How's things?

Things are okay. Health is good. Music's moving upwards, money downwards.


Combat 05 has been turning some heads and creating some serious damage. Did you anticipate this?

Well, kinda. The 4 tracks are feisty fuckers aren't they? But each in a different way. The tracks aren't that new, I've heard them tested out at various soundsystems and gigs over a long time and they seem to work, period. [Pump Maximiser] is a proper bruiser, it was written by Blackmass Plastics and that's his DJ style – tension, a solid groove, straight in for the kill. He dropped it at the main room of The Egg last year. [Carnivore] is Cursor Miner's angriest track to date. He dropped it at Trigger last year, and ripped the place to shreds. The mentalists seem well into it, like Scorn and Vex'd, and from hearing Stacey (Rag n Bone), Shelley Parker and Mary Ann Hobbs' sets, it seems popular with the ladies as well! The deeper, late-night electro heads seem to go for ScanOne's [Yes Yes], whose pads just fill the room nicely (for this EP, it was a very close fight between this and a more relentless bassline thing called "LBW Punk" which will come out on the ScanOne battlepack.) With it's hard but very disjointed rhythms, Ardisson's VIP track is a bridge between the mentalists and electronica heads. It was started in December 2004…it began as a 90 second sketch that got chunkier and more disjointed as the months went on; the dubby pads were added near the end and everything fell into place around them. Tested out first in a sweaty Shoreditch boozer, then out in Prague and finally at the Ecosystem benefit party this summer. Admittedly not the most straight-up easy track to mix, but some of the more interesting tracks require DJs to put time in to listen and be creative. Ardisson's VIP mix was first heard in a sweaty pub in Old St, then slowly tweaked over a few months. The finished version appeared at Celtric's party in Gent, summer 2005.  The EP was mastered and cut in this studio 28 floors up above the city…a silent chamber where you could see London for miles and miles around...quite a mad experience. They had this subwoofer the size of a small fridge… when the tracks dropped, especially Ardisson's, we all simultaneously did the 'bass face', always a good sign.

Test presses were hand-given to a few people, and the feedback has been positive. I sent off a few to various radio stations as well, with a note saying "if you like it, play it. If you don't like it, don't copy it - we need the money!" fortunately the response was a friendly one.

When you're skint, releasing stuff on vinyl is a slow and pain-in-the-arse process...but it does mean that tracks have enough time to mature and be refined to a very sharp point, and that you pick out only those you're 200% confident of.

What's in the pipeline for Stormfield in 2006?

More Combat releases… including a t shirt and ScanOne Battlepack parts 1 & 2, an immensely heavy dub-electro-grime-whateverstep remix by the wee djs More downloads. Getting deeper into software. More gigs. More debt.

I need to check out more gigs at University of Dub…it's a proper reggae dub / night just down the road in Brixton. A hall the size of several tennis courts, walls of sound either end, earth-shaking bass. It's a dream of mine test tracks out on those rigs.

Radio-wise, we'll continue the Ammunition series on Pulseradio.net. It's great fun, and we're quite grateful for the freedom to experiment and try new ideas, something that can't always happen if you're squeezed into a small slot in a banging, rowdy club environment. I loop loads of angry odds-and-sods, throw them into Ableton and see what comes up, some of these ideas get used in gigs later. The Ammo crew brings in loads of great music that I'd otherwise probably not get to learn about. Damo's the electronica specialist. Cybank handle the hip hop jungle glitchcore mashups. The lovely Shelly Parker joins the Ammo crew starting 20th December, she's quite eager to unleash her nastier, more experimental sounds, so expect a feisty injection of grime / dubstep / electro experimentalism.

There are some concepts and themes at Combat Recordings ... warriors, guardians, nightstrikes, weaponry.
Can you give us a quick rundown on this?

Probably too many years watching anime as a kid! But me mum threw all the robot figures away, shame. Demons bring good luck, in some cultures. The spear-thingy at the top of the combat website is a "naginata", a kind of 12 foot pole with a 2 foot blade at the end; quite elegant looking, and used to hack the legs off charging horses in a Samurai battlefield. During national service, I was exposed to budo-taijutsu, a kind of martial art based around samurai and ninpo techniques, which is where the swordwork, choke-holds etc imagery come in. I won't bore you with details but basically I'm fascinated with the idea of combining grace and violence - the idea of meditating in silence, then moving forth to perform mass killing. Apply that to strange noises filtered through an ex- junglist perspective and you get Combat.

Do you forsee the tough electro-breaks and grimey sub orientated sound expanding and evolving?

Eek, what's electro breaks?

"It" is certainly growing, but hopefully there won't be a name for this stuff, for as long as possible… so magazines won't bandwagon it, dilute it and make it boring. Help the cause! Make up silly new genres to confuse them! Call it wrongstep, or just the Combat sound.

Seriously though, it's great that dubstep/grime/whateverstep etc, electro and electronica have evolved and built up their strengths separately, but their fringes are now converging. Dub and old Photek-style drum n bass have been big influences and it's nice to see this emerging at 135bpm with the added low-end punch of current production standards. You can find artists for this odd 'in between' sound at nights such as Werk, Toxic Dancehall, Rag and Bone, Colony, Alt*Ctrl, Adverse Camber, Bangface, Desctructive Records, Rebel Bass, Cruise Control, Digital Penetration (Prague), Dead Silence, Let Loose, Sequence, Delta 9, Interakt, Illuminate (Prague), and the sporadic Combat parties. Even Surgeon has absorbed ideas from Vex'd into his techno sets. So long as people continually get bored of stuff and explore their own little paths, music will continue to move forward, though it's nice that there's a lot of cross-pollination of ideas at this very moment. The vibe between such crews is quite genuine and friendly too. Shouts-out!

Any musical heroes that have inspired you through the years?

From 1988 till now - Bomb the Bass, Aphex Twin, FSOL, Plaid, Autechre, Photek, Source Direct. When I came to England, Gimmik, Bola, Tipper, Si Begg, Funkstörung, Vex'd, Phoenecia, the Dexorcist, Subjex… and later Point B, Scorn,VolSoc, Bitstream, Cursor Miner, Volum, BassKittens, wee djs, Simulant, Ardisson. Gotta thank ADJ for turning me on to a lot of these recent influences. Am really keeping my eye on tunes from Milanese at the moment…great production and murderous energy.


If you had an all expenses paid month off anywhere on earth where would it be?

New Zealand… need to properly chill out! Then back to Europe for the music and madness.




www.combatrecordings.com

www.pulseradio.net/dj/ammunition/