Interview by Simon Sellars
Originally published in TRM magazine, 1999.
To be a drum ‘n’ bass producer in Melbourne can be a thankless pursuit. While beat-based nights in this city don’t seem to last long, the likes of Grooverider attract serious crowds whenever they tour; this schizophrenia can drive a person to tears. Clearly there’s a demand for the freshest sounds in dance music – which have revolved, arguably, around beats and breaks in recent times – yet, for whatever reasons, we don’t have the club infrastructure to regularly support local drum ‘n’ bass.
That’s a shame, because d ‘n’ b affords us some of our most innovative sound designers, such as Channel Zero: Steve Adam and Greg Serafin. Channel Zero are not beat fascists, however; they draw upon the entire spectrum of electronic music to produce inspired mutations. Their nearest parallel would be with so-called “intelligent drum ‘n’ bass”: alternatively (often simultaneously) ambient, funky, spacey, metallic, dancey, trancey 3D sound sculptures – a soundtrack to the technology inside your head. Splitting the atom of categorisation further, they are akin to the two-step powered template of Temple Records rather than, say, Good Looking’s occasionally insipid intelligence.
Channel Zero have a low profile at the moment. They’re slated to appear on the upcoming Hydrogen compilation, and Kandyman recently spun a couple of their tracks to a great reception at Every Picture Tells A Story; they occasionally perform live. But as it turns out, these boys have been around. Steve has an experimental, electro-acoustic background, while Greg has no musical “pedigree”. As a working architect, however, Greg brings to the mix an innovative compositional approach derived from architecture’s mapping and modelling of spatial-temporal coordinates. I visited Channel Zero in their studio to chew the fat.
Given Steve and Greg’s backgrounds, I was curious to learn of their first encounters with dance music. Steve: “I was into hip hop in the late ‘80s. Public Enemy are really influential for me, and that’s where the name ‘Channel Zero’ comes from.” Meanwhile, Greg’s induction was low-key. He’s a long-time Frank Zappa freak, who was sitting at home in 1993 “happily unemployed, listening to Zappa. I turned on the radio and heard some standard 4/4 techno, and then it was some sort of progression until I got sick of that style; and then into beats”.
I asked Greg how his profession shapes his music: “Architecture gives me wider horizons – that’s why I ventured into music. I needed to see the results of that type of lateral thinking, instantly, which you don’t necessarily get in architecture. It’s a great feeling to be able to create something, rewind it and experience it. Also, architecture’s discipline helps me to plan the music more effectively”. Steve shares this philosophy: “Architecture is frozen music and music is liquid architecture. Architecture is the formal design of space and music is the formal design of sound in time”.
Steve is a versatile artist, always reinventing himself. In a previous guise, he was commissioned by the ABC to produce vocoded, spoken word soundscapes; and he’s recently completed a series of very unofficial Kraftwerk remixes – purely for his own pleasure, and to play out when DJing. With the Kraftwerkian drum sound beefed up and a throbbing bass line snaking around the robotic pulse, he’s propelled Ralf and Florian into another dimension.
It’s not surprising, then, to learn that they are interested in making hybrid music. Steve: “We cross over without really thinking about it. It’s what we do anyway because our backgrounds are so diverse”. Greg: “Although we work within drum ‘n’ bass, we’re not really genre specific. A couple of our tracks have a spaghetti western feel which was a lot of fun putting together.” They then play me an unfinished tune, which instantly made me want to shut up and dance; its most striking feature was a drill ‘n’ bass gabba sample that weirdly, illogically, complemented the two-step dynamics.
So what exactly are their thoughts on drum ‘n’ bass, the base material for their output? Surprisingly, Steve states that the genre is “very limited. To continue the architectural analogies, if we have the Louvre of dance music, drum ‘n’ bass would be this dark, little room in the back block on the bottom floor. I like drum ‘n’ bass because it explores spaces that other music doesn’t, but at the same time it’s painted itself into a corner. I get the feeling that its heyday has come and gone”.
I mention that the “neurofunk” sound, popularised by Ed Rush and Optical, seems to have been taken about as far as it can go. Are people becoming jaded by that omnipresent style’s relentless onslaught? “Perhaps”, Greg responds. “Personally, we are open to all possibilities. Right now, we’re working on some absolutely minimal techno: skeletal beats, textures…” Is their aim to get people dancing? Greg: “It’s great to make people happy and watch them move around, but I’m not going to kill myself if they don’t. We like to mix things up, depending on the vibe. We might play a set of total ambience… Or controlled noise – we don’t like to be tied down”.
Greg tells me he’s into Panacea, the mad German drum ‘n’ bass producer: “I like his absolute unpredictability. The music has a pulse but is really erratic, sound-wise”. And with that, he pops on Panacea’s Low Profile Darkness; we do our heads in to the threshing rhythms. I leave them to sculpt some more sounds, knowing I’ll be hearing more of them. For Steve and Greg have vision and talent to burn – enough to propel themselves into the limelight and beyond.
Dust out your ears…