Premiered in November 2013 on UKF Drum & Bass… Matrix & Futurebound’s Control hurtled into the into the UK charts in January 2014 at a cool 18. It then wriggled its way all the way up number seven. By the end of March it was the 29th biggest selling track of 2014 so far.
It’s safe to say Control has been Matrix & Futurebound’s biggest single to date.
‘To date’ being the operative term there… There’s heaps of hype surrounding the next single Don’t Look Back. Nobody’s heard it yet, but Matrix & Futurebound have teased us with sneaky photos on twitter from what looks to be another sexy slice of audio and visual drama. Will it be as big as Control? Only time will tell. One thing we do know is that it won’t be complete until the final deadline is imminent… The entire beat pattern was changed on Control just days before it was premiered by Annie Mac on Radio 1.
“Our records never tend to be in the bag until the day before they get mastered and sent to radio and big DJs,” laughs Matrix. “We’re constantly doing little tweaks right until the very last minute. We’ve looked back at the old version of Control, while not under the deadline pressure and we knew straight away that we’d made the right call.”
As we wait to hear Don’t Look Back, we managed to pull the London/Liverpool duo away from their perfectionist, last-minute production touches to get three facts you didn’t know about them. Ever generous, they gave us four. Salute!
Matrix used to be one half of Goldtrix
We’d been hired to be engineers for Goldie and he didn’t show up. With nothing to do we ended up making a track called Trippin. It went to number six in the UK singles chart!
Matrix: It was a house music act that I was in with another guy called Dan Goldstein about 10 years ago. We’d been hired to be engineers for Goldie and he didn’t show up. With nothing to do we ended up making a track called Trippin. It went to number six in the UK singles chart! It was the first house tune we’d both ever made. We didn’t think it was particularly special but record labels ended up fighting each other to sign it! It was mad. We did a few remixes but never got round to doing another single and a few years later I started working with Futurebound. Weirdly, the three biggest singles of my career – Control, Magnetic Eyes and Trippin – were all released in the first week of January. That seems to be my lucky week!
Matrix’s brother is Optical
My brother and Ed Rush defined a whole side of drum & bass, they influenced so many people and made such an impact on drum & bass.
Matrix: This is probably quite well known by fans but it’s a great fact and he’s a great brother. Matt got into drum & bass the same time as me when a kid in our school gave us a basic music program on a disc of computer games. We started experimenting and built up a studio in our parents’ house. We had a whole room full of sequencers and samplers. It was where the early Ed Rush & Optical tracks on Prototype Records were made, and my early stuff on Formation Records. There are two years between us; our sound was pretty similar to begin with because it wasn’t so easy to find information and learn stuff before the internet. You had to feel your way around things, buy random gear and experiment and figure out how to mix things. We’re both massively supportive of each other. My brother and Ed Rush defined a whole side of drum & bass, they influenced so many people and made such an impact on drum & bass.
Futurebound gave up professional football trials to go raving!
Two days before the next trial, I went to my first big acid house rave. That was the end of that!
Futurebound: I was obsessed by football growing up and was playing it on a semi-professional level. I was playing for a team called Burscough FC and Tranmere Rovers scouted me and invited me for trials. I’d gone through three weeks of trials and on my fourth week, two days before the next trial, I went to my first big acid house rave. That was the end of that! That was the end of my entire football career! The football game is hard… Only the best make it. I don’t know if I’d have made it but I was taking it very very seriously. Tranmere were doing really well at the time, too. But I fucked it all up by going raving.
Their rider used to request national costumes!
Futurebound: This was around our Universal Truth tour. Whenever we went to a new country we requested an opportunity to wear national uniforms or costumes and have a cheeky photo shoot in them. We went to China and wore full Oriental outfits. We went to New Zealand and wore the proper Maori suits. Everywhere we went we tried to do it. It worked best in the Asian and Pacific countries but we’d do it in every country we could, and we had a great laugh in the process!
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