Mob Tactics haven’t just gotten Dirty. No. And not just unleashed an array of sharks, to attack. They’ve gone and given us five really underhanded D&B embeds and drawn a pretty ugly road story too.
Hi what are you doing right now… are you in the studio?
Funnily enough, we are! Just endlessly tweaking away at tracks we’ve got on the go.
Actually when is your fav time to be in the studio… when are you most productive?
Our favorite time is night time – without question. We just seem to work better when it’s dark outside. Probably says a lot about our psyche, ha ha!
The new tunes are blazing and I don’t think one can ever argue with an actual tank full of sharks somehow… can we go straight in with ‘Shark Tank’? What inspired this? My mind is racing when I hear this tune… and think about that title too hard.
Thank you! ‘Shark Tank’ is a track that actually came together quite quickly. It was a Saturday afternoon and we had this really sexy, fizzy bass patch we’d made and we were just messing about with it really. Got the riff down and the track pretty much wrote itself after that! Which is not usually the case we’re keen to add…
Definitely happy with how it turned out and it seems to get a good reaction in the clubs.
With D&B where do you guys actually start… a riff, a vibe, a beat… how do you start the momentum? How do you NOT allow inspiration to drift away?
It changes pretty much every time to be honest. We always used to start with the beats first as a rule of thumb, but, we soon realised that when you do that the entire vibe of the track is predetermined. Hard to write a musical thing with a thumping kick, distorted hats and a lashing snare.
These days it can be anything; a sample, a vocal, a nice pad, a snare – whatever grabs our attention. It’s much more liberating and conducive to productivity we find, and our work-rate has definitely improved as a result.
And ‘Get Dirty’… which takes no prisoners. Was there a time when this tune came into your heads and simply had to be done?
’Get Dirty’ came about purely down to the mood we were in at the time. We’d both had a really testing week.
Friday night came around and we got into the studio armed with plenty of beer and just went at it! We started with the bass, got a tight little beat underneath it and then just messed around with various little riffs over the top of it.
The tune itself came together nicely, but, it was actually one of those tracks that had about 157 different mixdowns before we felt it was just right.
On the lateral tip, what’s five ‘dirty’ D&B tunes over time you dig. I am thinking of certain Dillinja tracks, or Break, or Hazard, Keaton, D Minds, Hive, ‘Ladies Night’ etc etc!
Good question! Okay, I guess it would have to be – in no particular order…
Technical Itch & Kemal ‘The Calling’ Moving Shadow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gHisMo51YI
Future Cut ‘Stealth (Domination)’ (Dillinja Remix) Renegade Hardware
Bad Company ‘4 Days’ BC Recordings
Gridlok ‘Insecticide’ Project 51
Noisia ‘Stigma’ Vision Recordings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP69N-70LxM
Similar, there’s nothing like old tunes – or even ‘recent’ old tunes that may have slipped out of peoples’ recent memory – oming back into the set… any of these in your live sets right now? We still play plenty of tracks from yesteryear in our sets: ‘See Red’ by Jonny L, ‘Ghostbuster’ by Optical & Ryme Tyme…
… ‘Carrier’ by Cause4Concern & Fierce – loads really! Not all about playing 100% fresh, people still love to hear some classics from the past thrown in for good measure.
On the dirty trip… any good road stories [even ones that didn’t happen to you] that you’d share? We can change the names to protect the guilty parties.
Ha ha! Okay, a number of years back, a member of a well-known drum & bass duo was in Miami for the music conference. They had a few shows over there that all led up to their appearance at Ultra Music Fest – which is HUGE!
Anyway, a few days before Ultra they had a gig and decided to go back to an after-party. They then decided to get fully hammered for the next 48 hours, right up until the moment they had to go to Ultra and perform to thousands of people…
They got up behind the decks, started the first record then dropped to one knee in a pool of sweat, white as a ghost and insist that I go and get the other member of the duo to take over! Later that night, this same person pissed themselves on stage at another show. True story, kids!
So what’s next from you that we can expect?
Well, we like to keep busy so we’ve already got another five tracks that are pretty much done that we’re really happy with. We’ve got a few remixes coming out: one of a Maztek tune called ‘Stompin’, and the other is of Mampi Swift & Fresh’s classic ‘Play Me’ – which will be dropping on Charge later this year.
Can’t tell you how honoured we were to be asked to do that tune, and we’re all really happy with how it turned out. You can also catch us Djing all over the place, so if you do see us at a show, come and say hi! Gotta send a big shout out to all our Viper fam, 2016 is looking like a biggie!
