Words: Damian B
Space.
(cue wobbly operatic music)
Unknown origins. Mind-altering vortexes. Time which has a habit of stretching.
When you look at it all like that, it’s D&B’s natural home. This is certainly the case for the enigmatic Kolective…
They seem to have appeared in the night sky out of nowhere like some Unidentified Funkular Object. And they’ve done so with a killer new release on Flexout.
Thus I decided to set the warp controls to Metaphysical and initially enquire about Voices. Specifically, I asked… If this enigmatic tune was a physical place, then where could we find it? Is it Jupiter? Atlantis? Surely not Uranus.
I think for us it’s more likely a beach in the Caribbean at sunrise at the end of the party. Nearby there’s maybe some jerk chicken on the BBQ, a fat spliff and bottle of rum.
Okay, so let’s talk about the other track… You Don’t Know. What don’t we know exactly?
The answer to that question is top secret and can only usually be obtained by extremely attractive girls with worthwhile propositions.
Right. That counts me out then. Tell me about the Voice of Voices? I believe she is Amy?
We came across her as result of a reconnaissance mission from one of our space cadets Keza. Amy came into the studio and she managed to smash out a killer vocal in the first session. We have also recently done a show with her singing live which was totally wicked. She’s really talented.
Your music is very hard to pin down in the great procession of D&B history. That’s why it’s so great. Part of it could be from 2000. Part of it has a soul sort of which you could attribute to Bristol soul/trip hop. So what would you say about where you come from, what sort of things ‘produced you’, in D&B?
In regard to Bristol, one of our team, Kalm, has always been a massive Bristol head even remixing a Roni Size track back in 2000. I think all of our members have been heavily influenced by the Bristol sound as well as D&B and hip hop in general from the mid 90s and early 2000s. We are also massive fans of people like Portishead, Massive Attack, DJ Premier, Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Talking Heads, George Clinton and anyone else who lives in the 4th dimension.
And back on earth… what can you impart to us about your output?
So far most of our releases have been on the darker side but we have some more ‘musical’ stuff coming out. We want to show the range of our music and not be a ‘one trick pony’.
We’re also collaborating with a lot of other artists at the moment including Dexta, Mauoq, Kyrist, Arkaik, Hyroglyphics, Genotype, Hydro and Antagonist. We also have a few unexpected remixes in the pipeline as well as forthcoming releases on Diffrent Music, Dispatch, Icarus Audio and Nurtured Beatz. There’s a lot on the horizon.
Cool. Back to the beats: I imagine certain great films when I hear your work, what sort of visual things may inspire you?
We love abstract art, graffiti and recently we’ve been getting a lot of inspiration from the sound design in horror films. We also like film noir and really trippy films like Waking Life and The Fountain.
You mentioned live work… Where you playing next?
You can catch us at the Noise parties from time to time in Brixton. Got to give a big shout to Medika and the Noise family. Also we’re playing here at Surya nightclub in Kings Cross on October 4. Also look out for the Nurtured Beatz party returning to Brixton in November.
Brilliant. I thought for a second you’d start going on about space again…
We also do a residency on our spaceship every other night.
Right. I guess an exclusive about Kolective would be typically stellar?
Do you have a pen and paper ready? We make all of our beats on board the spaceship we mentioned earlier. We don’t actually use production software. Instead our spaceship connects directly to our brains and we make our beats using the power of our minds. Then the ship’s computer puts it into a digital form and transfers it to a floppy disk that pops out the toaster. It’s an unorthodox method but it seems to work for us.
Kolectiv – Voices/You Don’t Know is out now on Flexout.
