Skream If You Wanna Go Faster!

[Cupe]

Dubstep figurehead Skream has gone euphoric, smashed the templates, and upped the tempos. His new album ‘Outside The Box’ confirms he’s not content to be placed in a bracket, and is out to prove the haters wrong with a joyful set designed to resurrect the potency and power of dance music’s golden years. “I’m trying to bring rave back,” says Skream…

Remember a few years back? All that hoo-ha about nu-rave? Which sounded so promising but proved to be nothing more than a few indie kids dicking about with synths and desecrating the graves of hardcore classics? What a crock that turned out to be. Luckily, there were some for whom the rave spirit never died, only mutated and evolved into new forms, 2.0 viruses infecting the mainframe of modern electronic music.

In 2010, the landscape of dance has become so fecund with new innovations and styles merging and meshing, that genres have become irrelevant again, as they once were in the early years of rave culture, when DJs would think nothing of colliding house drums with breakbeats and ravers would barely blink at the join as they lost themselves in the free rhythms. In addition, the huge megaton riffs and breaks of that era are making a comeback, and the advent of dubstep – one of rave’s most successful progenies, which took many classic hardcore motifs and shaped them into something new – has been instrumental in this. In this light, few other producers could claim such a large influence on the current fulsome state of dance as dubstep figurehead Skream (Olly Jones).

Since DJmag last interviewed him in 2007, Skream has gone from hotly-tipped underground hero to stadium subjugating, festival sequestering, smash hit-having household name. One of the few there at dubstep’s inception in the early 2000s, working at Croydon’s garage mecca Big Apple Records, pushing the deeper, darker dubs on the flipside of UKG 12”s to soon-to-be influential, clued-up record-buying regulars, he’s since trail-blazed a path through the UK underground and onto the world stage.

Where he’s gone, others have followed, from the initial, entropic, sloping, grimy darkness and bass wobble sound into upbeat, techy future garage grooves, and now beyond into next century electronic funk and freaky new chimeras. Refusing to follow the crowd, Skream has trusted his instincts and creative drive and forged his own way. It’s paid off, and how. Last year, Skream’s ‘Let’s Get Ravey’ remix of La Roux’s ‘In For The Kill’ catapulted him out of a cannon, became an anthem that echoed from Radio 1 daytime playlists, festival fields and big room dancefloors. In short, it made him a star. He arrived.

When DJmag meets him one sunny spring afternoon in East London, Skream looks taller, a little older, his youthful face now matured. Still full of exuberant energy, and boundless enthusiasm for the music, there’s also now a different kind of confidence, a charismatic air that suggests someone in control of their own destiny, a steely determinism. He acknowledges that, with the La Roux remix, the Skream phenomenon reached tipping point, and changed his career forever.

“It was a big remix. Shit changed, I get bigger shows, the fees went up,” he concedes. “Everything got better. I struggled to get a prime time Radio 1 play before, but now it’s a lot easier. You make a lot more contacts when you make a song like that. More people know who I am now, I guess. There’s more production, it’s all just going well and things are far more high profile now. There’s a lot more eyes on dubstep.”

Indeed, dubstep is bigger. Much, much bigger. When Ministry of Sound’s new ‘Sound Of Dubstep’ compilation (once an inconceivable prospect in itself) rides high in the album charts at number six, and a glut of other similarly-themed collections are flooding the market, it’s clear to see that the music is at its zenith. And examine each of these albums’ tracklists, and you’ll see that anthemic remix appearing on them all.

“There’s like six dubstep compilations out now!” he boggles. “But it’s still just the beginning, man. There’s a bit of a shitty part at the minute. There’s a lot of shit – how do I put it? – a lot of mirrored artists, people get focused on one sound and don’t try to make it original. They’d rather make it sound like someone more popular. But also, on the back of dubstep, there’s a lot of really interesting just all round music around now, it’s good man.”

Source: djmag

[ChevChelios]

Fairly excited for his new album, cause his recent output has been pretty shite imo