The legendary dubstep producer and DJ Kahn gives us a few insights ahead of his set at The Irish Centre...
You listened to reggae and punk at home as a kid – what’s your earliest memory of those kinds of sounds?
My parents are really big fans of music so I was lucky to be exposed to a lot of different music from a young age. I remember hearing artists like Toyan and Prince Jazzbo toasting and making various farmyard animal noises over tracks and finding that pretty entertaining as a kid.
Has there been much of a metal influence on your sound?
I don’t think it really influenced any of my production, though as a teenager I was always into the low-end guitar tones of bands like Korn and Nine Inch Nails. I’d say Nine Inch Nails’ album The Fragile was probably one of the first albums I heard growing up that made me want to become a producer.
What are your most memorable moments in collaboration, both with producers and labels?
One of the biggest collaborations for me so far has been working with Tricky last year when I remixed his track Only Way. I grew up listening to his music pretty religiously so it was quite a dream come true to work with him.
How did you meet him?
We connected online initially, though with Bristol being Bristol we soon realised we had mutual friends. That’s one of the great things about the city generally; there’s rarely more than one or two degrees of separation between most people and the creative community in the city is mostly very supportive.
Bristol has always flown the flag for interesting music. Do you feel any kind of responsibility to keep that going?
I certainly do feel a sense of pride in the musical history of the city and feel like a lot of what I do is a continuation of aspects of that tradition.
Do you have any habits or rituals when you sit down to create?
Not so much really, though I tend to need a large cafetière of coffee on my desk before I can do anything. I rarely ever sit down to write a piece of music with a specific goal in mind so I think it all just depends on how I’m feeling at the time of writing.
What’s important about vinyl in relation to your projects and yours and Neek’s label, Bandulu?
We’d had the idea of starting a record label for a few years before we started Bandulu Records. From the beginning, it’d always been integral to us to release our music on vinyl as it just felt more relevant and appropriate to the kind of music we wanted to release. We come from a strong vinyl tradition in Bristol so it felt important to us at the time to continue that tradition in our own way, plus it meant we could include the brilliant screen-printed artwork by our designer Joshua Hughes-Games which I think really ties the essence of the label together.
Can you tell about how things were in the early days of Sureskank, one of the first nights to bring dubstep and grime to Bristol? How does it compare now to in the beginning?
Neek and some of his friends started Sureskank over ten years ago and I became a resident a little later on. I remember it as one of the first mid-week, small, underground club nights for the grime and emerging dubstep scenes in Bristol. It was an important platform for our generation in Bristol as it was one of the first places a lot of us really cut our teeth as DJs and began networking with other creatives in the city.
The main difference in Bristol nowadays is that we’ve lost some of the best small club spaces from that earlier period – like The Croft, The Tube and Native – and there seems to be less mid-week events with most of the better-known current club nights operating in larger venues at the weekend and being very student-orientated.
What can we expect from your set in Notts?
Well, I will have literally just got back from touring the USA with Neek so I’ll be playing whatever is in my bag! I’ve been sent a lot of really great new material from people recently though so there’ll be a lot of unheard music for sure.
What dubstep producers should we be looking out for this year?
My boy Boofy is writing some heavy stuff at the moment.
Was there anything else you’d like to say to LeftLion readers?
If you follow my work, thank you for listening and supporting my music.
The Dojo 007 present Kahn and Alxzndr at The Irish Centre on Friday 27 April at 10pm. Get tickets here
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