Dominic Stanton
Interview by Calico
In studios and clubs around the world, thirty years worth of music (and beyond) is being pulled apart and reconfigured into new forms and shapes. Close to the centre of this, is an explosion of inventive sounds from a crew originally defined by their location - the West London scene – even if many of the main players, including Dominic Stanton, aren’t based in the UK capital (Stanton is based in the small town of Bedford fifty miles north).
If Stanton’s name is not immediately familiar, you’ll probably recognise at least one of his alter egos. The best known is the long running Dom-Unique Productions, or Domu. Fresh from finishing up a “nice kinda cinematic opening” for his new album, Stanton took a moment to work out what was happening.
He ended up in music pretty much by default at the age of fourteen. “I didn’t have much else to be into, I was just a scrawler, not big on sport or anything.” So twelve years ago he bought turntables and soon after began mixing jungle and was producing within a year. He sent out demos and 4 Hero’s Reinforced label showed interest, bringing him on board. “I was only seventeen, but I moved up through Reinforced and then to 2000 Black and Archive. Then this scene kind of happened so it was all a smooth progression really.”
This scene is now better known as broken beat, but it is a true melting pot, in retrospect, an almost inevitable result of the genre clash of club culture. Taking the familiar ingredients of dub and dancehall, jazz and rare groove, hip hop, house, garage, electronics and drum’n’bass, the menu is contorted into unpredictable directions, and most people now identify the style by its intricate and irregular rhythms.
With the emergence of Jazzanova and IG Culture in the late 90s, support from DJs like Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge, great (if slightly confused) press and critical acclaim, they were touted as a potential next big thing and seemed set to explode.
It’s no mystery why they didn’t if you look at the detail. The Acid Jazz and Big Beat scenes had recently spent time in the limelight after wearing the ‘next big thing’ mantle, but when the press got bored, the scenes faded away and the artists involved had to move on. “We were all conscious of that and didn’t want to spoil the good thing we had. We’re all kind of on the breadline trying to make good music, and if that changed then the whole dynamic would change.” It’s hard to imagine, but with Bugz in the Attic playing festivals around the world, it can’t be too long until they get the call from Madonna.
“The music magazines are so corporate that if it’s not trendy, then it’s not in the interest of the magazine, because they won’t sell more magazines for promoting it, so they don’t.” Stanton’s wariness of the music media began with drum’n’bass. When he started buying records in 1992, there were a couple of music magazines available (DJ, Mixmag) and each had a drum’n’bass reviews page. But a year later the reviews pages stopped and coverage of drum’n’bass dried up. “The only place I could see reviews was in [fortnightly black music newspaper] Echoes. It wasn’t until ’95, when Muzik magazine started, that you could find press on drum’n’bass again.”
“I see music that a lot of my friends make in the house page, the leftfield page, the hip hop page, it’s always everywhere and in a way I think that’s more creative than having a page of your own because you’re spreading into so many different people’s tastes.” And as soon as a sound has its own page you start to have people making music to get onto that page. The scene has resisted expanding from its pool of key players, but there has always been a network of crews outside the UK. These include people like Jazzanova in Germany, Straight Ahead and GAMM in Switzerland, Kyoto Jazz Massive in Japan, Titonton Duvante in the US, and even guys like Ennio Styles in Melbourne.
“I was quite lucky to get in, it was just through Reinforced and 4 Hero. They’re hard bastards to impress and that’s why there aren’t a lot of new people coming in, because if someone gives you a CD and it’s not good enough, it’s not good enough and they don’t have a record. I was quite lucky starting eight years ago and I did manage to build a name as being someone that was experimental… But there’s being experimental and having potential, and there’s putting out a record that just isn’t right. I think there’s a lot of that now, people just want to put out music, so they start their own label and put out records that just aren’t really accomplished.”
Stanton blames the advent of PC-based recording. “People spend a week learning Logic or Cubase and they’ll have a record out, they’re just not ready.” Which suggests that Stanton’s not into grime. Or whatever you call the dark underbelly of UK garage giving birth to a deformed child (dubstep, 8bar, sublow). “Grime is a lot of kids in skullcaps and Nike tracksuits making music on Playstations. The MCing is all about aggression and anger and frustration and airing your views and the beats are simple and dirty. It’s great, that’s what kid’s music should be all about. If you’re a teenager and you live in a council estate and all you’ve got to make music on is a Playstation and a mic, then you’re going to make music and it’s a direct result of living conditions. But I wouldn’t play it because I’m not part of that. I’m old; you know I’m ten years older than them now.”
So what ties broken beat music together? “Attitude really, I think there just came a time where we all had an idea to stop doing the other music we were doing and do something different, and it was all around the same time.”
“People were experimenting, using classic song structure and playing that up a bit, misusing it. If you look back at the early broken stuff, all the early IG [Culture] stuff on People, Jazzanova and things like that, they’re kind of song based and they have a lot of movement, but not a lot of form to them, they’re quite free.”
Stanton complains that the scene has become clubbier since then. He’s held a long-time DJ residency at London club night The Co-op, which has a reputation for blending underground beats with the songs that have become anthems at the club, and says it balances with the production in terms of making money, but musically it’s not such a happy marriage.
“There are conflicts because Co-op has created a lot more dance floor tunes than there ever used to be, and it’s made a scene, where before it was people experimenting. That’s the nature of scenes, they settle down and form templates, but it’s made everyone more conscious of what works in a club. So when you play your really experimental stuff and it doesn’t work you go away thinking, ‘well what’s the point of me making it if no-one’s going to dance to it?’ There’s this huge paradox, where if you’re making 12 inches, a DJ has to buy it to be able to play it. Obviously there are different environments, but if you play it at the Co-op, where everyone is schooled and there for the music, if they don’t dance to it you wonder what chance you’ve got of anyone dancing to it.”
“When you’re looking at your music in that sense you can really lose a lot of experimentalism because you’re so worried about the dance floor reaction.” Stanton found the drum’n’bass scene stifling when it began to settle into a format of rolls and beat drops and says, “Even at Co-op there was a time when I could sense this formula looming over us. Now everyone has kind of checked themselves and they’re tinkering around again and trying to do something new. But there are not enough people outside of the scene making music for us to play.”
They are appearing though. “I can see similar things to where The Neptunes are coming from, but they have this whole jiggy American thing, which I can’t really get down with. But Crazy In Love is a baad track, it’s sampling the Chi-Lites with a fat break and a wicked vocal, and if you can do something like that with one of the best singers in the world then that’s a great record.”
“Madlib’s done the DJ Rels album, I really liked the first twelve, but the album is really dirty, scuzzy rough breaks and it’s all a bit, not unlistenable, but kind of unplayable unless you’re a real Madlib fan, cause it just sounds like Madlib. Sometimes the Americans really hit the nail on the head though, like Timbaland, he says he was trying to make drum’n’bass but couldn’t find the right sounds. So his whole sound came from being influenced by someone else. We’re doing that as well, we listen to Detroit techno records and try to make it, we blatantly haven’t got the same background as them, but it comes out like the music that we make.”
Like all music scenes, broken beat has settled down over time, but if you take a look at some of the music coming out now – especially the challenging stuff on Stanton’s Enter The Umod or IG Culture’s New Sector Movements – they’re definitely not slowing down. And that makes sense, because while the scene takes time to re-evaluate and consolidate the musical advances of the past, they’re laying the groundwork for the future.
This process of consolidation is often the lead-in to some of the best music to come out of a scene, which makes it clear that broken beat is yet to reach its peak.
Domu discography
While Domu is Dominic Stanton’s main project, he’s constantly releasing material and most recently dropped Enter The Umod on Jazzanova’s Sonar Kollektiv label. “Umod is about going back to messing around with samples, it’s very tracky and was done in about 8 days on spur of the moment. It’s a nerdy album for the heads, for the people that want to hear experimentation and sound manipulation. It’s nice to strip it down and just get a groove sometimes and that’s what Umod was about. I felt really glad when I did it, but now I want to get back and write songs and use some musicians and make a bit more of a masterpiece.”
“Vocals aren’t that important to me, but I try to include them as I know a lot of people are instantly taken by them. But the main thing is the rhythm; I’m really into the drum programming and the emotion it creates, that it leaves you feeling as though it’s moved around a bit. All the music I make has at least two or three different sections. Whether it’s techno, hip hop or whatever, I like to have a lot of emotional and rhythmic dynamics.”
The new album from Domu should arrive on Archive later in the year. He’s hooked up with Yolanda, a ragga-ish MC who’s worked with the Bugz as well as garage producer Spoonface and breaks duo Deekline & Wizard. “It’s shaping up to be a spacey theme, with samples from Battle of the Planets and Transformers, and I’m piecing together a story about someone arriving on another planet and trying to get home, a bit like ET but in robot form. I’m trying to write songs that are relevant to that, you know, the kind of similes about exploration of one’s inner self and exploration of the world.”
Sonar Circle is where it all started for Stanton with early releases on Reinforced. “I’ve always been a very complex producer - my drum’n’bass has so much going on, just to make up one beat I’d have four or five different tracks and beats going over one another, all these different high hats and things, it just gets a bit crazy at times.” Stanton still records under the alias from time to time when he ‘feels like making some drum’n’bass’.
“And the rest are just one-off names I make up because I’m doing something that doesn’t really feel like it’s Domu.” Among these are Yotoko’s deep broken techno (released on the Delsin label), Brazilian disco as the Star Wars inspired Bakura (Especial), the vocal broken beat of Rima (Compost, and a new album likely to drop on Sonar Kollektiv), Vaceo (Chillifunk), Zoltar (Sonar Kollektiv), Blue Monkeys (Spinning Wheel), Kudu (Bitasweet), Realsides (Sirkus) and Domu & Volcov (on Best Seven and Residual). He’s also producing a vocal album for Nicola Kramer who sang on the Rima and Domu albums, which should finished by the end of winter.
“It’s very complicated,” says Stanton of his prodigious, even by electronic music standards, array of alter egos. “You just go round and round in your head, ‘do I keep the nerds happy, do I keep the girls happy,’ so that’s why I have so many different names and so many different projects it’s because I can afford to make different people happy at different times.”
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