Just the name DJ Fresh presents a lifelong challenge. How can a
producer live up to that name some two decades after he was first
bowled over by the newness and innovation of rave music? How, in a
genre as notoriously demanding and sometimes conservative as
drum'n'bass, can he keep opening up new possibilities without losing
the buzz and aggression that his core constituency demand? How can
someone passionate about the ideals of the underground reach out to
new audiences without selling those ideals out or cheapening his
music? How, in short, does DJ Fresh stay fresh? The answer, perhaps,
lies in the same urges that drove Daniel Stein to get involved with
music in the first place. In his early teens at boarding school he was
surrounded by people who took privilege for granted, while he had a
very different understanding of life, his father being a self-made man
who had come to England from South Africa with nothing aged 21.
Already an outsider, Dan saw no reason to change himself to fit in,
nor to accept a system that required everyone to be alike in order to
be accepted. So when friends' older brothers began to return from
early acid house raves with tapes, flyers and tales of people from all
classes and backgrounds brought together by hedonism - united under a
musical banner as he puts it he was like a moth to a flame. The music
on those rave tapes also grabbed him instantly. Having learned piano
from an early age, he had a natural affinity for keyboards, and loved
the electronic side of his parents' record collection artists like
Tomita and Jean-Michel Jarre as well as the spacier, more experimental
indie bands of the late eighties like My Bloody Valentine, Happy
Mondays, Spacemen 3 and Ride. Rave music combined all the elements
that he loved in these acts with a huge injection of energy and,
crucially, the DIY ethos that a huge record could literally be made in
your bedroom. So before he was even old enough to get to a club or
rave, Dan set about working out how to capture that energy in his own
beats. Dan went on to university, but his attention was really on the
rave scene and when he made contact with pirate station Scandal FM in
the London suburbs aged 19, his initiation was complete and he dropped
out to pursue music and DJing full time. There he met mainstay of the
fledgling jungle scene MC Moose, who provided his introduction to DJs
like Mickey Finn, Kenny Ken and Andy C, who in turn supported his
home-produced tunes and provided the confidence that he was on the
right track. By 1995, he had made contact with the Renegade Hardware
label and got his first tunes out, and via the label met Future Forces
with whom he would go on to form the legends that are Bad Company
three years later. Like most people in the mid-1990s, his clubbing
wasn't limited to one sound; he took on a good range of underground
electronic sounds, with a lot of his friends being into the techno
scene in particular. But it was jungle / drum'n'bass that he felt
really had the rebel nature that had first attracted him to raving,
and also the progression within the beats, the futuristic sounds, the
open-mindedness that could incorporate this huge range of different
styles and producers. From his first session on Scandal FM onwards,
his life was focused on the studio, on trying to pursue that
progression and bring the musicality of his early electronic
influences into his productions. Through the 1990s and into the early
2000s, drum'n'bass became less fashionable and more insular but for a
long time, Dan didn't feel this to be a problem. His life was a whirl
of non-stop studio work and gigging at the weekends, Bad Company's
success was stellar, and there was always a new audience to play to
somewhere in the world. Because drum'n'bass is always changing, he
says, it gets big in different coutnries at different times as it
matches up to different tastes. There always seems to be somewhere
where it's new and exciting to people! Dan began experimenting with
live musicians too, and when Bad Company split, he was already
nurturing the Australian trio Pendulum, who he introduced to his
musician friends but that's another story. By 2004, though,
frustration was starting to set in. The drum'n'bass scene was into its
second decade, but having been forged in the chaotic black economy of
the rave era had never learned to get itself on a proper business
footing and it felt isolated from the rest of the music world. But
once again, Dan didn't see why he should operate like everyone else
and it was around this time that labels like Breakbeat Kaos (which Dan
founded along with Adam F), Hospital and others made a concerted
effort to set this straight, to become better educated and more
stable, to provide a proper platform and think long-term. At the same
time, Dan began to bring the melody and chord structures that had
always been latent in his music to the forefront, stepping sideways
from the rock influence that Pendulum were now exploring and into
rich, complex song structures. This idea that drum'n'bass could
produce fully-structured songs as a matter of course chimed with a new
generation of artists like High Contrast and Chase & Status, and
seeing that the labels had their act together and could be relied on
to promote records on multiple platforms radio began to take notice
too. There were fresh faces on the dancefloor, too: young clubbers
with diverse tastes brought bright colours and a party mentality into
the clubs, steadily chipping away at the dark, moody, male-dominated
stereotyping of the scene. Drum'n'bass was reborn and ready to take on
the mainstream once more. DJ Fresh releases have continued to push
this renaissance further. Pushing the sound he describes as future
jungle, he's managed to make tracks like last year's vocal rework of
his 2008 track Gold Dust reach out to new audiences, while keeping the
rude energy of the initial 1990s explosion at their heart. A perfect
example was his recent genre-defying top 5 hit Earthquake, a
collaboration with Diplo and Dominique Young Unique. And as the
support of Zane Lowe and Annie Mac has placed his tracks at the heart
of the new eclecticism, so he has begun to expand his tempo range.
Inspired by newcomers like Flux Pavilion, Jack Beats and Dillon
Francis, he has taken on jump-up dubstep, electro, Dutch house and
even moombahton rhythms, which provided the foundations for his recent
top 3 hit Dibby Dibby Sound. Now I can begin with the song and the
vocal instead of the beat, he says, and let it take the tempo that
suits it... but always keeping the energy of drum'n'bass underlying
it. Forthcoming tracks will feature a number of vocalists and
songwriting partnerships but one in particular has proved successful.
Dan's first attempts at writing with singer Sian Evans resulted in new
dubstep-tempo single Louder, and they found working together so easy
that a further six Fresh songs featuring Sian are in the can. With 2
million record sales, two number 1 singles and a further two top 5
singles to his name, he is infectiously optimistic about the next
phase of his career, seeing the current climate as being as
open-minded as those very first days of rave, back in 1990 or whenever
when I started to get what it was really about. Refusing as ever to
fit anyone's expectations, and always driven by that idea of diverse
minds uniting under a musical banner, he's not resting on his
reputation but still pushing forward still Fresh after all these
years.
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07/01/2023 Last update