None of the usual fluffy rehearsed interview rubbish for the Blu Mar Ten guys.  Five minutes after sitting down with them, we're debating the existence of art for art's sake and the role of audience in giving it validity. Not your usual, 'how did you guys get into drum and bass' conversation.  

But Blu Mar Ten are not the usual. Keeping up with them is tricky, the trio have a way of finishing each other's sentences and pre-empting each others' points, which betrays not only the amount of time they've been together but the amount of time they spend together.  

Each has carved out their own defined role to create a group dynamic that, judging by longevity and consistent quality of output, obviously works.  I'll be honest, it's weird. I know married couples who don't get on as well as these three do. And I'm actually a bit jealous; I wanna be in their gang.

We kick off the interview by talking about their wildly differing collective and individual motivations to keep making music together – a subject apparently no nearer being understood or reconciled despite being under their constant scrutiny.

"If you ask us the question 'why do we do it?', for me it's about showing off. Whereas he just enjoys the process," says Chris, nodding in Michael's direction.

Does he mind being answered for?

"Well, I'll see what he says and whether I disagree with it," says Michael.

"If we never released another record Michael wouldn't care," Chris goes on, "but for me [music] doesn't exist until there's an audience for it."

"I guess somehow it's enough for me to just write music and have it there," agrees Michael.

"Chris always has the bigger picture," adds Leo. "He's the strategist, he's the leader."

So what role does Leo play then?

"He's somewhere between me and Michael," says Chris. "He enjoys the process and all of that but he does like seeing his record in the shops as well."

"I'd agree with that", says Leo. "I went to the cinema last night and I heard one of our tracks being played in the lobby.  That's a nice sort of validation, but even if there was no such validation, the idea of just playing around with sounds is endlessly attractive."

The idea that these three just 'play around with sounds' is as inaccurate as it is attractive. Probably closer to the truth is they agonise over every aspect of the production process; as Chris puts it, this album has cost him one girlfriend, a social life and lost sleep. But the time dedicated to this perfectionism is just what has made their latest album, Natural History, so bloody excellent.  

That's not to say that they are rigid in their approach to writing; completely the opposite in fact. For them the key seems to be to surrender control over the music just as they seem to have surrendered themselves to it.

"We were talking about The Grid, the production forum on Dogsonacid.com, and I was complaining about how there's so much of a desire to control and master every aspect of the music they're trying to write on there", says Chris.  

"And we were talking about the way we write music which is very... not exactly zen like but you have to allow yourself to surrender enough control to let interesting things happen, recognise when you need to grab it and guide it, and then stop and let it do its thing. Probably very much like raising kids I imagine."

"That's something a lot of people would agree with though, that good tunes write themselves," adds Leo.

"Yes, but you've got this whole subculture of people who are desperately trying to control it."

"But if you look at the greatest songs," continues Leo, "the essence of them came about by opening up to a kind of random behaviour."

Working in this way must require a great balance of intuition and experience in order to know when to put the brakes on. At those points I wondered, do they have their audience in mind and does that steer the direction in which they guide the track?

"There's a degree of that," says Chris. "We've genre hopped a hell of a lot, but recently everything we've written is drum and bass and Natural History is our first all drum and bass album.  All the sketches we've been working on for the past two weeks don't sound like drum and bass, and we're finding ourselves having to crowbar ideas, which maybe three years ago we would have put in a down-tempo or house track, into this drum and bass template, it's really valuable to be able to take that template and stretch it."

 

 

"Drum and bass is nothing but a tempo, that's the only unifying thing," Chris says. "When you start talking about whether it's liquid or neuro, I switch off at that point. I think once you start acknowledging that level of difference, you're into this very obsessive, male, geek territory which is all about categorising. Does one club night every 12 months with 20 guys off the web really make a sub-genre? Instead we should just say 'drum and bass is that speed and beyond that the genre is completely elastic'."

Having to stretch non-drum and bass ideas to fit within a drum and bass framework can produce much more interesting stuff but in doing this, and by leaving the creative process open to serendipity as much as they do, are the three ever conscious of trends and whether they are referencing them enough to appear current?

"We are conscious of trends even if only insofar as we decide to buck them," says Chris.  

"We talk about that a lot", adds Leo. "It can focus your attention on certain things. Like the whole abstract, less beats driven instrumental type trend versus the smacked out Pendulum sound of a couple of years ago. That's quite a fundamental trend difference in the last few years; there's definitely a movement that's dubstep-like and fairly ambient, almost drumless at times. And that makes you think about things differently because it's not like we're out to copy everyone all of the time."  

"To some extent you could link that with the whole MP3 movement," says Michael. "Because there seems to have been some kind of shift away from being dictated to about what's going to sell. For a long time the dance floor oriented tracks were the ones that were successful so that what was everyone aped. But now people seem to have lost faith in the ability to sell music through the usual channels so they just get on with making what they want and it's somehow freed them up.

"The kind of music we make does require attention. You can't just flick it on and immediately get it. I think it's because drum and bass music is quite indirect anyway," continues Michael.  

I remember talking to the director Ross Casswell on the set of the video for Believe Me about how he came up with the idea for the film. He said he found that drum and bass tunes never seemed to get anywhere, they were more like a journey that never reaches its destination, and that's what he wanted to reflect in the video – giving no explanation or payoff. Does removing drum and bass from the context of the club make it less coherent, and a bit aimless? Does that matter?

"This idea that it's dance music is a bit strange," says Chris. "I don't know what the statistics would be but I'd be willing to bet that 90% of drum and bass is listened to outside of a club – on computers, in cars, in bedrooms...  What proportion does it have to work and be heard in a club to be classed as dance music?"  

"There's no elevator pitch for drum and bass!" adds Leo.

"But one of the things I always liked about it was that there was a surrendering of the ego and there was this understanding that there was lots going on at the same time and what you were doing was making small, attenuated changes within something that was much bigger," Chris says.  

"And each one of your attenuated changes didn't mean that much in isolation but taken as a whole, all those tiny changes to an idea, all marches forward in unison, so from track to track it all might sound the same but within a year or five years' time, that idea sounds very different because it's grown organically."

True to type, as Chris describes the bigger picture Leo adds his mediator's levelling diplomacy: "Morally I find that a very attractive idea because it's inclusive".

WORDS Emily Hobbs

Natural History is out now on vinyl, CD and MP3.

 

 

 

• Blu Mar Ten

Related Links:

• Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop
• Sounds of 1989 on BBC News Website
• 100 Weight Competition
• Soundcrash Presents Chris Cunningham
• Blu Mar Ten Interview

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