Exclusive Interview with Blu Mar Ten

Blu Mar Ten are a Drum & Bass outfit from London, and the story that has been told to Michael on how the band name was picked was that “Leo had a vision where the words “BLU” “MAR” and “TEN” appeared in front of him while he was in the bath. I might have totally made that up as it was a long time ago – I never wanted to ask again as I always thought it was a good story.”

Leo and Chris met when they left college, though [Michael] already met Chris a few years beforehand while he was working in record shops in Manchester and he was at art school. They were always writing and making this amazing music that he listened to and when he moved to London he used to come down to their studio, and eventually blackmailed them into letting him join up properly. “It was a logical progression…”

Their sound has changed over the years but “I think it’s the same ideas [and principles] all the way through really – I think the intentions of what Chris and Leo started back in 1995 have remained constant, and they somehow coincide with some of my intentions when it comes to making music. It’s about a certain mood or a certain feeling, and I guess from there that all Blu Mar Ten stuff has a certain sound; hard to define but you might know what I mean.”

As for what they’d like to achieve in the music industry, Michael says “We’ve come to a point where we don’t much care about what else is going on in the scene, we just want to write some music that we’re going to be proud to stand by for years to come. We really want our output to touch people in a way that goes beyond the usual aspirations of drum & bass producers…i.e. Get DJs X, Y & Z to play your tracks in a rave. Yes, that’s great and important, but it’s not enough for us and never really has been. We really want to make music that lives with people for a long time, not just for a few hours in a club and then for a few weeks on their ipod until the next thing that sounds more or less the same comes along and replaces it. Yes of course we love seeing people dance to our tracks in clubs – it’s fantastic – but we also love getting emails from people saying how much of an emotional connection they’ve had with the music. In many ways that’s much more important to us. We also want to help reposition drum & bass as quality electronic music, not just the paint-by-numbers affair it so often is. It can have depth, it can be elegant, it can be delicate, it can be moving. Chris often complains that too much d&b focuses on a snare that’s been smashed to pieces by someone desperate to make it as loud as possible, and thinks it’s very boring and macho – we argue about this constantly. Naturally, as Leo always points out, the truth is somewhere in-between.

The music that most heavily influences them “are as diverse as film composers like Cliff Martinez and Thomas Newmann, to indie like The Cure and Cocteau Twins, to minimalist classical music like Steve Reich and Morton Feldman, to jazz, like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, pop – a lot of Madonna and Sade and Pet Shop Boys, folk music like The Sundays and Kate Rusby, hip hop like Wu Tang, electronica like Future Sound of London and Mr Projectile…. it could carry on…” He continues ” It’s probably less that we’re obsessed with particular artists or genres, but with individual pieces from right across the whole spectrum of music. If anyone ever bothered to sit down and analyse it they could probably find connecting threads between all the pieces that are reflected in our own music. If you want a taste of the sort of things we like, then head over to www.blumarten.com/mixes and you’ll find some non-d&b mixes that contain a lot of music we really love.”

As for their favourite artist to remix  “anyone of the people already listed above would be great. The only thing is [they would] be at a bit of a loss as to how to make a ‘Sade’ track any better…”

Michael goes on to say “I think there’s a driving force in all three of us to create something music]. We’ve discussed it a lot between ourselves and, depending on when you catch us, it can be put down to a whole variety of psychological strengths or deficiencies. At a very basic level, of course, all three of us always loved music and people who love music often simply want to get involved for themselves. Most people dabble in it for a while but find that, eventually, life outside the studio gets in the way of things, but once you’ve been making music for as long as we have, (this is Blu Mar Ten’s 14th year), you’re wise to ask yourself some pretty searching questions about what’s pushing you forward and why you might be different to other people. As someone very clever once said, the unexamined life is not worth living. The answer to the question is also different for each of us. We’re all plagued by our own personal demons regarding how we want the music to be heard, what constitutes success, what the point of it all is; but I think that, even if we never released another record again, we’d still continue to create. Unfortunately, this unstoppable impulse means that there are often sacrifices to be made, and casualties along the way; but we feel this is an unavoidable price you have to pay.”

The new things that are in store for the band are the “album coming out later this year that will be all drum & bass, (our last two albums are a mix of downtempo, cinematic stuff and unusual grooves). The first single for the album, ‘Close’ / ‘Above Words’ / ‘If I Could Tell You’, was released on April 6th and has gone down really well. The next single will be out sometime in July, then the album in Autumn. The album’s going to be very musical & quite complex compared to a lot of drum & bass that’s out there right now. We thought this might put a lot of people off but so far the reaction to the tracks has been amazing so we’re very pleased with how things are progressing. There will be clips and videos of work in progress up at www.blumarten.com on a regular basis, so it’s worth keeping an eye on that. We’re also putting a lot of effort into the artwork, and working closely with our designer ithinkitsnice to try and deliver really high quality graphics that work with the music and that people will be proud to own.” The work on the album goes slowly as Micheal says “we’ve got a really bad habit of starting new things when we’ve already got lots of tunes half-finished. At any one time we usually have at least 50 tracks on the go, 90% of which will never see the light of day. We’re managing to discipline ourselves at the moment though, and work to a tight schedule. At the time I’m writing this we only have about 11 weeks to finish the album, and that’s very very very tight indeed.” When they start recording it’s “pretty much business-as-usual all the time. Someone comes up with something based on a few looped synth notes, or a drum pattern, or a chord, like a spark of an idea and either that gets worked up by a couple of people, or all of us, or left for a while and maybe picked up at a later date. Things can change lots during the lifespan of a track – in a recent track the entire bassline was suddenly reversed after months of working on it, and we were like “how come we didn’t do that sooner??” – it totally changed the mood of the track, for the better. While we’re working it’s all very much a technical exercise, a case of slotting all the parts together, but we often manage to make the music more than the sum of these mechanics. We’re not too sure exactly how this happens, but it does. We often try to switch things up when we feel like we’re getting too comfortable with a working process. Sometimes this means we change the software we use, some years it might mean changing entire genres.”

The off the wall studio antics include “a little secret bring that Leo and I often sing in a cabaret style (when Chris isn’t around to shout at us). There was one Saturday night, just us two, and we played that Foreigner track “I Wanna Know What Love Is” really loud; by the end we were both singing along at full blast in harmony, with suitable melodrama… We go through phases of watching different stuff too, we’re big Jeremy Kyle fans at the moment, and we used to have Silent Hill and GTA marathons.” The side projects the band is involved include juggling families, work, writing music and time doing label admin, artwork  and marketing it all….

As for who talks the most rubbish…”I think that probably shifts pretty evenly between all three of us. Chris and I do bicker a lot though over pretty much anything we can think of. We often just invent stuff to argue about. We’re forever having £100 bets over things, like what date of the month my last holiday was, or what the dollar exchange rate is at a particular moment. For the record at the moment he owes me £200…”

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