Xanadu: Out of the Blue

‘An asteroid about 350m in diameter flew past Earth on the release date of my album… ‘

Xanadu‘s causing serious waves with the deep space drum and bass of Through The Oort Clouds, via Dom & Roland Productions.

And appears to be literally, actually in space.

No really…

Xanadu, can I ask where are you based? Do you have a studio as such?

In the International Space Station.

I’ve got a studio up here, I work on an SSL Duality with some B&W Nautilus monitors. Countless rare synths and samplers, and a big window looking over the Earth.

I find I get the isolation and inspiration I need to produce up here.

!!!

I’m in Streatham in my bedroom with a mac, some Rokit 8’s, a borrowed Virus TI 2 and a bunch of plugins.

Can I ask how the link with D&R came about? Was it through tunes, a mutual mindset?

I was introduced to him by a friend at a show we were both playing, and I got an invite to his studio. Through playing tunes to each other and after a few beers and burgers I think we both knew that we could work together on a project.

Dom was feeling my stuff, we’ve got similar interests and we’re both pretty easy going most of the time, so it works pretty well I’d say. I’m stoked that we met when we did and now we’ve got a wicked product, what more could I ask for… for a debut release?

I love Through The Oort Clouds and also that it has a wicked conceptual slant, aided by the simple titles… reminds me of mysterious, unified albums through labels like Underground Resistance where you were sucked into a musical vortex, so what inspired it?

Cool, thanks! Well, I think an album with a bit of a story behind it is pretty cool, It gives it another dimension for the listeners, and triggers the imagination when listening! My music is pretty spacey, and I’m really into that sort of thing, so the theme works!

Even the artwork looks like it could be a picture of some sort of gas giant a bit like Jupiter.

Nice one Daniel Brusatin!

The Oort Cloud thing is deep… literally. What is it exactly? I know but I don’t know.

The Oort Cloud is an unfathomably large sphere of rocks, dust and debris that surrounds our solar system. It’s where comets, like the recent ‘Ison’ – that was ripped apart by our sun’s gravity as it made a close pass – come from.

The Oort cloud is so thick, they estimate that the Voyager satellite could take around 30,000 years to pass through it.

Bearing in mind, this thing has accumulated ridiculous speeds by utilising a rare planetary alignment and slingshotting around Jupiter, then Saturn before heading toward interstellar space at around 1.4 million km per day!

Crazy shit!

What is your fave space fact or weird space thing, as we are on the subject?

An asteroid about 350m in diameter flew past Earth on the release date of my album, and we discovered it has its own moon!

Hmmmm…

Recently I read that there is lightning in space. And it can be much bigger than lightning on Earth. In fact, the largest lightning bolt ever discovered is around the strength of a trillion Earth lightning bolts!

That’s big enough to turn our planet to dust in an instant!

If you want things to get really weird, watch a documentary called ‘Cosmic Thunderbolt’. In the documentary, they suggest that a huge lightning bolt struck Mars creating the massive canyon on it’s surface.

They put across some pretty convincing evidence if you can put up with the narrator.

From album, the tune ‘Cygnus’: can you take us through it in terms of inspiration and how it came about?

Well, I wanted ‘Cygnus’ to be a big stepper, a bit like Dom’s ‘Unofficial Jah’.

It came after I made ‘Helix’, and I wanted to make something similar as I liked the way that had turned out, but I wanted it to hit a bit harder. So after a lot of cutting old breaks up and layering drums, I started adding more sounds in, but It went a bit too far and got a bit overcrowded with sounds.

So I stripped it back again and made the tune just rock on the sub and the heavy distorted kicks. Then I thought the tune needed something in the high mids to pin the tune down, something that you can hear incoming in the mix.

I was thinking about tunes that have things like that in them, and I thought about that Benga & Coki tune ‘Night’ with the descending sine wave thing, and thought something like that, but bigger and more menacing ha ha.

It was made for a big sound system.

What’s ‘BPD’?

Ha ha, it’s Borderline Personality Disorder. I started that one a long time ago. I took it to my good friend Terror.Hubris’s place where we worked on it for a couple of days.

I remember there was a breakthrough moment in making the hook of the tune when we were looping what we had and I’d set the loop wrong, but the resulting riff was much better than the one we wrote originally ha ha… and totally by accident! I remember that was the first time I’d used the ‘Sausage Fattener’ plugin, so we had fun with bass and watching the sausage face get angry.

I really enjoyed making the tune, Terror.Hubris is a wicked producer, but he’s so modest that he doesn’t like putting it out there. He’s made some amazing hip hop too!

More tunes stories please.

Here’s an interesting fact about the flute sample in the tune ‘Axis’. Two years ago, I was asked if I’d record an album of tribal music of the Samburu in Kenya. So I flew out to Nirobe, then took a four seater plane to the deepest depths of the Kenyan bush and spent two weeks there with the tribe. I recorded every day from the break of dawn until it was too hot in the middle of the day.

Most of the recordings were vocal groups from different villages around the area, but one of the days we asked if they had any instruments to record, but sadly they said that they didn’t have any with them at the time.

However, a few hours later, one of the tribesman came back to us with a bit of water pipe that he’d found and proceeded to make it into a flute! There’s a picture for you… (below)

What places would you like to play this stuff live?

I love getting to play the tracks I love on big sound systems at parties. I’d love to play Outlook festival: I’ve been four times, and loved every one. Playing down in the moat there would be killer, or one of the boat parties… oh my god the boat parties are nuts ha ha.

I’ve never been to Sun&Bass, so I would love to check that one out! Only heard amazing things.

Name a tune in your head right now.

Calyx & Teebee ‘Enygma’: sick tune! Great intro, and that baseline is insane. Those E-Mu filters! I’m guessing they made them on an E-Mu. This tune is one of the first D&B tracks I fell in love with after my good mate Louis gave me the CD in school!

Ta Louis, see you at album launch on the 30th!

Through The Oort Clouds