Every now and again a tune will seemingly come from nowhere and blast your every follicle. It will sound like the past, the future and the present all rolled into one, you will feel like you know it intimately yet have no idea what it is at the same time.
Whether you hear it in a mix and go into ‘ID!?!?!’ overload or you hear it in the thick of the dance and grab your mate so hard he falls over, it’s those tunes we live for as music fans. And it’s what I personally experience the first time I heard Deadcode – Ratatata…
That AK74 ragga chomp. Those rusty amens. The horns. If an alien with no earthly reference points landed in your yard right now and told you to explain what jungle is, play it this and there’d be no confusion.
I’m not the only person who Ratatata has had a profound effect on… Amon Tobin tweeted this a few days back.
Dangers of enjoying LA sunshine and not keeping an eye on releases: only just heard/bought this. Deadcode “Ratatata” https://t.co/JWe4sTosOB
— Two Fingers (@twofingersmusic) March 23, 2016
It’s also been a staple shredder in Roni Size and Krust’s sets, as spotted here at Rampage the other weekend…
But who are Deadcode? Surely this is too strong for a debut release from a wet-eared freshman? More importantly, what other ludicrous jungle bangers do they have up their sleeve?
Well… It turns out they’re a duo, they’re from Finland and they have been around the block a bit with other well-known aliases (which aren’t hard to work out considering Finland isn’t teaming with global junglists) But for now they’d rather keep their projects secret…
“It’s not a case of secret but separate,” Janne corrects me.
“We put the first tracks together and sent them out to labels and we didn’t want to confuse anything with our established work so I put them together, sent them out and said ‘this is a new artist, if you like the track you can have it’ Doc Scott came back to us and picked the tracks just on the basis of them.”
That says it all. Doc Scott also thought they were from Australia for a while too, just to add to their slight veil of mystery. What’s interesting, though, is how the track came about. If it wasn’t for a chance flick through a sample CD, their collaborative debut may have been completely different…
“It came about totally by accident!” says Konsta. “We both share the same studio space and were doing some collaborations together, just sitting down having a couple of beers and having fun. We made one track that was quite cool but it was pretty basic in comparison, though. Then we found this vocal sample, a ragga vocal from a sample CD. We played with it through SoundToys’ Little Alterboy vocal manipulator then threw an amen and a Dillinja-eseque bass in there then add a foghorn for good measure. Suddenly we looked at each other and said ‘shit this is pretty good!’”
They binned the other track they were working on and polished off the Ratatata everyone’s been losing their mind to this year.
“We’re both big fans of the older, darker stuff like Dom & Roland, Trace and early Bad Company so we were heading in that direction any way,” explains Janne. “We love the old stuff but we want to bring it to today’s sound. It’s the roughness and organic of the old days with the super loud sound of today’s productions. We just want to bring the best elements of drum & bass’s two separate eras together.”
This fusion isn’t a one-off accident either. Deadcode will follow up Ratatata with Bomboclat on April 18 on their own label Deadcode Records. Armed with a shank-like skank and more rough, distorted bass, it’s another verified banger in the Deadcode cannon.
“Oh we have many,” grins Konsta. “A whole bunch of tunes are ready but we’re playing it by ear with every release and taking it slowly. We know how these things work and there’s no point in rushing things….”
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