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We recently did an interview with music site Organic Beats, and talked about why we use the internet so much, the equipment people use and the recent Natural History remixes.

Read the full interview here

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EXAMPLE: So guys first off, hows 2009 been for blu mar ten?

Chris: Busy and focused. One of our best years yet

EXAMPLE: Your new album “Natural History” has been causing a bit of a stir. What was the idea behind your album? what sort of statement did you want to make?

Leo: Broadly, we decided a while back to limit ourselves to a strict 170bpm template, veering away from the genre hopping we used to do. This limitation is a freedom so I think we’ve done better music and made progress faster. The album is the first batch of results from this new path.

Chris: Even though we’ve been making d&b since 1995, and despite this being our fourth album, we’d never made a proper d&b album from the bottom-up, so we thought it was about time. We didn’t want to make something that sounded like much other d&b that’s around, we just wanted to make something we were proud of. We don’t really care if it does or doesn’t fit with what else is going on in the d&b community, we’re much more interested in appealing to a broader audience than that.

EXAMPLE: Did you expect the response that it’s had?

Chris: We didn’t really know what to expect, but the response has been fantastic. It shot up the charts in all the online stores and it’s just been listed as one of the best dance albums of 2009 on iTunes..So yes, we’re pretty happy with that. I think the fact that we’ve been around a long time and written more music than just d&b has really helped us reach different sets of people, especially in places like the US where d&b isn’t very popular at all.

EXAMPLE: Where do you stand on the vinyl or cd or serato debate?

Chris: Really don’t care. It’s completely irrelevant to us. Personally I only play vinyl, and still cut dubplates because that’s what I love, but then Leo plays CDs because that’s what he likes. But it really doesn’t matter. People who worry about it really need something better to get worked up over.

EXAMPLE: You asked for some interesting questions and nothing gets peoples attention more than a bit of controversy, How do you feel about the “Bishigate controversy” a few weeks ago?

Chris: Again, not really that bothered. The only problem I can see is a mismatch of expectation. i.e. If 500 people come to a club expecting to see one thing and you do something completely different then i think that’s a bit unfair. If people *knew* that you might be doing something different and had the choice about whether they want to pay to see it or not then I really don’t think there’s an issue. The reality is, (whether you like it or not), that outside of a few internet forums the vast majority of people who go out to clubs have no idea about this whole episode, and even if you told them they wouldn’t care. To most people, getting two records that sound more or less the same to run in time with each other is a complete non-event.
Personally I wouldn’t do it, but then I enjoy the whole chaotic process of mixing and performing, as opposed to objecting to it on some weird moral grounds.
Quite a few people started complaining about producers DJing and how they shouldn’t if they’re not very good, but this is one of the realities of our time. Piracy on the scale we have now is often justified on the grounds that producers should now make their money from performance as opposed to sales, and so we have people out on the road who, years ago, would have stayed in the studio making music which is what they’re best at. People often forget that there’s no actual link between sitting at a computer and making music, and getting up in front of a thousand people and smashing up a party – they’re completely different skills and just because you’re good at one there’s no reason at all that you should good at the other. So if you force people into a performance situation (which can be very nerve-wracking at times) things like this are going to crop up from time to time. It’s inevitable.
Solution? Support the producers by buying their music, then they won’t have to take gigs they don’t really want to do in order to make ends meet and the ‘good DJs’ can get on with doing what they do best.

EXAMPLE: How did Blu Mar Ten come about?

Chris: Leo & I met through a mate in 1995 and started putting tunes together. It worked really well and we had a release about 8 months after our first studio session. We sent some stuff to Bukem who liked what we were doing, and after we did a remix for Erykah Badu’s first single we got signed to Good Looking. I’d known Michael since around 1993 and when he moved to London he started sharing our studio and gradually became absorbed into Blu Mar Ten.

EXAMPLE: You branched out into other genres what made you want to spread your wings beyond drum and bass?

Leo: We always listened super widely and we still do. But listening widely and writing widely all the time aren’t necessarily the best paths. Hence the 170bpm comment earlier.

Chris: If you really like music and you enjoy making it you’re constantly looking for interesting new sounds and ways of working. Drum & bass isn’t so interesting that it can satisfy you completely so you need to branch out from time to time. I never really trust people who only listen to d&b…It just displays a bit of a lack of imagination. We pretty much never listen to d&b ourselves..there’s too much other interesting (and better) music out there.

EXAMPLE: Which labels and artists are doing it for you at this moment? also who can you see being the bright stars of 2010?

Chris: There are loads of bright stars out there right now. Newer names I’m enjoying at the moment are:

Stray
Randomer
San.dra
Circa
Mr Sizef & Unquote
Vaccine
Ulterior Motive
Kharm
Jean Doe

and a whole load more…

Here’s a couple of mixes where you can hear some of their stuff:
www.blumarten.com/home/drum-bass-mix-sep-2009
www.blumarten.com/home/exclusive-bmt-mix-kongkast

Leo: Well, I can do the non DnB stuff. Recently liking:

CFCF “Call Girl”
Bibio “Bones & Skulls”
Wild Beasts “Hooting & Howling”
Jon Hopkins “A Drifting Down”
El Perro Del Mar “Change Of Heart”
Washed Out “Feel It All Around”
Darkstar “Aidys Girl’s a Computer”

EXAMPLE: What was the first ever piece of music you bought and also the last?

Leo: Blondie “Heart Of Glass” / Clipz “Download (Original Sin Remix)”

Michael: David Essex “A Winter’s Tale” and Kelly Clarkson’s album “All I Ever Wanted”

Chris: ‘Iko Iko’ The Belle Stars / ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ OST

EXAMPLE: Now that your album is out and you’ve been touring whats next?

Chris: We have a remix we’ve done for Bop coming out on Hospital early next year together with other reworkings of his stuff from Lynx and Subwave.
There’ll be the final single from our album coming out sometime as well – we’re just sorting out some remixes at the moment but it should be great if it all comes together.
And we’ve already started work on the next album which will be out….at some point in the distant future.

EXAMPLE: When can the mancunian fans next catch blu mar ten?

Chris: When a Mancunian promoter books us!

Just before Christmas we met up with Frank McWeeny from PyroRadio for a chat about a bunch of things, including the making of Natural History, our influences, advice for new producers and what really annoys us about drum & bass.

Blu Mar Ten – Interview with PyroRadio

Feel free to leave comments on the player if anything about it really winds you up.

Read the full interview here

Why did you pick the name?
The story I was told was that Leo had a vision where the words “BLU” “MAR” and “TEN” appeared in front of him while he was in the bath. I might have totally made that up as it was a long time ago – I never wanted to ask again as I always thought it was a good story.

How did you guys meet?
Leo and Chris met when they left college, though I’d already met Chris a few years beforehand while I was working in record shops in Manchester and he was at art school. They were always writing and making this amazing music that I listened to and when I moved to London I used to come down to their studio, and eventually blackmailed them into letting me join up properly. It was a logical progression, ho ho.

What are the new things happening?
We have an album coming out later this year that will be all drum & bass, (our last two albums are a mix of downtempo, cinematic stuff and unusual grooves).
The first single for the album, ‘Close’ / ‘Above Words’ / ‘If I Could Tell You’, was released on April 6th and has gone down really well. The next single will be out sometime in July, then the album in Autumn. The album’s going to be very musical & quite complex compared to a lot of drum & bass that’s out there right now. We thought this might put a lot of people off but so far the reaction to the tracks has been amazing so we’re very pleased with how things are progressing. There will be clips and videos of work in progress up at www.blumarten.com on a regular basis, so it’s worth keeping an eye on that.
We’re also putting a lot of effort into the artwork, and working closely with our designer ithinkitsnice to try and deliver really high quality graphics that work with the music and that people will be proud to own.

How’s the work on the new album coming?
We’ve got a really bad habit of starting new things when we’ve already got lots of tunes half-finished. At any one time we usually have at least 50 tracks on the go, 90% of which will never see the light of day. We’re managing to discipline ourselves at the moment though, and work to a tight schedule. At the time I’m writing this we only have about 11 weeks to finish the album, and that’s very very very tight indeed.

What would you like to achieve in the music industry?
We’ve come to a point where we don’t much care about what else is going on in the scene, we just want to write some music that we’re going to be proud to stand by for years to come. We really want our output to touch people in a way that goes beyond the usual aspirations of drum & bass producers…i.e. Get DJs X, Y & Z to play your tracks in a rave. Yes, that’s great and important, but it’s not enough for us and never really has been.
We really want to make music that lives with people for a long time, not just for a few hours in a club and then for a few weeks on their ipod until the next thing that sounds more or less the same comes along and replaces it.
Yes of course we love seeing people dance to our tracks in clubs – it’s fantastic – but we also love getting emails from people saying how much of an emotional connection they’ve had with the music. In many ways that’s much more important to us.
We also want to help reposition drum & bass as quality electronic music, not just the paint-by-numbers affair it so often is. It can have depth, it can be elegant, it can be delicate, it can be moving. Chris often complains that too much d&b focuses on a snare that’s been smashed to pieces by someone desperate to make it as loud as possible, and thinks it’s very boring and macho – we argue about this constantly. Naturally, as Leo always points out, the truth is somewhere in-between.

Who most heavily influences you (music wise)?
Our influences are as diverse as film composers like Cliff Martinez and Thomas Newmann, to indie like The Cure and Cocteau Twins, to minimalist classical music like Steve Reich and Morton Feldman, to jazz, like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, pop – a lot of Madonna and Sade and Pet Shop Boys, folk music like The Sundays and Kate Rusby, hip hop like Wu Tang, electronica like Future Sound of London and Mr Projectile…. I could carry on all day.
It’s probably less that we’re obsessed with particular artists or genres, but with individual pieces from right across the whole spectrum of music. If anyone ever bothered to sit down and analyse it they could probably find connecting threads between all the pieces that are reflected in our own music.
If you want a taste of the sort of things we like, then head over to www.blumarten.com/mixes and you’ll find some non-d&b mixes that contain a lot of music we really love.

Why did you start making music?
Good question. I think there’s a driving force in all three of us to create something. We’ve discussed it a lot between ourselves and, depending on when you catch us, it can be put down to a whole variety of psychological strengths or deficiencies.
At a very basic level, of course, all three of us always loved music and people who love music often simply want to get involved for themselves. Most people dabble in it for a while but find that, eventually, life outside the studio gets in the way of things, but once you’ve been making music for as long as we have, (this is Blu Mar Ten’s 14th year), you’re wise to ask yourself some pretty searching questions about what’s pushing you forward and why you might be different to other people. As someone very clever once said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
The answer to the question is also different for each of us. We’re all plagued by our own personal demons regarding how we want the music to be heard, what constitutes success, what the point of it all is; but I think that, even if we never released another record again, we’d still continue to create. Unfortunately, this unstoppable impulse means that there are often sacrifices to be made, and casualties along the way; but we feel this is an unavoidable price you have to pay.

Do you feel your sound has matured or changed since you started out (and with the addition of Michael Tognarelli)?
I think it’s the same ideas all the way through really – I think the intentions of what Chris and Leo started back in 1995 have remained constant, and they somehow coincide with some of my intentions when it comes to making music. It’s about a certain mood or a certain feeling, and I guess from there that all Blu Mar Ten stuff has a certain sound; hard to define but you might know what I mean.

Do you have a favourite artist to remix?
Anyone of the people already listed above would be great. The only thing is I’d be at a bit of a loss as to how to make a ‘Sade’ track any better.

What is it like when you guys start recording?
We’re pretty much business-as-usual all the time. Someone comes up with something based on a few looped synth notes, or a drum pattern, or a chord, like a spark of an idea and either that gets worked up by a couple of people, or all of us, or left for a while and maybe picked up at a later date. Things can change lots during the lifespan of a track – in a recent track the entire bassline was suddenly reversed after months of working on it, and we were like “how come we didn’t do that sooner??” – it totally changed the mood of the track, for the better. While we’re working it’s all very much a technical exercise, a case of slotting all the parts together, but we often manage to make the music more than the sum of these mechanics. We’re not too sure exactly how this happens, but it does.
We often try to switch things up when we feel like we’re getting too comfortable with a working process. Sometimes this means we change the software we use, some years it might mean changing entire genres.

Do you do anything off the wall whilst in the studio?
Well.. a little secret here – Leo and I often sing in a cabaret style (when Chris isn’t around to shout at us). There was one Saturday night, just us two, and we played that Foreigner track “I Wanna Know What Love Is” really loud; by the end we were both singing along at full blast in harmony, with suitable melodrama… We go through phases of watching different stuff too, we’re big Jeremy Kyle fans at the moment, we used to have Silent Hill and GTA marathons.

Are any of you working on side projects?
Leo has a full time side project – his wife had a baby last year, so he’s juggling work, the studio and a kid at the moment. We all have day jobs, which obviously means we don’t get that much free time. Besides actually writing the music, we have to spend a lot of time doing label admin, artwork, marketing etc etc..
I want to have an album of downtempo things out later this year, plus I’m working on some vocal house things too. If you gave any of us more time, you’d hear more music…

Who talks the most rubbish (at any given moment)?
I think that probably shifts pretty evenly between all three of us. Chris and I do bicker a lot though over pretty much anything we can think of. We often just invent stuff to argue about. We’re forever having £100 bets over things, like what date of the month my last holiday was, or what the dollar exchange rate is at a particular moment. For the record at the moment he owes me £200.