In The Commix

To outsiders of both Cambridge and the drum and bass scene, the historic English town may seem like an unlikely location for a burgeoning junglist community. Yet it boasts a holy trinity of drum and bass artists in the form of Nu:Tone, Logistics and Commix, the latter of which have just recorded a mix for Fabric. Commix duo George Levings and Guy Brewer have created an excellent and interesting mix for the latest instalment of the ever-popular Fabriclive series. Guy explains how they set about creating the latest release: “Creating a mix is almost like a jigsaw puzzle – there were a couple of tracks we knew would go at the beginning of a mix, a couple we knew would go at the end, and slightly harder tracks that would fill the gaps. It’s quite exciting because we were able to include new, key tracks that we play in our sets, but for us it was also important to showcase some older material that has really influenced us. Listening to this mix, we hear what drum and bass was when it started out - we hope to enlighten people about where it came from.”
“To be honest, a lot of the drum and bass scene depresses us at the moment, the whole state of the majority of the scene is quite depressing,” says George. “In fact, we’d like to say it’s almost completely removed from what we do.”

It’s not every day that you hear an artist condemn the very scene that they are such a part of. But Commix appear to have taken this frustration and attempted to re-invent the genre.

“We’re hoping to regain the interest of the people who gave up on the drum and bass scene a few years ago, perhaps they’ll listen to someone like D-Bridge and rediscover something new about it.”

Commix have been perfecting their art for a long time now. Guy speaks about how the pair began making music and how they arrived at where they are today: "I think when we first started writing music, we were really trying to emulate what our favourite producers were doing at that time. So it was just after Bad Company and Ed Rush and Optical had been doing that one sound for a long time, then Marcus Intalex came along and did more soulful, housey-influenced tracks - and that really had an effect, it was something really different at the time.”

“It all just sort of came together,” says George. “Again, going back to the friends we used to hang around with, one guy’s brother used to be in the Nextmen - a scratch DJ. So we had a lot of old records with old hip-hop acapellas, it all kind of fitted into that sound nicely. Then we started finding addresses of record labels and sending some tracks out.”

“Around the same time, Dan Nu:tone was a good friend of ours as well, and he’d just signed to Hospital, so we started playing tracks to Tony and the Hospital crew,” adds Guy. “They started becoming interested in what we were doing, we did the EP and it went from there.”

“When it comes to DJing we’re into the full spectrum of drum and bass, we just don’t like anything cheesy at all. “

George agrees: “There’s so much tasteless music out there, and as a DJ, you’ve got to kind of A&R what’s around. One of the best people around is Steve Bug. He can play for hours and he doesn’t really do much, but it’s just so down the same line of funky techno. And we really aspire to that in drum and bass - not really narrow-minded or just one-levelled, but have a bit of experimentation in it. It’s always that kind of DJing that we’ve looked up to as well: the rolling sets, rather than Hype’s energy-trip mixing. The latter is very impressive at the end of the day, and you can’t take away from what someone like Andy C can do to a crowd, but it’s not personally what we aspire to be. We’re much more down the road of Fabio, Marcus Intalex and Doc Scott, who just roll it out nicely for hours on end - you don’t get bored at any point, it just flows in the right direction. At the moment we're really influenced by techno and use across as much of that style of DJing that we can. Really progressive sort of sets.”

Guy adds: “We’re really influenced by tech housey stuff, and I suppose minimal stuff as well. On the minimal side of things Troy Pierce, Mathew Jonson, Conrad Black; on the housier side of things - Steve Bug obviously, Johnny D...”

“Ben Watt’s more disco stuff too. It’s really changing for us at the moment, we’re really into it. We spend a lot of time listening to our techno. Everyone needs a niche with house music, as there’s so much of it.”

What are the future plans for Commix after the release of the new mix?

“We’re spending a lot of time making house music mainly, tech-house, deep house. A lot of what we’ve learnt from drum and bass crosses over with it. Not a great deal. Once you’ve learnt production values like drum and bass which, as far as I’m concerned, is some of the most highly pressured music in terms of music production, I think it’s quite easy to transfer that over into other genres. It’s something we’re really interested in doing now. To be honest, I don’t want to get to age 40 or 50 and be like, “I’m a drum & bass DJ,” still going out and playing every weekend. I think it’s important for us to get involved with music production as a whole in terms of doing house and techno stuff. I’d like to do down-tempo albums, anything really.”