Following on from the success of their majestic debut release on BMTM, delPurr & Eraser kindly sat down with us to discuss their Five Steps, from the GTA 3 soundtrack and Dance eJay 2 through to “Fairytale” and beyond.

 

Step 1: Origins

delPurr: My first experience with electronic music was in the early 90’s (at that time I first heard The Prodigy). So my taste in electronica was formed rather early during my childhood and has been shaped ever since by producers such as The Chemical Brothers or ATB. It was only a matter of the time before I discovered first drum&bass track, which really touched my heart – FSOL – Papua New Guinea (High Contrast remix). I had an opportunity to hear the original track earlier and I was quite fascinated by nature of this remix. That was the time I started to realize that I was one of the few people in my neighborhood who found this kind of music not only rather dynamic, but also beautiful and genial at the same time.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/K5dFo_2amCM” title=”FSOL%20-%20Papua%20New%20Guinea%20(High%20Contrast%20Remix)” modestbranding=”1″]

Eraser: It was maybe in 2002 when I got in touch with Drum & Bass for the first time. I played GTA 3, the soundtrack of which featured pirate station called MSX FM, which was in fact a track mixed by DJ Timecode and MC Codebreaker [Editor note: we featured Codebreaker’s Five Steps too interestingly!]. I was only twelve years old back then and I found the music and MC-ing quite hilarious, therefore I would have never thought that DNB music would affect my life later on. Interestingly though, there was a track in the mix that attracted my attention and gave me goosebumps and shivers back then… as it still does now! It was “First Contact” by Omni Trio, which was a rather fitting name, considering the occasion. In the next four years I enjoyed various types of music genres, with the likes of Prodigy, ATB, Deftones and many others. It was the year 2007 and Andy C’s “10 years of D&BA” mix, which helped me rediscover my love for Drum & Bass. Then I came across liquid from Hospital Records and I have been hooked since. Apex – Space Between (feat. Ayah Marar) is the track which reminds me of those times vividly.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/BJHK9WOSBTY” title=”Omni%20Trio%20-%20First%20Contact” modestbranding=”1″]

Step 2: Introducing

delPurr : When I was 13 I started playing around with an easy Dance E-Jay 2, which was probably the main reason why I wasn’t scared by a ‘horrible’ layout later on in 2003, when I grabbed my first copy of Fruity Loops. I had no internet connection and absolutely no idea about the existence of tutorials. The only influences from the beginning were the tracks from the producers like Roni Size, Aphrodite or Teebee. With my own ways of experimenting with this program I was producing music only as a free-time activity until 2008, when I met Jan (a.k.a. Eraser) for the first time. After our first meetings we both decided to commence a kind of a deeper discovery process of music production, which was kind of fun for both of us and since we found out about our music compatibilities, which kept us moving forward. The first successful track which was admired by quite a lot of my friends was called “Sad Eyes”.

Eraser :  Pretty much the same as my mate delPurr with one exception – I was 18 when I first used E-Jay and I eventually moved to  FL Studio. The mass spread of broadband internet and the access to various tutorials made my learning process faster and it was easier to catch up. Before we got together we used to produce tracks by ourselves, but we often exchanged comments regarding each other’s results. Our sound and approach towards the music production used to be so different that we would not ever imagine making a track together… Our first collaboration appeared just a year ago! As for my first track, I think the first listenable was the one called “2142”. There were so many artists that influenced me, that it’s almost impossible to pick just a few. Matrix & Futurebound, Logistics, Seba and London Elektricity came to my mind at this moment… I believe there is a considerable amount of influence from outside the Drum & Bass genre as well. As for our setup, we both use FL Studio (10.0.9 at the moment) with plenty of VST’s and sound libraries. I also use Reaper 4.32 for recording and time-stretching vocals, which is a perfect complement to my setup and gives me exactly what FL Studio was missing. Our approach is to take literally any sound and change it totally by applying a massive amount of processing. It’s so exciting to end up with totally different sound you started with. We are also leaping towards to recording sounds on our own, which I believe, will take the fun factor to the next level, so yeah… we are really excited about that!

Step 3: Foundation

Unarguably for us, it was “Fairytale”… which is pretty unexpected, because 90% of our musical output before was (and probably still is) liquid Drum & Bass. Fairytale was one of our a very few experiments in that area of sound… but it all came naturally, as we both feel deep atmospheres and always gave a lot of attention to details. We love Drum & Bass, but strong, slamming beat lines is not always what you want in conjunction with the melodic content. Those moments, when we realised we created something uniquely ours, came long time ago, in those times we were making tracks ourselves… Occasionally, one of us used to come with unique idea in mediocre song…and we both used to be really excited about it, only because the idea (no one else was getting). “Fairytale” seems to be the track where everything finally got in place and there is also a musical story behind it, which seems to retain the attention of non-nerdy listeners as well… which makes us super-happy and motivated!

Step 4: Present

When we began working on Fairytale, we had no idea how it would end up. Even after its completion we had other plans with it… but it was right at this time when Blu Mar Ten Music was opening their doors to other artists and looking for demos. We felt an irresistible impulse to send it there, you know… just in case (maybe because they emphasised they were looking for unique tracks… and Fairytale was pretty much the most unique track we’ve ever made). After a few days, Chris BMT got in touch and asked us for some more stuff. It was right in the middle of creating “Imagine”, while being motivated and adrenaline boosted, we finished it extraordinarily quickly and sent him a preview… and in a few days, there was an offer for a single for BMTM from Chris. We find Blu Mar Ten utterly professional, promo is an important part of the release and the BMT crew are doing a fantastic job about it, bringing our sounds to audiences we could not even imagine before. We could not be happier!

Step 5: Future

We are constantly busy producing new stuff, both DnB and pretty much hard-to-classify 170 BPM electronic music (like our BMTM release). But we cannot share them at the moment, as it would cause potential problems if we wanted to release it. But there is still one track we would like to share with you. We did a remix for a Slovakian audio competition… well, it’s more of a remix treatment for our older, unreleased track… but it represents our attitude – deep atmospheres and details, this time in DnB form. It also features vocals in Slovak language, which is quite rare even for Slovak Drum & Bass.

 

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