Music > Interviews
Interview with Sub Focus
09/10/13
Dance artists are enjoying something of a reigning glory in the music industry right now. Artists like Deadmau5, David Guetta, Diplo and (and that’s just the Ds) are the ones commanding the real currency in the marketplace at the moment, and have other artists from different genres clamouring to work with them for the reflected glory. Luckily in the UK we have a heritage of dance music so diverse that there’s plenty still to offer, and one artist flying the British flag for us across the nation and beyond is Nick Duowma, as he’s known by his mama, or Sub Focus to you and I. He set his stall out early, with a full-length release in 2009, a strategy often overlooked by dance artists. The strength of the first, and some regular radio and club play has brought about a second album, ‘Torus’, just recently released. He tours that album this month, and gives us some time ahead of his Norwich date…
So you’re coming to Norwich on the 26th Oct, but I can see you’ve had a really busy summer, how has it been for you?It’s been good, it’s been a really hectic summer, it’s usually the busiest time of year for me and I think it’s the same for other touring musicians. But, I’ve also been finishing my next album, as well as doing all these festivals, so it’s been really hectic. But it’s nice to get the album done, and now I’m just excited to get it all out there.
You headlined the Radio 1 Dance stage at the Reading and Leeds Festivals in 2013 with live show, how was that?It was awesome. It’s one of my favourite festivals; in terms of crowd reaction, it’s one of the best in the UK I think. I think for a lot of people, it’s their first or second festival they go to, it’s quite a young crowd, which is really cool. I seemed to get a really good reaction this year, which was awesome.
Whilst we’re talking about crowds, you’ve played all over the world, are the crowds in America or in other countries different to the UK?Definitely. America’s really good at the moment; dance music’s kind of exploded over there. I did a massive festival over there this summer called EDC in Las Vegas; it’s one of the big dance music festivals there. And the reaction I got was really cool. It’s more like - different crowds react to different things. The type of tracks I might play over there is different to the stuff I might play here. I subtly change my set for wherever I play, depending on the crowd. In England, the deeper, house stuff is popular and I might slip that into a set, some of the more underground drum and bass stuff, I might play over here. Then in America, it’s more dubstep and things like that. It’s nice that I’ve got to a time where I’m making these different styles, so I can dip into these different genres throughout my set.
When you’re on stage the visual element plays such a massive part, how much input do you have?Quite often people who work with me are a bit surprised by how hands on I am with that sort of stuff. The company I work with on the live show, I sometimes spend days with them where we’re designing the graphics for the show. Other times, I leave them to it with a brief or whatever. I get really involved in that stuff. Also, I’ve developed quite a few things with the live show that are audio reactive, so when I’m playing an instrument on stage, it’ll be actually effecting what’s happening on the lights. We’ve also got these instruments I had custom made for the show, they’re motion sensors, so when I move my hand around in the air above them, it controls different sounds during the show.
So every show is individual in both audio and visual?Yeah sort of, there are some visuals that are pre-set to a track, but then some sections will be different, because those are the sections that are actually responding to the things I am doing. It’s definitely breaking new ground in technology, it’s quite hard to work out how the hell to do that, so it’s been really cool to get that into the show and show it to people.
When you’re up on stage it’s just yourself, do you ever get lonely with nobody to hide behind?I quite like it. I’m a big fan of the Daft Punk live show, and I wanted to do a show that was all electronic, because a lot of dance acts end up using a live drummer when they’re on stage. I just wanted to do something that was really authentic to how the music’s made and it’s made on computers and synthesizers and stuff like that. So I tried to use as much as of the stuff I used to make the songs and manipulate those things live where possible.
I saw that last summer you were featured in Vevo’s Summer Six - what was it like being followed by a camera crew?Actually, we did the footage by ourselves. It was really cool because I started working with a guy called Tai Chi; he’s done a lot of my video stuff. It kind of worked really well; he’s someone who I really rate. We’re actually working on a mini documentary about the live show, to show people the technical side of it. I wanted to show people the setup, because I think a lot of people assume with dance music live shows, you’re just pressing play and not really doing anything. So I wanted to show people the technical side of it in more depth, basically for those people who are interested.
Yeah, recently there has been a witch-hunt for musicians who are just pressing play and those who actually do put the effort in.There are boring technical reasons why people do press play, and just do they’re shows like that. It’s quite hard to synchronise visuals with other things, so some people, depending on how their show is done, for things like pyrotechnics and stuff like that, it’s a lot easier to have a pre-set show, with cue points for all these different things. I’ve luckily set my show up in a way that is pretty ‘interactable’ so I can change it from one night to the next. Some people are set on these one shows for a long time.
This documentary, is it going to be on YouTube or your own website?I kind of designed it for online stuff, to go on my website but also YouTube as well. So keep your eyes peeled for that.
With new album, Torus, recently coming out, I noticed that in the build up to its release, you were doing a treasure hunt to find ‘hidden disks’ on your website. Was that your idea to do that?It was an idea that I came up with, in conjunction with a guy from my label. He originally came across this guy who was an amazing 3D web designer and we hit upon the idea of doing an online version of what my artwork looks like, having these disks in different landscapes. That sort of developed into; ‘why don’t we hide all the different tracks on the album in a different place on the globe’. I really like the concept, from an artist’s perspective, sometimes you get suggestions from people about online things, that I find a bit gimmicky or that don’t really make sense, or they’re tech for tech’s sake. But this was wicked because I feel like it adds almost another dimension behind the concept of the album. We’re definitely planning on doing more stuff; I want to hide more tracks in the landscapes, maybe a free download or something like that.
Yeah, something like this really builds up excitement for an album more than just a standard release.Yeah, it was nice to just debut tracks in such a different way and I’m really happy in the way that it’s worked out. Also we’ve just launched the 3D version of the artwork, there’s the whole album now on there with this 3D version of the cover.
On this new album, you worked with Alex Clare, Alpines, MNEK, Kele and others - how did those collaborations come about?There’s lots of different ways, some of them are people who I wanted to work with for a long time. People like Kele I got in touch with because he was someone I’ve always wanted to work with. Most of those people are people I like and got in for sessions and we jammed. MNEK was really cool, we just had an afternoon where we just jammed on this house idea and that came out really nice. Foxes was great; I had this idea that I thought really suited her voice and she came up with some brilliant ideas too. There’s all these different ways you can write songs. The track with Kele, he sent me a bunch of vocal ideas over, as he was living in New York at the time, so I didn’t get to meet him to start with. Then I decided that I wanted to write something new with the vocals that he’d sent me, so I wrote a track starting with his vocals. There’s so many different ways that you end up writing, it’s not just obvious, ‘I’ve done a song, now I need someone to do a vocal’, sometimes the songs evolve in quite weird different ways.
It’s been almost a decade since you released ‘Down The Drain’ in 2003, has the way you make music changed at all?Yeah quite a lot; when I started off releasing those early tunes, I was making a lot of my songs from samples. Now, I create a lot of my sounds from scratch. I’ve become a lot better producer I think. I was releasing very underground club music, then decided that I wanted to do more, then really diversified with my first album in 2009, started to put out a much bigger mixture of genres. That’s what I’ve tried to do ever since, just make lots of different dance music to a high standard.
This album once again brings together different genres such as: dubstep, house, drum and bass, electro. Do you find it's good not to be pigeon-holed to one genre?It’s funny, I think that coming from drum and bass made me want to break out of it more in a way. I think especially in the early noughties when I first started putting out tunes, it was a very underground scene, not many people made other types of music, it was almost strange if you were drum and bass producer and you put out a house tune, that’s kind of my background. It’s kind of made me want to rebel more I guess, and just write whatever I feel. Also I think there’s this whole sort of group of us who’ve come from that and are also doing this, people like Chase and Status and Nero, they’re both good friends of mine and we’ve all spurred each other on a little bit. I think it’s much more exciting to write different types of music at different tempos, especially on an album, I wouldn’t want to hear a whole album at 110bpm, I think it would be a weird thing to do.
You’ve been classed as an EDM artist, what do you make of the term?I don’t love the term, but there’s nothing wrong with it I guess. I think it’s got an association with a certain type of dance music, that’s not my favourite style. But it’s just another way of referring to what is just another tag for dance music. I’m really enjoying what’s happening in the States, just the scale of the events there are mad, this EDC festival I played this summer, the main stage just had this enormous, animatronic owl centre piece. It’s funny the mad amounts of effort and money that people put into production.
My final question is, what’s your fascination with circles, they feature on your album artwork, your live show and now also on your website?I just wanted to start working with simple shapes; I’m a big fan of people with strong and iconic looking branding in dance music. I’m really into the art and design side of things, so I spent some time thinking about the concepts and all that side of it. It was just cool to get a shape that I thought people hadn’t really used much before. So we put the shape on the cover of my first record, then we moved it into three dimensions with this record. I like the way they’re kind of monoliths, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, these unexplained ‘thing’, that appears in these landscapes. It’s supposed to be this huge great unexplained monument that appears there, I like the mystique of it. It’s cool to just work with that shape, lots of people have done things with Triangles, so it was just a different shape to work with.
Will Nixon
Sub Focus comes to the Nick Rayns LCR at the UEA on October 26th. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk.