by brian o'connor
Luke Vibert's mother has stated clearly to her son that, while she harbors
no hostility to the far-out, manic jungle tracks he's been producing, she much
prefers the verse-chorus-verse pop songs he was writing with his indie-ish rock
band, Bank, in the late '80s. Of course, few 50-somethings have embraced jungle's
hyperbreakbeat charms as the soundtrack to their lives. Funny, then, how a world
of drum'n'bass vastly different from the one presently constituted is only a few
apron strings away.
Soon before he stowed away the Marshall stacks, Vibert, along with his four-track
friend Jeremy Simmonds, began looping breakbeat rhythms and adding some open-ended
keyboard-guitar noodling on top. Vibert soon developed a breakbeat dependency,
and Wagon Christ, his first electonic-dance incarnation, was born.
As Wagon Christ, Vibert assembled subtle and smoky breakbeat passages that were
some of the most artfully conceived, skillfully executed, and irrefutably original
pieces that have endowed the genre. Indeed, much of his work for the Rising High
label, particularly Throbbing Pouch, are keepers.
When Vibert decided to accelerate his breakbeats and enter the drum'n'bass/jungle
party, his music lost none of its bizarre compositional character: arcane found-sound
samples wind 'round a lonely string quartet or the ghost of Ian Anderson's flute,
frequency noises dive bomb into beds of stuttering keyboards, a hint of melody briefly
surfaces among the mix, and the rhythm embodies aggression, sensuality and swing, all
within a few measures. Plug had arrived.
And Trent Reznor, along with many others, took notice of this singular and distinct
talent and signed him to his Nothing label. Drum'n'bass For Papa, a two-CD
set that includes Plug's 1,2 and 3, a collection of previously unavailable
Plug EPs, might possibly possess more artistic reach than anything else the genre
has seen and may well stand as one of the genre's enduring statements, joining
company that includes Golide, Aphex Twin, LTJ Bukem, and Roni Size. DJ Times
recently caught up with the affable Vibert, who was in NYC, spinning tracks for the
CMJ Music Conference.
DJ Times:How did the DJing gig go last night?
Vibert:The gig was very tight, schedule-wise. I spun some
Aphex Twin tracks, a bit of hip-hop, and Meat Beat Manifesto.
DJ TimesWhen you take your own music on the road, it's strictly turntables, right?
Vibert:That's all I do, actually, if I do play out, because I don't play live. Usually,
I'll spin other people's records and a few tracks of mine on DAT.
DJ Times:Do you remember the first time you got behind the decks?
Vibert:It must have been around 1990 or so. I used to go out and see pop or punks bands
that I liked, and the I started going out to dance clubs. The first clubs I that I
went to, they didn't mix records there - I kind of thought it was my idea - they
just sort of played dance music and I thought, "You could mix these tunes together."
So I practiced at home with a tape deck and one record player, and by 1993 I had two
decks, but I was not properly DJing until 1995.
DJ Times:Was there anyone to give you a beat matching tutorial?
Vibert:Not at all, just in my head. I just realized for myself that it could be done. The first
time I saw it done was in a club in London in '94. Then I thought, "Oh, shit." Cos they
were good, much better than me. I think it was Todd Terry, you know, a house DJ who
was mixing really solidly. But I liked playing different stuff, like a bit of hiphop,
then a bit of something else. So they didn't worry me. I could still do my own thing
and get away with it. Besides, at first I would just play at friend's parties. Among my
first London gigs was the Phoenix Festival in '95. That was frightening indeed.
DJ Times:When did you go from DJing to making music?
Vibert:It actually worked the other way around. I'd been making music for years and years, and
I slowly got around to making kind-of-dancey music fo '91 on. It's when I stopped recording
bass, guitars, and singing.
DJ Times:You were writing pop music?
Vibert:Exactly. That's what my mom and dad still like best. She says, "I wish you did those nice songs
you used to write."
DJ Times:What kind of band was it?
Vibert:I was a drummer in my last band [Bank], in '88. We sounded like Stone Roses, I suppose. Kinda
indie-ish, vaguely funky.
DJ Times:When the transformation occured, how did breakbeats work themselves in?
Vibert:I remember I got a couple of breakbeat albums in '89; and before we had a sampler -
instead of using a drum machine - we'd make a tape of six minutes worth of breakbeats,
loop them up, and pile stuff on top, play live stuff on top. We finally got a sampler in
1991 - a Korg SS1 keyboard sampler.
DJ Times:Not much sampling time on that old bat.
Vibert:Eight seconds time, not much to play with. And that was intially why I started cutting
up beats more, 'cause if you take just the snare and the high hat, then you still got
loads of seconds left, whereas if you take a little loop, then that's all your time
gone. So that's why I started cutting up the beats. Its just really slowly turned into
Plug, Wagon Christ-y.
DJ Times:Were you opposed to using drum machines?
Vibert:We had a couple of drum machines, back in, like '88, and I always wondered why hiphop
beats sounded so much better than what we could do with the machines. And I determined
that the live drummer feel was a lot more funky than anything you could do with a
machine. So I stopped working with drum machines in '91 and ended up being a total
break boy. Now I love it. I go out looking for breakbeats. It's my favorite thing.
DJ Times:What other pieces of gear do you rely on?
Vibert:I've got an old Atari, which I'm probably going to ditch and get myself a Mac. There's
a Roland S760 sampler, which I've expanded up to eight minutes sampling time - as
opposed to eight seconds on the old one. I've got a couple of digital keyboards, nothing
analogue; so now I just sample most stuff and then play a bit of keyboards over that.
I like to get keyboard bits in on my tracks, but usually they end up sounding like bits
of the sample.
DJ Times:What are some of the technical considerations that come into play when
you're recording these manic jungle tracks with the skyrocketing BPMs?
Vibert:Well, when I'm trying to match up the breaks I have to do it at half the
time. Say a track is at 160, I'll have to slow it down to 80, pitch everything down
an octave, and work on it really slow to get them all fitted in, the I'll speed it
back up.
DJ Times:The samples that you choose from seem to come from an extremely eclectic
record collection. Is it yours?
Vibert:Yeah, that's probably from my mom. I used to sample her stuff before I
bought any of my old stuff - she had old Serge Gainsbourg, easy listening French stuff.
I used to sample the strings from that. I would do it for fun, but then I slowly
realized I liked that stuff. And when I listened to techno it sounded cold and I was
into the real, warm, old stuff.
DJ Times:Despite working in a field of music that's always changing, do you
have any constants, in terms of the sound you wish to get?
Vibert:I never sit down and make a specific-sounding record. I buy records, listen
to them and take samples off them and come up with something. My stuff changes all the
time. For example, the very first things I was ding in drum'n'bass, my attempts were as
way-out as possible. And sometimes I'll go in cycles and come up with something that sounds
vaguely familiar to something I did a couple of years ago.
DJ Times:You prefer the bedroom studio?
Vibert:I can't imagine having it any other way. I love it. If I don't feel like
working, I don't have to. I hate the idea of renting a studio and having to be creative
from 9 and 5. It's nice to be able to do it or not do it. But usually I'm busiest
late at night. You can get a long run without any disturbances and you can lose yourself
in the computer world.
DJ Times:Are some periods more productive than others, or are you like your
friend Richard James, whose creative spurts know no gap?
Vibert:I go through phases. A few weeks ago I just didn't go out for ages -
I just couldn't get enough of making music. But then another time I'll go a week and
not make any. There'll be periods of time where I'm like, "Oh, God, I couldn't make
music now if I wanted to."
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