When, less than half a decade ago, an explosion of homegrown British street-level dance music became the so-called soundtrack for a generation, few had big hopes for it. Jungle, drum 'n' bass, whatever your label for it, would surely be comet-like in its intensity, then would zoom away into the heavens, never to come around again- The fact that so many drum 'n' bass artists appear in FM isn't some nod to current trends but a tribute to the many techniques that this section of the popular music world is innovating. And if it wasn't for labels like Good Looking Records, led by prodigious ITJ Bukem, drum 'n' bass wouldn't have survived. But it's getting stronger.
Bukem, as well as having several record labels, is a DJ, entrepreneur, figurehead, shining light. - - He is one of the most recognisable faces in a genre not famed for its love of publicity. But when you have produced music like his, you crave more information. Good Looking and its artists, from the live power of Intense to the chilled-out swells of Tayla, are the subject of Logical Progression II. This is the second compilation of the best bits and the future tricks of Good Looking. With one half of the double CD mixed by Bukem's increasingly high-profile buddy Blame, it's a blueprint for The Sound Of Drum And Bass 1997.
Switch to a cool evening in a suburban Hertfordshire town. A seemingly incongruous place for the Good Looking offices to be in but, if you know your history, you'll realise this is the heartland of drum 'n' bass. Source Direct, Photek and Bukem himself are just three cutting-edge artists who are based around the Golden Triangle that goes up from Watford to St Albans and back down to the North London fringes. LTJ Bukem, known as Danny to his mum and friends, looks happy enough. He sits down and immediately hits stride to explain the rational behind the Logical Progression series.
The unmixed side was basically down to me," he opens. It always will be. Unmixed tracks of what Good Looking has been about for the last 12 to 18 months. All the tunes mean something to me. I can listen to them and think back to times at clubs like Mars and Logical Progression, and times playing out. They remind me of good tunes and they're a representation of what we are about. And the mixed side is Blame with stuff that's gonna come out on Good Looking, plus stuff you haven't heard:'
The door to this small conference room is shut. All you hear is the distant hum of a vacuum cleaner in another room. Outside, the streets are virtually empty. It's quiet Danny Bukem has a smile on his face. Understandably. Despite recent reports that he has become exasperated with certain former acquaintances, he's effusive. Jolly even. But then he's worked hard to get this far.
Bukem's story is that of a man open to change, to all genres of music: a musical harlequin. Trained on piano, his experiences In the 80s have all added something to his music: following British hip hop übermeister and now Radio One DJ, Tim Westwood, everywhere; warehouse parties; Gilles Peterson, Talking Loud label-head, founder of Acid Jazz; and Kiss FM DJ and rare groove specialist Norman Jay. Not to mention Jazzy B of Soul II Soul down at the Africa center. - - If you want to get ahead, you see, get eclectic.
All these influences make up his music, plus his conversion to house and on to techno in the latter part of the last decade. He calls it drum 'n' bass, what he does now, but you feel he's saying that because then it's easier for people to understand. It's actually more than that.
So when Good Looking was set up at the start of the 90s, Bukem's laissez-faire ethos imbibed itself in the label clientele. Like Blame. Who's now at the door, walking in and settling down. Dressed in street/hip hop smart, he looks fresh out of sixth form. Blame, who comes from fellow drum 'n' bass pioneer label Moving Shadow, as the writer of several tracks on Logical II and the man who mixed one half of it, looks contented enough. The prospect of getting away from the usual run-of-the-mill media interrogation of a dance press whose sole line of inquiry seems always to revolve around what they charge for a DJ set, sets him and Bukem in good mood. Blame makes it known that his musical workhorse was bought less with traditional requirements in mind but more with what he had seen others using "What I've got at home is a Roland W-30, which is what I've had since I read The Prodigy saying 'Yeah, that's what we use' [in Future Music, don't you know- Ed]. So I just get my basic ideas on that - very rough breaks and strings -and see if all my bits and pieces go in tune together. I don't polish anything; everything's really rough. I don't spend time doing things, it's just about getting a solid idea and then taking that to the studio, polishing It up that way and redoing the whole track So It's about getting a concept going, simply because I can't afford to get my ideas in a studio: it costs too much.
"The way I work," he adds, is that I get my rough idea and take it to the studio. Then, after that session, I take it back home, sampling that loop on my W-30 and then laying even more sounds on top, so the whole tune is building and growing. I run Logic on my PC and transfer the samples on to DAT although I haven't actually got any time generators or anything. Maybe I should have. And that's another thing, because I'm doing all this in a studio, that takes time. I always start with a break - a lot of people put in the bass then but the bass is always the last addition to my track
because I want to hear all the sounds bounce off each other before the bass goes In. What I tend to do is get a break and then I get thinking of the whole concept of the track, then I like to work on tt.as a whole:'
Visions Of Mars on Logical II was based around 50s' sci-fi films, Blame reveals and his whole-concept approach proven in the way he lays the teleporting bleeps and transmission feedback sounds under the tune. He aligns himself with fellow FM interviewee, Photek: "I read that he samples record crackles just to give it the old 70s jazz thing. That's the tip I'm on, but I'm approaching it from a different area.
Bukem, meanwhile, has fewer of the problems surrounding studio access than his cohort. Nearly five years at the top of the drum 'n' bass tree has put Bukem on a much sounder financial footing. That is not to say Blame is poverty-stricken, but it's normally major record labels who pick up the tab initially for studio time. Very few individuals have that clout. Instead, Bukem wants his own studio, away from his home: "I'm sick of working in my house and living in my studio," he spits. "Now I want my studio separate from my house so that I can come back at 4am and detach myself. I can then go off and get the buzz in the studio. At the moment, at home I can do what I want, bar hard-disk recording which I want to get sorted in the next few weeks as it's coming down in price. It costs around £1 0-15k to get it into your studio. But I can do anything that I want do at home. Like Blame, I'm not the world's best engineer who studies everything about frequencies, so it's nice to know someone who is a good engineer, who can say that you should be tweaking this and that:'
Blame nods his head sagely at Bukem's exhortations about engineers. He agrees their influence is underplayed in most areas of dance music. It appears to be something they want to change. It was during Blame's formative years living in Luton that he met up with an inspiring engineer at a local studio, Simon Donohue. He's gone on to engineer all the Blame tracks on LogicaI II plus many more besides. Blame explains the importance of the engineer in his musical life: "We kind of both evolved together," says Blame of his close colleague, "and now he has his own set-up in his garage and I am the only guy he engineers for. Even if I go to another studio, I always manage to get Simon down there on the last day to overlook the mixdown or something.
Sometimes I get too involved and need someone to have a look and think 'Hold on a minute, maybe you're putting too much bass in there: I was never a musician so I do need a bit of technical help sometimes. So I always go there because I know exactly what I can get out of the sounds. I go there straight away, whistle a sound and then it's there straight away:'
But engineers can be a hindrance If they are of the dyed-in-the-wool, been-there-done-that type' as a chuckling Blame recounts. "I've been to other studios," he says. "And I want to chop this break up and they look at you as if they're thinking, 'What is this geezer on about? Taking hi-hats out of a breakbeat?' And you've actually got to go step-by-step through it and then an hour later they'll go, 'Oh. I see what you are doing!' But its too much hassle. When I've got an idea in my head it's just got to flow down straight away. There are so many times when I am at home and I've got an idea for a break and I'll have to get a piece of paper and draw a lot of dots on it, like they did on those old school music programmes. But I've got to do it because by the time I've loaded all the gear up it's gone, but I can look at those scribbles and know exactly what I want:'
Bukem's method is far less orderly: "There's never a fixed way. I'm constantly going through records. I love old music. I still collect it now and so I know that I have more samples than I will ever use in my life. I jut constantly go through them and I might find something to totally inspire me to do something else. That is it. No formula, just, like, sounds. Nothing that says that this has to happen like this and like that I just sit there and go through breaks, and go through certain things and work out what will sound nice with another:'
Like Bukem, Blame's eclectic drum 'n' bass sound comes from the myriad of musical influences of his youth. Electro and hip-hop were his early loves, as well as the syncopated Latin jazz rhythms that have their natural home in Blame's thoughtful grooves. But it could have been so different. The young man, now close to being a drum 'n' bass veteran, decided on music as a career after being shown around a studio when young by a friend who was on work experience. When he left school, he poured his funds into creating music, but only decided on making what's now called hardcore after deciding it was 'easier' Music Takes You. his first solo track hit Number 1 in the dance charts and also the mainstream Top 40. Blame admits these were wild times, but he's now settled down to making music his priority In fact the bottom line is the music, and both men agree that the technology can often get in the way.
" I could take two years off and do nothing but read manuals about the equipment... Bukem begins.
But there's not enough time to do it," interjects Blame. And as soon as you do things like that, then you just want to get into the studio and do your next track. It's too much time, I'd love to do it at some point but there are so many tunes in your head, that you have to involve people to help:'
At this stage, someone doesn't help: a small Irishwoman whirrs in wielding a vacuum cleaner to unceremoniously turf our two heroes out of the room, despite protestations. Back in a Good Looking admin office, Bukem continues, not concerned about admitting that things do actually go wrong when making music.
It happens all the time," Bukem admits. "More often than not an idea will not work, however many ideas you have on a computer. But I can always put something new down and know that if I don't like it the way it is, I can totally change it. However, my biggest fault is that I only get about a week to do something. And then normally I'm so shagged that day; nine times out of ten I'm not in a fit state and not a lot get done. Life's becoming one big DJ set. I'm learning to juggle everything now:'
Whereas Bukem spends more time behind the decks because that's his passion, it's the opposite for Blame, who loves the studio. But he had one serious DJingjob when given the gig to mix the Logical Progression II album alongside renowned MC, Conrad. Even though, at first, it didn't go according to plan. Djing in the studio is different to doing it live, he found.
"Now, it's just like one of my DJ sets. It's what I'm about," he says gently. "But I was in the studio for 30 hours getting it perfect. There were certain tracks where I wasn't happy with the cuts and dub plates and I was routing them through the desk and then mixing each one down. Then I played it to Danny and Conrad and they were, like, 'This ain't Blame'. It was just too regimented and not what you'd hear If you went out and heard me. So I basically took all the old dub plates out of my box, crackles and everything and did it in one take. And it was full of more energy, more me. It was the most pressure that I've ever been under in terms of music, 'cos it was going to be mastered an hour later and I had one take, one chance and I did it:'
Mixing Logical Progression II should bring fame to the name Blame, possibly as much as to the man sitting next to him. And with an array of labels cropping up under the Good Looking banner, some of which will stray from the drum 'n' bass path, Bukem isn't resting on his laurels either. With his strength and the talent of the artist around him, the progression continues... that's logical, captain.
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