Plastician
Chris Reed’s career began thanks to a cheap pair of used turntables and an interest in the sounds coming out of his native London, including UK garage. By the early 2000s, Reed had graduated to Rinse FM, then a leading pirate station, and to making his own beats with an ear for a sound that was becoming known as grime. His early productions attracted the attention of Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, who featured him on the first Grime compilation, and he went on to release with Soul Jazz, Boy Better Know and Planet Mu as well as his own Terrorhythm. As attention around his work grew in the mid-2000s he eventually renamed himself Plastician. Sitting down at the 2004 Red Bull Music Academy, Reed shared details of his personal journey through grime and how to bring DIY sonics to the next level.
Hosted by Nick Dwyer Known to most of the world as Plasticman with a C and not a K. Plastician That’s right. Nick Dwyer Rather than talking about what you do, we thought we’d just kick it off with a tune from yourself. What’s this? Plastician This is a release I had called “Hard Graft,” which was ... I think it came out in 2002, 2003 sort of time. Not that long ago, but I think it was my third release. I’m just going to play it for you now anyway. (music: Mark One vs. Plasticman – “Hard Graft”) Nick Dwyer For a lot of people that sound, that whole style of music might be very foreign. For people that don’t know, what are we calling this? Plastician At the moment, people are sort of labeling it as a new genre called grime, which sort of evolved from the old UK garage scene when it started getting a little bit dark. People have labeled it grime. It’s a totally new kind of music that’s coming out of London at the moment, and it’s starting to spread around. Nick Dwyer If you had to describe to your grandmother what grime was all about musically, how would you tell her? Plastician I suppose it’s like energetic, dark, mainly instrumental because most tracks are made with the intention of perhaps an MC to spit lyrics over the top of it or... I don’t know. It’s quite high energy, dark stuff really. Nick Dwyer When you say that, you’re talking more about the whole dancehall concept, we’d say rhythm culture, and people come out with a rhythm and MCs toast over it, and it’s kind of evolved from that? Plastician Yeah, totally. It’s the same concept, yeah. Nick Dwyer Without a doubt in modern electronic music, I don’t think there’s been any more genre that’s been more confusing for people. In the last five years you’ve seen the speed garage thing, the UK garage, and 2-step. We had breakstep, then there’s grime and sub low and eski, and it’s all a bit mad really. What’s the difference, and what’s up with all these people calling their stuff different things when... Nick Dwyer I don’t know. I think it changes so much that everyone’s trying to stick a pin on it, and say, “This is what it’s called.” Someone will go, “Well I don’t want to call it that. I’m not calling my music that, we’re going to call it this instead.” It just got so confusing for everyone that someone had to come along and go, “Let’s just call it grime, and that’ll do,” sort of thing. It’s gotten to that point now. Nick Dwyer Everyone sat there and went, “OK, we’ll call it grime.” Plastician Yeah. I think... I don’t even know if everyone sort of... It’s not even an official name. It’s what most people call it now. Technically, it’s not even the proper name for it. It’s just what a lot of people would call it. Nick Dwyer If someone says to me, “I make sub low,” just go, “No, you make grime.” Plastician Yeah, basically. Sub low is a sub-division of grime, but there’s no point in trying to pigeonhole it anymore. It’s such a small scene that hasn’t really reached its full potential yet. There’s no point in trying to pigeonhole it even more. I think if you just stick to grime it’ll be all right. Nick Dwyer Where did the word grime come from? Plastician It basically got... When the whole thing switched from UK garage, and it became quite MC-based and dark, you would hear MCs on the mic saying, “Oh this one’s grimey,” or someone would go, “Oh that tune’s grimey,” then it got... DJs were going, “I don’t really like grime, this grimey stuff.” The garage DJs would get on the mic and say, “We don’t support grime.” It just stuck really. It just took a few people to start using the word and... Nick Dwyer If I was to look up in the dictionary the word “grimey,” what would I find? Plastician Dirt. Nick Dwyer Dirt? Plastician Dirt, scum. I don’t know. Nick Dwyer What you were saying before, I don’t think you need... genres evolve so much, and with all these different names, what I think would be cool is for a lot of people also, the word garage conjures up the US images of garage. Plastician Yeah, totally. Nick Dwyer Maybe we can break down over the last six or seven years what it’s evolved from, and with some tunes just to give people ideas. Plastician Yeah, definitely. I’ve got some old garage tracks as well just so you can see the difference, how it’s kind of changed over the years or like this whole industry standard. Nick Dwyer First of all, at what point did the UK producers take the old US version of house and garage, when did the UK producers start picking up on that, and why did they pick up on the name garage? Plastician I’m not too sure to be honest with you. I think it was like, at the time it was like when jungle and that was starting to fade out a little bit. People wanted something new. Again, this was exactly how grime kind of split from UK garage. It was like the drum & bass scene split a little bit when the old vocal thing started coming in and the MCs were starting to get on the mic. People were like, “Oh that’s not how I used to like it.” Then garage came along, and people were like, “Yeah, I want to get on this.” Then that got ruined as well. To them anyway, it got ruined. I mean it’s, everyone’s always looking for something new. I think that’s why everything evolved. It’s just a continuum. Everything just carries on moving. Nick Dwyer Nice, what’s this record we’re going to listen to now? Plastician This is an old track, let me just check that I’ve got the right side of it. An old garage track actually. Nick Dwyer Which is on Locked On? Plastician This was on Locked On, which was a big garage label. Nick Dwyer It kind of spawned out of this record shop called Pure Groove. Plastician That’s right. In London, and they were on the label. This is an industry standard track. This basically is like garage as we knew it when it first arrived. (music: unknown) That’s garage basically. That was what it sort of spawned from basically. That was garage. Nick Dwyer Speed garage or UK garage? Plastician Hmm. Nick Dwyer Speed garage is a naff journalistic term that Mixmag came up with sort of thing. Plastician It was like a bit of a mad one. Speed garage is kind of a bit more bass driven than that. That was a bit more like house, a bit more US style. Speed garage was a bit more bass driven like the 187 Lockdown and that kind of stuff. Nick Dwyer There were a couple of remixes that Armand Van Helden did ... Plastician Yeah, definitely some of his stuff. Nick Dwyer For you, growing up, what was your entry point into this music, and underground music in general? Plastician To be honest with you, living in England. I think England is like, the whole country’s brainwashed by the UK charts. I didn’t actually get into underground music until quite later on. I was probably about 15 or 16 when I started listening to jungle, and I was into it but not as into it as a lot of people were and a lot of my friends were. I was checking for new school break stuff. Some of the old breakbeat stuff, and the sort of stuff people were breakdancing too. I was just checking for old stuff. When I left secondary school at 16, I went to college and started listening to pirates and I was listening to garage at about probably the age of 16, which is about five or six years ago. Not that long ago really. Nick Dwyer For you, what was it initially about garage that made you go, “Damn, that’s me. I’m feeling it.” Plastician I suppose at 16 or 17 you start thinking about going out and getting drunk, and at the time that was the music that was played in the clubs, and it was like, “Yeah, I quite like this music.” When you’ve had a few drinks in there, it seems even better. It’s like you’re going out with your mates, and it was like, “Yeah, I quite like this stuff,” and started buying records and got into DJing almost straight-away as soon as I started listening to pirates. I thought, “Yeah I quite like this.” Nick Dwyer If there was one point that was a bit of a catalyst to going, “Right, I like going out and rocking out to it, but I want to be playing it. I want to be making it.” What was it for you? Plastician It was the opportunity I had to buy a set of decks off of my mate. I thought, “Why not?” He had them going all dirt cheap, I thought I can’t really take up that. I’ve got to take the opportunity. I might as well have a go, and if they’re cheap. I think I paid 150 pounds for a full set of decks and turntables and it had a mixer and everything. I just haven’t looked back since really. I just got right into it straight away. Nick Dwyer So for you, obviously the DJing came before the production. Plastician Yeah. Yeah. Nick Dwyer Was it out of necessity that the production side of things started to kick off? Plastician When I first started I totally... Like even now really, I’m not really a musically-minded person. I just know what I like musically. I remember a mate of mine telling me, “Oh yeah, you’ll start making tracks soon.” I was like, “No, I will never. I haven’t got the brain for it. I don’t have a clue how to use that equipment.” It just got to a point one day I was DJing and listening to pirate radio, I had been on a pirate at the time, I think I might have just left the pirate station at the time. I was listening to a pirate, and there was a DJ on there who was quite a big producer at the time, but wasn’t the greatest DJ. I just thought, “Do you know what? This is really annoying. I’m a better DJ than this guy, but I’m getting absolutely nowhere.” I thought maybe if I start trying to make some beats and I get lucky, I’ll get a set on radio and that. Low and behold... Nick Dwyer It did. Plastician It worked, yeah. Nick Dwyer When you talk about pirate radio, I’m pretty sure everyone in this room knows a bit about pirate radio, but for UK music and the evolution of UK underground music over the last 20 years or so, pirate radio has played a pivotal role. Just how important has pirate radio been for garage, and what kind of role does it play today, still? Plastician It’s massive. There’s god knows how many pirate stations in London getting hit by the DTI [Department of Trade and Industry] every couple of days. But they’re still going. I saw a list on the Internet actually, somebody actually took time to go through the dial and say, “This is a list of all the pirate stations,” and there was over a hundred pirate stations, on rotation or sort of on and off. Taking time on and off the air waves. But the station that I’m on, Rinse FM, has been running for ten years now. Kool FM still runs, and they’ve been running from back in the jungle days as well. So it just plays such a big role in bringing forward the new music. Nick Dwyer If you go back to like the mid-‘90s, every single pirate in London and up north, was all jungle, all jungle. Then when the garage thing came, they’re kind of saying that all these pirates are now with garage on pirates everywhere. Break down musically what you’re hearing on pirates these days. Plastician I reckon 90 percent of it is grime. Garage, grime. The traditional UK garage is almost gone now, so there’s a couple of stations what will play it all day long and nothing else. And then there’s other stations what might play a little bit of garage during the day, and then at night time it’s pure grime. And there’s actually now a couple of stations which play 100 percent grime, MCs on every set, kids, everything like mad. Them one’s are mad though. They go on and off all the time because the kids hit up the studio and sooner or later someone finds out where it is and they’re having trouble staying on all the time because there’s so many people in the studio all the time. Nick Dwyer It is still as bad as it used to be to point with the DTI, if you get busted, like 50,000 pound fines. I remember a guy that was sort of playing pirate and he had about 50,00 records and they ran to his house and confiscated all of his records. Is it still that bad that they actively? plastician Yeah, they can literally take whatever they want. If they find you in a pirate studio at a time when you are broadcasting, they can take whatever they want. There is no law to say they can’t walk in your house and take all your records, your decks, anything... Do you know what I mean? Anything caught in sight as well, anything in the building that you’re broadcasting from. Nick Dwyer I mean musically from that whole scene you know the one person that has amazing international success is Dizzee Rascal. Now, with someone like Dizzee Rascal, and there has been a few other names obviously like Wiley and all that have started to crop up over the last year or so, without pirate radio would we be seeing people like Dizzee? Plastician No, definitely not. The commercial market in the UK is really, it’s so, you’re spoon-fed it. Do you know what I mean? There’s no one will come through unless there’s a hype on them. The whole Pop Idol thing, these people aren’t... do you know what I mean? Half of them aren’t good enough to be on television and to be singing. They’ll get signed by a major record label because they have been on television for the last six months. Do you know what I mean? They last ten minutes. Then there’s actual people like Dizzee trying to come through. If it weren’t for the hype you got on pirate radio and playing at raves and stuff, the majors wouldn’t have listened. He could have sent them a million demos and they would have just been like, “No, what they hell is that?” Do you know what I mean? It’s too weird. Nick Dwyer Just quickly going back to the Dizzee thing. How is he perceived within the garage community, and is there a certain element of Dizzee’s done a lot of good for the scene internationally? Plastician Yeah, totally. I think there’s some people in the scene are split. There’s more intellectual people within the scene are really pleased for him, to see that he’s doing stuff and he’s really sort of pushing boundaries lyrically and with his sound. He’s totally representing, he’s opened the door for people like myself to come through and show what I’ve got to offer. Then you’ve got the more narrow-minded people who are, like, they used to go and watch him at the raves and they used to listen to him on pirate and now because you are not going hear Dizzee on pirate every Saturday and he’s not coming and mashing up all the raves and they are like, “He’s selling out and he’s not street anymore, he’s not real.” It’s like, “Get a grip man. What you rather be doing? Sitting in a record shop on a Saturday just chatting to people or going and flying out all over the world and playing your records, playing your music to thousands of people?” I know what I would choose. You know what I mean? Nick Dwyer The track you just played was a UK garage thing. Should we play another bit now that’s kind of, you know, plots out the course of evolution for the music? Plastician Okay, yeah, cool. After UK garage there was 2-step which was... which was slightly... slightly less dance-y but a little bit more R&B sort of styles going on. Nick Dwyer And the name 2-step came from, just, you know, just the beat. Plastician Just like the way the beats were sort of like, yeah. Get this track on here. (music: Genius Cru – “Waiting” / applause) Nick Dwyer Who was that by? Plastician This was by Genius Cru who actually, they had a commercial release of a track not long after that. I think this is 1999, 1999-2000. They had a release in the charts. Nick Dwyer "What Is It Called?" Plastician No, that was More Fire Crew. Genius Cru had “Boom Selection.” And they had another track called “Course Bruv.” Nick Dwyer ‘Course bruv! Plastician That label actually, this label Chronic put out some of the early So Solid stuff before they got signed as well. So it’s quite a big 2-step label. Nick Dwyer Musically with 2-step we’re kind of dealing with the same kind of bass hits and vocal edits as the 4/4 stuff you were playing before but now the beat pattern changed. Plastician The beat pattern had changed, it was just skippy beats and the bass was more punchy whereas like the 4/4 bass was a bit more subby, a bit more rolling. This was a bit more punchy and a bit more in your face. Nick Dwyer So in terms of that four to the floor sound, you know, people like Todd Edwards and all that. Is anyone actually still doing that in London? Plastician There’s a few. There’s a few people. It’s like music, music’s never going to die totally. There is always someone in the world who’s going to be doing something, it’s never going to totally fade away. So there’s a few guys, there’s about a handful, literally a handful of producers like Matt Qualified, MJ Cole’s still doing UK garage. Karl Brown is producing stuff with El-B under El-Tuff. Karl “Tuff Enough” Brown and El-B are producing under the alias of El-Tuff. They produce quite soulful four-to-the-floor garage stuff. Nick Dwyer But essentially, the garage scene as we have known it ispretty much non-existent. Plastician Yeah, it’s pretty much non-existent. I think it was when the first couple of grime tunes came around all the kids loved it and all of the old garage people were like, “We don’t, we don’t like this.” And a lot of the people involved with garage at the time were like, “I’m nothing to do with this grime, I don’t like this stuff, I’ve had enough of garage now if that’s the way it’s going...” So then half of them people went on to doing funky house and then you’ve got the other half of people who were like... When the girls left, a lot of the Friday night drinking crew went out to Croydon and got mashed up and went and raved up to some garage. When the girls leave the scene, they left it as well. So they moved on to listening to some R&B, again getting brainwashed by what was being played on Radio 1 and Kiss FM and stuff like that in London. It’s the UK way of being brainwashed by what’s getting played on commercial radio. Nick Dwyer One of the things that was kind of, you know the symbiosis with the garage scene was the screw face element. It was that bad vibe. A few stabbings at Ayia Napa here and there. Plastician Yeah, yeah. Nick Dwyer When did that element kind of, because that element really did give the music a bad name, didn’t it? Plastician Yeah. It was when it got commercial and it was cool to go out and rave to garage. It was such a bling. It was like the UK’s hip-hop scene basically, it was like, how you can go out and sort of buy champagne and go out with all your gold on and it got a bit boring. You know what I mean? That’s when going out became, you sort of had to watch what you were doing, thinking, “Am I going to be all right in this club?” It got really moody and that’s about the same time as the girls started leaving, the girls don’t like seeing fights and stuff like that. Not happening, then. That’s when it started to go downhill. Nick Dwyer You were talking about before, one of the first grime tunes that came out, that was probably labelled grime, was a track called “Pulse X.” You’ve got that here? Plastician Yeah. Nick Dwyer What year did this come out? Plastician This came out, I think 2001, 2002. Bout then, yeah. Probably 2001 like. I remember the first time I heard it, it was at a Big Apple Christmas party. Nick Dwyer Big Apple was a record shop? Plastician Big Apple was a record shop in Croydon and they specialize in garage from 2-step to four-to-the-floor garage, it’s always been one of the main stockists in London, definitely in South London the main one. I remember they had a Christmas party and they had Heartless Crew booked there and Oris Jay and Hatcha played there. At the time it was still quite garage-y. It was starting to get a bit dark, a bit experimental. This track, even when it started to get experimental, it was just like, “What is it?” It’s a mad track. It’s totally different to anything that’s been played at the time. Nick Dwyer Were you producing at this stage? Plastician At this stage I was dabbling in production, I’d just got FruityLoops off the internet and was messing about with it, trying to fit beats that were terrible but still, you’ve got to start somewhere, you know what I mean? Nick Dwyer This tune is one of the tunes that made you go, “Oi, damn, that’s...” Plastician Yeah. I think this kick-started the grime scene. Because it’s such a simple track, there was thousands of kids in London like, “I really love that tune, but listen how simple it is I’m gonna make a tune like that.” There was a period of six months where you were hearing some poor, poor tracks man. I was probably one of the culprits as well, listen to this tune, it’s terrible like. Nick Dwyer At least you can admit it to yourself. Plastician The whole thing of it was, someone’s made a track, everyone would be like, “Mate, that’s rubbish.” Yeah, but it’s as good as that, or sounds like that, it’s like, “Come on, give it a rest, give it a few months, you’ll be all right.” This is “Pulse X,” this is what kick-started it all. (music: Musical Mob - “Pulse X” / applause) Nick Dwyer This is around the same time there was another label that was being banded about which was 8-bar. Plastician This is it. When this track came out, obviously there was no such thing as grime. Everyone was like, “What is that?” You know what I mean, all the garage people were like, “That’s rubbish.” All the kids and people like me were starting to get into what was starting to get a bit darker in garage. That came along and it was like, “Wow.” It’s a pretty cool tune. I really liked it. Everyone called it 8-bar because it just changed every eight bars. That even became a little genre for about six months, then it turned into grime when it got a little bit more like, “You can’t have every tune that changes every 8 bars.” Every tune sort of thing of what’s going on. Nick Dwyer One thing that we all first notice when we look at you, you’re not an old fellow at all, are you? You’re a wee man. You’re 22 years old. Plastician That’s right. Nick Dwyer Funnily enough, with that scene, you’re pretty old. Plastician Yeah, it’s a young, young scene. Nick Dwyer Tell us how young. You were playing me a tune before that you’re about to sign from someone who’s 14 years old? Plastician Yeah, that’s a kid, from Milton Keynes in England. It’s a whole young crew of kids. There’s even now... Nick Dwyer Dave’s old stomping ground. Plastician Yeah man. Milton Keynes in there. We have the grime crews like Roll Deep and N.A.S.T.Y Crew, Boyz in da Hood and all that. Now it’s got to the point that there’s these kids coming through, and they’ve got like, a b-team, the younger kids, the youth team, they call them “Younger Nasty” and “Roll Deep Youngers” and the “Wile Out Ones.” Kids are 12, 13 years old getting on the mic, MCing, going pirate radio, DJing. The first ones to do it, funny enough, was So Solid Crew. One of the DJ’s younger brothers, Skipping Frost, and they were eight years old, they used to go on Delight when So Solid were on pirate radio. Eight years old. Bout 12 now, quite good DJs, but 12 years old. They’re playing grime, there’s loads of kids, man. There’s station called Raw Blaze and I know about half the people on there are under 16. Have to take bunk school to go and do a set, texting all their mates in school like, “Listen to me on the radio,” sneaking out lessons on their mobile phones. It’s such a young scene. It’s good though. If you’ve got youth, it’s got longevity. There’s a big future for it. Nick Dwyer The one thing you touched on before, it’s a pretty funny thing. You’ve got old school guys on the Dream Team and all these boys, who they were there when speed garage broke, and they got the Radio 1 shows, MC Creed, and they were living the life, getting all the column inches in all the magazines. They’re feeling like stars and all of a sudden it feels like they felt their whole scene was robbed by a whole bunch of 14 and 15 year olds. Plastician Yeah, it was like we were saying the other day. Nick Dwyer Tell us about this committee thing. Plastician They got together. When stuff like this started to come about in the garage thing, a lot of the old guys got together, and they were like, “We can’t let...” The Dream Team, Creed, and a few other guys got together, it was like, “We can’t have this music. This is ruining our scene, our beautiful scene.” They got together and actually had a meeting and set up what they called the UK garage committee. Actually started saying, “We refuse to play this on our radio show on Radio 1.” The DJs who were playing legal radio, “We’re not going to support this. This is rubbish. This isn’t us at all.” Lo and behold, a few months later, they lost their shows, nobody wants to listen to what they’re playing anymore because people were waiting so long for garage. It came, finally. A lot of people liked it. Everyone who didn’t like it, just moved onto something else like R&B or funky house and really, the only people left in garage now are like the DJs. There’s no sort of punters who would just go check it out, like they’ll still go out raving to it, the few people that go out raving. There’s a scene of DJs. It’s really close-knit now. This UK garage committee totally flopped, man. They used to make a living out of DJ garage... Nick Dwyer One of the beauties it seems with the whole grime scene is you’ve got all these young kids who, it seems, FruityLoops is a program. You’re dealing with a whole lot of people that maybe they come from the projects, the ends, they don’t have a lot of money, they can go and get a cracked version of FruityLoops and then be making beats. Plastician Yeah. That was it. When this track came along, it was like kids just hearing it, and they were just like, “I can do that.” They all downloaded FruityLoops or Music Generator on the PlayStation and stuff like that. It was just whatever you could get ahold of, young kids would get in it and they were having a go doing beats like that basically. There was a good six months of a whole genre of stuff like that. Half of the scene was getting annoyed with it and half the scene was trying to get involved with it. Then it was like a cleansing period I think, anyone who was trying, most of the people who were [inaudible] out of it then are still here today doing tracks but on a more advanced sounds. Perhaps not in terms of equipment they’re using, they’re still using the same equipment, but they’re using it more properly, and they’re using it better and getting better sound out of it. Nick Dwyer For you, when you started FruityLoops, and still to this day FruityLoops. Nick Dwyer Yeah. I’ve used Cubase and Reason at college, I’m currently at college studying a music technology diploma. I went to college when I started, I’d had about seven releases, I just thought, “It’s going really well and I’d like to try and make a career out of it.” I thought, “I want to go to college and actually learn something musical and get a bit of a paper, that says you can actually do some music.” So yeah, I’m at my college now. Nick Dwyer Something to show your mum. Plastician Yeah, keep her happy, keep her quiet. Nick Dwyer We’ve got another track, a remix I’m sure a lot of people in this room are familiar with, Alter Ego, and a track called “Rocker,” it originally on Clang, part of the Playhouse family, and it’s kind of a crossover. They just got signed to Skint. You’ve done a remix... Nick Dwyer Yeah, I’m going to try and find that for you actually, it’s sitting here somewhere. It’s a guy called Andy, he got in contact with John at Big Apple Records in Croydon and he was just really interested in what I was doing and got in contact with me and said, “Do you want to have a go at doing a remix for us?” Of course I didn’t turn it down, I thought Skint’s a really well-respected label worldwide. It’s good to know that these people are starting to find out what you’re doing, you know what I mean? It’s really good when you hear that these people are... It just goes to show how quickly it’s all spreading, sort of thing, at the moment. Let’s see, it’s right here. This is the track here. This is a remix I’ve done for Alter Ego. (music: Alter Ego – “Rocker (Plasticman Remix)” / applause) Nick Dwyer Is grime, is it kind of some set beat pattern that it follows? Plastician No, not at all. As long as you got energy and a nice fat, the bass is normally quite fat and warm as compared with some other genres of electronic dance music. It’s just like quite a fat sound. Some of the stuff that are made for MCs sounds a bit more hip-hop oriented. With string patterns and stuff like that. There’s loads of different sounds going off in grime. It’s all sort of based around 140 BPM though. So there’s no strict beat patterns as long as it’s moving, basically. Nick Dwyer You hooked up with Rephlex? You got signed to Rephlex. Plastician Yeah. Nick Dwyer How did that come about, man? That’s a pretty cool thing. Plastician Yeah, the track that I played at the beginning came out at and then, a few of the like, electronica shops in London picked up on it, they were like, “This is quite interesting. I might be able to shift some of these.” And Grant [Wilson-Claridge], who helps run the label with Richard D. James, picked the record up and he really liked it. And he came in and I played a gig in London at a night called FWD>>, which kind of is a night that supports the kind of music that we’re playing. It’s like a whole night of it, Plastic People in London. And Grant came down and checked it out and I played this set and he really enjoyed it. And he got in contact with the guy who put the night on to get some beats off of me. And yeah he was really into it and he picked four tracks he really liked, picked another couple of artists and he did the same with them. We all had about four tracks each on this triple-pack LP. Nick Dwyer Which was called... Plastician It was called Grime. Nick Dwyer And Grime Two is coming soon, I believe. Plastician That’s right. Grime Two is due for a release next month, I believe. And that’s technically, it’s not grime. Nick Dwyer Right. Plastician Technically it’s another genre called dubstep. Which is like, garage just... you know what I mean? The continuum never ends. And that’s it. Nick Dwyer Now I mean, you’ve dropped the name so we better give an example. Dubstep’s another name that’s been kind of creeping into the sub conscious recently. People like Horsepower Productions and all that. Define dubstep and can you give us a bit of an example as well? Plastician Well, I’ve just picked this one up. Big Apple Records, actually own a label and a lot of the stuff they put out is dubstep. There’s a few guys like Horsepower Productions. Label called Tempa, I don’t know if anyone’s heard of it. It takes influences from old dub reggae but it sort of like fuses it with 2-step beats and stuff like that. Some of it’s quite like, quite ethnic, like bongos and stuff like that, there’s loads of different examples. Nick Dwyer And so you as a grime DJ, per se... I mean you play a lot of dubstep. Plastician I drop the ol’ bit of dubstep but to be honest with you there’s a deep. Hatcha is probably like the dubstep DJ and another guy called Youngsta at Rinse FM. Them guys properly are pure dubstep. So I leave them to play all of the big tracks and that, I just try to pick out a couple that I like and I drop them. This is a track which came out on Big Apple Recordings via Skream. Get to the end of that track. This is a track called “Skunk Step” by Skream, which is pretty dubstep. (music: Skream - “Skunk Step”) So that’s dubstep which is kind of like similar, fits in nicely with what we’re playing in the whole grime thing but it’s technically, you know what I mean? If you want to get deep, it’s not really anything like it at the same time. And another artist called Kode9 who is pure dub, like some of his tracks don’t even have beats and stuff like that, it’s pretty deep. He plays at FWD>> and stuff like that. It all just kind of, it all just sort of merges in somehow. People are just picking up on whatever they can, sort of thing, saying “whatever.” Nick Dwyer Now this is what I thought you were talking about. Historically any kind of new music that emerges has its epicenter, be it Paradise Garage and the Warehouse or breakbeat hardcore had Rage at Heaven, jungle had AWOL, broken beat’s got Co-Op. Is FWD>> kind of like the epicenter of grime? Plastician FWD>> is weird, it’s hard because a lot of people in England even are getting confused. They’re calling like, the more technical grime, they’re calling it FWD>> beats and people are getting confused. Because FWD>> is more of music-based night, whereas like more of the grime nights are for like, more MC-based stuff and like lyrical clashes and stuff like that. FWD>>‘s more like a night to do more with the music, so it’s like, you can come and play the same tracks that they’re playing at these MC nights, or Eskimo dance and stuff like that but at FWD>> it’s more to do with the music. So it’s like, you can drop the same tracks, it doesn’t matter, but more people are there to listen to the beats than dance to it. Nick Dwyer Yeah. Now when you’re talking about the whole clashing thing, I mean that’s something that especially with grime, has kind of risen up and shooting along at the same speed, is this whole warring thing. I don’t know, it kind of just seems really self-defeating. Plastician It’s mad, yeah. Nick Dwyer What’s the whole deal with the warring thing that’s like, “I’m gonna clash you.” Plastician Yeah, it’s really mad. There’s like DVDs coming out now of like, studio time fights on the mic and stuff like that. But it’s mainly staged like, the MCs sort of sort out between themselves, like, “Right, me and you are going to get up on the mics, start cussing each other’s mums and that, get off the mic and then shake hands” sort of thing. But on the DVD, it’s like they’re all in their face, telling them they’re going to beat them up and that. And it’s mad. It’s like the MC. I don’t know it’s really weird. It’s kind of like hip-hop but a bit more aggressive and a bit more blatent. Nick Dwyer The problem is a lot of people don’t, a lot of young people watching that, looking up to these guys as kind of somewhat idols. They don’t realize that it’s all for show and a lot of people take it seriously, yeah? Plastician Yeah, I’m sure the kids definitely. A lot of the kids don’t know that it’s fake. It’s like watching wrestling, when the kids are young they think that wrestling is real and they find out. It’s like, grime is the same. It started this whole MC culture, the MCs go and they like stage a show, like, “We’re gonna go and get everyone excited by starting telling everyone that like, ‘your mum slept with him’ or something like that.” It’s mad, but... Nick Dwyer The other thing you were talking about as well that’s kind of mad is, you know, at any kind of musical event, a big tune is a big tune purely on the fact that it sounds good. It’s got a wicked bass on or whatever. But you might have you a tune that’s a pretty average tune but it might be big at one of these, let’s say, lyrical nights, because someone checks a certain lyric or something. Plastician My first ever release was signed purely on the basis that an MC got on the mic on one of DJ Slimzee’s sets on Rinse FM years ago. Nick Dwyer Who’s Slimzee? Plastician Slimzee is, at the time, he still is like the biggest DJ in the darker side of garage and grime. And he was the one who sort of brought grime through the more commercial garage nights, he would get booked and he’d play like a set full of dubplates. And yeah, I gave him a track and this is before I had anything released and he cut it onto a dubplate and he asked if he could have it exclusive and I said, “Yeah, you can keep it for a while.” Then he had an MC called Riko on his set and Riko got on the mic just as the tune started coming in and he starts cussing this guy from another crew called More Fire Crew and this was quite early in the whole clashing thing. It was quite unusual to hear it on the radio. So when you hear something like that, there was such an excitement and there was big talk about ... On the internet loads of kids going on, “Who heard this? Who heard what he said about Nico from More Fire Crew?” It happened to be my track and the kids were like, “What was that tune that was playing when he was spitting. That was a big tune.” Nick Dwyer So purely on the fact that he was dissing someone else? Plastician Certainly, if he’d have gone home and then like, the kids had all sort of, turned their radio off, I probably would have never got the track signed in the first place. It’s mad. Nick Dwyer Now another thing you’re talking about with dubplate culture, obviously, especially, very much a UK thing with jungle and with garage. You know, DJs were playing pure plates. And if you were a DJ that was carrying weight you had to be drawing pure dubs. I mean with the advent of these things, how’s dubplate culture been affected? Plastician In grime, not so much, because it’s such a young scene. I was saying, there’s not many DJs who can use them. It’s such a funny, such a young scene, and the young kids nowadays are just like, lazy. See this? [touches turntable] They like that. And then see that [points to CDJ] and they’re like, “What? It doesn’t move around,” so they’re just like, confused, “I’m not touching that, I’m going to stick to this.” So they’re spending all their pocket money saving up for like 30 pounds for a dubplate and they’re cutting, like, on a 10” rec dubplate which is supposed to hold like one track per side. They’re like, cutting three tunes of about one minute long on each side, it’s like, “Come on.” The quality’s like, rubbish and they’re going home well happy, they’ve got a bag full of dubs but like each one’s about a minute long and they’re all really poor quality. Nick Dwyer I mean, for yourself, are you playing much dubplates, 50-50 kinda? Plastician Yeah, I don’t really cut much anymore but I cut occasionally. It depends. If I’ve got a track that I know might never come out and I want to play it in the club. There’s actually a new cutting studio in Bristol in England that cuts dubs onto PVC. It’s like no metal at all and they weigh less than a record. I’ve got one here. Nick Dwyer And you don’t have to pay 35 quid for a... Plastician It cost about 35 pounds. It’s like plastic. It’s not got an acetate inside it. OK, no more dubplate. Nick Dwyer You miss out on that dubplate smell, though. Plastician Yeah, but it still smells nice. It’s like, have a smell of it. Nick Dwyer Everyone can have a go later on. We’ll pass it around. Plastician Pass it around. Don’t scratch it, though; it’s quite a good track. Nick Dwyer Should we get in another track quickly, and then I think you’re going to give us a little bit of FruityLoops session? Plastician Yeah, I get this Wiley track on, to show you the MCing side of the grime thing. Nick Dwyer Also, you’ve just done a remix for High Contrast, drum & bass producer. Plastician Yeah, I’ve just finihed it now. The version I’ve got is the uncomplete finsih but we’ve got enough of it to show a good... Let’s get this track on here. This is Wiley. He’s just been signed to XL, and this is a track called “Take Chances,” I believe. (music: Wiley – “Take Chances” / applause) Nick Dwyer It’ll take me a few days to figure out the lyrics. Plastician The whole tune is war, pure war. Like, don’t come step to me with your attitude, because you’ll get beaten up basically. Nick Dwyer It’s part of the success of the insular grime, and even prior before that with the UK garage thing. As soon as you add an MC to the mix,. with the comparisons with hip-hop, blah blah blah. The first time where UK, and especially the youth, they felt like this is our own music. Plastician We were having a chat back home about it not long ago. A lot of UK acts who are doing stuff like this are making the mistake of then putting an album together and putting hip-hop on it. I think the reason Dizzee has done so well is because he’s come with something that nobody’s heard before. People all over the world are like, “This is amazing. What is this stuff?” There’s so much of it that people wouldn’t even believe. If you came to London and went in a record shop, and saw the amount of different kinds of grime there are and different MCs and how many artists are involved, it’s just mad. Nick Dwyer Is white label culture rife? People just purely press up, say 250 whites. Plastician It’s getting better. This is a release that came out recently. This is a pure grime release, as well. It was a big track, a big rhythm for the MCs and stuff like that. It’s got a full artwork sleeve. For me, that is one of the first ever grime tracks to have a full color sleeve. It’s just mad. They’ve even gone to the extent of getting labels done. Nick Dwyer What you were saying before with someone like Dizzy who has kind of taken it to the world. With anyone in UK garage, all your Dream Teams and all that, sure, they were the biggest thing in the UK, but no one knew. They never played outside the UK. With grime, you’re starting to play outside England. Plastician Last weekend I played Brussels and to two thousand people at a big even there called the White Night, which is an all-night event that goes on all over the city. They have different nights. I played Amsterdam a few weeks before that, and Austria the week before that. Nick Dwyer You toured the States with Todd. Plastician Toured the States with Todd, yeah. He was here the other day. Yes, I think the Rephlex thing has totally open doors, as well, for me personally. Dizzy’s sort of paved the way for the rest of us to follow in his footsteps. Nick Dwyer I’ve got to ask, with the name, have you had any angry techno fans on your door? Plastician It’s quite funny, actually. Nick Dwyer No call from Richie Hawtin? Plastician No, funny enough, no. Apparently he doesn’t know about me, but nothing’s been done. John Peel, he’s got a show on Radio 1 in the UK. Plays quite a lot of my stuff, he’s a big supporter of what I’m doing. Every time he plays one of my tracks, he always says, “Plasticman, with a ‘C.’“ Now, when I meet someone, they’ll be like, “Oh, you’re Plasticman with a ‘C,’“ like it’s part of my name or something. Nothing really has come back. If anything, people have been like, “Yeah, I think that’s cool that you did that,” sort of thing. It’s the whole grime law, “We don’t give a shit what you’re doing. This is our thing.” It’s the whole grime attitude. It’s almost like I did it on purpose, but I didn’t. I honestly hadn’t heard of Richie Hawtin when I started, and I think I’d had about three release before I’d even heard of him. Then I had a second other release before I heard any of his tracks. Nick Dwyer Something you said, within the whole grime scene, like a lot of other musical genres, people are taking influence from here, there and everywhere. Grime producers, they’re just feeling grime. Plastician We’ve pure got the blinkers on, man. We don’t have a clue what is going on in the world outside what we’re doing. It’s why it sounds a bit weird compared to most stuff that’s going on, because most of the stuff is like, I might hear that track, and think, “I like that track. I want to do one similar to that.” I don’t sit there and listen to techno and that and think, “I’m going to use those mad sounds in a grime tune.” Like, the whole Rephlex thing, and getting this remix work from labels like Skint and Low Recordings, and the tunes that they’ve given me to remix, I’m sort of sitting there thinking, “These tracks are actually quite interesting. It’s something I can bring into my sound.” It’s good. The way that more people are getting involved with it is just bringing my music forward, as well. It’s really cool. Nick Dwyer Should we go into one more track before we go into that? Plastician Yes. This is, it should be anyway, the remix that I’m currently working on for High Contrast. It’s just finished now, but this is a unfinished version you’re going to hear. (music: High Contrast ft. Nolay – “Angels & Fly (Plasticman/Plastician Remix)” / applause) Nick Dwyer Interesting with the vocals this time. Plastician To be honest with you, I had tried once before with an a cappella of a guy, who I know that MC’d. It’s like for me, at the moment, it’s still what I’m actually learning, as well, to record and master vocals myself. I don’t have the equipment at home to do it, so I’m purely just doing it at college to get a feel for it. If someone can give me a decent a cappella, which has already been mastered with ad libs and stuff, I can run away with it. That track there was originally 174 BPM, I had to time stretch the vocals down to 143, I think I produced that track at. It was a long process, but it was quite enjoyable, getting involved with doing vocals and then running them into FruityLoops, and time-stretching them and cutting them into little bits so they fit, because FruityLoops doesn’t... It’s not like Cubase, you can’t just drag it and time-stretch it. You actually have to cut it to pieces and start putting it here, there, and everywhere on the drum machine. Nick Dwyer With your setup at home, what are you running? Obviously, as you say, you’ve been using FruityLoops, but what about the sampling? Plastician Sampling, I just use Cool Edit, or Soundforge. I just download samples off the Internet. I just search hard for them. I might hear a track on the radio and think, “That’s clean. I’m going to go buy a CD, cut some of it, distort it out a bit.” You can get samples from everywhere. Sample CDs, even. I’ll buy samples and get them off of friends and stuff. It’s like building up a good library. If you’re going to use FruityLoops, it’s really important that you get a good library of samples. Because the stuff they give you when you’re first there, unless you’re amazing with synths and stuff like that on software, you’re going to find it difficult to come out with a nice sound. The drum kits in that are pretty old school. Like the 808 kit is about all you get and a few samples on top of that. Nick Dwyer What about plug-ins, you’re mad on plug-ins? Plastician Yeah, to be honest, that’s something that I’ve only recently come into play. I was purely samples. Every track was just like, WAVs. I was just using WAV basslines, WAV drum kits, WAV instrument hits, and messing about with them and playing them in different keys and putting them through effects units enough to make them sound like something else. Since going to college like last year, starting last year at college, I’ve sort of liked learned how to use VSTs and sort of like gotten loads of them using just whatever I could get my hands on. I would just have a go at it. I’m starting to pick things up now so the whole thing is like, I don’t know, like a learning curve. There’s definitely people in here who’ve got much a wider knowledge of software, bass synths. I have never used a hardware synth in my life. Nick Dwyer Right. Plastician Ever. I like the TS-404 and the old version is really like manageable, you can just turn it into all sorts of sounds. Nick Dwyer Does anyone in this room use Fruity Loops or has used it? Plastician It’s more or less a drum machine. You know what I mean? But you can put all sorts of things and you can get some good stuff out of it. I mean I have just been messing about with a loop, getting a loop together and let’s just mute a few of these channels. Yeah just to show like just load... [shows FruityLoops on computer screen and demonstrates music] See, that’s like a four-bar tune as opposed to an eight-bar, sort of. But that was like how our eight bar tracks were being made, basically. Someone was coming with like two eight bar loops and just pasting it through the entire track, and that’s kind of what kick started the whole grime thing, really. Just going to play this Wiley track actually, to sort of emphasize what I was saying about the whole square bass thing and the slide. This was Wiley’s first sort of instrumental release, with this kind of sound. This is what he calls “Eski beat,” which is kind of like his version of grime. It’s technically grime, but he just wanted to name it. This was a massive track. This sold about, I don’t know – it still sells today. (music: Wiley – “Eskimo”) So that was like Wiley’s take on grime, and that whole square bass sound was like the biggest track at the time. It was quite soon after “Pulse X.” It wasn’t long after the first. Well it was one of the first few grime tracks to come about and that was big. He started his own version of grime, what he called Eski beat, I’ve got a track here, which is a new one for him, just to show people do still make eight-bar tracks, even now. This is a track by Wiley. (music: Wiley – “New Era”) That’s eight bars all the way through, it just keeps changing. Wiley’s quite clever, like we was saying about them, how a track can get big from like a MC saying certain lyrics over the top of it. Wiley always makes the tunes, and like, that track, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that track “Wot Do You Call It?,” it was in the charts. That tune got big because he staged a clash, and made the tune, and he made all the MCs involved in this great clash, like, “Do a version of it.” Every time you heard a clash on the radio it was over his tune. All the kids were like, “Oh, that tune,” and they’re always killing each other over them. Yeah, it got massive, and this is the same. This track here, he made originally for the More Fire Youngers, the kids of More Fire Crew. It got quite big, and then he went on to 1Xtra on the UK Garage Weekend and brought a Wiley showcase. He brought loads of MCs from east London down, and basically made this tune, and made everyone just gun each other on the mic. It’s just quite a big tune now. There’s like a massive sort of bootleg culture in the whole grime scene, where, at the moment, there’s a thing on the internet called DC++ where you can put files on, and download them, and that kids are getting older tunes like this on CD. This is unreleased, at the moment. They’re getting a hold of these on CD, like burning them as MP3s onto their computer, and then they’re putting them up on DC++. It happened to me with this track that’s only just come out. I heard a remix of this track before I’d even released it like, because kids were downloading it, and cut up, bootleg versions of it. Nick Dwyer Is that worrying you as a label head, just like... Plastician Yeah. Nick Dwyer Kind of seems like it’s rife throughout the grime scene. Plastician Yeah. People, this is the whole dubplate culture, like people want an exclusive version of a track. If they can’t get it, they sit at home, cut it up, and make one. They don’t care what the producer thinks. I’ve heard bootlegs of my tracks all over the place. People even have to cheat to send me one. I’ll be on MSN messenger and a little kid will come up like, “What’s up blood? Here’s this tune, have a listen of it,” and it’s like, got all my samples, all over it. I’m like, “Mate, are you joking? What’s going on there? Are you going to release this?” And he’s like, “Nah blood, it’s just a dubplate.” But then I find out someone else has got it, going, “Yeah, I cut that tune that kid sent me,” and there’s like a million people playing this bootleg version of my tune that I haven’t authorized. Nick Dwyer For you, what’s coming up next? You’ve got like your own label. Plastician Yeah, I got releases in my label. I got about six releases lined up on the label over the next, trying to get one out each month. Nick Dwyer And the label is called... Plastician It’s called Terrorhythm, just like an independent label. I’m sorta signing these purely grime stuff. Just all sorts, like I put out a release with Mark One and myself called “Fight” and then, this one is a three-track EP by me, I have a track on it called “Cha” which was quite big, and here, the next one is another one from me and after that I’ve got that track by the young kids from Milton, and I’ve got a remix of one of my tracks that was on the grime album done by a crew from Bedford called Macabre Unit. Bookings are really taking off at the moment as well. With the whole grime thing, internationally they are starting to come in now as well. Nick Dwyer Are any DJs outside of the grime scene, like say for example in America, who play more eclectic mixes, are you finding out that they’re playing grime? Plastician Yeah. Nick Dwyer Are you finding producers popping up, you were saying before there’s some guys in Australia that have sent you tunes. Plastician Yeah, people are just starting to, starting to take off now. I played a night in London called Rebel Bass, which was at Electro Works in London. It was a good night. I went there a couple of weeks later, there was another night, same night, but they have more electro DJs on. I went there, and I was walking around, and there was electro DJs in room two playing like “Cha” and stuff, and I was like, “No way.” The guy, he was here from DJ Magazine in the week like, he’s a producer on a label called Low, which is an electronic label. He knew my stuff, and he knew who I was when he got here, so yeah, people in other genres are starting to stand up and take note. Which is the difference between grime and the whole UK garage thing. They didn’t really want to know. Nick Dwyer Chris, thank you very much! Plastician Thank you!