There’s been a lot of creativity amongst the D&B community when it comes to tempo trickery of late. While some are checking out the vista from the good ship dubstep, others are heading to the fringes, and offering a cool insight into what makes them tick in the process.
Take Sinistarr, a man usually spotted on the likes of Metalheadz, Horizons, Nu-Directions and Inside Recordings. Next week he’s releasing his first non D&B EP on Hit & Hope. It’s worth checking no matter what tempo your heart beats at. Born and bred in Detroit, home of the most influential techno producers the dancefloor has ever been seduced by, his Cetra EP shows just where his roots are, and how he arrived at D&B in the first place. “The guys in Detroit have been doing this for years. I’ve been influenced by the whole ghetto tech and juke sound for a long, long time,” he explains. “A lot of the ghetto tech guys pull from drum & bass and jungle anyway. You listen to the old mixtapes and you hear old Reinforced plates and what have you. I came from house and techno, and it’s not hard to hear the similarities.”
Especially when it comes to the icy sonic D&B oceans Sinistarr has sailed in the past. Textured depths and emotive machine song; the only difference between tracks such as Detroit Diesel, Uptown and Something’s Working and cuts by the likes of Carl Craig and Derrick May is tempo. Shucks, one track on this new EP is D&B… It’s in disguise as ghetto funk.
“Bear The Mark was finished two years ago,” he admits. “I had that sitting around for ages, I sent it to Goldie and he showcased and supported it but there wasn’t space on the schedule to get it out. I got to say, I love writing drum & bass, but now that I’m comfortable with how I write music and the programs I use I’m gonna write other stuff. I told another interviewer, this isn’t my swan song! I’m still gonna write drum & bass but there’s just a wider spectrum of ideas and sounds in the pipeline now.”
As the D&B community breathes a big sigh of relief and looks forward to more uptempo Sinistarr goodies in future, let’s check in for three moments in Detroit’s decadent discography and play a cool game of genre dot-to-dot…
You can check out Sinistarr’s previous work on our download store right here
Rhythim Is Rhythim – Strings Of Life
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAagkcFHzOs
“That piano! It’s responsible for so many inspirations in drum & bass. Especially if you speed it up. You take that up to 150, 160 and you can hear that old hardcore stuff that we used to play. I know Zero T made a remix of it and I still haven’t heard that. I really need to! That tune really changed stuff for me. I went to school with a relation of Derrick May. He was a good friend of mine. I went to his house a way back. He told me he had something for me, ran into his house, came back and gave me Derrick May’s Innovator – the album which this tune is on. He gave me that and Aril Brikha’s Groove La Chord. I sat there and studied them and thought ‘okay, this is what I want my drum & bass to sound like!’”
Underground Resistance – Jupiter Jazz
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQv3dCkY2Tk
“I love the aesthetic of this. It’s got the keys and arrangement you hear in drum & bass. And here’s a little fun fact: I listened to this tune to write Mainstay. The breakdowns and how everything stops abruptly? I love that! You can really hear it being programmed physically. And that’s what I wanted to put in a drum & bass track. People have said ‘Mainstay sounds Detroity’, well that’s why!”
Reese – Just Wanna Another Chance
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMO2fMYHAKw
“This should strike a chord in all of us. It is all about the bassline! It sounds like the bassline from Terrorist, or Be True or millions of other D&B songs. This is Kevin Saunderson in and throughout. The reese is responsible for so much drum & bass, old jungle and a lot of techno. If you haven’t already, you need to hear this!”