A-sides

Jason Cambridge is trying to remember what life was like before drum & bass - "shit, you're making me realise how old I am!" With a decade of production behind him, from early breakbeat hardcore experiments on IE on through to Strictly Underground funk phenomenon "Punks", the man they call A-Sides and The Vagrant shows no sign of letting up regardless of his age (a ripe old 30, if you must know). Currently holding down three labels (East Side, Fuze and the newly minted Diagram), Cambridge continues to merge the ass-shaking vibe of hip hop with the wall-rattling rumble of subsonic bass in a consistently astounding fashion. "I was a hip hop kid back in the day as a matter of fact. I was the one that used to carry the ghetto blaster around. I actually used to play the drums but then I had to ditch them 'cause they made too much noise. Instead I got a set of turntables and a little four-track recorder and started looping up beats and scratching and mixing little bits of records over the top and it just went on from there. I bought myself a drum machine, then my first sampler - since then I haven't looked back." Producing early breakbeat hardcore classics and progressing on into the developing hardstep scene, Jason was one of the old school heads that used to hang around Forest Gate's De Underground record store. With four or five labels running out of the shop and heads like Randall, Cool Hand Flex and Uncle 22 hanging about it was no time until Jason got the itch to start dropping his own tunes on his own label. "At the time I used to work for this big American accountancy firm in London. I'd work there during the day, do my nine-to-five and then I'd come home and go in the studio and bang out tunes. Back in the day you used to be able to knock out a tune in a night. Things just used to come together in them days, the music was pretty basic. You could literally just go in, knock a tune up and then get up the next morning and roll into work. And that's what I did for the longest time. Eventually the music just took over my life and they fired me from my job and I was like, all right, I've got to start doing this seriously and looking forward down the line, you know?" The result was the creation of the East Side imprint in 1996 and four years worth of crowd-pleasing bombs that have since followed. Cool Hand Flex, Majistrate, Mikey James, Uncle 22 and A-Sides himself fed the dancefloor masses the mammoth b-lines and snappy breaks they craved throughout the jump-up years. "East Side has always been about good time music - good vibes, nice basslines, tough beats." The label instantly became a favourite at home and abroad as the drum & bass scene went global with tracks like "Uptown," "The Shuffle" and "The Playa" leading the way. In October of 1997, Fuze Recordings was formed in response to a subtle shift in the drum & bass scene. "The sound began to change and segregate itself into these different sub-genres. You had your jump up crowd and your intelligent and suddenly this dark streak came in with all these experimental electronic sounds and I was really into it. I had people coming in on the firm like Elements Of Noize and their stuff wasn't really suited to East Side and I was doing some things myself that I wanted to release that weren't really right for the label so that's when I decided to break out with Fuze." Fuze immediately became a favourite among producers with technoid thrillers like "Orbiter" and "Doodle Bug" setting the hard and sinister tone for the releases to follow. Although the product may not move as quickly as the East Side goods, Cambridge continues to stand by the label and its riskier approach to the sound. From a critical perspective, the abstract and experimental productions from Fuze seem to have a depth that the East Side sound lacks. With contributions from bass-prophets Embee, Elements Of Noize and The Vagrant (Cambridge in acidic-mode), the sound foreshadowed the retro-analogue darkness to come. "The average joe public doesn't always appreciate it but I always say it's more for the producers, they know what's going on even though I don't think it's necessarily that far out there." With huge tracks scheduled for release in the new year including some remix biz from Digital & Spirit, East Side and Fuze continue to be the labels to watch. Dylan & Facs, Total Science, Kenny Ken, Futurebound, Peshay and Randall are all eager to step up and drop knowledge on the label as well as the usual crew. With the newly established Diagram imprint added to the mix, Cambridge hopes to add some fresh faces to the scene while solidifying his already impressive roster of top-notch hitters eager to kick that ass on or off the dancefloor. References: Metalheadz, Fuze, East Side