To preserve your memories for the future a lot of you would probably reach for the camera or perhaps a pen and some paper, but Bristol-born and nowadays New Zealand based Aidan “Aydn” Bennett had a better idea: He wrote an album!
A couple years after being nudged into music production by way of an endlessly supportive, artwork-curating dad, Aidan grew weary of the genres tried so far, before swiftly stumbling into a speedrun towards liquid drum & bass notoriety. From the project’s unveiling in 2020, not even a whole orbit around the sun went by before his name lit up on his hbmentor’s imprint Goldfat, with a premiere on UKF to boot. Since then having delivered several tunes that embody both the aureate and, as far as the liquid sound allowed, the rotund, however, he felt it was time to for something more ambitious.
Rejecting the artificiality of our times by embracing his own humanity and focusing on hand-picked quality over algorithmic quantity, Aidan’s new debut long player from memory takes the nostalgic and extends it into the realm of garage and 140, while still retaining his drum & bass core sound.
Ahead of the album’s release, we sat down with him to discuss his evolution in sound, his familiar collaborations, and how Carl Cox fits into all of this.
What does from memory mean to you? Take me through your thought process!
Music is in quite a strange place right now. I – and a lot of other creatives and people making music – really feel the pressure of having to stay afloat with the amount of music being released. So I wanted to make something quite personal. The main idea behind the album was sampling, since I’m quite a sample-heavy musician. They are like musical memories! I love the idea that you can chop up a sample however you like, but it’s still got that link back. Something from the past, but not exactly how you remember it.
I wanted a solid piece of work out that has meaning to it. This definitely wasn’t AI generated!
100% human-made! Is that you on the album cover then?
Yeah! I was speaking to Jonny Mitekiss, who runs Goldfat and helped me with the direction of it, and we were coming up with some themes for the album artwork. I thought it would be really cool to just whack an old photo in an almost polaroid-looking shot and have some text below it, just something simple! So I was going through a load of old pictures and that one stood out. It’s me as a little kid riding the bike, and my dad’s behind it!
Fits with the theme as well! Going through the tracklist, you can see some more personal references, like ‘Akaroa’, a beach town in your current home of New Zealand, followed by the Bristol area code ‘0117’ – your previous home. I’m curious, are we moving through time here?
Not quite! I’ve been living in New Zealand for about six months, and used to live in Bristol. I didn’t intend for it to be a particular linear timeline though, I was more so trying to capture the jumbledness of specific memories popping into your brain. When I finished ‘Akaroa’ the track, I was doing it in the back of my camper van in Akaroa, for example.
Fair enough, memories are rarely linear either! Does ‘0117’ tie back into more of a Bristol memory or sound for you then?
I would say ‘0117’ is more “old me”, musically, which is one of the reasons I called it that. You’ve also got ‘Voicemail’ afterwards as well and they kinda tie in together. It was definitely more my old style of music, compared to the other stuff. Then moving on to the next one, you’ve got this break, and then into the whole next section of the album, which is newer!
A quite garage-heavy half that! Is that a recent development for you?
Yeah I think so! Drum & bass got me into making drum & bass, but I haven’t listened to a huge amount of garage. If someone told me to do a deep dive mix, I wouldn’t really know where to start! It’s definitely a new thing for me, through listening to things like Pola & Bryson‘s new album. They had some garage in there, which I thought was really cool! People are really starting to bring it in, there’s a lot more overlap now. Club nights with drum & bass and garage and 140, you just get people doing a whole spectrum! That’s what I like to in my mixes as well, I don’t just do drum & bass. The similarities in the production and sampling style make it quite a nice segue for someone producing drum & bass anyway.
‘Retrospect’ really stood out to me, since it’s so much more synth-y than the rest of your discography. How did that one come to be?
Yeah, all of my stuff is usually super paddy! I literally will have layer, layer, layer, layer, just pads. Which is really nice for soft soundscapes! But I was listening to Oskar Med K and he’s got some really nice synth tracks in his latest album, so that sort of crept in. I do this thing where I will sit at my kitchen table and will have my dad sitting there and I’ll be like “What do you think of this?” He has given me a lot of feedback on my tracks! For this one, he was saying I need to bring the synth up, because I always tend to dull a synth down to where it becomes a pad. So this was me intentionally bringing the synth up! I listen to some parts of it now and think I should’ve turned some of it down a little bit, but it felt hard for me to do, if that makes sense.
Take me through the arrangement of the album a bit!
The album was originally seven tracks, but we decided to have a sort of split in the middle to give the two sides some breathing space. I have always put intros on EPs or tracks I’ve sent out before, but unless it’s a big project there’s not much point in having a long intro like that. I’ve always wanted to do something cool with it though! Have you heard Adventure by Madeon?
He’s probably my most listened-to artist. I listened to that album literally non-stop for about four years! I don’t know why I love it so much, it just scratches something in my brain! It’s the way the vocals and the vocal chops are popping in and out. It’s not predictable music! I mean, it is for me, because I listened to it so many times now, but you get me. He also does a really good job of building tension. He’s got a really nice intro on there, where it builds in and builds up – I didn’t want to necessarily recreate that, but I definitely drew some inspiration from it. I wish I could recreate that!
Your intro, ‘maybe’, is quite lovely…
I love the lead on it – it’s my favourite part of the album. And then how it goes into ‘Crux’, it’s just really nice! It was originally more of a pad – shocker – and then I slapped loads and loads of effects on it. Now it sounds really crunchy and I just love that sound! I didn’t make the intro before I made ‘Crux’, it was more like “I love his track so much, I’m going to make an intro for it”.
The album also loops back around again, with the “did you miss me” sample. Is that from somewhere?
I actually can’t remember where I got it from, but “did you miss me” was the original title for the album! I hadn’t released in a while, so I wanted it to be something that tells the audience I’m back. We obviously changed it to “from memory” though, I didn’t want it to be that direct. So I popped that vocal sample into the intro and then the final track is called ‘did you miss me’, so it is kinda circular.
Another thing I had noticed is that the entire LP is produced by you, no collaborations in sight. Except for your dad, perhaps.
Hah! He’s got the credit for the album artwork at least.
Exactly! Was this singular vision approach otherwise on purpose?
Basically! So Winslow has got this Bad Snares Anonymous discord server right? A few years ago, we were all putting down goals – he’s got this 2020 goals list. For that, I wanted to put a solid bit of work out that was just me and that people could look at and go “Wow, that’s crazy he did it all by himself!” It was definitely intentional in that I wanted to have a statement piece like that, but it was also not intentional in that I’m… really terrible with collaborating with people, hah! Don’t get me wrong, I finished quite a few collabs, they just didn’t make it onto the album. But I’m quite in and out with my music, it’ll come in waves. I’ll have a period of a few months where it’s just not working and I just can’t make anything. For this album for example, I have probably finished three or four tracks in a month! That’s why there’s a bit of similarity in the tracks, because they all come from a certain point in time. It is kinda like a little time capsule for me to go back and be like “Ahh I remember that one”.
Let’s actually open an older time capsule of yours. You have cited feedback streams as an integral part of your development early on. How did you get into those?
I first started properly making drum & bass in 2020, it was lockdown. I don’t actually remember how I found Jonny Mitekiss‘ stream! I must have just been on Twitch on a random Thursday, seen one of his feedback streams and gone “Okay, let me give it a go”. That was me literally trying to properly produce my first drum & bass track. I remember I went back and watched the video of the first demo I sent and I was just like “Oh my god, what am I doing“.
The track was like one-and-a-half minutes long. It went from zero to a hundred straight away.
Stream-friendly and ready for the loudness war!
Gotta get those LUFs up! Now we’ve come six years and I’m releasing my debut album on his label, which is quite nice. I didn’t have any community in drum & bass until I saw the stream, started making it, joined the Discord, and spoke to people – and there’s loads of knowledgable people in there! I mean, Bristol is obviously big for drum & bass, but I personally didn’t know anyone who was going to drum & bass events in my friend group.
Which is strange, yeah! I only started going to drum & bass events post Covid.
Oh wow, you were already part of the scene and all, and only then did you go to your first rave? How was that for you?
It made me want to make more music! I wish I did it sooner. I had Shazam open a lot in the crowd. I obviously listened to a lot of drum & bass before I went, but still.
Back to the community thing though! I popped myself into these online spaces and it’s kind of built from there. All the Goldfat crew, there’s a lot of super talented people in there. You’ve got *IYRE, you’ve got Note, Leniz – everybody in there is so sick! You can pop a track in and they’ll give some feedback on it. It’s been such a weird progression to go from those streams to then being part of it!
How did you actually make that jump onto the label then?
Jonny obviously listened to a couple of my tracks, so I was on his radar. Through the Discord I got in touch with him, he gave me an email, and I sent a track in. I only sent one track! Super weird for me, because I usually have this stack for people to go through. I sent in ‘No Ride Home’ as my very first demo to Goldfat, and it just snowballed from there. I wasn’t expecting them to come back and say yes, to having a UKF premier, to then having it reach the amount of streams it has now. It’s almost been a speedrun into drum & bass for me! I’m super lucky, it’s just crazy that that was my first demo. Most people would wait years and years for opportunities like that, so I was super grateful for all of it.
Sometimes it just works out! You did have a bit of a run-up to this sprint through, apparently your piano tutor got you into production way back in 2014?
It was really random! I used to do keyboard lessons as a kid, up until grade seven. Then I had to do music theory in grade 8 and I couldn’t sight-read so that was that. And I didn’t want to learn at that point! I had learned everything by ear, so it got to the stage where you put some sheets in front of me and I didn’t want to know about it. I’m a bit sad that I never learnt how to do it, because watching people who can just go and pick up any piano tune is just crazy! So at the end of grade 7 I had a conversation with my tutor at the time. He was showing me some arrangements in some software, which I had never seen before. I don’t even know what program or DAW it was, but it was really cool.
It was probably my dad who put me onto an actual DAW though! He was like “You should try this, give it a go”. That was around 2014. First thing I did was load up the stock sample bank and just start messing around! So that was my segue into using a DAW. Would I have got there eventually anyway? Maybe. But I don’t think I would have been put onto it if I hadn’t had some experience of what it is, from both my tutor and my dad.
Shout-out your dad! So it was Hydrology first, then Ayben, then Aydn – right?
Oh god. The Hydrology stuff.
You even had some drum & bass in there!
Yeah, some really dodgy remixes hah! A lot of Spinnin’ Records, big house stuff, the back in the day stuff. I don’t even know how I came up with “Hydrology”. It’s funny, because my degree is in Geography and Environmental Engineering, so we did a lot of, well, hydrological stuff. But the name came way before I knew anything about that! I genuinely don’t know why I chose it. Then Ayben is more similar to my name now, just an abbrevation of my first and last name. Then Aydn, because I didn’t want anything like Hydrology again, hah! I just wanted something simple.
Getting back to your new home of New Zealand – how and why did that happen?
I did some traveling two years ago. Went into Australia for a few months, then did Southeast Asia and whatnot. Then got back into the UK, started working for two years. But I never got to New Zealand! So I thought, if I’m not gonna do it now, then when am I gonna do it? So I moved here, bought a van, did a little tour of the North and South Island in November. I loved it so much we decided to stay for winter here! So I’ll be here in Queenstown working up in the ski slopes. Very different to my corporate job!
Are you planning to stay longer?
My visa is two years, but I can extend for up to three. I’m planning to stick around for a little bit! Hopefully play some shows, get some DJ sets in while I’m here.
Speaking of DJs – how did Carl Cox of all people end up playing your tune ‘Gaijin’ on the radio?
It was crazy! We went to Ibiza and his poster was absolutely everywhere, as you can imagine. They were opening [UNVRS], that big new club they’ve got there. That was early May last year. I didn’t even see it myself, it was my dad again. He is always super on it, he’s literally my number 1 fan!
That’s so sweet…
He woke me up and was like “You’ve got a play on BBC Radio 6, listen to this!” I thought it was AI-generated or something, I couldn’t believe it. So I reached out to him, got in contact with him, and through his manager managed to meet him when he was in Queenstown, doing an event at a winery. That was such a cool venue. I asked him at the time like “How did you find this?”. Obviously, ‘Gaijin’ being a UKF release probably bumped it up.
Even then, he isn’t a drum & bass guy!
I know! A more liquid-y drum & bass track as well. You look at the tracklist on BBC Radio 6 and I’m literally between Diana Ross and somebody else. It was so random! He was super nice. He just came across it on Spotify, it was between my track or a couple others. Just super random! I sent him the album in advance as well. Hopefully he had a listen!
Enough nostalgia, let’s look into the future. What’s next for Aydn?
I definitely want to start DJing more. There’s quite a lot of opportunity in Queenstown to do it. It’s quite funny going back and realising how DJ unfriendly my music is! Not intentionally of course, but because I didn’t DJ I never added an intro for the sake of mixing, for example. Even on the album maybe like 4 tracks are DJ-able? ‘Crux’ has a key change halfway through! I DJed that the other day and then I was like “Oh, 10A – but what key was the rest of the track in?!”
I want to keep pushing with releases while I do some more DJing. It just spurred me on if anything! I don’t think I’m gonna take a break. I’ve got everything I need here with me to make music, I just use a laptop and some headphones, that’s literally me. I also want to try out loads of different genres and I’m definitely going to make some more garage. Maybe I’m hopping on a bandwagon, but a lot of garage recently is coming up to 140 or 138, quite house-y. It’s blurring the lines between whether it’s a garage track with breakbeats, or more of a sped-up house type. Stuff that MPH is making, that’s also garage. It’s all melting together! I don’t think I’ll go back to any super chill liquid anytime soon. I’m gonna keep trying to make some heavier stuff! It will probably be heavier garage or 140 rather than dancefloor though.
Exciting times ahead! Any last words?
Listen to the album!
