Commix Interview: Call To Mind

The Metalheadz duo shed light on their past, present and future.

Commix have just released their debut album, 'Call To Mind'. In the process they've not only become the first artists to release an album on Metalheadz beside Goldie himself, but have also produced one of the finest drum & bass debut albums in memory. One half of Commix, George, was in bed sleeping off a well earned birthday hangover, but we had a lengthy chat over the phone with the other half, Guy. During the interview he told us about how they arrived at their current sound, their thoughts on the new school of drum & bass talent, their aspirations for the future and much more.

Endclub.com: You’re now fully fledged members of the Metalheadz crew. What does that mean to you?

Commix: It’s something quite special for both of us because I guess Metalheadz pretty much got us into drum & bass. They were some of the first records that we really paid attention to - some of the early releases by people like Wax Doctor and Doc Scott, and Goldie obviously, were what actually got both of us into it, so it’s very special.

I think initially our sound didn’t really fit with what Metalheadz were doing, and then we changed what we were doing a couple of years ago. Around that time we started speaking to Goldie, and it sort of went from there.

How did this change and evolution in your sound come about?

Well when we first started making tunes, we were still very much in the pockets of Dan Nu:tone and Logistics. We were all hanging around together, so I guess we were trying to emulate what Dan was doing to a certain extent, because we were learning to make music at the same time. A couple of years after that we split up with one of the original members of Commix, Conrad. And after that I think we had to just change what we were doing, it was either a case of stopping completely and going to do something else, or completely changing the way we looked at it.
We’d always been into so many different types of music that we felt a little bit constrained making soulful, Rhodes-keyboard sounding tunes, with bits of acapella flowing over the top of it; basically it started to bore us. So we started to look at what sort of music we were into as a whole rather than just concentrate on what particular sound. That was when we started to make our best stuff to be honest.

Do you think there were any specific tunes you guys wrote that helped shape the new direction?

When the first two tunes that we did for the ‘Future Sound of Cambridge EP’ on Hospital, that was probably the time when we started thinking to ourselves “not every time we make a tune do we have to get the Rhodes out and start playing some chords”. Just doing the same shit day in day out gets boring after a while. I guess we just wanted to keep ourselves interested.

Talking of the Hospital EP, you released on loads of different labels early on. Did you ever see yourself settling down at any of those labels in the way you eventually did at Metalheadz?

We did seem to sort of float around quite a lot in the early stages of our career, I don’t know why, I guess that’s just the way it worked for us. Around the time we were speaking to Metalheadz we were also speaking to Hospital, but I think tying ourselves down to Hospital didn’t feel right for us, simply because two of our best friends were already on that label and we didn’t want to be jostling for space with them. And when we started to speak to Goldie and he came up with the offer of us doing an album it just seemed right for us because we were the first people to be offered to do it, so it was something quite personal for us as opposed to just being another one of the Cambridge artists getting signed to Hospital…

So when Goldie signed you to the label had he heard the completed Commix album?

No not at all. I guess the initial conversation we had was a couple of years ago, we did a 12” for them, ‘Urban Legend / If I Should Fall’, and he was interested in our approach to making music. Ourselves and Goldie had similar influences and were into similar things, and me and George both were at the point where we wanted to do an album. So we started speaking to him about that and he basically said “look, go off, do it, and when you’ve got the album ready come and see me and we’ll put it out for you.” It took a little while to get it together, and after the first year we thought we had it, then we made ‘Be True’, and decided to scrap the entire album and write another one around that. Yeah, there has been a few setbacks along the way and it did take a while, but we finally finished it about six months ago.

Now the album is finished and out, there’s been loads of great stuff said and written about it. Are you pleased with the plaudits you’ve been getting?

I think hopefully we’ve achieved what we set out to do, which was try to cram all of our influences into something that still sounded like Commix, and still had an underlying theme to it. We’re really pleased with the way it’s gone down, I think we impressed everyone we set out to. I guess you’re never 100% happy with the project yourself, especially when it’s new, it takes a while before you can even see it as an album, and I think we’re only just getting to that stage now. It’s just been a bunch of tunes for ages, and it’s only now that I’ve seen it in the shops and packaged as a CD that I can even sort of think of it as an album.

We’re really anti anything cheesy, we’re real musical snobs, and we hate 90% of the stuff out there. So we just wanted to make something that stayed true to what we believe in in terms of music, and I think we’ve done that.

On the album, there’s some pretty clear techno influences. Which artists inspired you in this way?

All kinds of different stuff I’d say. Right now we’re really into Mathew Jonson and his live Cobblestone Jazz thing, we like what Claude von Stroke is doing, plus Swag and loads of random stuff like that. Obviously we were influenced by a lot of the older electronic stuff like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, we’re really into stuff like Prefuse 73, and the whole Warp thing has been a big influence on what we do. I wouldn’t really say it’s techno as a whole, but just good electronic music basically.

You mentioned Cobblestone Jazz as a live act; has a live show ever been something you’d consider with Commix?

It’s crossed our minds definitely. But I don’t know whether or not we’d be ready to do that for a long time. To be honest I think with the live drum & bass thing it’s something that, if you rush into it, it can sound so awful. As far as we’re concerned, we’d have to stop DJing, stop everything, and just sit down and think about it for a long time. At the moment, I think we’re quite happy making music in the studio.

The ‘Call To Mind’ artwork is quite different, what inspired it?

It is different. That was the point of it really, we wanted to do something that didn’t look like a drum & bass front cover at all, and didn’t have any of those connotations that you think of when you picture a drum & bass album. The designer’s a friend of ours from Cambridge, he’s really good at doing photo realistic artwork. We wanted something that summed up the time of year it was going to come out, autumn, and something that would have a kind of classic look that won’t look dated in a couple of years. I think it’s actually an oil painting. A lot of people hate it and a lot of people like it, and I think that’s a good thing!

It’ll be remembered then!

Exactly, and that’s the whole thing we’re trying to achieve with the album. A lot of tunes on there, they’re not ‘immediate’ tunes. Sometimes we write tunes, and we know they’re only good for a 12”, something like the ‘Electric’ thing that we did last year, we wouldn’t want to put it on an album because those kind of tunes, they get forgotten so easily. You want album tunes to have longevity; you know they’re things that you might not get into initially on the first listen but you that you’ll grow to like after a while.

Drum & bass is currently awash with new talent, do you think the scene is benefiting from this?

Definitely. There seems to be a little upward peak at the moment. We’re really into what Lynx is doing, he’s definitely one of the most exciting to pop up recently. Some other guys, Instra:mental, we’re really into what they’re doing as well, they’re slowing it down a little bit and putting the space back into it and really don’t seem to be paying attention to what’s happening on the dancefloor at all which is great as far as I’m concerned. We’re into anyone that’s cropping up and doing things a bit differently.

Do you think the number of new producers making music in drum & bass right now reflects the number of new ideas out there?

Maybe not…I’m not sure, maybe only one in every fifty tunes has got something even remotely original in it and it’s one of those things, music moves round in circles and maybe in a year’s time something will come out that blows everything out of the water again. Drum & bass has been around long enough for it to be quite difficult for people to come out with things that are really different. You notice subtle changes as the music goes along, but I’m not really aware of anything completely different.

‘Disco Dodo’ is pretty different…

Definitely. When you play that in the club everyone stops for a second and just goes “what the fuck is this.” Then they obviously get into it, but it’s really good that something like that has broken through as much as it has done.

Where do you think the sound is going in the next couple of years?

I think it’s always really difficult to predict. A lot of people have been doing down the techno kind of route recently, but I don’t really know where that is going to go. I’m not very good at predicting where things are going to go to be honest, I guess it’s just dependent on what people are sampling, or what people are interested in at that time, or even what’s going on in the wider music world…

And what’s next for Commix?

Well we’ve just started going back into the studio to think about what we’re going to be doing next. We’re going to be setting up our own label at some point in the next year or so. We haven’t got any firm plans as far as that is concerned, but it’s definitely going to be happening. We’re thinking about writing another album and we’re going to be doing more stuff at other tempos as well. We’ve been putting a lot of effort into writing 4/4 stuff at the moment, and downtempo bits as well, just to give ourselves a bit of a break.

Speaking of the 4/4 and downtempo bits on the album, personally they worked really well for me. Have you been pushing them to non drum & bass DJs?

We haven’t really, we probably should’ve done a bit more than we have. We’ve had some good reactions to them from people like Gilles Peterson and Marc Mac who were really into the downtempo bits on there which is really nice. It’s a funny one though, I think when you’re so closely involved in one scene, you tend to forget about everyone else that is out there! We’re so busy with drum & bass, we’ve never really found time to try and network with anyone else. But we are definitely going to be pursuing that side of things more, it would definitely mean something to us if we got a release on a non drum & bass label, even if it was under another name. I think that would definitely spark us up a bit!

Thanks Guy!

Published: 19/11/2007

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