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EXCLUSIVE: THREE TECHNIMATIC D&B VIDEOS

New tracks from one of the drum & bass albums of the year

Technimatic are dropping one of the drum & bass albums of the year - 'Desire Paths'. And DJ Mag has snagged three exclusive videos of tracks from the album. Watch them here: 

Read on for DJ Mag's interview with Technimatic (below)...

Both Pete Rogers and Andy Powell from Technimatic started collecting old hardcore records when they were still at school in the early '90s. 

“I started buying hardcore vinyl around 1993, initially just because it was new and exciting and my parents disapproved of it,” Pete says. “But then LTJ Bukem released 'Music' and 'Return To Atlantis' and everything changed. It then became a form of music that spoke to me at a very deep level.”

Andy, meanwhile, was introduced to the music by older kids at school bringing in tapes. 

“In about 1994 I used to go into the local record shop to find the tunes I had heard on the tapes,” he tells DJ Mag. “As I started to dig deeper into the radio shows and collecting flyers from the same store, an obsession grew and I wanted to know more about everything to do with the culture and the sound that it was producing.”

let Both individually did indeed investigate further, diving headlong into the scene, although it took them a while to start producing themselves. They first hooked up together on one of the Drum & Bass Arena messageboards, where up-and-coming producers swap tips and post up tunes for feed back. “We were both making a similar kind of musical d&b, and so we began chatting, and very quickly we were making tracks together,” recalls Pete.

“Working together was extremely easy, and I personally was quite surprised because I'd never had that 'click' with anybody else when making music,” Andy adds. “It just seemed to work straight from the off.”

“I used to record under the name Technicolour and Andy used to be called Komatic, so in classic drum & bass portmanteau fashion we combined the two,” explains Pete.

The duo started releasing tunes, first on Technique's sister label Worldwide Audio, and then labels like Critical and Hospital. They sent a CD off to Friction at Shogun Audio but then forgot about it until six months later, when Ed Friction emailed them to ask to hear more of their stuff. They had found their label home. And now they're dropping their debut album. Rich, cinematic, lysergic and musical, 'Desire Paths' announces the arrival of a major new talent in drum & bass.

The rolling trippy 'Innermost', the jazz-inflected 'Mucky Jeff', the oceanic Bukemy feel of 'One Way', a gorgeous Omni Trio-esque 'Lost Times', a Calibre-tinged 'Beneath the Skies'... every track is different, expertly produced and — perhaps most importantly of all — emotive. Technimatic tracks make you feel things. When you discover that the title track is an ambient interlude with a Timothy Leary/Terrence McKenna spoken word vocal, the same sampled vox that is peppered throughout, you know that these aren't your regular run-of-the-mill drum & bass producers.

If you had to pigeonhole Technimatic, you'd say they're liquid funk producers, although that's to ignore some of the darker or pummelling shit they like making sometimes ('Tectonic' etc). But when the type of artists you end up name-checking when listening to 'Desire Paths' — and previous twelves too — include LTJ Bukem, Omni Trio, Calibre and EZ Rollers, you know which end of the spectrum they're coming from.

DJ Mag is interested in why the tracks end up coming out the way they do. “We just let the creative process lead us,” says Pete.

“We never ever set out to make any style, tempo or concept,” adds Andy. “We treat each track as a melting pot and just see where it takes us along the way. I think it's important to do that whenever you set out making music. It's often about the journey, where that piece of music decides to take you, rather than you being the driving force behind it.”

Andy talks about how adding certain elements during the album production process could suddenly take a track in a whole new direction, like the horns on 'Night Vision' and the strings on opener 'Perseverance'. “Sometimes those magical moments are exactly what gives the tracks a piece of 'us', because we know when those moments have arrived,” he says. “And I guess that's what gives us our 'sound', because we understand when that magic is happening and when it isn't.”

The 'Desire Paths' London launch party is this week - full details here