Features

Elite Force

Breaks veteran, Simon Shackleton, better known for his Elite Force and Zodiac Cartel monikers, has been hard at work forging a new sound which he likes to call tech funk. Elite Force's latest offering is a genre defier of epic proportions. His Re:Vamped album takes the concept of mixing, remixing, sampling and writing music to new heights, by creating 15 pieces of music, composed from bits and pieces of existing tracks. We spoke to him to find out more...

The last time we interviewed you was back in 2006 just after the release of your Modern Primitive LP. Things have come a long, long way these past four years. U&A Recordings has gained a prominent role within the scene, that hard work has paid off, how does it feel?
I think Modern Primitive was for the catalyst for me, the final nail in the coffin of the 'old school' way of doing business. I wrote that album for a label that weren't able to effectively promote it, using an archaic system of sales & distribution that weren't able to sell it, and when Intergroove, Amato and then Adrift/Kingsize all went under I realised that self-determination was the future and set about developing U&A.

Initially it was a bit of a false start because I was still holding onto those old models and worked with a label management company, who were hopeless and shortly after went under themselves. However over the last two and a half years I wrestled control back of everything I do and am now trying to develop a new paradigm in how to market and develop my music, and the music of the U&A artists.

U&A has nurtured talent like Loops of Fury and Rektchordz, artists which encompass their own unique styles, how important to you is nurturing that talent and making sure it flourishes?
As a label it's important that we have a steady, manageable amount of output hitting the streets, but it's also vital to me to be offering people an opportunity to develop themselves and become part of what is a family of artists, not to mention that it's essential to the well-being of the scene as a whole. It's also hugely rewarding and exciting to see people develop behind the scenes, and then see their music doing it on some of the biggest stages.

Re:Vamped encompasses many unique styles through your remixing of some big name tracks and artists; how did this idea come about?
It kind of evolved really over a period of time. It was never originally intended as an album project at all... the original plan was just to create some bespoke mash-ups for my DJ sets really, but it quickly evolved into more of a production project nipping and tucking tracks here and there.

I guess the basic premise behind it was to ditch the notion of 'copyright' and return to that 'kid-in-a-candy-shop' ethos that the original sample kings had back in the hip hop / mixtape days... so it worked more along the lines of 'I love that bassline so I'm gonna take it' or 'the drop in that track's huge, so why not use it wholesale'.

I then set about fusing lots of these elements that I loved together into new production tracks – some of them ended up using five or six tracks whereas others were more a case of re-styling through the power of the editing tool.

How did you select tracks to mash-up and remix?
The starting point was pretty straight forward for me – keys. I've always mixed tracks in key. As someone with a pretty diverse DJ portfolio, I'll go from minimal techno one minute to breaks the next and from electro to dubstep the next, the key was always something I used to unite what, stylistically, could be an impossible fit otherwise.

When I was working on the mash-ups, I'd load 30 or 40 tracks up in the same key in Ableton and just start working from there doing live one-bar loop jams and seeing which ideas gelled best together. Because I never saw it as a 'project', or something that we might go & release until the very last moment, I never really considered what I could or couldn't get away with, or get a license for, so in that sense it was pretty liberating, creatively.

I also understand you had some trouble with securing rights to some tracks? Did it affect the outcome of what you might have originally planned for Re:Vamped?
It was frustrating because some of the tracks were designed to blend together in the mix – for example I had a great run of three tracks in B and the third of these just rolled so well off the back of the other two in the mix and just took things into this deep, almost tracky, psychedelic breaks territory, but with that third track two of the three major components were owned by Kompakt and I think the concept of what we were doing was slightly beyond their comprehension, so they flatly refused permission.

The dubstep-orientated re-fixes were interesting too. Some people like the Datsik / Excision guys at Rottun and the Bar9 track with Z Audio were really keen to fully embrace the idea... almost too much so in a way in that the re-fix of Datsik's Retreat they wanted to feature on their own label so we couldn't use it on the comp, but then it just spent 18 days straight at #1 on Beatport and was the first breaks release they'd ever done on the label, so everyone was dead pleased to be honest!

The album is brilliant and the reception behind it is building to be quite a force before its release in early March, how does it feel having that kind of support and love behind something you've crafted?
I couldn't be happier with the response. In fact last night I was out at Fabric playing at the Breakspoll party and I was cornered by literally dozens of people from the scene who seemed to be genuinely excited about not only the album release, but all the other promotional avenues we've been exploring, such as the label and artist websites and the custom bundles we've been creating.

You can check these out at www.eliteforcemusic.com and www.uaarecs.com and it's an amazing feeling as an artist to be discovering a whole new style of connecting with your fans and providing the kind of content that I think is the way forward for the future.

For example, in the next few weeks we are looking to roll out a bundle where you can buy an advance ticket to a show, and as part of the deal you receive an mp3 recording the following week of the actual set you went to see. These are new models and they're developing all the time, but I want U&A and all of our artists to be amongst the first people to really seize this kind of custom technology and make it work in the most positive way possible.

Words: Nick Bleeker