EL-B
The name El-B is a brand of quality assurance with over fifteen years of dance floor satisfaction – it all starts in the club. El-B has absorbed every bit of “what makes people want to move” from every musical experience he has encountered in life – salsa, hardcore, jungle, techno, jazz, funk… He then blends it into honest dance music that is easily digested. Organic. No pesticides or growth hormones, just whole beats and hard grooves. Read forth for insight from a man who is just honestly working to make you dance.
interview by Donnie Valdez
Does your earlier work with Noodles have a lot of influence on what you produce today? Or is your process completely different?
No, I was into music before Groove Chronicles. With my dad being a musician, with Incognito and Cayenne and Gonzalez and stuff. So you know, I had a big jazz, funk, and salsa upbringing. I was in the music scene and touring around with my dad since I was a baby. He said I used to fall asleep in his saxophone case. The big one of course, the baritone. [Laughs] Anyway, before I was with Noodles, I was hanging around on the drum n bass kit a lot. Jungle. Hardcore before that. Techno before that. So that stuff, as you can hear in the music, has influenced it a lot, more than that soul, kinda garage shit that we were doing before. That was just the sound at the time, that’s all. And we wanted to push the boundary at that. But now it’s all different, a completely different sound now.
What element do you think your DJ sets bring to the rave?
When I do a DJ set, I play like 90-95% my stuff. When I say “my stuff” I don’t mean my tracks, I mean tracks that are coming from our camp. There are a lot of producers here. There’s roughly… and this is off the top of my head… There are about six of us here. I’m never without a brand new track, I’m always polishing up stuff and finishing up stuff for them and playing the new stuff. There’s loads of stuff. That’s how we carve …no, that’s how any DJ can carve his own sound. Just play his and his boys’ stuff. And that’s it really. It’s the same with Joker. I was with Joker on KISS FM recently, and he was playing just his own stuff and it really gave an individual sound to his set. So that’s how we do it man, it’s hard grooves. You don’t really hear anybody playin a set like I do, or any of the boys at my camp. Our stuff has that same kind of sound, so it gives us that signature sound on the decks. It’s hard grooves rather than hard noise.
