GETTING LOGICAL
LTJ BUKEM

LTJ: It was like all the different genres seem to be on a level from like 110 to 120. So I used to go out and buy house records and then breakbeat albums - I love breakbeat 'cause I'm a drummer, I play the drums - and I used to try to break the albums with just the breaks, chopping the breaks into the house music and then mixing it together.

Then out of DJing, and DJs doing that, we had things like Four Hero and those guys doing Mr. Kirk's Nightmare and early drum 'n' bass tunes. It was everyone doing those same kinds of things in that year, '90-'91, and breakbeats just came away from the house beat. House went over there and drum 'n' bass went over here, and tempos got faster and faster.

It was a kind of happening, where everyone realized, "Hey, we're all kind of going this way." Before you knew it, you could go into record shops and buy it - a whole set of drum 'n' bass. Wow! It's so hard to pinpoint when or who started it.

Air: I remember being in London in '92 and sitting up late one Friday night in my flat turning the radio dial on my Walkman looking for pirate broadcasts. I came across something I had never heard before. It was the fastest, hardcore, revved up tune I'd ever heard and it excited me. But I had no idea what it was or where it was coming from, all I knew is that I wanted to go that party or wherever the source was - probably not far away from my flat, you know a ten mile radius max. - hear it loud and live. Later a friend passed me a tape of tunes with the same speed and he called it hardcore jungle. I was smitten with the sound.

LTJ: It's mad. Like that story is what happened to so many people in the early '90s and it was so good to be a part of that. Actually going out and DJing that. You knew it was something special, even though the journalists and critics said this music is for drug-crazed youths and it's not going to last very long, I knew that ten years later it would still be going on.

Air: Drum 'n' bass is often thought of by the mainstream as just "dance music," club music, but there's an aesthetic level, too, a sound aesthetic that listeners can find beyond the dance floor. What's your take?

LTJ: You get a lot of different styles in drum 'n' bass. You always as an individual find something in drum 'n' bass that attracts you to it. It's not just house with a kick and certain sounds and its own formats. There's everything in there: from rock to jazz to hip hop to soul. Everything is in there. My parents like the music. MY PARENTS, man! I mean, it's a joke.

If you met my parents, they'd tell you. They used to come upstairs shouting at me when I was playing my drum kit and piano when I was younger. Now they're like "well, we hear what you were doing then and we hear that in your music now." So, there's a lot in there that people can relate to.

Air: What was your musical background growing up?

LTJ: When I was five or six, I started piano lessons, because I used to play around with the piano with one finger and make noises and my parents thought that was good so they gave me piano lessons. And I'll thank them for that forever. Mum, I luv ya'!

From piano I got into drums and then into trumpet and I was interested in early Mod music like the Jam, the Police, The Specials, and all that kind of thing. I was very attracted to that kind of rock drumming: Pcha-boom, pcha-boom, pcha-boom! That kind of thing, which is very drum 'n' bass now anyway. It's really weird that.

From that, a friend just took me to a soul party, and with my ability to introduce my friends to (to the music of) like Chick Corea, Bill Evans and the early jazz guys and whatever and Dizzy Gillespie, I got into this feeling, this certain vibe. The '70s guys Roy Ayers, Rippington, decades ahead of their time. Pshooooooooo! That was it. Do you know what I mean?

That was the foundation my life musically. And for many other people, I think that decade of music was It. And I'm still buying it now. I can't stop. Everywhere I go I have to find a record shop and buy some music. That's me really. That's where I come from. I've gone through every stage: hip hop, reggae, I had a sound system, gone through them all. Tapped them all.

Air: What does the future hold for Bukem? Can you think of a time when you might not being doing music? And, if so, what would you do?

LTJ: Well, maybe learn another language, but maybe later. I'd like to travel. Maybe in five or ten years time, definitely. I don't want to be a mad producer/DJ for the rest of my life. Just at some point I'd like to just go travelling. I say things like this to my girlfriend and she just looks at me like (like she doesn't believe me) "Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, yeah, yeah," knowing full well that in five or ten years I might just say, "Right, now I'm going to go do this, and it'll be musical.

In fact, they all got me in a room one day, my girlfriend and her friends, and they asked me "if you stopped doing what you're doing in five or ten years, right, then what would you do?" And without even thinking, the first thing I said was "I'd change my house into a studio." And they went "See!" And the conversation ended.

That was it. I'd have a big studio in my house, and I'd just wake up every morning and if I felt like making music, I'd do it and have an engineer and invite live people to come in and orchestras and things and just make like whatever I felt like making.

Air: You want to create that space where you can comfortably execute your ideas whenever you want to.

LTJ: I was thinking of it as a place with a live instrument setup. Also, I want to know what kind of music I'll make when I don't have a deadline to meet. I've got a lot of constraints, so I like to put a time limit on a project, otherwise you get nothing done. It'll be nice to see what happens when I don't put those time constraints on the music. It's interesting.

Air: All right, Dano, here's our favorite Q: if there's one message you'd want to tell people about your music, what would that thing be?

LTJ: Keep an open mind. That's the one thing I tell everyone, about myself or music, keep an open mind. I can't tell anyone what they should believe my music is, just keep an open mind. You never know what you might miss.

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