Clayton Hines talks music.

27/09/2007

Posted by Clayton Hines

For me, the most exciting thing to happen in drum & bass over the last few years was Pendulum, you know, they started from heavy rock, and moved into drum & bass, and fused the two and they made it work. But when it comes to drum & bass, I personally don’t like that kind of stuff. I like the more liquid, soulful kinda stuff. If I’m gonna go to a drum & bass night, it’s not gonna be like a hard thing, or a jump-up thing, it’s gonna be more of a Swerve type night. There’s a lot of new fresh talent in that area of the scene that I’m really into, there’s obviously Alix Perez, there’s Lynx, Spectrasoul, Sabre, there’s Survival. There are a lot of great artists that are doing really good things in that side of the scene. It’s the soulful stuff outside of drum & bass I’m into as well, that side of hip hop, the neo-soul scene – artists like Musiq Soulchild, and I’m into deep house, particularly a French producer called Yaas.

That said, with our labels, we’re slowing things down on the liquid side with Renegade Recordings, and are whittling it down to just Hardware. The other labels will be putting nothing out unless it’s a big project - Renegade Hardware is the massive one, the one that’s recognised, so we’re focusing on that. The new artists at Hardware are exciting too, the biggest talent for me being Vicious Circle. It’s minimal, but it’s still got a groove to it, and if it’s hard it’s still gotta have a groove for me.

What I want to see in drum & bass firstly is the tempo to drop, people have been saying it for a while, but that’s really important for me. More than that though, I think drum & bass needs to incorporate more music into its tracks, and be producing more proper songs. If it’s gonna get any bigger and go to the next level, it’s gotta get more mainstream recognition, and the only way it’s gonna do that is with more songs, more vocalists and by concentrating less on being drum & bass, and more on just being music. I don’t necessarily see our Hardware artists going that way, but what I do see happening is our artists going down the Ableton Live route and that’s something I’m really looking forward to seeing.