In the current situation, we should respect those who paved the way for the music we have today. Young people can access it easily nowadays, and getting everything at once has become much easier compared with previous years. Buying music software to start writing tracks is easy! A couple of speakers and a laptop—and you already have a complete studio. In the past, we had to go into debt to buy at least a couple of items from the list so we could assemble a studio setup and start working. There was nothing like the reach of social media today, there were no MP3s, and the internet was rare. People sold records from their boxes and went to shops or distributors to persuade them to take the records on consignment so that an audience could hear them.
Much of the music created in those years is considered the “best” in the entire history of the style, as well as a source of inspiration for beginning producers. Sometimes it is genuinely amazing to imagine how those tracks were written in the ’90s using the simplest setup: MIDI, a sampler, and a console. All those producers were true pioneers, champions of a new sound that pushed music forward. Ask many top dubstep producers, “What did you listen to when you were teenagers?” and you will get the answer: “Drum’n’bass.” This music became the foundation of modern “BASS” music.
One of the few resilient creators still afloat, who has been through a great deal over all this time and continues stubbornly and persistently to release his distinctive deep, dark, crazy jungle/drum’n’bass, is Dominic Angas. This man, who earned a reputation as a talented artist through his releases on Moving Shadow and No U-Turn in the ’90s, has still not lost his power.
I knew Dom was as much of a “psycho” about music as I am, so I prepared for a short interview with him in the studio, and he agreed. We present our new feature, “Artist Spotlight,” whose first subject is the one and only Dom & Roland.
You have been in this game for a long time. How old were you when your first track was signed to a label?
A track called “Wax Musical” came out in 1994 on Saigon Recordings, a subsidiary of No U-Turn. I was 19 at the time.
A lot has changed since then. What are the most significant changes you can identify in your career over all this time?
Back then, not everyone could record and release a record because not everyone had the capital to buy equipment or rent a studio. I took out a bank loan to buy everything I needed. I required £5,000 at the time. I bought a Roland sampler, a CD-ROM drive, an Atari 1040 with Midex, Cubase, a Yamaha SPX-990 effects unit, and a portable Sony DAT for recording the final versions. To level something out or add an effect, I had to run the sound from a standalone sampler through its output, level it, sample it again, and then record it through the input using a cable. Of course, all of that is outdated now, but it worked perfectly then. Everyone’s sound ended up different in terms of tone because people used different equipment. At that time, we listened to music exclusively on cassettes or records. If you had a track, you had definitely paid for it to have it. We did not make very extensive use of the internet.
I think young people’s attitude toward what they create has changed too. It used to be really cool to create a track that sounded unlike anyone else’s. I was crazy about the time when I would disappear into a record shop, spending my money on records that nobody else had yet. That made me feel the whole movement, becoming part of it. Especially when the guy in the shop pulled a white-label promo record out from under the counter for you. Now, apart from the obvious changes in formats, everything has come full circle. I read in an article that it is much cooler to like the same artists your friends like. So if your musical taste is different, you get labelled a “weirdo.” To me, that is complete nonsense. I am 38 now, and in young people’s opinion I am just fucking “ancient.”
Was it hard to say goodbye to the Roland? It gave your tracks character.
No, actually… I never said goodbye to it. It still sits on its stand, while newer and newer equipment accumulates around it. I even switched it on once, by pressing the little “on” button. I used it while writing the album “Terminate,” where I worked only with individual samplers, a console, and hardware effects.
Your tracks are very rich and epic in sound, with sketches that seem to come from films. What inspires you? Film? Music? Life?
Film, life, other people’s music, ordinary things. I grew up playing classical music on instruments. Both my parents were opera singers. That is why I absorbed all this epic quality. Although, you know, I cannot watch opera without falling asleep or starting to look for something else to do. I am a sci-fi fan; it helps me extend the flight of my imagination.
Have you ever written anything other than drum and bass?
I have worked on other music, but only superficially. I never released anything myself. But everything could change one day. I mixed rock with electronics for people, incidentally.
You seem to remain at the musical forefront. You work with the latest plugins and equipment. Which manufacturers would you single out?
Valhalla Ubermod sounds simply excellent on anything… It is as good as my Eventide “hardware.” Their delays are very cool. Most Airwindows plugins are very good. I like their Drive and Desk plugins the most. My digital audio workstation is Reaper; they have also changed a lot for the better. Slate Digital’s products are not bad, but the company’s creepy marketing rather puts me off working with their products.
And what equipment has stayed with you to this day?
I have supported DMG Audio for a long time. I have known Dave since he worked at Focusrite, when I tested the beta version of Liquid Channel. I have always been involved in their process, from the very moment the company was founded. All their plugins are simply excellent; their coding is in the best and most suitable form for working. I also worked with Pitchfunk not long ago. It is my current favorite. I used products from Soundtoys and tested them for a long time. You can hear Echoboy practically all the time on the tracks I write. I used FilterFreak a lot. I have been using samples from Acustica Nebula for a very long time, but they have never received the respect they deserve in the market.
You were part of the testing team for DMG Audio’s Equilibrium project. What ideas did you bring to the process of improving this equalizer?
I suggested a shape with a flat top, and pressing the A/B/H buttons with the right hand to view the images. Not much, of course. There was a whole group of us; we exchanged ideas and ultimately arrived at the best way to improve the operation of all the plugins.
Your tracks often have audible overload. How do you achieve that dirty sound characteristic of Dom & Roland?
I simply raise the level through plugins or hardware until everything starts sounding “rotten,” then pull it back a little; it is all quite simple. I can start working with the level straight away using an equalizer—a great method if you want to control which frequencies begin to overload first. Hardware almost always sounds much better when you push it to full volume, similar to the effect of trying to achieve overload with digital equipment.
What is your general attitude toward the transition from analog to digital?
Fine… I have been doing this for a long time. And I understand perfectly what each is best suited for. I learned to work with Logic when my studio was at Moving Shadow’s head office; it was very convenient to be able to pester Rob Playford with all my questions. I think it was Logic 3 then. Audio instruments had not appeared yet. Logic was elevated to the status of a great tape recorder.
Analog and digital both have their advantages; do you agree?
Yes, everything involving overload, including compression, is better with analog equipment. But there are exceptions to the rule.
You worked with Logic for a long time, then moved to a new workstation. Is it difficult to leave behind something that is comfortable and familiar? Why did you decide to move to new equipment?
As I understand it, there is a big difference. It is about how the track itself sounds; I could no longer work with Logic. All their code and so on simply does not meet modern standards. There are several things I cannot continue with. Here are some of them…
- I cannot import anything into my workstation that is still in 32-bit.
- Adding something to a loop means having to rework the loop from scratch; it takes time and you end up going in circles. It is absolutely useless for perfecting a beat.
- You have to press “start” and “stop” to hear any changes you have made.
- They removed some very useful things from the “Audiosuite” menu, such as sample-rate conversion.
I started working with Reaper because I can preserve all my key commands from Logic. A very important feature, I think, is the ability to zoom in and out using a rectangular selection. Everything is very clear and precise. It is also easy to learn and use going forward. I found several useful things in it for myself. The sound is better—much cleaner and more open than Logic. In terms of acoustics, Pro Tools, Cubase, Reaper, and Studio One are the best, followed by Logic, with Ableton Live bringing up the rear. You and I, along with the others, carried out a pile of boring tests to reach this conclusion. Now I work with Reaper; using the “up” and “down” buttons, I raise and lower the pitch of audio fragments in real time with a sample-rate converter, like a sampler. For simpler tasks, I do not really need a sampler. The waveform also changes, making it easier for me to work because I can see what is happening to it. I was surprised when Logic Pro X came out that they had missed these key points. I switched to Reaper several years ago and am very happy with it.
Tell me about macros in Reaper.
I recently developed one for beats: it finds and separates transitions, quantizes them, strengthens the legato, and adds a millisecond fade before the transition. It is similar to Pro Tools’ Beat Detective. You have an editor at hand in which you group a list of commands and then assign them to a specific button. It is brilliant!
Are there a few more tricks you would like to share?
When processing sound, make sure that the original sound and the sound coming out are completely level-matched. Sometimes our brains like to play tricks on us. Sometimes it is useful to make it louder.
As far as I know, you are not a big fan of compression in most cases—is that true?
I sometimes like working with compression, for example when it comes to the bass part. But otherwise, if I do not need it, I do not use it. I prefer to overload or edit the dynamic range manually. That is more precise.
You often shift notes in your tracks in search of the best groove. You are also well known for taking drums from one breakbeat and building them onto another beat that is unquantized. Many producers cannot overcome their fear of missing the drum grid.
It is all about the groove, as they say. People often laughed at me for using a sample-delay plugin and stretching a hi-hat across three separate samples, but I have proved more than once that I hear and feel it. Even drummers playing to a metronome most often play their snares slightly ahead of or behind the beat. That is the difference between an ordinary drummer and a professional. It is no less important for electronic music. Remember, we are talking about very small amounts. But they are enough to feel the difference, especially in the context of a track.
For many people, you are the creator of one of the most famous drum and bass breaks, Tramen, which contains several breaks from the ’70s at once. What do you think of the idea of putting one break over another nowadays?
I created the Tramen break from several well-known breaks. There were three of them; they were layered on top of one another and produced a groove. They were all cut from vinyl records, then I brought their levels up, and I was faced with three tasks within a single rhythm. Three different breaks—three characteristics. I can still put one break over another if I need to. But more often I will prefer to find the one I need that contains everything. I do not want to rack my brains trying to combine them by phase if I need another kick over one kick, and the same goes for snares. The three breaks were overloaded and combined into one by regulating the input level on my console—it is very difficult to do that with digital equipment. Then I resampled it and did the “chopping” again. Trace was working on a couple of his tracks at the time—I was his sound engineer—and convinced me that he needed to use this break (laughs). In the end, we recorded a couple of tracks together, and those tracks later became classics. “Sonar” and “Mutant Jazz Revisited” were the first of them. On one of them I left the break clean for a bar, and then everyone started “stealing” it. Everyone from Ray Keith to Bad Company and Optical built their tracks on that basis. It annoyed me, but I feel differently now. It is an honor for me.
After all that, you eventually recorded your first record for Metalheadz. How did the work on the remix of Goldie’s track “Jah” go?
After all that… (laughs) Because I was not credited on the Skylab EP by Ed Rush, nobody knew that I had mixed it, and that we had recorded it together in the ’90s. “Jah” was a difficult track. It took me a year to bring it to the right level. I wanted to preserve the atmosphere of the original while also giving the track a slightly more modern look. I had no samples and did literally everything from scratch. It is such a great track that I wanted to do it absolutely right. Goldie knew I was working on the remix, but I did not tell him which one. He was absolutely blown away when I played him the resulting track.
What is planned for the DRP label (Dom & Roland Productions)?
A joint single from Hive and me will come out, along with a collection of remixes of tracks from DRP by my favorite artists. There will be several singles from newcomers to the label—Armando and Xanadu. After that I am planning albums and my own singles. I have a lot of tracks sitting around that I have not yet got around to releasing. It is quite possible that some of them may also come out on other labels.
Original interview: Mike Bell, Darkart Mastering. Translated from the Russian translation by Rustee (Special Request, 2013).
