NEWS
EVENTS
Engine Earz Interview
Drum and Bass | Wednesday 7th December 2011 | Osh
The Dubstep music collective Engine-Earz have only been around for a couple of years but have already created a buzz in the scene. We caught up with Prash to chat about the concept of the live shows and his Asian roots.
Can you tell me a little bit about the Engine- Earz Experiment?
It’s a live Dubstep band but we draw influences from lots of different cultures and bring them all together and then perform it all live.
So how many are there of you in the collective?
It’s kind of hard to say there are a few people that work a lot with us and do their own projects as well. The core band is about 5 or 6 people which is the DJ, MC, myself on the electronics stuff the drummer, percussionist and the lighting engineer and then we collaborate with loads of different artists as well depending on where the shows are.
How did the live shows form, do you have a selection of tracks or do you kind of improvise on stage?
There’s a mix of both to be honest. There are tracks that are really important to our message, what we want to say as a band so those tend to be in the sets, depending where we are performing. The crowd as well will completely change the set for every show. Then there are elements of improvisation in there as well, all of the electronic stuff is improvised from the technical mix downs to mastering, filtering and obviously playing the keys as well. It’s a lot of fun, the live show. After the first couple of plays on Radio One by Nihal and Bobby Friction and all the rest of those guys, we were about to do a Maida Vale session for Radio One and that was actually our first ever live gig. We hadn’t actually played out yet so we built that and thanks to people like Foreign Beggars, Jenna G and Nathan Flute Box, they kind of came in and we performed live for the first time.
So you’ve been working together for about a year now and your album is nearly ready when is it out?
Towards early summer
What’s the concept behind the album?
We chose the name Symbol because for us it’s the easiest way to get the message across to a medium. Whether it be a sound, as a single, a jingle on the radio or a logo it’s just the best way to get the message across in a concise way.
You have a message in everything you do. You’re not just making music for the sake of it..
Yeah because this is our first album, we really wanted to say something. It’s not just about making a bunch of records and making them fit, we wanted to put something out there that reflected what we are about and the world we are living in at the moment. We are all pretty geeky and we spend a lot of time looking at pyramids and all sorts of weird things. We wanted to get across a message so people would look to our past to figure out what’s going on now and hopefully learn something from that. So we reference a lot of kind of indigenous cultures and sounds that have been around for thousands of years and try and mix them with today’s sound which I suppose would be Dubstep which is one way for kids now to express themselves.
Your quite influenced by Asian sounds and classical musical influences in your music but it’s essentially Dubstep. How do you go about melding the two?
It’s about passion. We all try and reflect how we feel when we write as any musician or creative person does. Whether it’ll be a screaming rock guitar played in a rock tune or a singer in a Pakistani classical Indian song or you know whichever kind of discipline it comes from, it’s the passion in it and those can be equated. It’s the same with the dirty bass sound; if you use that out of context then it just becomes aggression and that’s what it is. A lot of Dubstep is like that and it works well in the club but for us we wanted to try and give those sounds reasons to exist. So if it’s aggressive, it’s aggressive because it’s part of that story and effect. I suppose that is what we were aiming to do and hopefully we have achieved that.
You’re quite politically vocal and you open discussions a lot on your fan pages. Is that important for you to get feedback from your fans and do they influence your music at all?
I definitely feel like those kind of discussions inspire me in the studio to actually write a lot of the music because the songs are created based on themes and aspects before we really write them. The stories are there before we then compose to it. I think they are really important because even if someone agrees or disagrees, that’s not really the point of the discussion. It’s just for people to open their minds and be aware of.
So you start off with the song title before you begin working on the track?
Yeah, that tends to always be the case. I think half the work is thinking of the name really, you know half of the challenge is finding a concept that resonates with you as the creative person. So when you’re writing, you don’t just lose confidence in what you’re writing. It’s helpful in that sense of direction to keep you focused and when you’re talking about a subject matter that is important to you or that your passionate about, the writing side becomes far easier. It’s just another form of communication.
You want to work with a lot of people I hear ?
We really wanted to collaborate with artists that had a similar positive view they may come from a different background, different musical backgrounds, different scenes but the one thing that connected them all together was that they really care about the world around them in some way. I really want to work with Akala. I went to see him in The British Library for the first time, actually, it was a live performance and it was one of the most inspiring Hip Hop shows. The message was pure. It was liberating, positive and it resonated with the young fan base that actually probably have grown up on pop grime and that haven’t really met music with a message like someone like Akala or Lowkey or one of those guys.
Can you tell me a little bit about the Engine- Earz Experiment?
It’s a live Dubstep band but we draw influences from lots of different cultures and bring them all together and then perform it all live.
So how many are there of you in the collective?
It’s kind of hard to say there are a few people that work a lot with us and do their own projects as well. The core band is about 5 or 6 people which is the DJ, MC, myself on the electronics stuff the drummer, percussionist and the lighting engineer and then we collaborate with loads of different artists as well depending on where the shows are.
How did the live shows form, do you have a selection of tracks or do you kind of improvise on stage?
There’s a mix of both to be honest. There are tracks that are really important to our message, what we want to say as a band so those tend to be in the sets, depending where we are performing. The crowd as well will completely change the set for every show. Then there are elements of improvisation in there as well, all of the electronic stuff is improvised from the technical mix downs to mastering, filtering and obviously playing the keys as well. It’s a lot of fun, the live show. After the first couple of plays on Radio One by Nihal and Bobby Friction and all the rest of those guys, we were about to do a Maida Vale session for Radio One and that was actually our first ever live gig. We hadn’t actually played out yet so we built that and thanks to people like Foreign Beggars, Jenna G and Nathan Flute Box, they kind of came in and we performed live for the first time.
So you’ve been working together for about a year now and your album is nearly ready when is it out?
Towards early summer
What’s the concept behind the album?
We chose the name Symbol because for us it’s the easiest way to get the message across to a medium. Whether it be a sound, as a single, a jingle on the radio or a logo it’s just the best way to get the message across in a concise way.
You have a message in everything you do. You’re not just making music for the sake of it..
Yeah because this is our first album, we really wanted to say something. It’s not just about making a bunch of records and making them fit, we wanted to put something out there that reflected what we are about and the world we are living in at the moment. We are all pretty geeky and we spend a lot of time looking at pyramids and all sorts of weird things. We wanted to get across a message so people would look to our past to figure out what’s going on now and hopefully learn something from that. So we reference a lot of kind of indigenous cultures and sounds that have been around for thousands of years and try and mix them with today’s sound which I suppose would be Dubstep which is one way for kids now to express themselves.
Your quite influenced by Asian sounds and classical musical influences in your music but it’s essentially Dubstep. How do you go about melding the two?
It’s about passion. We all try and reflect how we feel when we write as any musician or creative person does. Whether it’ll be a screaming rock guitar played in a rock tune or a singer in a Pakistani classical Indian song or you know whichever kind of discipline it comes from, it’s the passion in it and those can be equated. It’s the same with the dirty bass sound; if you use that out of context then it just becomes aggression and that’s what it is. A lot of Dubstep is like that and it works well in the club but for us we wanted to try and give those sounds reasons to exist. So if it’s aggressive, it’s aggressive because it’s part of that story and effect. I suppose that is what we were aiming to do and hopefully we have achieved that.
You’re quite politically vocal and you open discussions a lot on your fan pages. Is that important for you to get feedback from your fans and do they influence your music at all?
I definitely feel like those kind of discussions inspire me in the studio to actually write a lot of the music because the songs are created based on themes and aspects before we really write them. The stories are there before we then compose to it. I think they are really important because even if someone agrees or disagrees, that’s not really the point of the discussion. It’s just for people to open their minds and be aware of.
So you start off with the song title before you begin working on the track?
Yeah, that tends to always be the case. I think half the work is thinking of the name really, you know half of the challenge is finding a concept that resonates with you as the creative person. So when you’re writing, you don’t just lose confidence in what you’re writing. It’s helpful in that sense of direction to keep you focused and when you’re talking about a subject matter that is important to you or that your passionate about, the writing side becomes far easier. It’s just another form of communication.
You want to work with a lot of people I hear ?
We really wanted to collaborate with artists that had a similar positive view they may come from a different background, different musical backgrounds, different scenes but the one thing that connected them all together was that they really care about the world around them in some way. I really want to work with Akala. I went to see him in The British Library for the first time, actually, it was a live performance and it was one of the most inspiring Hip Hop shows. The message was pure. It was liberating, positive and it resonated with the young fan base that actually probably have grown up on pop grime and that haven’t really met music with a message like someone like Akala or Lowkey or one of those guys.
