Fusions, forces & juxtapositions. They attract, repel, push, pull, creating dynamics, tensions… well it sounds like a typical day in the life of D&B.
But this…
Even before we set foot in the city limits of the actual MUSIC of Jubei’s To Have & Have Not there’s two things that hit you: the title and the artwork. The two stand guard like big blocky enigmas. They make you THINK before stepping in, they look you up and down and challenge you. It’s like the album’s started before it starts, the gauntlet is down.
So I put it to him.
What does the title To Have & Have Not mean?
What does it mean to you?
OK. Well, I’m obsessed with the way the world is shaped right now and when I saw the skyscrapers angling upwards, there’s a feeling of oppression, the modern ideals we have… ‘we’re here but are we happy, are we fulfilled in life?’. Erm. Plus it’s perhaps about D&B: it’s ‘oppressive’ as an artform but we sort of like it that way. How does that sound?
Yeah.
(pause)
But if you chose not to explain it that’s cool as well…
Ha ha, a lot came from my life while I was making the album; I had to move house three times in six months. Things in my life seemed to come and go. I had to find a base then had to move again… I had a couple of other names but they didn’t stick. So I called it To Have & Have Not.
We’re referring to the album as ‘it’ so when did it become an album, and not a simple compilation of tracks?
It wasn’t until quite late. I knew what I wanted to do and it seemed to develop as it’s quite diverse. I always wanted to do something like that; when I pictured it in my mind I saw myself listening to a CD.
But I didn’t realise it was there until the end. I kept falling in and out of love with it.
The tunes are insanely high spec when it comes to production, it must have been an obsessive task.
When it was sent back from mastering I sat down and listened to it first time NOT from a production point of view, not from a ‘what’s bad, what needs to be louder, what needs to change’ point of view, I sat down and thought ‘It’s finished, it sounds like an album.’ Previously all I could hear were the flaws.
I have to ask re your association with Flowdan there’s loads of collabs here, people like Marcus Intalex, Consequence, Goldie, SP:MC, so many, so how do the collabs work? How do you ‘know’ what and who will work on there?
When you do the tracks you just know who will sound good on it. With ‘The Moment’ I wrote that with Flowdan in mind.
I wrote it knowing what it would sound like, and he would sound good with him on. If that makes any sense.
With the Jerome Thomas track, I wrote it as an instrumental and needed a vocal that hadn’t been done before. Luckily a friend, Rebecca, was working in a youth scheme and she put forward some names. When I heard Jerome’s voice I knew he’d work well with the track, so we met up and recorded the track.
Same with DRS as well: I was in the studio with Marcus and I said ‘I really need something, a little hook just before the drop.’ Marcus called up DRS who came to the studio and nailed it straight away. It came about organically, without making it specifically FOR him. Originally it was a roller, and then adding the vocal gave it some character.
You say ‘organically’ and I feel on the point of the Dubstep tracks that they are very organic, that you don’t think ‘oh this is the token Dubstep/downtempo’ tune, that this made up of the same fabric, the same mindset as the rest of the album.
Yeah that’s exactly what I wanted it to be. I wanted everything on the album to tie together, but not be the same. I wanted it to be diverse, and everything to have its own character. I wanted them to be a player in the team, but to have a different skillset. I wanted them to fit under the umbrella of what the album should sound like. And each tune should come along and be different to the track before on the album.
In terms of the Dubstep, it sounds to me to be a LOT of fun to produce as someone like you can really stretch out with the atmospheres and the vibe, you can really go in. Melodies in these tunes are different to the D&B melodies for example.
It is hard to do though as there’s so much space. It is a lot of fun though. You can’t just punch something in to fill out the space because it’s all about the space. It’s hard to make things sound… simple. Some of the tracks that might sound ’empty’ or ‘sparse’, well they may have actually about 100 different channels of things going on. It’s fun but a lot goes into the engineering.
Live-wise I would like to hear this material played out loud! Where can I do so, what spots?
I do play 140 sets; I’ve played FWD a few times, at Fabric, done a Rinse set, played in Leeds b2b with Icicle but the majority of the times, it’s like with D&B: I give this material to the DJ and if they like it, they play it, in terms of certifying it. And it does get played by the people I would hope would play it. People like Youngsta, Icicle, V.I.V.E.K, Killawatt, Distance.
Back to the D&B what about the tune with dBridge? That’s a killer.
That tune and ‘Say Nothing’ were written about the same time. ‘Say Nothing’ didn’t have a vocal on it; it was called ‘Snitch’. I put that in an ‘album’ folder, into which I’d keep going back into, to see if I still liked the stuff in there ha ha. To determine if they stayed in the pot, so to speak. Over a period of time I had a bunch of tracks that I wasn’t bored of regardless of how old they were. With one track I thought it’d be great if it had a vocal on it, similar to ‘Patience’.
Darren’s a good friend, he’s heard the track in the studio and I was speaking to him – we were out in the pub one night – and I asked ‘Do you fancy doing me a vocal for that track? but all I wanted is a couple of words, similar to ‘Patience’ and he took it away with him. He sent something back and said ‘See what you think’ and I listened and instantly knew it’d work.
As is the case throughout.
To Have & Have Not is out now