Teenage Geekery: Atjazz questions his existence

A softly spoken sound-designer from the heart of County Durham, Martin Iveson plies his trade somewhere in rural Derbyshire, miles away from the club setting his music is tailored towards. From here, he’s been bubbling under the radar for a good few years, focusing more on collaborative, label-head and remix duties than his Atjazz output – until last month’s long awaited three-track release, that is.  

Posed as a trio of questions, the songs – Does This Qualify?, Well, Does It?, and Happy Now? – are an attempt to quantify the position of Atjazz in the current realm of dance music. “I’ve done nothing purely for myself for so long that I almost felt pressured to get something out there,” Iveson admits, calling from his half-built studio in Derby. “The titles are a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I’m asking myself these questions as much as I am anybody else. There’s a new breed of producer these days; I need to know if I can still chip in on my own.

“I’m in between set-ups at the moment,” he explains. “The bulk of these tracks were made on a chunky old PC with a really nice sound card and NI Kontakt. I’ll often record myself playing keyboard and resample the result, then resample that, and so on. It’s the same process when I use jazz records. I’ve still got quite a bit of outboard gear knocking about though: Fender Rhodes MK II, Roland SH-101 and Waldorf XTk are a few favourites.”

The fact that Iveson only spent “about three days” putting the tracks together certainly belies his non-stop work ethic as an omnipresent studio workhorse and all round team player. Atjazz Record Company is a solid unit these days, curating a range of talent sourced from around the globe. In fact, Iveson’s latest collaboration is perhaps the most tantalising yet, a live project with Baltimorean wizard Kris Klayton – aka Karizma. Going under the alias Exist, the pair are actively guiding “good, strong dance music” through unchartered territory.

“We’re doing something different,” Iveson affirms. “The sound of Exist is centred on very basic ideas and techniques, techniques that can be reproduced as a live spectacle. To give you an idea of the sound, we’ve just written a track called Need This that has two intertwining vocal samples, a core bassline and drum beat. That’s it. But it’s how it works; it sounds perfectly like both of us but just that little bit harder.

“It’s been a good few years since I first met Kris,” he reminisces, taking us back to around 2007. “We used to hang out together in Simbad’s studio in Brick Lane. We all had the same agent back in those days, and would often get booked on the same bill. That led to us doing a little crossover section between our sets, adding in loops and that kind of thing. Kris turned around one day and suggested taking it a bit more seriously, so that’s what is happening right now! We’re taking advantage while he’s in the UK to get an album ready.”

Individually, Klayton brings an incredible knowledge of hip-hop to the table, as well as being a machine when it comes to the technicalities of retrigger, beatmatching and all that jazz. “He’s a quiet genius,” Iveson adds, “And there’s definitely a mutual appreciation between us because of that. My role is to harness the groove, holding it all together and keeping watch for anything too sporadic. We’ve also got my good friend Ross on bass and, just recently, the drummer from Magic Number. He’s going to cut up our loops and reapply them to his kit so he can play our beats to an audience. We’re doing our very best at making Exist sound like Exist, live.”

If that’s the case, the overall effect of their music depends entirely on production quality in the studio. There is an element of danger here; if the duo lose that edge in their sound then they risk slipping into the ether like every other live dance band. That’s why both guys seem to be checking themselves from noodling around too much, being disciplined in the way that they approach each track. It’s the kind of discipline that should pay off in abundance when it comes to rolling out the hardware for this year’s club, or festival, or boat appearances.

Again, these settings are a world away from the bedroom “teenage geekery” that Iveson committed himself to in his younger years. In fact, the Commodore 64 was what first turned him on to the idea of sound design, specifically Rob Hubbard’s soundtrack to the game Delta. “The Commodore had this thing called a SID chip, which is pretty sought after these days. It’s basically four channels of monophonic noise, and you could choose between crazy synths, mixing sounds and drums as the game was loading. Games took about 15 minutes to load back then, remember.”

With the support of his parents, Iveson eventually branched out to an Amiga and an Atari ST, which is when he started to write tracks himself. “When I was about 17, a friend who I met in a videogame shop asked me to come for a random job interview in Derby; that must have been about 1991,” he recalls, “I literally hopped on the first train and got the job, working for a fairly young start-up called Core Design.”

It turned out to be a very wise move, with Core Design going on to release the first of the legendary Tomb Raider series in 1996. “I remember sitting in a golf club and Toby [Gard] pitching the game to us; he wanted to make an Indiana Jones-style video game but with a woman with big boobs instead of Harrison Ford. Crude, yes, but his storyboards were incredible; the guy is an insanely talented visual artist.

“I didn’t actually find working on Tomb Raider too fulfilling, to be honest. I was working as the FX guy, but the media hype meant a lot of pressure and ridiculous time constraints ­– we literally had 55 minutes of music to record in five hours. To put that in perspective, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers took six weeks to record and seven weeks to mix down three hours of music. It was a different type of challenge, but it definitely wasn’t as fun as working on the shoot ’em ups. The soundtrack for Shellshock 2: Blood Trails is what I’m most proud of, it’s got this eerie John Carpenter/Apocalypse Now thing going on. I did that in 5.1 surround sound too.”

A trip to Glastonbury a few years earlier to see The Orb play live had already instilled Iveson with a passion for the ambient side of things, which is largely the style he was producing early on: “I was starting to get into hip-hop and trip-hop too, which is when I sent my first demo to DIY in Nottingham and formed my initial label, Mantis Recordings.”

Mantis unfortunately collapsed under the strain of “three distribution cockups and a dodgy business partner,” but it certainly had its time, providing the platform a wealth of quality material, including 2001’s Lab Funk: “I learned a lot from that experience, and you have to view the new imprint as a phoenix from the ashes. I’m confident enough now to push a more diverse blend of styles from all over the world. Before, it felt like I was working in a limited arena. In fact, I’ve still got a ton of ambient DATs sitting in the attic that I might choose to release one day,” he says, with the trace of a snigger in his voice. “Be warned!”

Whichever way Iveson chooses to go, it will undoubtedly involve Atjazz Record Company spreading its wings even further away from the standard house routine. His date in Liverpool this month is followed by a slew of releases later in the year: “I’ve got some stuff planned with Kyodai and Jazzanova, as well as a single with Rancido, and another album under my Martin Iveson project. Keeping busy, alright, but I can’t help myself, I have to make noise. I don’t know how to stop.”