Alongside a couple of contemporaries, drum and bass duo Commix are pushing their own sonic agenda

Their synthetic, synth-heavy techno influenced sound landing them the first ever artist album on Metalheadz. And – as Bodytonic’s Fraher found out - the Cambridge pair are intent on exploring further afield…

After ‘Call To Mind’, you’re now readying ‘Recall To Mind’, which was supposed to be a remix EP. Is this still the case?

Guy: “It’s actually turned into an album now, I think the initial plan for it was just for it to be one remix of 'Bellview' by Claude Von Stroke. We got that done and then decided to do an EP… and then we got a couple more mixes done by Burial, and people like that. And now it’s turned into a full on album project.”

Who else is on it?

“Confirmed so far we have got Jonny D, Konrad Black, Matthew Johnson, Burial, Claude Von Stroke, Instra:mental and D:Bridge - so it’s filling up quite nicely already.”

The album clearly reflects your love of techno – I know you had a 4/4 track on the album and then there was the recent UR remix. Could you see yourselves making anymore techno or house?

Guy: “We're spending a lot of time making techno. Towards then end of last year we went a bit quiet on the drum and bass front, because we've been practicing really hard with our techno. It’s a completely different mindset making it.

”The track on the album was really one of our first attempts; we're really trying to push on and get our techno stuff really polished and sounding good. Our big plan this year is to break down a lot of the genre boundaries. We don’t want to be specifically know as drum and bass producers - we'd much rather be known as electronic music producers so that’s the plan. We've sort geared our studio a little bit more towards techno now - it has to be said it’s got its advantages for drum and bass too.”

George: “The more other music that we make – techno and downtempo – the more inspiration we find for drum and bass. Usually we make our best music when we've been listening to a lot of other stuff.

The phrase 'minimal' has been attached to a lot of tracks in drum and bass recently - like your track 'Bear Music' and a couple of other bits. What do you think about the way producers are currently pushing this ‘minimal’ sound?

George: “Within the more left of centre end of drum and bass things seem to be going in big circles. Maybe a few years ago, when everyone was doing big soul samples and Rhodes pianos and chopped up vocals, that was the kind of fashionable thing to do - maybe that drew to a conclusion towards the beginning of last year. There had been a few too many soulful Rhodes-y tracks and people just started to look a little further afield for their influences. Certainly for us, I wouldn't even really say minimal techno but techno as a whole and electronic music as a whole really started to influence us and a few other people at the same time.

“I guess people like Calibre, Instra:mental, Spectrasoul, Alix Perez, and those guys were all kind of tapping onto a similar kind of thing, I don’t know where it will end up in another year’s time, probably something again completely different.

Guy: “I never really understood minimal techno, it always did my head in a little bit. But the drum and bass I like is minimal - the best music really is minimal, simple music and that’s what we have always been into: music with very few elements. With techno it’s the same - my favourite techno is the Carl Craig stuff, where its just a bare minimum - just working the drums, working a bassline…”

Do you think it might be something to do with certain drum and bass producers looking enviously at comparisons with dubstep and maybe trying to bring elements of that without leaving their 170+ bpm comfort zone?

Guy: “I think there is probably definitely an element of that to it. I think dubstep has open up a few people’s ears to the fact that drum and bass doesn't all need to be engineered, massively compressed, smack-you-round-the-face beats and basslines - you can do stuff that’s a little bit less engineered and more about kind of song structure and the idea within it. The popularity of dubstep and the way it has really come through in the last couple of years has maybe made people look a little bit more at what their doing with the drum and bass scene.”

Do you have any desire to make it?

George: “Dubstep hasn't really grabbed us to be honest, I mean, we're massive fans of Burial and stuff and I really like what Martyn is doing - but it tends to be the more two-steppy garage-type deep stuff that we listen to rather than the half tempo stuff.”

Have you plans to start your own label? Maybe for stuff you can’t do elsewhere? Looking at Instra:mental for instance, they've put out about five releases or so and they've already got this Non-Plus label coming through…

George: “It’s definitely going to be a plan – but we’re quite keen to get our second album out of the way before we focus on that.”

Guy: “We'd love to sort of secure ourselves in a different sort of realm really. As we said, we'd like to be considered more eclectic than we are at the moment - with that reputation we would have a lot more scope for putting out all different types of records on our platform.”

One last question, and it’s something I wanted to know personally: your much-talked about 'Ultraclean’ track with Icicle – what’s happening with that? Is it going to come out this year, or is it ever going to come out?

George: “We've been thinking about alternative methods of putting it out there, what we didn't want to do is just stick out a 12", because I think we've done that quite a lot over our career - especially early on when we first started making tunes, we put out a few things that maybe, in retrospect, we wouldn't have done. We've become a lot more picky about what we release and what we don't these days. There seems to be quite a lot of attention around it, people seem to want it to come out so we're trying to think of some cool way of getting it out…”

Guy: “We might try and build a project around it, maybe do an EP, you know, we even thought about putting it out on a cassette, just for the laugh! We were quite happy with it, it’s just it’s a collaboration with Icicle… so it’s very, very Icicle - and we don't really feel we put enough of us into it.”