Chris Reed aka Plastician is a big player in the grime and dubstep scene these days. Hailing from Croydon, he's been a key figure in the sound's development. His debut album, Beg To Differ, cemented him as one of the leading grime and dubstep producers.

He was instrumental in putting the Dubstep LA Embrace The Renaissance mixtape last summer which saw UK talent producing beats for some of the US' biggest rap names. Kmag caught up with him.

When you were growing up, who influenced you?

I didn't really have any underground music background as a youngster. A lot of people will tell you these stories about being really involved in music but when I was young, all I was interested in was playing football.

It wasn't really until I left school and started going to college that I picked up pirate radio by chance through listening to other people's music at college. My first experience of the UK underground would have been listening to UK garage.

I used to listen to DJ EZ and I really liked the style of music he was playing and especially his style of DJing. That was what got me into the idea of DJing myself. He was a big influence on me.

I also took a lot of influence on the early grime sound and the dubstep sound. People like Skream and Benga who helped me get my head round production when I met them through Big Apple shop and playing house parties.

Before that, at school, I didn't really have that much interest in music. A lot of my friends were into jungle and d&b but I never really got into that.

The only underground music CD I bought at school was a CD mix by the Freestylers called Future Sound of the UK. Actually, if you listen back to that now, there's quite a lot of stuff in there that sounds similar to the stuff I play now. It was completely unrelated. I just happened to hear it on the radio and thought it sounded pretty cool.

When you first started visiting Big Apple Records, did you ever think dubstep would be this big?

To be honest, no. Pretty much everyone who was making that kind of music was coming through the record shop anyway. You got to meet everyone who was playing a similar kind of style, apart from a few people like Oris Jay and Zed Bias who I didn't really meet in the shop. You could meet everyone from the scene in that one shop.

When I started making records as Plasticman, I found out there was another DJ by the same name and I got played a record by him which was pretty techno. I was sure that he was never going to hear about me. That's how sure I was about what I was doing was so confined to this small place.

When I heard the techno mixtape, I wasn't even bothered about changing my name because this guy is never going to hear what I'm doing. Low and behold, now it's a lot bigger than the four walls of Big Apple.

Joker's spoke about one of the first buzzes he got was when you played one of his tunes in your set. When you started out, how did you feel when a DJ played your tune out?

The first DJ to play one of my tracks was N-type who used to play on Delight FM around the same time I was going into Big Apple. He was one of the later people that I met from the Croydon scene. I had heard of him as Delight FM was quite big at the time so it was a big deal to get my tracks to him.

I remember him playing Venom on his show, I'd met him on the Saturday afternoon in Big Apple and his show was at one or two in the afternoon and I remember going home to listen to it. It was really exciting to hear your own track on the radio for the first time.

Shortly after that, Slimzee played one of my tracks and that was massive back then. He was big grime DJ and anyone who was making these dark instrumental tracks, whether you call them grime or dubstep, just getting someone like Slimzee to play them was massive back then because every DJ used to listen to his radio show and side wind the tape back to see what was fresh because he would be playing all the new dubs.

Then Hatcha picked up on it. He was always put off a little bit by my style of production, he thought it was a little too grimey whereas the stuff he was playing was deep, like the early Benga and Skream which was really quite stripped down.

I had quite a lot of mid range in my tracks which was unusual back then. Until Slimzee picked up on it, Hatcha stood back from it a bit. He would always give me hints and tips and I would try and make the deeper kind of stuff but I never hit the nail on the head. Eventually I got there and Hatcha was supporting me quite well.

 

 

Mary Anne Hobbs' dubstep special in 2006 is highly regarded as the show that broke the sound globally. In the four years since it's gone from an entirely underground sound to verging, at times, on the mainstream. What do you make of it?

It took about four years for even people like Mary Anne Hobbs to pick the sound up. Since 2006, it really is a global sound. It's really cool for the genre and the whole mainstream is cool too.

I don't think anything that has reached the mainstream, in terms of dubstep, has been particular watered down apart from the odd bits and pieces that have obviously not been produced by dubstep producers. You can hear some remixes that appear on B-sides of some pop CD release, like in-house producers being told to produce something along the lines of Benga & Coki's Night.

Skream's In For The Kill remix was a straight-up dubstep remix which just happened to get popular. Night which hit the charts was a massive track on the underground. I have no problem at all.

If the music is still good, I wouldn't have a problem with anyone producing dubstep to a more mainstream audience, as long as it wasn't watered down. If it gets big in the mainstream from people supporting it and actually enjoying the music then that's cool.

I'm not sure if I would like some of the stuff aimed specifically at mainstream but I don't think anyone really goes out with that aim but it would be interesting to see what it would sound like. I wouldn't denounce any of it because it's always interesting to hear different people's take on the sound.

A lot of grime and dubstep is played on pirate radio station Rinse FM, how much of a part does Rinse have to play in dubstep's rise?

It's definitely played a massive part in, not just the early stages of it from supporting it, to giving FWD a show on its station and also integrating itself with the actual event.

It was the first place that people could listen live, online, to the real sound of dubstep. Not just the stuff that people were able to buy in record shops. They had actual DJs and producers who were integrated into the scene playing shows on the radio being broadcast live all over the place. Over the last few years, it really has helped blow it up.

 

 

The Dubstep LA mixtape dropped in the summer. The mix featured beats from Benga, Caspa, MRK1 and Starkey to name a few, alongside lyricists including Ras Kass, Murs, Grouch and Snoop Dogg . [It's still available to download now, for free.] How did the mixtape come about?

I've been playing in LA for quite a long time now and really integrated myself into their scene. I'd done quite a lot of gigs with the guys who run a night called Smog. Through playing at those nights, I met a guy called Kosta who worked at a PR company who dealt with a lot of major record labels.

They had a lot of artists on their books, particularly Snoop Dogg who was one of the biggest artists they were dealing with, PR wise. He spoke to me about the possibility of doing some remixes for Murs and a couple of other rappers. We got talking over AIM and he was telling me how he would bump into Snoop quite a lot in the office and he was trying to play him some dubstep.

He was getting me to send over some big tracks to play to rappers who were coming through the office. I sent them over a load of stuff and one of the tracks was Chase & Status' Eastern Jam. Kosta played it to Snoop and he wanted to do something with it. Then I wanted to do something because now Snoop was on it everyone was going to be on it. It's like a seal of approval for rappers over there.

After that I said to Kosta we should look at putting a mixtape together. I would keep passing beats over and Kosta would then pass them onto the rappers. Over here, I couldn't really tell them what I was doing with the tunes. They had to just trust I wanted these tracks off them for a good reason. I didn't want to big up everyone and tell them I've got Snoop Dogg to rap on a dubstep track.

People were giving me their tracks in the hope I was actually doing something productive with them. Shortly after, they decided to leak the Snoop Dogg track and the wheels kicked in motion and I managed to get Xzibit and Murs involved. It also helped the UK talent too, look at Chase & Status who went onto produce tracks for Rihanna's album.

It's definitely opened doors for people. That was the whole point of the project in the first place. The next step for that is taking it elsewhere. We're looking to do a dirty south edition of that with the southern rappers. It's just a case of getting the tracks together right now which is difficult with everyone in dubstep being as busy as they are this year.

It's blowing up everywhere in the US. What do you make of their interpretation of the sound?

The dubstep nights in the States, more recently, are pushing the really hard edge of the sound. They are building up their own scene over there which is good. That's what needed to happen over there for a few years for it to really pick up.

They've got some real good communities built up over there and now they're building their own sounds and own nights. They don't need to book headline acts from the UK to fill their venues anymore which is obviously a good sign that it's really healthy over there.

Playing over there is good fun. The gigs are getting bigger and better. There's more and more producers popping up from the States who are making some interesting and detailed music. The harder edge of dubstep is really starting to pick up over there, more so than it has over here. It's going to be interesting to see what emerges from that movement.

Grime is a massive part of your music, you've produced for Skepta and Wiley. What do you make of their commercial ambitions and would you like to take your music in that direction?

Personally I don't think I have that sound within me. I don't have any problem with people pushing their sound to the mainstream. If you want to push it to the mainstream then you're going to have to water it down.

Probably the closest mainstream music I've done is the Chew Lips remix but even that is still dark to me. It would be great if someone played it on daytime radio but it wasn't built for that audience.

With Skepta and Wiley who are specifically building their music for the mainstream, you got to look at what everyone else is doing around them. You've got Tinchy Stryder, Dizzee Rascal and Lethal Bizzle, people who have come from the same place who are pushing in that direction.

It must be difficult for them to see their friends and people who have been doing things around them making that kind of money. A lot of it is to do with money, fame and placement within the mainstream audience. They want to be on the big stages, performing in front of massive crowds.

It's not really the sound I'd be able to support in my own sets but it wouldn't stop me playing a Wiley or Skepta track in my set as long as I felt it fit amongst everyone else I was playing. The mainstream pop sound that they're catering for at the moment wouldn't really work within my sets but I don't have anything against them. It's fair play if that's what they want to do.

When you sit down to make a tune, what do you want to get over to your listener?

If sit down and make tune, it just depends what kind of mindset I'm in on the day. It's like doing a painting, if you're in a bad mood, you would probably paint something a bit dark and it's similar with music.

Depending on your mood, it definitely comes across in your music. When I made a lot of tracks from my Beg to Differ album like Japan and Walk In The Carpark, I was going through a massive relationship break up at the time and I think that comes across on a lot of the tracks on that album.

A lot of producers will just get up and make a beat. I don't do that, I have to be totally in the mood. My emotions definitely come through in my music. It's more so to do with how I feel.

What's next for you?

I would love to do another album one day in the near future but I'm in the middle of moving out so it's not going to happen anytime in the near future. Music production is on hold at the moment. I've got such a busy DJ schedule that I don't find time to make music as much as I used to be able to.

Every year I do the May Mix and this year, I would really love to release that as a compilation CD and try to earn the artists who give me their music a bit of money out of it.

This is the fifth year that it will be done and over the years, it's had hundreds of thousands of downloads so it would be a nice thank you to all the artists that give me their music. If it does happen like that it will be more into the summer. I'm just looking into the possibilities of doing that at the moment.


Plastician is currently looking for producers to submit their own music to feature on the May Mix. Visit his SoundCoud Dropbox for more.

Plastician was talking to Sam Moir.

 

• Plastician

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