young Disciples, he had a thing called Dodge City Productions, which was a big-ish British hip-hop act. You had Phil Asher, who was a UK house producer, kind of losing his way a bit. You had Marc and Dego, 4hero drum & bass producers, losing their way a bit and they were like elder statesmen. They’ve all had big deals, they all know how the business works and they started to talk about doing something else.

Nick Dwyer

It wasn’t just Marc and Dego from Reinforced...

Domu

Well, we were all there as well, you know? I mean, Seiji and G Force were there as well, and they later went on work with Orin and Kaidi and Daz to make Bugz [In The Attic]. But Bugz was kind of bubbling when we were at Reinforced at that time. Seiji would say to me, “You know, you should really do some of this stuff for Bugz,” and I’d be like, “What’s Bugz?” And even at this stage, Goya, the distributor that Enrico talked about, had a label called People Records which made, at the start of this scene, very influential records from IG Culture and people like that. And they’d already been out in 1998, and I’d missed them because I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t know what my direction was. I kind of liked Jazzanova, I kind of liked 4hero, and I kind of liked Hefner and people like this that were being different, but there was no umbrella, there was no name for it. And now, if you want to know what it is, it’s called broken beat, but I look back at that period of ‘98, ‘99 and much prefer it then, because it wasn’t called anything, people were just making music and you had to go and find it.

Nick Dwyer

Was there a good support network, as such? Everyone was supporting each other?

Domu

Well, there wasn’t really, it was just people with similar ideas. It’s like people here working together. They’d be like, “Right, OK, we’ll do this,” and everyone would be really excited and buzzing because there’s no structure. But imagine if we all lived here for three years, we’d do each others’ heads in after a little while. “I don’t want to play on the flute today. Just leave me alone.” [laughter] And that kind of happens in a scene. It’s the same thing. You don’t live together but you see each other everyday, you talk about music everyday and it just wears you down. And in a way I can see how scenes like the UK drum & bass scene... There’s no one at the center of a scene saying, “I’m gonna take this scene there, and I’m going to control it.” It’s just a bunch of people making music, and it can go wrong, And it quite often does. So in a way, you’re better off on your own thinking about what you’re doing with someone you can really trust, rather than entrusting your faith to the god of broken beat, whoever he may be, you know? [Laughter] Come on, god of broken beat, get me there, get me through.

Nick Dwyer

At what point did different influences come in, be it Detroit techno or…?

Domu

That all came from 4hero really, and Enrico. Enrico’s a really big influence on me on the Detroit side. I never really liked any house music, I must say. Sorry, if anyone comes from a house music world, but I really hated it. Because I was a breakbeat boy, you know? I like my breaks. I was a b-boy. I came from UK hip-hop. Well, kind of fast US hip-hop, like late ‘80s, early ‘90s fast US hip-hop, into UK hip-hop, and I like breaks. I like funky breaks from funk tunes, and I didn’t like disco or disco breaks. And it’s only in the last two or three years I’ve really let myself think, “Ah right, you can make nice house music, you can make nice disco-influenced music.”

I think it was probably my age, really because I was always so hardcore. It’s like, beats – that’s everything, that’s life. And scratching. Being a producer I just learned to be a bit more open-minded about house music and the subtleties of house music. The same way that hip-hip has subtleties that I had to learn. Every established music has a discipline that you must understand before you can subvert it. Before I could subvert drum & bass, make it different, I had to understand the way that everyone else was doing it. You have to have some kind of idea of the rule that you’re breaking.

Nick Dwyer

How does this work for you? I mean, obviously your music is covering so many different genres. Are you actively, before you start mucking around with this genre, are you actively going out checking records, checking what’s hot, or whatever?

Domu

It’s not like I’m some kind of genre prankster or something. “Ha ha, I’ve found a new genre that must be twisted!” I just like what I like and I interpret that in a way that’s trying to be quite honest and pure. You know, I’ve gotten into Brazilian music and I’m going to incorporate that into my music. I’m gotten into techno, so I’ll incorporate some of that. And it’s just trying to make something different. It’s the fusion element where things haven’t been done before. It’s not just like now, having mash-ups – “I’m going to take the ‘Trick Me’ a cappella and put it over Depeche Mode.” That’s not really the same thing. It’s more about mixing your influences and creating something that hasn’t really been done before.

Nick Dwyer

Tell us a bit more about the Rima project. How did that start to take shape?

Domu

Rima was born out of the communication that me and Enrico had, talking about Brazilian music and boogie, slow house music and that kind of stuff, and we thought it would be interesting to make an album which fused elements of Latin music with some tracks that were blatant boogie, house tracks. I’ll play a bit. So on one side we did this cover of “Vidigal”.

Nick Dwyer

How did this work, was this you flying to Verona?

Domu

We had a couple of sessions together but generally after that we did it by post, which is time-consuming.

(music: Rima – “Vidigal”)

(music: Rima – “Let It Go”)

Domu

That was on Compost, well, Jazzanova Compost Records. That was two years ago, so we really should start doing another one. I was a big fan of Jazzanova. They were a very influential act to me at the time when I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. And I was very flattered for them to be interested in having a project with us, and that was the outcome of it. We wanted to have quite a high standard of songs and playing, and have a lot of live playing. Because it is easy for me to slip into studio mode and just jiggle around some sounds and, you know, I can impress the nerds with it. But when you’re trying to write songs, when you are trying to make something appear like you are actually a producer, you have to pull out all the stops and make a bit of an effort. Especially now, as the market is how it is, if you want to be on top of the game you have to have sources that are of a high standard to make a product that is [of a high standard].

Nick Dwyer

As well as the Rima project you also have this Kudu project, tell us about that.

Domu

I was a little bit out of my depth with them. I went to work with Seiji at the Bugz and Mark de Clive-Lowe, who is a keyboard player, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was in an environment where I was a bit out of my depth, a bit out of control. I had done some beats, and they did what they did and I kind of sat there and went, “Yeah, that sounds good.” I was quite young and shy.

Nick Dwyer

How long ago was this?

Domu

It was like four years ago. It was a bit of a rude awakening. But on the other side of that, just from working with people for one day or two days, watching someone else program, I learned so much about shortcuts, about mixing. I learned a lot. And I hated it because it made me feel really small. It made me feel like I didn’t know what on earth I was doing, because I was in someone else’s environment. But it was one of the most positive things that ever happened to me as a producer. To realize that maybe my way isn’t always the best way, maybe someone else knows how to do it better. As a producer you need to realize that you must always learn. You could be the most thoroughly read, nerdy producer in the world and still someone will come along and show you something that’s more about feel than technical [skill]. “Well, but if you do it like this, it gives it this certain feel…”

Nick Dwyer

You ended up working with them again on a dance thing?

Domu

Legends of the Underground, it’s a project that’s in the process of hopefully getting fairly big. It’s a dance display, like modern dance, jazz dance, street dance, with a storyline and visuals that work alongside the dancing. We had to construct the music for it to a storyboard. I did all the beats, Mark de Clive-Lowe did all the music with Bembé Ségué on vocals and a few other musicians. And then Seiji arranged it all and mixed it. They did a half-hour presentation at Paradiso, which is a club in Amsterdam, had a full house and a good reaction. It is just an interesting project, another avenue, having your music relate to something people can go and see and it’s a show. The same way as maybe doing music for television or film. It’s another outlet, it is another avenue for people to hear about you.

Nick Dwyer

At this point, musically, how many different avenues have you got? How many different hats are you wearing? There are a lot of aliases out there.

Domu

I only really do it just so I can keep making music. Because if I made a straight hip-hop record as Domu, people would be like, “Yeah, but that’s not Domu.” I can’t make drum & bass as Domu now, it has to be Sonar Circle. I just start building personas, building projects and building possibilities. I don’t like to have all my eggs in one basket. I like to have different projects going in different directions, different labels, different countries, different vibes. So I just have different names and I work with different people. If I do something with Enrico, that has to be Rima. If I do something with my mate [Roberto] Marin that plays bass, that’s for Especial Records, which is a Japanese label, and that [project] is called Bakura. That’s just a name we found on a Star Wars poster, it was just the name of a planet. We were like, “OK, we’ll be called Bakura.” It doesn’t mean anything, but it was the name for that project.

Nick Dwyer

Aside from going into the studio with a collaborator, where it’s for a certain project, but when you are in the studio by yourself, how does this creative process work? Do you walk in there and go, “Right, I’m going to do an Umod thing now,” or does something just happen along the way?

Domu

I consciously know that I have to do this new Domu album and I am listening to Domu stuff that I’ve done before and I am thinking, “Right, that is what I was thinking four years ago, so I should maybe try and incorporate that feeling – what I was thinking about then and where would that be now?” So yeah, I do have different frames of mind for each project and I am aware of when a project needs to be resurrected, just in amounts of time. Like Rima was two years ago, so we should start to think about that again soon. But the last Domu album was out three years ago, so I can’t avoid the fact that that has to happen.

Nick Dwyer

And that’s coming out again on...

Domu

On Archive.

Nick Dwyer

Tell us about Umod, because that was released, what? Three or four months ago?

Domu

Umod was again with Jazzanova on Sonar Kollektiv. Umod is Domu backwards. It doesn’t take a genius to work that out, but lots of people didn’t. It was after a touring experience I had. I toured the States for like three weeks and I felt a bit drained emotionally, because I took in a lot of new influences but I also met a lot of new people and left them quite quickly and it was the first long tour I’d been on.

Nick Dwyer

How many weeks?

Domu

It was about 11 gigs and 17 days, which isn’t many. But the thing was, it was 17 days and I went on 17 planes, because a lot of the journeys were broken between two stops. And I don’t fly very well, and it just kind of upset me, really. [Nick Dwyer gives a pat on the back] It’s alright. I wanted to come home and make a record that had some negative energy in it.

(music: Umod – “Just 4 Funk Sake”)

I spent a lot of that time listening to a lot of Dabrye and Prefuse 73 and things like that. I didn’t want to come home and make a record like that, but I listened to a lot of electronic hip-hop, or IDM, as they call it in the States. It was just another different angle. A big thing for me is making music that actually expresses some kind of emotion. It’s all very well making dance music, but dance music can often be quite flat and monotone. From the music I’ve played, I like it to kind of move, to have different sections. If you have a house record that goes verse-chorus-verse-chorus, just in terms of the music, not vocals or anything, if it has different sections that lead into one another I think it makes for a lot more interesting listening. Because I’m not much of a stoner, and stoned music gets you stuck in there and it loops around and it builds very slowly. I’m all for that at different times, but I don’t work stoned, so I don’t try to make stoner music. I make music that has peaks and troughs.

Nick Dwyer

For you, how does the creative process work? Do you always start with beats?

Domu

Generally, but sometimes it can just start with a sound, or a break from a record. You hear a nice Rhodes progression and you think, “I’ll loop that up,” but then I never just loop it up. I’ll replay it and spread it along the keyboard. So it can start with any number of things, really. It rarely starts with an idea in bed, like, “Oh yeah, I just had a great idea for a song.” I’m sitting at the equipment usually. It’s not like writing words down, which you can do on a train. Quite often I do have ideas for tunes on the train, but I haven’t got a laptop, so I just lose them. I wish I could get them back, but...

Nick Dwyer

What does your studio set-up look like now? You’ve progressed from the Amiga.

Domu

Well, I have a computer, but I’m not going to say what it is. [Laughs] I still use an E-mu E6400, which was a late ‘90s sampler. I had an MPC for a long time and I didn’t program on it. The whole point of having an MPC or whatever drum machine you have is to use the swing that it creates, but I don’t know how you program on drum machines. I have no idea how you do that. I program on the screen and people say to me, “Wow, you get such great swing,” or, “Sometimes it sounds like you have a live drummer, there’s so much going on.” But if you spend a little time programming drums on the screen, you play it in by hand and then program over the top and it can sound quite intricate quite quickly.

Nick Dwyer

It would seem that you are fairly productive. You manage to get things out and happening, is this true or false?

Domu

Well, I work every day. I get up and I work, and that’s it. I wake up in the morning and start making music.

Nick Dwyer

No lingering, you just get it done.

Domu

Yeah. Sometimes I’ll go into the studio straight in my pants, just wake up, don’t wash, there’s a massive beard, and realize, “Whoa, I’ve been in here for three weeks.” I’m sure lots of producers are like that. Because my studio is just another room in my house. But if I have an idea at eight at night, I don’t just go and work, because I live in the world with my girlfriend and I live in normal time, so I don’t just go and work. I work [during] work hours, so it creates a regime for myself. I know I am most creative in the morning, I am most creative until midday. I’ve done all the boring programming stuff in the morning, then it’s just creativity between 12 to three, and then at three o’clock I start to dip because I am getting hungry or something.

Nick Dwyer

You’ve been touring a lot recently. Has touring given you inspiration musically?

Domu

Well, the Umod album is a good example of that. Being influenced by DJing is not really that constructive, because I don’t often play that much of my music out on the dancefloor, very rarely. I don’t like to see people stop dancing to it. [Laughter] But when you start to see what works on the dancefloor, it can change the way you make music. Take someone from the drum & bass scene, like Dillinja. Up until around ‘94, ‘95, Dillinja used to make quite experimental drum & bass. Then I think there was a point where he started DJing and started to realize what worked on the dancefloor, and it just changes your whole attitude, because you’re then starting to make music for the dancefloor and you lose this whole element of the mind. It should be three things: mind, body, and soul. Music should appeal to all of those at once. There’s music that’s just for dancing, there’s music that’s just for crying to, and there’s music that is just there to make you think and is political. But if you can try and incorporate all three of those into a record, then I think it makes it last forever, it makes it work on so many different levels.

Nick Dwyer

Different people have heard your music from five different names. The people who are booking you to DJ, do they want to book you as Domu or this or that?

Domu

As long as I know what their night is… I’d rather play an eclectic set. It is a horrible phrase: “Hi, I am an eclectic DJ.” But I just want to be able to play the records that I’m feeling at that time, and old records that I like that are relevant to that kind of movement. If it is a strictly house club, I would struggle playing house all night because I would get a bit bored, likewise drum & bass. I like to be able to move around a bit, play a bit of hip-hop halfway through to chill everyone out a bit, and then take it back up again.

There a lot of different musics and BPMs: 100, 105, 110, 115, 118, 120 and up to the 130 BPM, like fast, 2-steppy, broken beat kind of stuff. It is all relevant at a different point in the night, and not just starting start slow and going faster and faster, because then by five in the morning you’d be playing gabber. [Laughter] You don’t want to do that. Just understanding what the crowd needs at different points. I have a lot of respect for people who just play records as well, they don’t bother about mixing, they don’t care about tempos. Just, here’s a good record, and play it from start to end, and then, here’s another good record. That skill is perhaps better than being technically good, because you are playing records that are just absolutely amazing. I would rather hear that than seamless mixing all night.

Nick Dwyer

You come from a background in turntablism, you’ve mastered it a little bit?

Domu

I’ve nowhere near mastered it. I used to watch the videos and go to the DMC things in the UK. I quite quickly realized I didn’t have the time to commit. I was interested in scratching from early hip-hop days but I couldn’t really scratch on my first decks because they were belt-drive. As soon as I got my Technics I was practising scratching, and trying to break my other hand in so I could go deck-to-deck and stuff, and I was really into it. But I realized it takes literally eight or nine hours of practice a day and I’d have to give up eating, a girlfriend... there just wasn’t time.

Nick Dwyer

Another thing that is kind of missing from the whole picture is a label. It seems that everyone that starts producing, after a while, they get their own label. Why haven’t you? You just can’t be bothered?

Domu

Kind of [laughs]. I just haven’t got time. I am not the most business-minded [person]. I have a very basic business attitude, which is if I can sense that you aren’t going to rip me off, I will be nice to you, until the point you rip me off, when I won’t work with you again. That’s it. I will treat people the way I expect them to treat me. And that’s it, that’s all my business attitude is.

Nick Dwyer

Any bad experiences so far?

Domu

No, it has all been great, but that is because I fell in with Reinforced and they are very down to earth. 4hero have been messed about in the past with record things that went wrong, and so they had a great deal of experience in that and they know what it is like to be young and eager. It was very lucky to fall in with them. But of course, it is very easy to be suckered, especially with complicated things like publishing and licensing and money. I don’t know if I really appeal to a major label. I am fairly unclassifiable as an artist because of all the different names and different styles. If anyone wants to sign me, it’s fine.

Nick Dwyer

You had said you were working on the new Domu album for Archive. What else is happening at the moment?

Domu

I’ve got the Bakura album burning at the back, and the Domu album nearly finished. The Nicola Kramer project — she sang on the Rima album and the Domu album. Actually, I will play a track from the Domu album. I’m actually quite proud of this because I wrote the words to this, and it’s a bit of sad, falling-out-of-love song. But I have done a whole album with her [Nicola Kramer] and it’s just taking a long time to finish because vocalists are hard to pin down sometimes.

(music: Domu – “Last Time”)

Nick Dwyer

How long have you been working with her for?

Domu

I used to be in a band with her, in a kind of jazz-funk band. I was the DJ doing the cuts in the band. We did alright, we were called Collective Unconscious and we did the Jazz Cafe and stuff like that. We reached this thing where you’re 18 or 19 years old in a band, and then what do we do now? I didn’t have the production skills or knowledge to record them at that time, so it just disbanded. But I still work with them on different projects and I work with her. It’s a shame because, as a band, they would be perfect for me to take on the road live because I’ve known them for 10 or 12 years.

Nick Dwyer

So you haven’t done the Domu thing live?

Domu

No, because it is so studio-fiddly. It doesn’t really translate into live very well because it’s all about sample manipulation. With laptops and stuff you could probably do it now, but it would not be completely live. This whole semi-live thing, I really don’t know where I stand with it. [With the Rima project] the logistics of a band too are just unbearable to think about. With a band, you need to pay people for rehearsals, you need to have a group of dedicated musicians that are going to turn up for every practice. You have to practise for a week and then go on tour for a week or month, whatever. They need to be around. The situation just isn’t perfect to have that. I wish there were enough musicians around that I knew and that were of a standard to play my music that didn’t demand to be paid to come to practice. It’s just hard to make it happen.

Nick Dwyer

At this point I might stop asking questions and let you take over. What do we have here? [Gestures to table]

Domu

I just wanted to demonstrate the difference between using single hits and sounds — which is like house music or hip-hop programming — to using breaks. I’m not going to make a tune or anything, I just wanted to give a visual difference of what I think are the two major different ways to making a beat: a breakbeat or single hits. So I’ll do a bit of fiddling. I haven’t loaded up a break but I’ve got some single hits here.

So with the drums that you find, certain drums sound right for certain things. [Demonstrates drum sounds] There’s certain places to find certain drums – funk drums are generally quite loose, gritty and dirty, and they’re not really good for being the main sound upfront, like a hip-hop tune or something like that. So it’s a bit cheeky but I tend to sample from records I like from whatever genre, where it’s a producer I trust, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. I used to have this thing in drum & bass times about not sampling from drum & bass tunes to make drum & bass. I think if you’re going to make a hip-hop tune, you should sample from a house tune or a funk tune. I’d rarely sample from its own genre. That’s just a funny thing that I have. I also have this thing where I never play more than one track off a 12” in the same night, ‘cause I think that’s kind of cheating.

Nick Dwyer

Even if it’s a really strong B-side?

DOMU

Yeah. Dunno, just a funny thing I have. Anyway, these… [plays in drum sounds] The way I work is I play it in by hand. Anyone want to tell me where this kit’s from? It’s all off the same record. Any super nerds? [Plays 4/4 rhythm] That’ll be like a slow house, Theo Parrish thing. [Plays different rhythm] That’s a classic hip-hop beat. [Plays another rhythm] Or if you’re into Destiny’s Child from 1998. But that’s the kind of thing that can start a tune, whatever swing you decided to apply to it. Or even drum & bass [Plays drum & bass rhythm]. You can do whatever you want on any kind of kit and then add to it, elaborate.

My point is that with any set of sounds you can just jam it out and make whatever rhythms you have in your head at the time. That’s the way I start my music. “I’ve been listening to a lot of this or that.” And the first rhythm that comes into my head I’ll put it down and that’ll be it. Hip-hop, house and drum & bass can all be made this way. Often you’re trying to make a [plays hip-hop beat]. But if you sped that up… [demonstrates] It works because these sounds are quite nice. I could do it with a set of sounds that are rubbish and it wouldn’t be inspiring. It’s all about the integrity of the sounds you choose. That’s kind of my point. If you can source a nice set of sounds that will inspire you, if you’ve got rhythms in you then the tune will happen. If you’ve got a load of duff sounds that are presets from a module, it wouldn’t inspire me. It might just be the way that some people work.

Nick Dwyer

Any questions at this point?

Audience member

Could you dive a bit into how you find the good sounds? When you find a funk sample, for instance, what exactly you do to cut it up and reuse it?

Domu

There are a couple of different ways, really. With a waveform, if you see the waveform, it will sound slightly different depending on how much space you have at the start of it and how much space you have at the end of it. So a sound like a hi-hat will sound completely different with loads of noise at the end of it or how tightly it is chopped. Likewise with the space at the start, when you press the key here [presses key], you can hear that is late. But if I program that, it will give it natural swing. If it was bang-on-the-dot, it would be tight. And when I quantize it, it will be super tight, and that will be a sound. But there is also another type of sound where all of the hits aren’t super tight, and that creates another sound. It creates a looser kind of sound, which is more organic. So it depends where you coming from musically. You can say, “I want all the sounds to be tight on this track,” or you can say, “It’s going to be loose.” For soul-y, loose hip-hop, this kit would be good because all the sounds are a bit late. And if you programmed it and didn’t quantize it, it would sound fairly loose. But if I cut all the samples and make all the start points [perfectly tight], it would sound a bit less vibey.

Audience member

You are sleeping in the middle of the night and the broken beat god kidnaps you and leaves you on this island and he says you can use three instruments, hardware, or software synths – what are the three things you’d have to have? You’ve got a computer, you’ve got Logic already, and all your recording equipment.

Domu

My E-mu. Not the animal, that would be ridiculous, unless I got hungry but I don’t eat meat. [Laughter] My E-mu sampler and a keyboard. I would definitely have some type of outboard because it’s nice to have the tweakability of the keyboard. It is all very well having a plethora of plugin synths, and you do have some hands-on features with plugins, you can interface with them very well, but there is a certain sound that comes from analog keyboards that you can’t recreate. So I would have something fairly versatile like a [Roland] Juno, something with bass, pads, lead, and a little tweakage. A nice warm thing like a [Juno] 60 or even a 106 would be alright. I always have a shaker with me, because a little egg shaker doesn’t take up any space but a little bit of live shaking on a record can give it so much vibe. It can, you know? If you have a programmed beat, you don’t even need a pop shield or even a decent mic, and you just shaker into it, straight into audio for a few bars. EQ it up and compress it or whatever, and it’ll sound lovely and it’ll sound live. And if you have extra programming on the top, it’ll have feel, because it’s come from you.

Audience member

We’ve actually been using a shaker made of an old floss container and some sugar.

Domu

Yeah, sugar, beans, rice, we can even record our own bodies. Anything is a possible source of sound. I’m not Herbert – that’s great, that is his thing. But [what he shows] is that you need to be resourceful, you don’t need that much equipment. It’s more about the ideas you have and the choice of sounds. I think that is my point, that if you choose the right four or five sounds, mix it well, you can have a great record. It is more about the process of putting something good in rather than putting average sounds in and working on it for ten years and getting something good out.

Nick Dwyer

Are you going to be around in the practice studio today?

Domu

Yep.

Nick Dwyer

So if anyone feels like asking him anything they’re welcome. Dominic, thank you very much. [Applause]