FREQ NASTY
Freq Nasty
Interview by Katya Guseva
Born in Fiji and raised in New Zealand, breakbeat pioneer FreQ Nasty grew up listening to his father’s stories about his rowdy rock shows (“I remember him saying when he was 14 or 15, he was earning more in a week than his dad was in a month from playing in bands!”) and dreamed of bigger possibilities. He decided at the age of 14, while working his first manual labour job, that he didn’t want to succumb to mundanely being a cog in the machine. That very same boundary breaking sensibility has always transcended through his music, from his scene-shaking classics like “Boomin Back Atcha” and “Move Back,” to his remixes of pop icons like Fatboy Slim, Kelis and KRS One. At the same time, he’s always been very receptive to all that surrounds him, especially when he made the move to London and immersed himself in its developing scenes. His seminal releases on Botchit & Scarper for example, forward thinking and progressive, were a sign of the fast-moving times. No matter what new genre or new scene steals the media spotlight these days, FreQ Nasty has the wisdom and experience to see it for what it is. After all, the cycles have spun around countless times within his vast, expandable career. Continually shape shifting under the wide umbrella of bass culture, FreQ Nasty forever stays one step ahead of its ongoing hype-fuelled evolution.
I just have to ask where you got your name from?
I used to be into 50s and 60s sci-fi comics for a while. And I was reading a lot of them and was looking for a name for some stupid cartoon character names out of one of those retro-futuristic comics. I just used it for the first single (I used to have many names I was recording under) and it just stuck. I didn’t expect myself to be using it for longer than just a few singles but that’s the way it goes.
You’ve gone thorugh a lot of different music influences: breakbeat, nuschool breaks, fidget, dubstep… What era of music was the most memorable to you?
In a way, thinking back to it, the whole continuum through breakbeat up to now is a bit of a blur. What I do remember is going to the clubs when I was making music but hadn’t put any records out. I remember going to jungle raves and hearing crazy new music, even the world fusion music before that in London, and grime beats. I was really fascinated by hearing crazy new sounds that I’ve never heard before. And that kinda stuck with me, the idea of looking for new ways of mixing different types of music to create something new. The more specific memory is when I heard my first tune, it was actually drum’n'bass tune. I heard it at the Blue Note club. The first time I heard my tune played out there, I heard it come on, but I didn’t recognize it. I don’t know why, I just only heard it in my studio, I never heard my record out in a club, it didnt even occure to me to think that it was my record. And I was like “What is this tune? I’m sure I recognize this”. The moment it clicked that it was my tune… suddenly, it must have happened at the same time, but it felt like someone had thrown a hand-full of rice at me. I just got these prick-storm prickles all over my body. “Oh my god! That’s my tune! It’s playing! That’s my tune!”. And then suddenly I was looking around at people “Are they into it? Are they not? Is it going off?”. That was the strong memory I still have of music from back then…
Did it go off?
Yea! It was a jazzy drum’n'bass track I wrote, it was ambient, and there weren’t many tunes like that in the jungle back then. They were either all jazzy and deep, or really storming. And this was kinda the balance of the two. So yea, it was cool. It went well. But you know, how I am thinking right now, ten years later, and how it actually went then are probably two very different things. I should go back and listen to the tune.
You’ve always been a pioneer of the new sound in different types of music. What do you think is gonna happen next? What direction will the underground music take?
I think in terms of dubstep, there’s a lot of great tunes coming out and it’s a great scene right now. But at the same time there are new sounds coming through that are kind of back on a double-beat, breakbeat tempo, that are really interesting. They take what dubstep does further and fuse it with breaks and create these hybrid mixes of dubstep and almost back to breakbeat garage. The whole bassline scene is in a similar mode. Dubstep still got a lot of life in it in terms of being creative and still taking in a lot of influences. There are still a lot of crazy tunes coming out…
Can you give me some names?
Yea… Slipz & Dapz. They are awesome! I think their shit has that kind of vibe, kinda dubsteppy garage. In a way, I think that’s what’s happening in the bassline scene as well. More four on four bumping garage has come back on a bit more heavier edge. That’s one side of it. There’s a whole lot of interesting things happening. I think what’s also happening now is instead of being one new sound, we’re gonna get even more fractionalized, we’re gonna be breaking down into more niche scenes.
How did the FABRICLIVE mix come around?
I played at the club a lot for the first three-four years since they opened. I played there pretty much every month. And then I was touring a lot more internationally after that, but I’d play when I was in London. Fabric has cutting edge music on an amazing sound system with a very educated crowd. So it’s somewhere you can go and play crazy shit, and people are educated enough to get it, which is a great privilege to have. It’s slightly different, like San Francisco has a reputation for wanting crazy shit too, but there isn’t that depth of the music. They want the newest, latest stuff. Things get old really quick. And in London people have the appreciation for the whole history of the music. And when you play there you can drop an old garage tune from 2001 and people will go ballistic, or an old garage tune from ‘99 and people will go mad, because even if they haven’t listened to it, they’ll have heard it from their older brothers and sisters. And that’s what it is about: all sorts of crazy shit comes out through the label and through the club, and it’s awesome and I love to be part of it.
The mix starts out really hyphy – hits you on the head and then chills out byt he end, while usually it goes the other way. Did you plan it that way?
Yea, I didnt want to do it the other way around, which is the normal way I do it. When I come on these days it’s like “Bam!”, big time hits. When you come on, you gotta bring it. And I wanted the mix to be like that. So it comes out hard and heavy, then chills out for bit, then goes into steppy-heavy, and mellows out at the end. I was also trying to do it a little bit differently I guess.
You mentioned that the music scene in SF is different from London, can you elaborate a bit more on that?
I think the music scene in SF is really deep and people are really into new stuff, but there are not so many producers as compared to London, where it’s crawling with people making music. And because of that London is able to sustain the lineage of the music and make people appreciate the parts of the scene that are 2-5-10 years old. While San Francisco is a smaller scene with fewer producers, still hungry for new shit, without really having a strongly rooted scene, besides the house music. You guys have a strong house music lineage there. But you know dubstep comes out and becomes cool for a while, and then it becomes uncool and the next thing comes around. People will be like “Oh, dubstep, I’ve already heard that before”. While in London people go underground. Instead of just disappearing, people go “We’re not the cool shit anymore, that’s fine, we’ll go underground, make crazy new shit, then come out three years later and then people will think it’s the new thing, and we will be the next generation producers”. But in terms of the vibe, San Francisco is one of my favorite places to play in the world.
You are one of the co-founders of Giveback.net and you’ve talked a lot about the mission of the organisation, but what are you working on at the moment?
Well what’s happening is we’re creating an online widget right now, a template so anyone can start a campaign to raise money for any cause they are passionate about, which really was the initial plan, but these things take a while to come around. Big project. Hopefully once we get everything up and running we’ll be working directly with a lot more cool interesting artists, helping to create more positive change in the world, but also more importantly demonstrate to people that you can go out and party and create some good in the world at the same time.
So the rinsed subject: vinyl versus mp3s. What do you use in your sets?
I use cds, I have Serrato, but I just haven’t got my shit together to put into computer. Over a shitty system, most people can’t make a difference between vinyl and mp3, but that said, a shitty mp3 sounds rubbish, and shitty vinyl sounds fucking awesome. In my opinion, vinyl still sounds best, but I can’t be bothered carrying around 50 kilos worth of records. I did that for years, it was cool for the moment. I try not to use the cds, when I can afford it.
