Lynx: The raw truth
RA's George Mitton catches up with one-half of the team behind one of the best and most unorthodox drum & bass albums of the year.
"To me great music is in the attention to detail," says Lynx. "There's a lot of drum & bass that touches the surface, and then it's off to the next thing. On this album we wanted to make something we thought was really thorough."
Lynx is discussing his recent album, The Raw Truth, produced in collaboration with politically-attuned MC Kemo. The faddish, throw-away nature of much modern dance music is a topic that recurs in conversation with the artist. It's a trend he's determined to fight in his latest work, an album that is as inventive as it is unusual. Of the 15 tracks on the LP, only four are instrumentals. This statistic is almost unheard of in drum & bass, a genre that tends to value rigid technique over the expressiveness of vocals.
Lynx admits his work with Kemo is "quite out-there compared to most drum & bass." It's not just Kemo's half-rap, half-spoken word political critique that sets it apart. Lynx's sparse, edgy productions, filled with pregnant pauses and eerie orchestral samples, are highly unorthodox. The album has already elicited some grand praise. In the words of Marcus Intalex, owner of the Soul:R imprint that released The Raw Truth, the album could "change people's opinions on what drum & bass is."
"[It's] an album that leans towards many things," claims Intalex. "Hip hop, drum & bass, R&B, even dubstep. But what it actually is is none of them and all of them at the same time … [it's] a sound that is as individual as drum & bass has ever been."
"The political angle really comes from Kemo," explains Lynx. "But it inspires me to produce tracks that have that kind of edge to the music. It's not really a heavy and hard sound but there's a certain venom and underlying anger. That sound to me only came around with Kemo. Before that I was touching on it, but there was no real outlet for it. Certainly I try to get inside Kemo's head and the lyrics he's doing, and that translates to the music."
For Lynx, it's very important to have a unique sound. "Everyone's striving for that," he says. "It's quite difficult. It's so easy to go to a rave, hear a song and be influenced by it. And I think most of the drum & bass scene moves in that way. I read a quote a while ago about astronomers which you can really apply to music: They're like a herd of antelope. They all move in one direction, convinced that that's the way to go. Then the leader will move the other way, equally convinced that that's the way to go. Musicians are the same. We're all guilty of it. You hear something and think, wow, that's now the new sound, let's follow that angle. I'm just trying to go against the grain a bit, find the undiscovered, you know?"
Given Lynx's determination to find a distinct sound, it's slightly puzzling that he nevertheless stays true to drum & bass. Many casual listeners complain that the format is too formulaic, and even some dyed-in-the-wool heads say the genre can be limiting. Lynx has experimented with a range of different styles of music before, but says he keeps coming back to drum & bass.
"It's a love/hate relationship," Lynx explains. "Though it frustrates me, I do find within drum & bass a really wide scope of musical influences. I'm not someone who likes to do just one style or sound. I've done things like 'Disco Dodo' which are quite clubby, even though I didn't write it with that in mind, to the really deep tracks like 'Global Enemies' with Kemo. I guess it's because of the broadness. I've been into it since 1993. I was there as hardcore developed into the jungle sound. I was buying records all the time, and a lot of my biggest influences go back to the early Moving Shadow records."
"A lot of tunes sound great in
a club, but at home I
would never put it on."
Lynx says it's the obsession with hard and heavy club tracks that he finds difficult. "I was 16 once and I can totally understand wanting to go out and rave to hard tracks," he explains. "But that is the frustration, and I'd like to see some balance restored so that it's possible to listen to drum & bass at home without it sounding rubbish. A lot of tunes sound great in a club, but at home I would never put it on."
"I'm sure it goes on in every niche of DJ music," he continues. "It's the pressure on DJs to go to a club and perform so that the crowd thinks they're the best DJ. The whole Andy C way of mixing has come from people DJing faster. There's certainly pressure on DJs, and even though I'm not trying to compete in that game, when I'm DJing I do feel it myself."
Lynx prefers to vary his mood of his sets when playing live. "For me it's contrast, dynamics," he explains. "Rather than a set that starts at ten and finishes at ten, you might start at five, go up to ten and bring it down to one. Even to the point of having the biggest clubby tracks followed by something really minimal, to create those dynamics."
That's not to say that Lynx hasn't had dance floor successes. His 2007 smash, "Disco Dodo," was possibly the biggest drum & bass track of the year. Audiences responded to its stripped-down techno sound and infectious rhythm, and DJs found it wonderfully flexible and easy to mix. In the words of one reviewer it "broke all the rules of modern drum & bass" by eschewing the full-spectrum, wall-of-sound style that tends to dominate in clubs.
Drum & bass innovators
Lynx
Foul Play
"They're like my heroes," Lynx explains. "The main guy who was the producer died, so they stopped writing music. But they were phenomenal. They were around from 1992 to 1995." Foul Play were early contributors to the legendary Moving Shadow imprint—one of the most important labels in the history of drum & bass.
Roni Size & Reprazent
"I listen back to old Roni Size and think in some ways, that was the pinnacle of drum & bass," says Lynx. "Maybe a lot of what's missing in drum & bass now can be seen in what he did." Size's New Forms won the Mercury Music Prize in 1997, a landmark for the hitherto underground genre.
Calibre
"Just due to sheer volume and quality of his songs," explains Lynx. Belfast-born Calibre has given the scene a huge and rich catalogue of tunes despite being a relative newcomer. A pioneer of the so-called "liquid" sound, Calibre has released five albums, his most popular being 2005's Second Sun.
Goldie
Both the public face of drum & bass and one of its most inventive proponents. With producer Rob Playford, Goldie gave the world Timeless in 1995—possibly the best album drum & bass has yet produced. "He's one of the only people that somehow managed to find that balance of a really raw kind of drum & bass with songs as well," says Lynx.
LTJ Bukem
Labeled a purveyor of "intelligent" drum & bass (though he never liked the name), Bukem's music blends jazz and electronic sounds, and is influenced by artists such as Herbie Hancock. It's a sound perhaps best showcased on 2000's Journey Inwards. "It was a bit like he was fighting a battle against all the other jungle DJs...it's amazing how he stuck to his guns. I see parallels between what I'm trying to do and what Bukem's done," says Lynx.
"In some ways it's really positive that that was the big tune because I don't feel compromised," he continues. "A lot of people who are into the deeper drum & bass feel a little a bit of resentment to that tune, but I didn't feel compromised writing it. I wasn't writing it thinking, I've got to have the drum & bass hit."
Listening to Lynx talk about the success of "Disco Dodo" you detect that he's afraid of selling out. It's to be expected from a producer who draws on influences from the early days of drum & bass, when the music was self-consciously underground and rebellious. The last few years have seen a number of artists achieve crossover success, drawing criticism from the scene's hardcore that their music is too commercial. The clearest example is of course Australia's Pendulum, whose massive success has seen drum & bass become a regular feature on the UK's Radio 1.
Lynx seems unlikely to follow in Pendulum's footsteps, however. It's not because his music isn't good enough, but rather because his whole approach is built upon being isolated from the mainstream. "That's where hopefully I get my edge from," he says. His isolation has been geographical as well as artistic. Though he's lived in London for the past three years, he used to live in Portsmouth, a town on the UK's south coast where "there's not really much of a scene." In between Portsmouth and London he lived in Chichester, "and there's really nothing going on there," he says. "It's like a retirement town. That isolation allowed me to ignore [what was going on elsewhere]."
That's not to say Lynx hasn't enjoyed a number of collaborations. The longest and most fruitful is the partnership with Kemo. "We hooked up on MySpace," Lynx explains. "He was in Germany at the time. The way we were writing music was that I would send him a groove, he would write some lyrics to it, then he'd send that back to me. Even to the point on our first release, the original backing track that he did his vocal to didn't end up as the backing track. I ended up writing the song around his vocals."
Lynx and Kemo didn't actually meet until they'd made three tunes together ("Global Enemies," "Carnivale" and a third track that eventually made it on to the album). Did the working relationship change when they finally met in person? "I think the music changed slightly," says Lynx. "I think it probably became a bit deeper, in a way. Before that we were sort of just touching on the sound really, we didn't really know where it was going."
"Working on the net and chatting to people on the net … it's almost a non-reality," he muses. "It's an odd thing, the net. I love it and we all use it every day, and without it we'd all feel lost. But I do miss that personal connection with people. There are certainly a lot of producers and DJs that I send tunes to, and vice versa, who I haven't seen for a long time. It's got to the point when a lot of DJs and producers I only see once a year."
Though he bemoans the disconnectedness that can affect musicians who work online, Lynx is excited its possibilities as well. The potential for ambitious online collaborations is behind his next project. Starting some time at the end of the year, Lynx plans to launch his own imprint, Detail Recordings, which he describes as "a kind of Chinese-whispers record label."
"I'll start a groove and upload it to the Detail Recordings website," he explains. "People can get involved, add stuff to the music, upload it again and it will just develop. I want it to become a collaborative kind of record label. I didn't really want to start a label and just press up a few thousand vinyl. The way the music industry is now, it requires something out of the ordinary, and that's something that excites me because I want to collaborate with a lot of different musicians."
"I'll be A&Ring the bits that I like," he continues. "Some tunes might end up with three or four people writing, but if some tracks end up with 50 people writing, all the better. The approach is as important as the result. In the early days it'll stay quite exclusive, I'll only give maybe five people the link. These will be people within the industry that I'm close to, maybe Kemo if he's feeling the vibe on it, or Alix Perez, Commix, dBridge, Marcus Intalex, Calibre. I'm hoping that we'll get five or six really great tracks out of it and that'll enthuse everyone else to have a go."
"Drum & bass is often an
emotionless kind of music."
It's clear Lynx has an open-minded approach and is keen to try new things. His musical interests are also broad and take in a range of styles. "Outside of drum & bass in the last couple of years it's been people like Flying Lotus and Burial, Björk, MGMT, MIA, Basement Jaxx," he says. "The Prodigy are my heroes. Leftfield, Massive Attack, the trip-hop angle. Bugz in the Attic as well. I don't even know what they're doing at the moment, I'd love to hear a new album from them."
Lynx has an instinct to go against the grain, and this is reflected in his favourite dance album, Fat of the Land by the Prodigy. "It's very different to what I'm doing, but I do think they were breaking the rules. In some ways you listen back to it and it's quite a safe album, but at the time it blew me away. I'm quite into acoustic stuff as well. I'm envious of those kinds of musicians, like José González. Drum & bass is often an emotionless kind of music, and that kind of stuff is like a different world, it's amazing."
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