As a man of many talents, from running the Breakbeat Kaos label, to administrating the Dogs on Acid website, to having spent a lot of his time in the past as part of the production outfit Bad Company, it is hardly surprising that DJ Fresh is a well known figure within the d’n’b community.
Yet, in the past few months, Freshs days have been even more non-stop than usual. With the release of his first solo album “Escape From Planet Monday” recently, his life has been somewhat even more chaotic than usual. “It’s been absolutely manic recently,” says Fresh. “I’ve had the last couple of months about five or six gigs a week – it’s been complete insanity. Between running the label and trying to get into the studio, as well as dogsonacid.com, I don’t really get a lot of time to do very much – it’s all quite full on.”
Freshs road to the release of his solo album is peppered with experience, and yet the production of his solo album was far from anything that experience may have possibly prepared him for.
“It was defiantly more of a process than anything I have ever done before.” Fresh agrees, sincerely. “I have always worked around themes a lot in the past, so I suppose I’m used to thinking a track through. I do a track around an idea and then I stick to that, a lot of producers go with the flow, mess around and see what happens. My album wasn’t like that. It was structured form the beginning and I thought about how I wanted the album to progress form start to finish.”
“I don’t think I’ve managed to achieve what I would really like to achieve,” Fresh admits humbly, for as with any artist, the creative process has its own way of representing itself. The end product, however, is as it is – a sublime and enticing smorgasbord of styles underpinned by the drum n bass ethos, and that ethos is definitely in evidence. The quality of collaboration second to none, but when pinned down to name a stand out moment, he was unable to do so – proclaiming every artists upon the album as amazing and stunning in their talent than the rest.
“There were lots of standout moment,” Fresh remarks, and with a vibrancy in his voice you can hear the end result of an exciting period of creative exposition. “Everyone I worked with, every collaboration, had something special about how it came together if it was something like working with DJ Shadow – which I was over the moon about, and he’s such a busy guy. The track with Neil Turner form the Petshop Boys was a track that I had sung on myself and I wanted someone to re-sing it and id worked with him before and when he rang me up and told me how much he liked the track, then being in the studio with him as he’s singing my lyrics to my harmonies on my track on my album was just like amazing. Mindblowing. You can’t describe it, it was absolutely incredible. But there were quite a lot of those moments – all the people I worked with were brilliant at what they do.”
Fresh is, at the core, optimistic about the future of drum n bass, and understands that each element has its place. “One of the things that has progressed d’n’b over the years, ” he explains, “is that every so often there will be a new sound that emerges, a new instance or a different style being sampled to create a new flavour and then every so often a flavour will appeal to people outside of the music – with my album I wanted to include a whole bunch of different flavour, because that what d’n’b is what d’n’b represents its not just the flavour of now – its all the different flavours that happens over time, you know what I mean?”
With his album standing the test of critical acclaim inside, and outside the d’n’b community, we can certainly see exactly what he means.
