Monday, 29 March 2010 06:41

Club music often breaks down into binaries—the stuff that rides a 4/4 beat inherited from house and techno on the one hand, and pretty much everything else on the other: breakbeats, drum & bass, dubstep, U.K. garage, all children of the tradition often termed the “hardcore continuum”, in reference to its relation to British breakbeat hardcore.

But Scuba—aka Paul Rose, a Londoner based for the past three years in Berlin—is looking for a third way, one that fuses both great strains of club music into something that’s not either/or, but both/and. He makes that quest explicit with the title of his second album, ‘Triangulation’.

At its core are tracks like ‘Latch’, ‘Three-Sided Shape’ and ‘Minerals’, tracks that balance dubstep’s relentless, lurching forward motion with implicit, more relaxed 4/4 pulses. It’s a three-way meeting between urgency, contemplation and a more sensual, luxuriant sensibility. Those familiar with tracks like ‘Klinik’ or the recent ‘Aesaunic’ EP will recognize it immediately as simply Scuba.

‘Three Sided Shape’

 

But Scuba, who has recently been exploring more explicit forms of techno under his SCB alias, hasn’t stuck with any formula here, not even his own.

‘On Deck’

 

‘On Deck’, built upon a jacking house rhythm, he incorporates the swinging, parade-ground snares of U.K. funky; ‘Tracers’ attempts a different kind of fusion with open hi-hats stringing a 4/4 pattern over the top, while his trademark lurching kick drums draw out a half-time sensibility below. The rest of the track is all about splitting the difference, with intricate cowbell, rimshot and synth patterns swapping their allegiances from techno to funky and back, and an enormous bass drop hailing all drum & bass die-hards.

‘Tracers’

 

‘So You Think You’re Special’ is, by all intents and purposes, drum & bass—clocking 170BPM or so, rocking back and forth on the balls of its feet, lashing out with double-time flashes of percussion. Switching it up yet again, ‘Heavy Machinery’ is a straight-ahead, 4/4 chug at 125 BPM, festooned with colorful, slightly melancholic synths straight out of 1981.

But somehow breaking everything down into its constituent parts feels wrong with Scuba’s music, which is ultimately all about the way that it gels together. The meaning of his artist alias is obvious, given Scuba’s sub-aquatic atmospheres and his sense of three-dimensional volume. From its full-scale club tracks to its immersive moodpieces, ‘Triangulation’ dives accordingly deep.

‘Glance’

 

What was different about making this album, versus ‘A Mutual Antipathy’?

It wasn’t that much different, in the sense that with both records, I wrote a lot of stuff that I scrapped. In both cases, well over an album’s worth. With the first one, I actually got to the stage where I had pretty much finished one, then basically junked it all and started again. With this one it was a bit more of an organic process.

When I sat down to start, I consciously sat down to write an album. It was January, 2009, and I didn’t finish until December. It was a bit of an arduous process. I kind of gave up and started again a few times along the way. The releases that came out last year, before it, were products of the album-writing process. The ‘Aesuniac’ EP that came out, a few of those tracks were going to be on the album, and I decided that I wasn’t going to do an album, so I’d just do an EP instead. Then I changed my mind again [laughs] and decided to do an album, so a lot of it got written at the last minute, in September and October, or even November, really. Then it was just finishing up.

Down to the deadline!

Yeah. The thing is, the ‘Sub:Stance’ mix CD came out in January, and Melissa Taylor, who’s doing the PR for both of them, was of the view that, if possible, they should come out reasonably close together, instead of having maybe one in January and one in May or June, it would be better to do one in February or March. But the point at which she told me that, I was probably 40% done. So I decided I had to write something pretty quick!

In a way that made it easier, because it made me focus, and forced me to do it. No more procrastinating for months, as I had been doing before.

I guess it made you stop throwing things away.

Yeah, it made me… I think focus is the right word. Just get on and do it.

What kind of material did you scrap?

To be honest, I haven’t gone through most of it. Basically there’s a folder of Cubase files that I haven’t really gone through since I finished it. I’ve been kind of, like, Ok, it’s done, I never want to be involved with any of this stuff ever again! But I should really go through it, there’s probably quite a lot of good stuff in there.

For the whole of last year, I was working on quite a wide range of different stuff, doing the SCB project, and the normal Scuba-type stuff I’ve been developing for the last years, and also doing the drum & bass-type stuff. It was pretty wide-ranging. Those are the areas I’ve been concentrating on over the last 18 months or so, without focusing too heavily on any one of them.

One thing that makes the record stand out is the multiple tempos and rhythmic structures. Is the more techno-oriented material a response to living in Berlin?

It’s difficult to say, really. I’ve been here for two and a half years now, so I don’t really know what it would have been like had I stayed in London, because obviously house has got really big in London over the last couple of years. Obviously it’s a different sound to the sound that’s big here, but it’s certainly gone through a revival in the quote-unquote urban, London music scene. House was nowhere three years ago, and now it’s a really big part of it. I don’t know what it would have been like had I not moved here, but I certainly wouldn’t have been doing the SCB project, because that is pretty much straight-up, unreconstructed Berlin music.

But I’ve always been into techno, so in the course of messing around in the studio, it’s kind of an obvious thing for me to do. That said, you’re always going to be influenced by your surroundings, whether in a conscious way or a more unconscious, osmosis-type thing. The 4/4 thing is a big part of my sound, though.

 

When I met up with you and Shackleton a few months ago, I remember you feeling frustrated by your associations with the dubstep scene. Do you feel that the fact that dubstep is loosening up and diversifying makes it easier for you to do your own thing?

I know I do bang on about how dubstep’s rubbish and I don’t want to be a part of it [laughs] but equally, I do feel a sense of ownership over it, and a sense of responsibility towards it as well. I don’t like what’s happened with a big part of the sound, and the scene, generally. But equally, I feel that, as someone who was around when it started, it’s partly my responsibility to keep it interesting and good, and try to promote the positive aspects that remain of it. And that are still actually growing within it, as well—I think, generally speaking, it’s in a much better state than it was two or three years ago.

I think the 2007-2008 time was really grim, musically, for dubstep. But since then there’s been lots of interesting things happening, and lots of new labels springing up with good music, and new producers who are doing good stuff. While I don’t like being pigeonholed—and it’s even worse with the “techno/dubstep” stuff, that’s just become, like, the cliché of clichés—while I don’t like being lumped in with it, it is an important thing that’s happened within music in the last 10 years or so. The people that have been influential in making it, the good parts of what it is, I think it’s good that people continue to try to build on it.

Do you have a background in U.K. garage and classic 2-step? There definitely seem to be some 2-step influences in the album, particularly tracks like ‘Latch’.

‘Latch’

 

I was a garage DJ before I got into dubstep. Basically I started playing garage in 1999. My garage set started out as a very straight garage set, and gradually developed into what it is now. In those early days I wasn’t just playing garage, I was also playing breaks, broken beat, and house as well. My garage influence was one of a number of things.

You talked about re-discovering drum & bass recently, as well.

Yeah! A really small part of drum & bass, I should emphasize. [laughs] For me, the most interesting musical thing last year was the Autonomic podcast, by dBridge and Instra:mental. In the ‘95, ‘98 period, I was really into jungle and drum & bass. I used to go out to raves every weekend, you know, get wasted and watch Randall and Andy C. It was an amazing period, and a really cool thing to have been apart of—not involved directly, just as a punter. And long since having written it off, nothing much good has happened for, from what I can see, five years or more—a lot more, I think 2003 was the last time I really paid any attention to it.

‘So You Think You’re Special’

 

I think what they’ve done is really interesting. Not just with the drum & bass thing; it’s obviously quite dubstep-influenced, the way they’re doing the half-time rhythms, and have moved away from the hyper-obsession with engineering. But also their attitude towards music-making, just the idea that you don’t have to worry about what people expect from a stereotype of drum & bass—the massive kicks, and the snares, and the rave thing. Obviously dubstep has that as well. But it’s the sense that you don’t have to be confined.

It seems in general, there’s more openness to different tempos right now – not just in dubstep and funky but also house and techno.

Totally! The tempo was originally a bit of a prison for drum & bass. The good thing about dubstep, it’s similar in tempo to lots of other genres. The immediate potential for crossover is there, as a DJ, just mixing in different kinds of music, regardless of influence on actual producers. But drum & bass, obviously, is in a territory of its own, unless you want to start getting into breakcore, but that’s not necessarily fertile ground.

That would probably explain, or partially explain, the creative cul-de-sac in drum & bass for a long time. But what dBridge and Instra:mental, and everyone else who has been influenced by them—which is lots of people now—have been doing is really cool, really positive and interesting.

On the new album, it seems like with at least a few tracks, like ‘Before’, you’re working towards more of a classic song structure than you have before. Can you see yourself working in a direction that’s more, dare I say, pop?

When I was a teenager, I wrote lots of songs for bands, so I do have that background. But I’m a bit hesitant about striding out into that terrain. The song is an amazing musical form. It’s incredible how durable it has been, for centuries. But marrying it with electronic music can be problematic. [laughs]

There’s lots of things I want to do, musically. At the moment it’s trying to find the time to do them.

‘Heavy Machinery’

 

What are some of those things?

Um. Well, I’ve… I don’t know if I want to talk about them, particularly! [laughs uproariously] Off the record… no, I’m not even going say anything off-record. Primarily, what I’m trying to juggle at the moment is developing the dubstep thing, and continuing to do that, but I’m having the most fun in the studio at the moment writing house and techno. But at the moment, finding any time for the studio is tough. But that’s where I want to spend most of my time at the moment, doing the SCB project. Because I haven’t spent, like, long periods on any kind of music apart from dubstep. I started doing dubstep, or exclusively making what is perceived as dubstep, in 2002 or so. So it’s a long time to spend on something!

What distinguishes Scuba and SCB, then? Because you’ve already shown Scuba to be a pretty versatile project.

The SCB thing, it’s totally unpretentious. I want to make club music, essentially. Interesting club music exists, and you can always play interesting tunes in the context of a house set, but the bread and butter… It’s just something I haven’t really spent a lot of time doing, six months or a year just making that kind of music. It’s an experiment, I guess.

SCB, ‘3_5’

 

And you’re working on your live set now, right?

[nervous laugh] Yeeeeah, I am. I’ve got to do one in just over two weeks, at Berghain, for Sub:Stance.

And how’s that going?

It’s going slowly, yeah. The thing is, it’s really starting from zero. Before this, I hadn’t even thought about how I might perform my music live. Hadn’t even considered it. So I’ve got a couple of weeks, but it’s been a steep learning curve, and I’ve never used Ableton before, either. It’s all been very last-minute. But it’s getting there!

The thing about it is, it’s an opportunity to play lots of my music that I would never play in my DJ set. But obviously you don’t want to go too far up your own ass, you know what I mean, some kind of free-jazz, experimental hour. If it turns out the way I want, it should be danceable and maybe quite interesting, as well.

Since you are a DJ, what made you decide to do a live set?

I’m not planning on giving up DJing, it’s just an extra thing to do, really. I have this habit of taking on things that I haven’t really got time to do. I’ve been planning, meaning to do one for a long time. I’ve aborted various attempts at doing it. It’s like the album deadline, really: unless there’s something actually booked in, unless it says it on a flyer, I’m never actually going to do it. So book me in for Sub:Stance, and hopefully that will force me to do it.

Scuba performs Friday, April 9 at Sub:Stance, his regular dubstep night at Berlin’s Berghain. DJs for the night are Skream, Untold, Peverelist, Tayo, Roko, and Paul Spymania. Check Resident Advisor’s event listing for more information.

Source: beatportal