SmartShanghai | Interview: Disrupt

Interview: Disrupt

By Alastair Sloan, Jan 28th, 2010 | In Nightlife

Winging his way in from Germany is Disrupt, bringing dub reggae mixed with 8-bit ish Atari retro weirdness and other assorted blips and bleeps. It called "Digital Laptop Reggae" and comes across as a fresh, humorous, and contemporary take on the genre. Disrupt is joined this Friday at The Shelter by JAHTARI label mate Soom T (JAH + Atari = Jahtari... nice, I just got that), and also on the night is Steve Barker (from the BBC Radio show "On the Wire"). More on Steve here. And of course, the Uprooted Sunshine crew.

So that's a great show, but wait that's not all. Disrupt and Uprooted also collaborated on a 500-copy run of an EP called "Bass Shelter EP" which will also be available on the night. It's a pretty neat looking thing with a hand stamped cover, and features Uprooted vocalist ChaCha collaborating with Disrupt. Check out some samples on the MySpace.

SmartShanghai called up Disrupt to talk about dub, electronica, and gabba. Don't miss him at The Shelter this Friday.

***

SmSh: So is this your first time to Shanghai?

Distrupt:Yep.

SmSh: Looking forward to it?

Distrupt: Yes of course...I'm looking forward to meeting Gaz [manager of The Shelter], and seeing the club and playing a gig. I have no idea about people in China, or if they know about reggae or dub, or 8-bit music. Or if there's any kind of subculture or something like that, so really looking forward to it. Also to the food of course!

SmSh: Yeah you've got a lot to look forward to on the food front. So dub and 8-bit music, they don't necessarily come together that easily. How did you come to this kind of sound?

Distrupt:Well at first I was listening to old reggae and dub records, and I wanted to make it myself. But I was producing by myself and all I had in terms of gear was a really old laptop. I was just trying to use whatever I had at hand, and what came out was this cheap-sounding 8-bit reggae. And the first release we ever came out with was a cover of a Commodore 64 game soundtrack, I tried to put it together with a bassline and the off-beat. And surprisingly it worked really well. And then we went and got old reggae records from the late '70s and '80s that used synthesizers and drum-machines -- and this I really like because it's really close to what we're doing with the rough-edged 8-bit sound, rough drums, etc. So that was very influential too.

SmSh: But there's not that many people doing this round the world now right? Do you try and have Jahtari as a centre for this and draw more 8-bit producers in?

Distrupt:Yeah, but presently I don't understand why more people aren't doing it because it's so close-at-hand, you know? If you buy a computer for cheap, and you make reggae music that sounds like a computer, it's good. But if I think more people are trying to make music that sounds like an old '70s record. I think if you're honest with it and say "a computer sounds like a computer," then it works. I don't understand why there aren't more people! But the people there are I spend a lot of time traveling around with them and playing with them. That's the center of what we do.

SmSh: So you produce on a laptop but then press it to vinyl. What's your live show is it on laptop or turntables or what?

Distrupt:Well, actually I have a laptop, and then I have a Playstation joystick and a controller. On the laptop there's a bunch of tracks and loops, so I'm like an old dub producer I put the tracks together on a mixing board. So I arrange the track on the fly so I can adapt to what my MC is doing on the microphone. We dub it up after we've built it up, lots of delays and reverbs.

SmSh: I read that when you started out you went through quite a different genres before reggae?

Distrupt:Yes I did.

SmSh: Including gabba?

Distrupt: [laughs] Ah yes...and before I was into punk and stuff. I was into gabba and made hardcore recordings. And then I went to Leipzig and got into Detroit techno. And from that into dub.

On your website you have a pretty serious looking section called "The Theory" which is all about how you make dub, not other genres influenced by dub.

Yeah exactly, it's "dub dub" not the other way round. But then with the sounds of other genres built around the dub. I wrote that section because a lot of people were sending me demos saying it was dub and I was writing back saying "no this is electronica, you can't call this dub." It doesn't necessarily need the reverb but it needs the bassline and it needs the riddim. I think you can make the most interesting music though when you make dub but you use sounds and noises from other genres, like electronica and techno. And then you put in certain things like a rasta vocal or a Gameboy sound. A lot of people think you can't make reggae with a Gameboy, but surprisingly it works.

SmSh: And you're currently working with ChaCha from Shanghai, how's that going?

Distrupt:Well Gaz from The Shelter put me in touch with her and told me she was a great MC. And I'm always interested in lyrics which are not English and in a different language. So I sent her a batch of riddims and she voiced over two of them and sent them back, and now we're puttin them on a CD. It's absolutely amazing actually to hear Mandarin singing on a reggae track, because the meter and the vowels and the whole balance of the language is completely different - but it works and it's brilliant, really brilliant. Of course I don't have a clue what she's saying but when she translated it, it was amazing. It's brilliant.

SmSh: So any message to the people of Shanghai?

Distrupt:Well I think next weekend is going to be a super-nice soundsystem session, very open. And of course the MC Soom-T is going to be great. I played a gig with her last week in France and it blew the roof off. She's a small girl but she's like dynamite!