Caro C
Hello K, better known as DJ Crust. Welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast.
DJ Krust
Thank you for having me.
Caro C
You're very welcome. I'm most keen to represent the jungle and the drum ’n’ bass world of electronic music and looking forward to unpacking that with you. You have been described as a master of the genre, so I'm quite interested if we could start with kind of unpacking your journey from the days of Represent and the early days of drum ’n’ bass through to where you're at now.
DJ Krust
It started way before that for me, you know, I watched a film when I was 14 called Wild Style and it's about New York hip hop and how that whole thing started. I was like 14 years old. Me and my brothers and a few friends, we watched it and it completely blew my mind. You know, I grew up in this, you know, working class council estate. There was nobody like me there, you know and so I didn't have any sort of anyone to look up to certainly role models or anything. But when I saw Wild Style though, it completely changed my life. You know, I saw these guys who looked like me, who didn't look like they had much more than me, but they were, they created something. They were DJing, they were scratching, they were rapping, they were painting. They had this look and this vibe and this feel about them and I just fell in love with it. And me and my brothers, the next day we decided we're going to start a crew. We called it Fresh 4. We had like the first general meeting in my mom's front garden and then we proceeded to ask the school if we could have a room on a, you know, every two weeks on a, after school and they said yes. And so we started holding, you know, our first sort of, you know, warehouse parties as it were, in the school classroom. And we took that idea to the local youth club, Eagle House in Norwest and we did the same thing there. We asked them if we could have a back room, we told them what we want to do. We want to do this new thing called break dancing and rapping and stuff. And they were like, yeah, sure. Go for it. And they let us have the room once a month. Um, and we held parties there.
Caro C
Awesome.
DJ Krust
And then we took the same idea to a squat in Bristol called St. Luke's Road and there was an old scout hut in the bottom of the garden and we made a doorway with a sledgehammer and we cleaned it up, swept it up, got our friend Inky and Chaos to come and spray the walls and we did exactly the same thing now. And so that's kind of how we kind of got our foot in the door of the music game. We kind of just hacked it, you know, we sort of saw what was going on because what was happening in America at the same time, you had people like Massive Attack who were called Wild Bunch. Then there was a vibrant Bristol scene. You had like FBI, UD4, you know, there was Ask Fresh 4, you had John Stapleton, DJ Manfred and you know, it was all about house parties and warehouse parties and we wanted to be a part of that whole scene. My brother had opportunity Flynn, he had opportunity to make a record. This, he had this idea and he is like, right, we want, we're gonna make this track. We're like, you know, really? How are you gonna do that? He goes well, I know these guys like Smith n Mighty. They got a studio and he is, I'm going to go knock on the door and ask to make a track with them. And we're like, wow. So you did it. He went to see him, made this track that track turned into a track called wishing on a star. And that went, we got signed to the majors to Virgin and that track went top 10. We got signed for an album deal and within like six to eight months, we were dropped and we were back to square one because we didn't really have a clue what we were doing. Management wasn't great and it was like, lesson number one. While that was going on though, we were in London one day. We were being shown the studio and the doors, as the doors opened, the vibe hit me. I saw this massive mixing desk. I saw this glass panel in front. I saw these huge speakers and you know, when I saw Wildstar, I had the feeling, I knew I was going to do that for the rest of my life. When I saw that studio, I had the exact same feeling. I knew I was going to learn how to use this equipment. I was going to do that for the rest of my life. There was no doubt in my mind. And so when I got back to Bristol, my brother had a sampler, a Casio FZ1, like 14 seconds sampling, like 16 bit or 8 bit it was, but for three years I hassled him and lived in his back room until he showed me I had to use a sampler so I could fully understand it. While that was going on, I got introduced to Cubase, Atari 10, ST1040 and I just started messing around, trying to make beats, trying to understand what this, what was happening, really. I mean, there was nothing like it is now. There was, you know, no-one was talking about making beats back then. Maybe like a couple of people, Smith and Mighty were the sort of people that I knew who were making music. There was another guy, a guy called LED who was like a guy who'd make these mixtapes, these cassette mixtapes, they were amazing. And he was really inspiring, but not actually producing. There wasn't many people doing it from that. I was trying to make hip hop, but it didn't really happen. And then I met Dive because of, he lived down by the squat. So he used to hear the music and he ended up coming in one afternoon. And I met him, Sav, I'd known for years since we kind of grew up together. So we started hanging out together, making beats in the back of Smith and Mighty's studio. They gave us the studio. We called it Studio B and it was just like a back room with us, with a soundtracks desk in it and the same Casio FZ1 sampler and just basic Atari 1014 set of speakers and that was it. But we lived in that room. We stayed in there as much as possible. We just started to understand how to put sort of beats together. Rave kicked off. We started to go to raves every weekend and we started to hear this sound. People were calling it jungle techno and you'd only hear like one or two tunes a night, but it was like this rave tune with the four to the floor. But it also had like hot pants break running through or amen break running through or think break running through it. And it was like, wow, what's this? Yeah. And so that was really the focus of going to these raves. Of course we were enjoying ourselves and partying, but whenever we heard one of these tunes, we'd run to the decks and try and see, you know, what the record was or see who was playing it that went on for about a year or so. And we'd come back to the studio and we would tinker around sort of trying to emulate what we were hearing. So you were studying it basically, you were studying that's, that's what I do. I can't help myself when I'm listening to stuff. I like the way they use that rim shot or whatever.
Caro C
Exactly. Yeah.
DJ Krust
We were students. I mean, we did the same thing before when we learned to become scratch DJs and DJs, we would go to St. Paul's carnival or any of the warehouse parties that we were going on in Bristol at that time and whoever we're playing, we just stand at the front of the decks and just watch them watch how they cut and scratched and stuff and so this is exactly the same thing, but we were there watching these DJs play this and listening to these, listening for these beats. Eventually we just kind of caught our own vibe and we were starting to build tracks. We had so much stuff. We decided one day we were like, right, we need to do something with it, we need to start a label. We need to do something, you know and Sub says, oh I know this guy Roni Size. He's, he wants to start a label as well. It's a great, let's all have a meeting. So we had a meeting, we had a meeting in my flat and that's kind of when Full Cycle was born. We then lived together for about the next 10 years and we started to form what everybody considers sort of the Bristol jungle sound and that was really born out of the Roland 760, the E64, the Roland 550 and the Mackie desk and NS10s and then Genelecs. And we just lived in each other's houses. I'm just push buttons and experimented and just after we started our label, Brian G and Jumbie Jack Frost was starting a label. They'd heard about us through a mutual friend and so because of the work rate that we had back then, we had so much material, we had enough to give to V, we had enough for Full Cycle. We ended up starting a new label called Dope Dragon and then V started another label called Fiddy Blunt and basically for about the first sort of maybe seven, eight years of all of both his labels, we furnished all of those labels with material through different aliases. We were just, we were a machine back then. We just lived and breathed production.
Caro C
And what about all the other sort of the processing side of things? So like the dynamic control, the EQ, the compression, did you just learn that all that yourselves as well? Just worked it out?
DJ Krust
There was none of that. There was none of that. The only EQs we understood was red light. Yeah. Yeah. And the Mackie desk was great for distortion. So what we, you know, we were using in the beginning, it was Cubase and the Roland. So we knew enough to sort of not sort of boost too many levels here and there, but there was no shelving, there was no EQ in, there was no compression. It was just all going through the Mackie desk, coming straight out of the sampler through the, we separated it through the 8 tracks at the back of the sampler, straight into 8 tracks on the Mackie desk. And then we'd use the Mackie bus section as well to actually push more of the levels. There was no shelving, there was no kick drums shelved at a hundred hertz or anything like that or one ten. There was no shelving for the bass. It was just everything came through the channels and we just balanced everything from source.
Caro C
Yeah, you just balanced it and you just listened to it.
DJ Krust
You know, you, it, we eventually started getting there, but in the beginning, those first, maybe, I don't know, those first couple of records you heard, it was just like, they were quite raw and sort of rugged tunes. I mean you know, you knew enough to let the kick drum and the sub bass breathe. So, you know, you'd figure out a way to balance those or maybe shove off a little bit of the low end so the kick drum could breathe. But it's nothing like it is now. It wasn't as clinical as it was now. It's really vibes. You know, it's really about vibes. And you know, there's loads of, we'll probably get into it in the conversation, but what we created was a system of making jungle music. So we made a system of like of in the arrangements, in the sound, in the way the beats worked. You know, we really dug deep and figured out how to make this sound really work as a sound because we were the very first DJ producers, ‘cause back then you are either a DJ or you were a producer. There were very few people who were both. We came in with a totally new idea of a totally fresh approach to production and performing. Because what we realised before then, if you bought a record, it was generally from a producer who wasn't a DJ, so he didn't understand what it was like to DJ in front of an audience with only a certain amount of time to mix a track in. So the intros will always be off, the timing on the intros, the length of the intros. And if you had to cut that onto a dub plate, the dub plate would on the, because there were this thick pieces of acetate, the intro would wear away because you have to cue it up. So unless you had a clear one, like the clear one starting point, the mix would always come in off key and because the plates were heavy, you couldn't necessarily slow them down the way you could at CDJ or vinyl. So you had to learn a different style of mixing with dubplates. So what our thing was, right, we're DJing, we need to master a form that still entertains the crowd and helps us create a track that's still original, but was also a tool because that's what it needed to be, it needed to work as a tool in the set. And so basically what we figured out was you need certain length of the intro so that the drums would mix in or the hi-hat would mix in, or you had a string or a sound, there was something measurable so that all of our tunes would fit together. So we figured out we would have these set ways of making our tunes clean up, clean out the back end, no funny sounds or off key pads or anything front ends would be, you know, really simple you know, some bass, with some sometimes a bit bass in there, sometimes they weren't, sometimes it'd be clean drums, sometimes it'd be higher. And so basically we constructed our tracks so it didn't matter who made them, they would fit together like a jigsaw. And then that way, when anyone would play them, we knew exactly where the mix point would come in, we, you know, exactly when the bass would come in, you know, exactly when to drop the track, you know, exactly how long to mix the track. And that completely revolutionised the sound and that to the degree today it's become sterile, you know, it's too formulaic now, but that formula worked in the beginning because before that the music was really chaotic, like jungle music. And what you hear back in the early nineties was that crazy sound and in the beginning it was fine, you could mix a couple of them, but we needed to kind of create some kind of order because it was just becoming too difficult to mix. And then if you couldn't mix them, you couldn't perform properly. Then you can't be up there trying to figure out how to mix two tunes, you didn't have that time. Yeah. And it needs that momentum. It needs that energy and all that. So it's almost like being aware of the mechanical, having an overview of how, how the experience works. If you're listening to a set, basically. It's a finely, it's a finely tuned machine. performing, you know, you've only got seconds and it's all instinctual, so you don't have time to figure out what's the next tune. It's about impact. It's about excitement. It's about creating a story and a journey and to do that, the preparation needs to be on point.
Caro C
Yeah. And so what about hardwares and samples and how did you get hold? How did you create your sound palette back then especially?
DJ Krust
So we basically were sample Kings. You know, we came from the hip hop era where it was all about sampling. We would camp out in second hand shops. So we would just go to second hand shops and just listen to loads and loads of records and just buy and when we started to go to other countries and touring and stuff, we just had to promote as soon as we stopped anywhere, we go to the pro, take us to the, even before we go to the hotel, take us to the record shop, you know and we just go straight to the record shop and just buy breaks. And that's all we were looking for, breaks, breaks, breaks and more breaks. And so then we started to buy secondhand equipment or, you know, whatever was in the secondhand shops like music shops, we started getting fascinated by the old sound of the 70s, you know, classic Moogs, Arps, Arps Salinas, Korgs, you know, anything that could just give us the edge of the sound. And then we, wherever we go, we just, you know, buy drum machines, anything that had a sound to it. We just spend hours in secondhand shops and, you know, I remember one of our favourite shops was in LA black market. I think it was called On La Brea and that was a treasure trove. It's like, it's archive. You walk into a warehouse, it just had that musky smell of like old equipment. We loved it. And we just used to go in there and just spend like hours in there just playing on the drum machines and playing keyboards and then just, you know, buying a few pieces.
Caro C
And transporting them back wasn't a problem in those days?
DJ Krust
Nope. No, I mean, we'd be on tour or something. So the tour manager would just wrap it up for us and send it by the time we finished the tour. It'd be waiting for us when we get back or we'd, you know, sometimes it'd be small enough that we could take it on as hand luggage or something.
Caro C
Yeah, I started producing in the late nineties on virtually no budget and it was amazing how I remember someone assumed I had money because I had an array of hardware, but actually everything came second hand and Sound On Sound reader's ads was one of the places. But apart from that, I was also just, as you say, just looking around and finding things with interesting sounds. So in a sense, I don't know, is it a bit those days are over? That was a good time for that, wasn't it?
DJ Krust
Yeah. I mean, I think those times are coming back. I can definitely see in lots more of my peers buying hardware again and trying to make music outside of the box and I'm definitely being pushed that way as well. And I've just revisited all my old, you know, I've got my MPC out the other day and the floppy disc is, this is it. Now I've got my r policy out and that all the faders need to be clean. And so I think in a way we've gone through these cycles. You know, I remember a conversation we had one time when we were all using cubase and Atari ST1040 and it was brilliant. We were doing some amazing stuff on it. And all of a sudden Pro Tools came out and we all switched to Pro Tools. And in about, I remember about 10 years later, we were like, there was nothing wrong with what we were doing, you know, we just rushed and rushed in this technology thing and jumping on this thing, jumping on that thing, you know, and it's like, now everyone says you've got to compress your sounds, you've got to do this EQ level, dah, dah, dah. And it's like, I don't need to do any of that stuff. You know, like warhead, one of my biggest tunes, no compression, minimal EQ, just turn up, made on a six track soundtracks desk, you know, it's like, you know, soul emotion, one of the most complex tunes I ever made, same thing, Mackie desk, so that took a month to make though. Yeah, no elaborate, you know, EQing or compression, nothing like that at all.
Caro C
I think in a way there's something to be said for that, getting it right at source, because there's some tracks where I like, I don't actually need, surely I should be EQing this more, surely I should be doing this and you're like, well no actually I've just, the palette is right and the palette is balanced and you've almost, you can start to think of that when you, in the, as you're building it, don't you, you factor that in. And I think there's something, that's a strength in that regard.
DJ Krust
Well, we would spend a great deal of time in preparation mode and so that stuck with me. We would have days of going out hunting. So we would just go on missions, you know, we'd go to all the second hand shops in Bristol and we just live in those for two or three days. And we would just buy samples, buy records, you know and just, that would be it. And then we'd have these marathons sampling sessions where we would just sit down in a room, you know, and just sample these lists, play records, and then listen and that's where I kind of, we got our musical education as well. I listened to all these different types of records, prog rock, rock, heavy metal, breaks, jazz, funk, soul, RnB, classical. You just be sitting there listening to his music all day and then up sample that up sample that and then and then as you're sampling it we put on the keyboard and so one of the differences between what's going on back then and today's like everything went into the sampler first and everything had his own key group. So drums had their own patch and on those drums, you'd work the drums. So as you're sampling and you're editing the drums, you're working them so that you find the right ones that work together. Put this snare drum with these breaks, with that, put a loop on there forward, backwards, then let's put a LFO on there so it sounds like it's an actual, and all these like little tricks that we did that were making the sound, you know, so there wasn't necessarily, you know, a need to sort of EQ the hell out of it. The speakers told us everything. If you pressed something that had a high, it was supposed to be a high frequency and the speakers are flapping, well there's a frequency and that shouldn't be in there, take it out. It was just all really organic, really all simple. But that process took us, you know, years and years to figure out. So you know, the whole thing really was about the prep because in the preparation, that's where you made your sound and so that's where you were sculpting the sound. So we did a lot of the sculpting in the sampler, in Roland, so we use a lot of the filters to like, you know, shelve off all the highs or the lows and that kind of gave you the basic foundations. The Mackie decks had a great saturation to them anyway. So if once you got it up into the red, it just gave you that early jungle sound. Now, if you think about a track called, you know, freak show, probably that's one of the best mixes I ever did and that was just all in the levels, you know, and a little bit EQ. I didn't really understand shelving. So I'm probably boosting more than shelving on that track, but because of the sound choice it was just, you know, you could hear it, you could just hear it in the mix with what it needed and it was just like, it was more than anything, it’s just turn it up, you know? So that's kind of what we did.
Caro C
You talk about having like a 14 year gap before you came back with an album more recently, The Edge Of Everything. What was going on there?
DJ Krust
Life's caught up from 14 to 37, you know. I just, that was the sort of cycle of music I was living. I’d lived a life in the spotlight and you know, locally and then nationally and then internationally and you know, after a while, life caught up, I had to slow down, you know, I was living on the road, I didn't really have much of a social life, I didn't, couldn't hold a relationship down, I didn't see my family much, you know. I had a great career but personal life was shot, you know, my health was pretty much shot and I just realised, you know, one day I woke up in one of our clubs in Bristol, and like literally sort of came to and it was like, is this all there is? Is this it? Is this it? This is what I've worked all my life for. You know, this is what I've sacrificed my family, my child, you know, relationships. This is it. And I kind of said to myself, you know what, nah, I don't want to do this anymore. And then within about eight months I'd left the business, I left Full Cycle. I kind of took a step back from the whole jungle thing, DJing thing and then it sort of, everything crashed down quite quickly after that. And then I just rebuilt myself. I kind of looked at what was going on in my life. I looked at how I created what I created. I looked at why I was feeling so unhappy and you know, so low, low self esteem, the whole thing. And it was just, it was a huge, you know, it was a breakdown, but it was a breakdown so I could break through. I didn't really recognise it at the time because it was really insurmountable and I didn't have any sort of language for it, but it was at the time, it was a huge departure from the life that I'd created and there was a lot of worry and anxiety and stress at who I was going to be. If I wasn't Krust, how am I going to make a living? And I think that that was going on for quite a while before I actually made the decision because you don't just leave your business you know, it was like, you know, it was my baby, do you know what I mean? I'd created it, you know, I was, you know, I was in a relationship with Ronnie, Sub and Di, they were my family. And that was a really hard decision to walk away from those guys and that lifestyle and the community that we built, you know, we built the jungle community that first, the first, you know, first version of it, you know, with Brian Frost and Fabio, Groove Rider, Goldie, and that was family you know and to walk away from that, that was devastating. But I knew with the personality type that I was, if I didn't, it would have been a lot worse. And so I decided to look after myself, take care of myself and that was the best thing that I ever did and it took 10 years to really figure it out. But once I did the real me came back online and I started to wake up and realise, okay, you know, this is here, there's this K character now, you know and I've rebranded myself as K, you know and then it was like, create that new identity around this new version, you know, version 2.0 and that's where the whole adapt the canvas stuff and the coaching thing came from, because I went through the transformation myself, I saw what it was about, I feared it, you know, I'd saw it for what it was, you know, I'd face the beast and I'd came out the other side and I was a better version of myself and you know, people could see that people were seeing that they were coming up to me and say, look, something different about you, what's going on? And I would talk to them and I could see that there was something in it. And so there, boom, there was my next light bulb moment. And it was like, boom, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life now. And so yeah, I started to really dive deeper into the whole mindset, consciousness, spirituality, meditation, health and wellness. Started reading a lot more business books, started to take that more serious, marketing and then I just combined them all into this, you know, what I call adapt to a mentality now. It’s just being like a pioneer, like a hacker, really. It's the same thing about learning how to do jungle music or hip hop. You're just looking at all the elements around you and figuring out how you can, you know, adapt and create something new. And so the transformation creative consultancy was no different. It was like, you know, I always say I do, when I do my talks or workshops, I'm still performing. I just don't do it behind the decks anymore, you know and so that was really about me saving myself, helping myself and then introducing people to that along the way. So after studying the music, it's like almost things got out of balance. So then you studied how to be human and came back with both. Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're gonna imagine, but yeah, back then there were, it was, it's like, you just do this, you know, there was, there was no meditation. If there was, it was very, very, you know, it was just considered hippie-ish if you meditate in, you know, god forbid you were drinking green tea and doing yoga, you just would have been thrown out of the whole scene. It just wasn't talked about and you know, it was like, it was go, go and when you can't go anymore, go some more. And what's really powerful, powerful with driving the adapter canvas brand right now is because of that, I actually know now I'm helping creators who are reaching that transformation stage in their lives or feeling like they're being burnt out, here is the system to solve that problem. Yeah I don't know if you've heard of Help Musicians here in UK. They've got a music minds matter and they've really started focusing on that more, which I think is great that that exists. Cause yeah, there's a lot of that support is not there, or just as you say, the acknowledgement really of the stresses and strains of success in that sense and just that what goes with the territory of electronic music in terms of the working hours and all that kind of thing.
Caro C
Yeah interesting. Well yeah, well done you for working all that out and now of service to others, that's brilliant. So that's your Adapt The Canvas work and people just sign up for courses or programs that you offer?
DJ Krust
Yeah. So we have a free community, that's the starting point. So anyone can join that. I'll give you the links for that so you can come on there. We do, there's a free course on there, two free courses on there, which just helps people kind of get a start in the creative industries, you know, I help plan out what it is that you're trying to do and then we plan out the, you know, your first 90 days and then it scales up. We have a paid monthly course and then we have a paid yearly course for creators who are ready for that transformation. So that's really for sort of industry professionals who are feeling like they need the transformation and they've been in a career for, and they want to go to the next level, or they want to transition out of that into something else. They might have a business idea that they're struggling with. They might have a business idea that they want to launch. So the big package, the year long course called Elevation Formula, that really helps them. I guide them for a year through that, help them get clear on what it is that they want to do, help them sort of get the product together and then launch it into the world.
Caro C
Awesome. Awesome. Cool. So can we get under the hood bit of nuts and bolts about jungle, drum n bass production? I'm not a drum n bass jungle producer. I love it and therefore when I listen to it, I hear quite a compact sound is complex. You know, you've got the obviously solid, they layered the kicks and the snares, but then you've also got the intricate percussion, you know, that all that lovely kind of, I hear it as quite sort of loose, interesting, whatever timing and polyrhythms and all that kind of thing. You've also got the atmosphere, you've got the synths are obviously a massive part of it sounding quite abstract, you know and sort of quite weird sounds. Everyone almost fine is trying to find their sound their voice with a lot of overdrive a lot of sawtooth uses what I'm hearing. What would you say is going on?
DJ Krust
I think probably the best way to talk about it would be to break down one of my tracks. I guess something like maybe some of the music on the last album at The Edge Of Everything. So my approach to that project was really a lot of research in the beginning. So I looked at what was I trying to accomplish for me. One of the greatest periods of music was the seventies and so I started there. I said, right, I'm going to go out. I bought the silver face 1176 URI compressor and the E series SSL compressor and a Neve mic pre for the vocal chain. And so most of everything that I got went through there. I already had a Moog D, model D. I already had the ARP Odyssey and I had ARP Selena string ensemble, Roland OR organ, Roland V Synth as well, so I kind of set my room up around this, around that type of keyboard setup and I used a couple of old vintage pedals and then really what I did was I set about making my sound. So I said, what's the sound of this album? What is it that I'm trying to accomplish? I meditated and I wrote and I journaled and I kind of watched documentaries and I tried to understand like, what was the theme of this album? And I wrote down loads of words and I stuck them all on a wall with loads of pictures and I ended up having this wall, which ended up looking like a collage. And I really, I just sat there for like about nearly two years meditating and visualising and thinking about what this project was supposed to be about, what is the message that I want to get across, you know, what do I want to say? What do I want to talk about? And really, the whole thing was about reinvention was about my rebirth. You know, I'd been in music, released a project for 14 years. So I thought I had something to talk about and the whole thing about The Edge Of Everything was this sense that we are on the edge of something new, something different. You know, I remember growing up in the seventies, early eighties and there was a crisis like every six months, it seemed like, you know, the heatwaves going to melt the planet. And then it died down and then it was the miner's strike. And then it died down and it was the oil. And it seemed like you had plenty of time between these crisis to sort of get back to normal. Go back to school, play football in the fields and then all of a sudden, you know, there'll be some, another crisis. And it just seemed like today and when I started writing, I realised these crises are just every day now, like every time you pick up your phone, there's a crisis, you know, it's a new something new is happening. There wasn't any time to get, you know, reprieve from the last one before you even sort of come to terms to the one you're already dealing with. Another one would hit and then another one, another one. So throughout the day, yeah, it’d be pure murder death kill. And so I thought, this is interesting. We are in this position where everything is, it feels like it's on the edge of everything and so that was the whole idea around talking about that. But really it's like, what do you do about it? You know, what's the solution? And so I started to write this music talking about the journey of going into the self because they're, you know, from my, you know, from my standpoint, I was thinking, you know, I'm the one causing this in my life, so I'm the one that's going to be able to solve it. And so you have to go on your own hero's journey to be able to understand, you know, the chaos that you are creating and how that's being reflected in your environment, in the world and in, you know, other people. So that's what the story was. I said, right, great, I got the story. Then I sat down with all the synths and I started to sculpt the sounds. And so I would spend a day with like the Moog in a pedal and grab that going into the desk into Pro Tools and I would just mess around until I found the sound that resembled one of the titles or one of the words or one of the ideas that I was looking for. So I spent about six to eight months really going through all of the sounds and setting the room up, setting all my synths up, setting all my drum machines up, setting all my pedals up. Setting all the filters up, the effects, the EQs everything until I had this consistent sound I had all my presets that I'd made, everything I'd made my sample packs, my drum packs, my synth packs, everything. It was like, you know all in their own folders ready to go. So anytime when I had an idea for a track, boom, I go straight to my library and I'd go straight to my drums, I'd go straight to my synths, I go straight to my bases and I would work from there. And then that was like the first layer of the palettes. So then I would do sketches. I did loads and loads of sketches. I did about a hundred sketches, maybe 150 sketches. And they were like the 16 to 32 bar loops and they just lived on one timeline. So on one timeline I had about a hundred and odd loops and I would just listen to them every day and add to them and take away and I would just go through them. And so what I, how I set up my channels, I set up with the waves NLS. So they're the NLS plug-ins, they are the summon plug-ins from waves, so they're incredible. So I put that on every track and then on the master bus you have like the mixer that you can select, but if you put that on all of your channels straight away, like the Yoad Nevo is good for the drums, the mic, something that's good for sort of bass and the Spike Stent one's good for sort of bass and drums as well, so that went on. On top of that, I put the SSL sum in another SSL saturator and then set up all the EQ, set up all of the effects. So I had like 10 racks of effects. I can't remember all of those. And then I would have the mix auxiliaries as well. So then I would have everything coming out of the main channels, sidechained into the auxiliaries, then coming out of the auxiliaries into their subsections as well. And those subsections would have all the same NLS as again, but they would have some sort of distortions. Some tracks would have like, EQs, filters, more saturators and then that would be the way that I would work. So I'd mix everything and so this was rough, there was no EQ and going on there, some shelving. So obviously some basses and kick drums need would need to be shelved. So it shelved, but there was no radical high you know, cuts and shelves and not just nothing like that really. It's just, it was quick and dirty just to get the sound in. And sculpting, so that would all go through and then I would use that to colour the sound some more and then at the end, I would bounce it down to two tracks. So then I would then come back to the original loops again, and then, so I'd have this loop section, I'd be making my own loops and with my own sounds, so it'd be like this flywheel. So then by the end of like, you know, six months, everything that was being played live would be replaced by samples. And then I would go again, I would use the same tracks that had the saturators and the NLS channels, put everything back through that so it gives us a double saturated sound and then I would just continue to do that. So that's how that sort of album sounds like as rich as it does. It's just this process of going around and around and around. And if you combine those with like, you know, all the analogue outboard stuff, you start to get this really full, wooly, fuzzy sort of analogue warm sound and the NLS is of natural, they had the natural sort of crunch and compression in them. I don't compress my sound, I use compression as a volume or colouring, so I don't slam into it. I don't slam a limit as either. I don't use those in my music. I just use them for colour or for volume and effects as well. So if there's something that needs something like that, I will use it to give it an effect. Maybe I'll crush a higher or maybe I'll over-compress a kick drum, but it's not my sound, I wouldn't use it in my sound. And this whole album was mixed down by Joker as well. So that's not a thing that I'm pursuing right now at this stage of my career, I’m not interested in mixing. I'm just interested in creating the palette and sculpting sound and then I'm quite happy to pass it on to someone else to mix these days.
Caro C
Wow, awesome. Yeah so looking at the current kind of ecology for the drum based jungle breaks kind of world, see, obviously I noticed as loads more women coming through, which is great and yeah, in terms of mainstream as well, you know, Nia Archives was mentioning you guys when she was nominated for a Mercury prize. So yeah. Where do you think it's all at, at the moment? What's your thoughts on that?
DJ Krust
I think it's really, it's an interesting place. I think there's two or three things that's happening that are going to shape the next 10 years. One is definitely the state of the industry as it is now, that's compounded by the overall music industry and how that's shifting and where that's going to land in the next 10 years. You've got a huge technological effect, but you know, you're going to have a huge technological shift that's going to drive the economics of the business in a whole new way. And then you have, just the way that we are performing and what DJing is becoming and what live shows are becoming. And yeah, it's really starting to saturate and saturate the mainstream as well. I think if we tackle what the, what Jungle is doing now, it's definitely becoming a hybrid of itself in a way and that's really interesting the way that it's mutating and it's changing, you've got so many different facets in it. The down, you know, the half speed, the, you know, the neuro funk and the jungle, the jump up. These are becoming established sounds and they're becoming even more kind of niche sounds of the original sound itself and the new audiences are finding it and they're doing their spin on it. Manufacturers and people who are making the technology are recognising what Jungle is and how people are using those synths and those samples and those sounds and are now catering for it, which is going to expand it more and open up to another audience, which is interesting. I think the business and the way that technology is changing the entertainment industry as a whole, the dismantling of the music business, that's what I'm seeing. And I'm seeing it being rebuilt in a new form. And I know a lot of people want to preserve the music business, and, you know, keep music, whatever. It's like, I don't think that's the right idea. The way that technology is used in music is one of the most advanced in any industry and to try and keep it, you know, as it was 20 years ago, I think that's the mistake. And I think because of the way that the music businesses and the heritage of it and historic nature of the, you know, the way that it's run, I think that will start to erode and you will have a new generation who really thinks differently about how to market, how to express themselves through the music and what brand is, what story is. I think that is what's changing and I think that is what's allowing a new generation to come in and not be encumbered by the old ways of thinking, not become encumbered by the old attitude, you know, and what, where you market, how you reach your audience and how you get your sound out and what your sound is, that's no longer being informed by the gatekeepers, you know and that's really, really huge. That's really, really different. And so there's two things about that. One is because it's no longer guarded by the gatekeepers, the sound now has gone wild and anybody now who can, you know, put a sample pack together can make that sound, you know, put anything on top of it vocals or, you know, classical music and people will listen to it. It's now a mainstream sound, you know, and the flip side of that is that that sometimes dilutes the sound sometimes that dilutes the culture and that's what's happened as well. So you still have the roots of the culture, which are, you know, the nightclubs, which are sun and base, which are the metalheads, the rams, the, you know, the V records, you know, you know, the gutter funks and you know, the, but then you're seeing a whole subsection of that splitting off and doing its own thing. Where it's going to end up, we'll just go back to the melting pot. We're already seeing jungle making a resurgence. We're seeing a clear separation between drum & bass and jungle and all the other sub genres and variations of that and it feels like. There's a definite pull and push towards, you know, a resurgence of that jungle sound, but been brought more up to date technology wise, but with the same roots in the same ethos and that's interesting. You've got your purists out there who still want to keep it pure, but also you kind of got your new generation who just remind me of what we were doing when we started out. Cause our thing was we were trying to beat hip hop heads or we were trying to make rave, but we veered into making a hybrid of all of those things and that's what they call jungle. This is what's happening now. You know that's what's really exciting and so there's a huge drive now for the recognition of the craft and the art again and that's where I think all the hardware is coming back because people now know that we don't need to be on a conveyor belt. We don't need to compete with, you know, last week's release. We can now slow down and get back to making art, back to making music, back to the craft and as such, we can put a better, we can put the value back into it. And what web three is going to do, it’s going to allow people to use the blockchain technology to create smaller limited runs of music or art or craft or whatever it is that they're doing and we will use and I think this is one of the use cases of NFTs. We use NFTs to create limited runs of the stuff that we're doing. So we won't be selling an NFT. We'll be selling a limited edition crust 12 that there is only a hundred of and we use the NFT as a, like a watermark. So that, in that sense, then we'll be bringing the art back. People will know that they've got a limited run because we could see it, it’s on the blockchain and it costs, you know, it costs a hundred pounds for that limited run rather than those and those and those. Well, let's get back to how it used to be. There used to be like 300 presses or 2000 presses, you know and then when people wanted more, the artist then decided whether they want to do more, but they might not as well. So that's not down to the distributions or the streaming services that comes down to a decision from the creator of the art or how it used to be. So I think we're returning back to something that we all love and respect, value for the craft and making sure that the artists or the creator of the art form is properly valued and compensated. We're just figuring out how to use the technology to be able to accomplish that.
Caro C
Cool. Any current or upcoming projects you'd like to tell us about?
DJ Krust
Yes, so we have the new WonderPalace compilation coming next year and it's going to be about 18 to 20 brand new pieces of music and that's going to be accompanied by some new merchandise and some new goodies I don't want to talk too much about, but some interesting stuff that people can be able to collect and stuff. So that's really exciting. And apart from that really it's the new, all the new coaching stuff is really, really starting to take off and I'm doing more talks, more workshops. Yeah and I'm available for talks and workshops as well. So people out there are interested in booking Adapt A Canvas for workshops for your company, for your brand, for your uni, for your college and one on ones, then yeah, I'm available.
Caro C
Wonderful. Well, it's lovely to hear more about your work. Long may your adventures in sound and music and life continue. Brilliant.
DJ Krust
Thank you very much.
