2015 has been monumental for Truth so far. So much so, they’re describing it as their best year ever so far. Here’s why:
They’ve launched their own label Deep Dark & Dangerous with Undeniable going full vinyl. They dished up the immense smoulder-session The Ark on Firepower and toured with Datsik on his Ninja Nation tour. They’ve developed a really cool anti-competition collaborative community for budding producers and have a summer full of shows including full tours of their native New Zealand, Australia, the US and Canada and Europe, including two big appearances at Outlook Festival.
If that’s not enough, they’ve developed a merch range, they’re deep into their fourth studio album – on which they reckon they’ve made some of the best tracks of their career – and released Monumental. The second release on Deep Dark & Dangerous – Truth – Monumental – they’ve taken an interesting gamble that befits their independent, uncompromising spirit.
“It’s an experiment,” they tell us. “We decided to make it Bandcamp-exclusive and bypass iTunes and Beatport. We’re still working out what that means, and whether the experiment is going to be a success. But so far the response has been phenomenal…”
Five tracks deep with cuts like Chimera; it’s not hard to understand why…
Still flexing timezones between LA, LDN and NZ, we sent Tristan and Dre a few telegraph messages. These are their responses…
Let’s get some background on Deep, Dark & Dangerous… Having a label of your own to develop and have full control over has been an ambition since day one, right?
Of course. We’re sent a lot of music and there have been a lot of times when we wished we could just release a bunch of it. Some of that music did end up seeing good releases, and sadly a lot of good stuff never makes it out. That’s one motivation. At the same time, there’s this thought ‘does the world really need another label?’ To which the answer eventually turned out to be ‘Yes’ haha.
We really want to nurture a particular element or elements of the overall sound. There’s some amazing talent out there just waiting to be discovered by a wider audience.
One of the things we are doing that’s really exciting for us is the DDD collab project. Every month we’re putting up a small sample pack. It’s free for any producer to download. The idea is for producers to get the pack and then make their own tracks out of it. At the end of the month we’re taking all the finished track submissions, checking them out and making a mix of all our favourite versions. It’s about uncovering new talent, exploring the way samples can be interpreted and bringing a wider group of producers together into something of a community. Rather than making it a competition where everyone is pitted against one another, this is the opposite, it’s seeing how well everyone’s music can work together. We’re hoping this leads to cross pollination between producers and people in the underground discovering each other’s music. We just want this community to grow and become stronger and stronger, with quality being at the forefront.
Once that month is done, we invite a new guest producer to share a few samples and the process starts over. We already have some dope guys lined up. So another part of this project is that after a few months, once the sample packs build up, there’s a great resource for any new producer to come download and get started with. Check the demo.
Nice to see Ill Chill on Monumental. He’s becoming quite a consistent presence on your tracks…
We love Ill Chill. He’s got his own style and quite a distinctive flow. But best of all when you listen to what he’s saying, it’s deep. A lot of meaning to his words, very well thought out, coherent, he keeps it simple and real: “Everybody’s just slaves to currency exchange, one of the reasons all of our brains are currently insane”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luk7vMWFTp0
Are you still dabbling back around that 85/170 axis like you did on The Fact, too?
We love making stuff at that tempo. We came from a D&B background, so it still seems quite natural to us. Some of our favourite tracks of 2015 so far are at 170. There was a point in about February where were asking ourselves ‘are we writing a 170 album right now without even meaning to?’ But no, as soon as we had that thought we had some studio breakthroughs at 140 with music we were really feeling. We’ve also made a bunch of stuff around 160 bpm. So when you see Truth play live now, we’ll usually drop a bunch of music around 140, 170, 160 and even a few around 125. But it all has that Truth vibe.
Finally, please share a few key monumental moments in the Truth journey so far…
Meeting Mala
We met Mala in 2007 in New Zealand and gave him CD with our music on it. Soon afterwards he signed us to his label Deep Medi. Having not much of a clue about what Deep Medi was and dubstep in general we had no idea that this was the start of something big. This opened up some doors and gave us a boost of inspiration to make more dubstep. The rest is history!
DMZ
Seeing a YouTube video of Mala playing The Fatman at DMZ on July 5 2008 was the first time we ever saw anyone play our music, and the reaction on the video blew us away.
We’d literally just made the track a few months before and had no knowledge about dubstep and the dubstep scene in the UK. One year later – July 4 2009 – we’re playing DMZ in Brixton. By then we’d realised just what a legendary night this is! As it happens, DMZ celebrates its 10th birthday this week, so a big Happy Birthday to the DMZ crew!
Youngsta
The summer when Yunx started playing our music and we got signed to Tempa: Around this time we were properly realising what it was we really liked about the music – deep dark and dangerous was most fun for us.
American Horror Story
Hearing our music on American Horror Story on US television was awesome. It’s a very popular TV series and we were very honoured when they contacted us (through our soundcloud!) and asked if they could use our track Devil’s Hands on a very steamy and creepy scene on the show. Seeing it played on TV the first time was really cool for us.
READ
