Jack Jambie

''HEARING FOOTWORK FOR THE FIRST TIME, I HAD A FUTURE SHOCK''

Interview with Jack Jambie, June 2013

For all our listeners that may not be familiar with your work – could you introduce yourself?

Hi there, my name's Jack Jambie and I'm a DJ, raver and writer from the London party scene! I've been playing tracks out since around 2005/2006, used to blog a lot, had a radio show for many years and also head of a multi-genre party crew originating from Cambridge, UK called Voodoo Rave - but these days I spend most of my spare time working as a club night promoter. For the past year I've been heavily involved with a project called We Buy Gold, which has been gaining some real momentum as of late. It's built around mine and the Das Boot dudes that I run it with's current sonic obsession with modern juke & footwork music, as well as the many strains of fast and frantic dance music that have come out of its international expansion.

I first heard of your work years ago via the Funky mentasm tune. I loved the UK Funky rhythm and the mentasm stab in it, but it never came out. Is that kind of sound where you started in terms of production?

I've actually been producing on and off since my late teens, though early productions were 100% fruity looped (read 'bad') attemps at trying to sound like Warp acts like Boards Of Canada or Squarepusher, as well as the jump up dnb guys that me and my mates liked at the time, like Dillinja, Konflict, Bad Company and all those sort of guys.

Funky Mentasm was a Voodoo dub that I wrote back in early 2011, trying to make something in the vein of the UK Funky sound that was big at the time. On the whole I was quite disappointed by the rise of UK Funky - while I really felt the tribal vibe and loose jungliness of some of it, most of it I found to be quite lacking in terms of what I would call a vibe of 'avin it compared to the more heavyweight grime and dubstep productions that had come before it in UK underground clubs. Funky Mentasm was really just me having a go at injecting some of what I saw as that all important rave heritage back in to the undeniable, slinky freshness of the UK Funky template one night in my bedroom in Epsom.

What did you produce it on?

It's actually made up of nearly 100% sampled material. The mentasm itself is from an old Bizzy B jungle/hardcore 12'' that I had kicking around, and the snare and bass drums are knicked off some old breakbeat garage tracks. I figured that I could save a lot of time by using their already really nicely produced sounds as presets instead of Reason's House kits or whatever. I'm a much better record collector than producer at the end of the day anyway, and if that's not wearing your hardcore heritage on your sleeves then what is, ey? [laughs] Needless to say the Reason file of the track was lost a very long time ago, and I scratched my CD dub to hell and gone, so I think that the only person that has a copy on their PC now is my girlfriend – so anyone that knows her and wants a copy should probably give her a shout!

On your blog, you've openly admitted you're really into a new sound from north of England – Jackin. I think most of the people outside the UK are really unfamiliar with it. Could you explain the roots of it, and what makes it so special to you?

Jackin - or as people that I've met up at The Rainbow club in Birmingham prefer to refer to it as, Dirty House, House & Bass or just straight up Banging House Music – is definitely one of the most exciting ravey dance scenes to have emerged from the UK for a good few years now in my opinion, probably since bassline house or maybe the #upnorth grime scenes that preceded it, I guess. I first heard about it because about 2 years ago a lot of the bassline guys from Sheffield, Birmingham, Bradford etc. (so lots of places around the Midlands in the UK) that I liked at the time starting producing and uploading these really slow and what I saw as basically wonky, nutty house tunes. Dub Melitia, who later became Cause & Affect, as well as DJ Pantha and this dude Bo who's wicked, had been some of my favourite bassline guys, and as I remember it they basically just stopped making bassline overnight and started uploading loads of house with these kind of warped basslines that I thought sounded really good, even though ordinarily I hate house music! [laughs]

Then there was this absolutely dire documentary about the grime scene up north that went on the BBC in the UK, absolutely terrible. It starred Charlie Sloth and was called It's Grime Up North. I loved grime from pretty much anywhere north of London at the time, and the whole concept of this show was that there must be good grime music SOMEWHERE north of London! It was really laughable tbh, but anyway in it Charlie stopped by at this club night called Insomnia in Leeds to see Tom Zanetti, who's like the don of Jackin up there, and I couldn't believe that there was this whole weird house scene that I had never heard of (despite the internet!) that seemed so authentic and underground yet so popular and fresh at the same time! The music, the crowd, the raveyness – everything just really seemed right – and that was just a 5 minute piece in a documentary! Yeah, so after that bit of bombardment I started to get really in to it and spent ages online chasing it, eventually finding www.bigtunesmp3.co.uk which is like the Mecca for jackin tunes. Everything on there's 100% fresh, so if you want to know what's up musically with the scene, the top tracks chart on there is definitely your best bet!

How would you explain it to someone who hasn't heard it yet?

It's really not like anything else. The beat is very housey, but it's slow and staggered, with garage influences and this bizarre bassline science. Anything goes: from remixes of rave classics, to top 10 pop hits to trap and ragga vocals, and I think it's that unbound, balls out, 'avin it raveyness mixed with this weird clubby coolness and 2013 swagger that really does it for me. Really good stuff.

It's gaining quite a momentum, as well. A lot of former UK Funky producers are embracing it also, especially Marcus Nasty champions it. Who are the most relevant players and club nights in the underground scene right now?

Yes, Marcus Nasty has been an enormous part of pushing the sound both in his sets and through his label – he's a bad boy DJ and deserves a massive big up for doing so. I know a lot of my mates that weren't feeling the jackin bass sound at first really changed their tune when they started to hear his mixes on Rinse FM and Soundcloud. On top of his regular free Wednesday evening night in Brick Lane after his radio show, he's also just started a night called Jacked in London dedicated to the sound, which is a wicked operation and I'm expecting big things from it, obviously.

In terms of nights up North there are 2 big ones – the first is Insomnia at Mission in Leeds which is Tom Zanetti's night. I've still not been unfortunately but I've seen incredible videos and heard from reliable sources that things get pretty messy at the big nights there! [laughs] The other one, which I've been to a number of times now (as well as having the honour to actually DJ at once with my man DJ Datwun), is Face / 2:31 at The Rainbow in the Digbeth area of Birmingham. It's probably my favourite club in the country right now, and, the vibe, sound and sheer size of the operation that they've got going on there right now is just banging. It's a bit of a trek up there on the train, but I really do find clubbing up there much more enjoyable than anything going on in London right now! Well worth a visit, and with local residents including Cause & Affect (Lorenzo & Ko Kane), Hannah Wants, Tom Shorterz, Alex Parkin and loads more massive names coming down as guests all the time it really is a bit of a Mecca for the Jackin bass sound right now (plus it's just a short taxi ride from the Balti Triangle, which is one of the best places in the UK for a pre-raving curry)! Definitely check it out!

Jackin is just one of your two big interest at the moment. You've been also known for being a footwork/juke enthusiast, making even a 100% juke/footwork night in London. How did that come about? What drew you to footwork in the first place?

I've been totally entranced by the Chicago footwork sound since I first heard it in Mike Paradinas' first mix of it went up on his Mixcloud back in 2010. I was vaguely, though far from actively, aware of ghettotech as well as the sort of house music that it had come out of, but this footwork stuff just totally blew my mind. I had total future shock, and imagined that this weirdness that I was hearing and feeling from an already very established urban music scene must have been the same sort of feeling that people got hearing hardcore and jungle for the first time in the early 90s: fast, hypnotic, crazy sampling, rushy bass, etc. For me, it was like when I first heard dubstep back in 2005 all over again, and I became totally obsessed – and, as it was hard to get tracks the time, set about hoarding as much of the music as I possibly could, tracking producers like DJ Earl, DJ Manny, DJ Roc, EQ Why and many others down on social networks and buying zips of tracks directly off them. Needless to say, I now have a lot of tracks! Surprisingly for me, not everyone else felt the same way about the sound here in the UK, and most people in the DJing circles that I moved in continued to play grime, techno, house, garage aka all of the sort of stuff that I had been playing before, and the many different mutations that continued to come out of these - whilst I shifted more and more towards playing nearly 100% juke and footwork track out from then on...

Where did you play those tracks, then?

In terms of the night, I'd known of the Das Boot guys for a while and been going to their wicked Z Shed nights for years, but through a mutual acquaintance as well as a couple of friends who'd seen them play out at the time I was told that they were playing a similar kind of sound, and that I should definitely link them if I wanted to start a footwork night (this was early 2011). Warlock (Rag & Bone Records) actually got me talking with them at one of the London Borough Of Bass nights in the end, though in all honesty I was pretty pissed at the time so just have a vague memory of us both saying that we'd both given up on vinyl recently and were now enjoying CDJs because we could play more juke or something. Needless to say, it was a good night, and I remembered enough to hit Absnif from Das Boot up a few weeks later to chat more, and from that fateful pub meet in Brixton onwards We Buy Gold was born – London's first ever night (to our knowledge) 100% dedicated to the sound of juke, footwork and its various mutations!

Suffice to say, things have gone pretty well from there, and so far we've been lucky enough to have Slick Shoota, Sarantis, Lenkemz, J-Cush (from Teklife/Lit City), Warlock, Leatherface, Fracture, Boi-A-Gutz and loads of others down, plus on the 28th June at Visions Video Bar in Dalston we'll be celebrating out first Birthday with Chrissy Murderbot, the LONG Clothing boys and Glasgow Ghettotech DJ Dave Shades.

There have been also a lot of jungle producers making the link between the two. Are there any producers in the UK right now, representing this hybrid footwork jungle scene, that we should be aware of?

Yes. I think that the spread of this was nearly entirely the result of a project by Om Unit, called Philip D Kick. He did a series of free EPs last year called Footwork Jungle Volumes 1-3 and absolutely knocked everyone dead with them. Simple enough concept - footwork edits of classic jungle tracks - but it just really connected with ravers and UK music fans in general I think as, despite the obvious sonic comparisons there already, it further established footwork as a sound as having one foot in the rave, and that hardcore heritage thing is always going to click with anyone who's listened to any amount of jungle, dnb, garage, grime, dubstep etc. These were the only ever tracks that I used to have people text in asking me to wheel on my radio show, for example! [laughs]

As a result loads of jungle/dnb producers are now having a shot at making footwork jungle, and, as a rule of thumb, most of them are pretty good! In particular I think Fracture is worth a shout, whose Get Busy is a real WBG favourite, and who keeps releasing a slew of techy steppers that are just going from strength to strength. Elsewhere our mates Warlock and Moocha are making heavily hardcore influenced darkside future footwork with a healthy dollop of rudeness. There's also a couple of dudes from North America that make stuff leaning way more to the jungle side of the sound pallet that is also really really good, Fishstix and Mat The Alien I like in particular! So yeah, loads of good stuff going on right now, all very exciting!

Have you been producing footwork, too?

In short, yes, though not much to boast of just yet! [laughs] I've started on a series of juke edits of Black Metal tracks from the likes of Bathory and Mayhem, but other than a looped funeral bell sound over a beat with this 1 riff over the top I don't have much to show for it at the moment! Otherwise there's this juke edit of a classic Father Ted quote (a popular 90s low key Irish comedy about priests) going around that you might have heard...keep watching this space!

Do you guys have any upcoming releases?

I'm very happy to say that we do actually! We Buy Gold the label is officially up and running, and we will be dropping the first of what will be many releases imminently this Summer. I won't say any more than we're working with some truly talented producers and wearing our hardcore heritage right on our sleeves! It's so close now I can feel it, and trust me when I say that the music is going to knock people's socks off.

You've compiled a mix exclusively for Radio Student. Could you tell us something more about it? 

The mix is a lot like what you'll hear from me when I play out, raw as hell and very rough around the edges! No, joking aside I'm very happy with this mix - starting with some of the more hypnotic and authentic Chicago footwork style tracks, it works quite quickly into a future footwork jungle juke out with plenty of rave hoovers, moody strings, amen breaks, piano euphoria, ragga vocals and more. It's packed full of dubs, unreleased and exclusive tracks from all my nearest and dearest producers right now, so there'll almost certainly be stuff on there that you won't hear anywhere else! Expect tracks from Durban, DJ Roc, EQ Why, Fracture, Warlock, Boi-A-Gutz, Moocha, Andrew Juke and a whole lot more. Recorded on Serato Scratch Live with two rusty turntables and 1 numark mixer in 1 take, so excuse the bits when it's a bit slippy on the mix, but sonically be ready for nothing less 100% danger. You have been warned!

Download the mix (right click + save as)

Tracklist:

Durban - Vega XS - [Unreleased]
DJ Roc - Don't Make Me - [Unreleased]
DJ Roc - Redemption [Unreleased]
JMJ & Richie - Universal Horn (Mat The Alien RMX) - [Self Released]
Fracture ft. Dawn Day Night - Get Busy - [Exit Records]
Lana Del Ray - Born 2 Die (Andrew Juke DJ Hearts For Girlfriend Music Remix) - [Unreleased]
Boi-A-Gutz - #8 - [Unreleased]
Dj Heavee D - Ice Cold - [Teklife Unreleased]
EQ Why - Fake Ass Bitchez - [Unreleased]
EQ Why - Psycho - [Unreleased]
EQ Why - Grind - [Unreleased]
Rebound X - Rhythm N Gash (BF FW Edit) - [Self Released]
Redlight - Source 16 (Gash's Jukebox Edit) - [In The Face]
Hadean - Dat Ass (VIP) - [In The Face]
Spooky - Code 9 (Wheez-ie RMX) - [Hot Mom USA]
Kahn - Fierce (TCJ 160 Edit) - [Teklife Unreleased]
Drexciya - Hydro Theory (Phillip D Kick Footwork Edit) - [Self Released]
DJ Fresh - Gatekeeper (CL Moons Edit) - [Pseudogeddon]
CL Moons - Wildlife Edit - [Self Released]
Bustos Domecq - Drop Out Jungle - [Pseudogeddon]
Lenkemz - Jack Jambie Smashing It - [Dubplate]
Fishstix - Buss It Up - [Unreleased]
Fishstix - Boom Wah Diss - [Unreleased]
Andrew Juke (ft. DJ Gatorade) - XXL - [Hood Records]
BF Hoodrich - Bats And Gats - [Unreleased]
Warlock - Bad Boy - [Rag & Bone Records]
Unknown - Madman - [We Buy Gold]
Andrew Juke - Clean It (VIP) - [Hood Records)

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