DJ Planas, Ranking Records Label Owner and Producer talks in-depth to Blunted about the label’s sound and ownership, the Dubstep ’scene’, economic factors governing Vinyl sales, production equipment and the future for the label. We’ve also the original of Evergreen & Landlord ‘Jah Rain ft. Danman’ (RAN007) streaming below. Hit play and read on..
A: Jah Rain ft.Dan Man (RSD remix) by Evergreen & Landlord
AA: Jah Rain ft.Dan Man by Evergreen & Landlord
Ranking’s seventh imprint sees a fresh angle from this now well-established label. With soaring vocals from Leeds-based singer and host, Dan Man, producer Rob Smith has constructed a thumping dub steppas roller designed solely for the purpose of getting your skank on. The dub veteran and current King Midas brings low end devastation to the Evergreen & Landlord original - with his trademark heavyweight bass squelches and militant digi-dub drum loops, this is essential dance floor business!
On the flip is the Evergreen & Landlord (aka Planas) original. With a toasty warm bassline and a crisp drum track, this young production duo have made way for a mesmerising and seemingly never ending vocal hook that just keeps on giving! One for both the classic dub lovers and the dubstep soldiers.
Artwork by Johnny Lee
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How did you start running your own label? Did you just have a release that you thought would be killer and wanted to be in control of it or was it that you found other labels were not willing to sign your tunes?
We had been making tunes around 140 for a little while based on the sounds we’d heard at house parties and nights like Sub Dub and Transmission (where Exodus started), and this one tune, Miserere, immediately stuck out from everything else we’d done. I remember playing it at a house party and getting a lot of people asking who it was signed to. I’d been talking with Harry Evergreen about starting a label for a while, and when I played him Miserere and the flip – Arigato by Quark – it seemed that in theory we would had a pretty strong first release. Then Mary Anne Hobbs started playing it on her Radio 1 Experimental show and that gave us enough confidence to start up. We were all massively into the sound, and encouraged by our positive feedback, spent the majority of our time in cramped bedrooms making beats. Because of the huge output of tunes at the time it was clear that this wasn’t going to be a flash in the pan project, so starting a label seemed like the logical thing to do.
Who releases on your label and how did you all hook up?
Initially it was myself, Dom Ruckspin and Ed Quark that were at the core of the Ranking sound. We were living in the same area and were into the same music, so it wasn’t long before we started hanging out and bouncing around ideas for tunes. Guy Quantum soul was in halls at Uni with Dom and Ed, and would appear every so often, always with a few new tunes that made us sit up and take notice. To date, we have had the privilege of releasing material by Foreign Beggars, Virus Syndicate, Reso, RSD, Evergreen, Dan Man and Ras Spear.
How would you best describe the sound of your label?
Although it sounds corny I’d like to think we sound different. To be honest when we first started out we weren’t really into the ’scene’ and didn’t consider ourselves as ‘dubstep producers’. Generally we’d just put the bpm on Logic to something in between 130 and 140 and away we’d go. Experimenting was at the centre of everything – if it started to sound like something else we’d generally scrap it and change tack. It also helps that we’ve all got a musical background, because instead of spending hours looking for that perfect sample, between us we play enough instruments to record our own samples. This opened up a myriad of possibilities, and the live feel has become an irreplaceable part of the Ranking sound.
What do you think of the recent explosion of the dubstep scene? Do you think that any of the vibe or ethos of dubstep has changed over the last year?
Like I said we don’t really take a massive interest in the ’scene’. To be honest the idea of a ’scene’ really bugs me. It’s cool that there are more people digging the genre but by nature it means everything associated with the music and everything that we have been building towards is going to get diluted. I guess the vibe has changed a bit in that the DJ’s and Producers (especially DJ’s) are getting treated more like untouchable celebrities. This is really a result of people that are unfamiliar to the genre assuming that the bigger DJ’s must be either tortured geniuses or up their own arses. This is really not the case, and the sooner this mentality disappears, the better.
There seems to be a lot of talk about dubstep splitting into sub genres. People are already using labels commonly found in drum and bass such as ‘jump up’ and ‘liquid’. Is this a necessary progression for a scene to grow bigger or do you think it will have a negative effect?
In my experience people have a bad habit of putting things in boxes for the sake of their own piece of mind. Once music or art or design becomes a tangible product it can then become a part of someone else’s life, and is no longer property of the author, and from this arises a whole heap of problems. What the producer intended is in no way related to how the public interpret his or her work, so you get a divide between the other artists and the die hard ‘heads’ who sympathise and become frustrated, and the hobbyists who consider music as something that starts and stops at the push of a button, and is a soundtrack to their lives. The answer to this problem I think lies in being open-minded and finding the balance between being over-precious and taking the music for granted: it is true to say that nowadays music DOES start and stop at the push of a button, but if that was all underground music was about, it would have died a sorry death a long time ago.
What equipment do you use to produce and what do you think has contributed the most to your sound?
As a pro sound engineer Harry Evergreen has amassed a really nice collection of studio gear, and we’ve been lucky enough to have access to his many outboard reverbs, delays, compressors, mics and preamps. My favourite bit of gear is probably the 2-channel SSL strip he built from parts; you can’t really beat it for live recording. Having said that, when we were just starting out we’d plug a mic into an interface and record straight into Logic, and that would produce some wicked ideas and effects that we might not have been able to get through super-clean converters. One tune we hung a mic out of the window and recorded all of the weird night-time ambiences and just had it running underneath the whole track. We’ve also drawn a lot from Logic itself: there are plugins like Space Designer and Synths like the ES2 and the Albino that you can have a lot of fun with.
With the forthcoming economic problems how confident do you feel about vinyl sales in the years ahead and at what point would you think it would no longer be worth your while to produce Vinyl?
In theory it isn’t really worth our while at the moment! But in reality vinyl is something that I think still has legs, especially in a genre like Dubstep which seems to have inherited the love of wax from Dub and Reggae. I have used Serato and I really like the fact you can bounce off a tune ready to play in your next set, but at the end of the day there’s nothing like having direct contact with the music you’re mixing. I think so long as the online shops keep doing their thing it will provide the labels with enough cash to make pressing vinyl worthwhile, even if it means only doing a run of 500.
If you could get one non-dubstep producer to remix a tune on Ranking, who would you get to do it and why?
I think Flying Lotus would probably have a really interesting slant on some of our tunes. I’m loving the smoked out stuff he’s doing at the moment and I think his take on a tune like Warfare or even Oxygen would be nuts. Also getting Noisia on a remix would be great because…well…have you heard Noisia? Failing that I would like Abeyance to do a Ranking remix as I’d never have to work again.
Any future plans for the label and where can people check out more of the ranking sound?
We have just released RAN007 which was an RSD remix of a collaboration between my alter-ego, Landlord, Evergreen and vocalist Dan Man. We’ve then got RAN008 coming up in late Feb which will be one of my tracks, ‘Zulu’, on the A and a Quantum Soul banger, ‘Living in Darkness’ on the flip. Another massive bit of news is that we are soon to be releasing Gentleman’s Dub Club’s first E.P ‘Members Only’. If you haven’t seen or heard the GDC before then you’re in for a massive treat…there’s also the Ranking Records Myspace.
Questions: DJ Fu
