Dusky Interview: Next Stage

Image: Dusky

Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman aka Dusky have become premier league names in the world of electronic music over the last half decade, their tracks championed by top flight DJs and heavily supported on radio. Emerging in 2011 with debut album Stick By This, released on Anjunadeep (a label they'd previously recorded for under the earlier alias of Solarity), subsequent releases like the 'Nobody Else' and 'Careless' EPs on Aus Music and 'Flo Jam' on Dogmatik caught widespread attention and acclaim. 

They formed their own label 17 Steps in 2014 on which they've maintained a prolific release schedule, largely with their own material and issued their second album Outer in 2016 which featured guest appearances from vocalists like Wiley and Gary Numan. Their music is an often highly melodic and extremely well-produced amalgam of house and techno, frequently featuring vocal samples, and despite their music's obvious underground roots Dusky continue to hold an extremely wide appeal.

This popularity is evidenced by the fact the current live tour they are undertaking in support of their album calls in at an unusually large amount of cities across the UK. On top of that they also hold down a busy touring schedule as a DJ duo and will appear at 2017 festivals such as Annie Mac's Lost and Found in Malta, Parklife in Manchester, Hideout in Croatia and SW4 in London.

 

Melody is a very strong element in much of your work. Do either of you have any formal music education? Do you play any instruments?

Alfie: Yeah, I grew up playing the piano. That's why I play keyboards most of the way through the live show. I studied composition, for film and TV, as well. That involved studying quite a lot of different types of music, quite a lot of orchestral stuff. That helps a lot when we use strings in tracks, which we do quite a bit. While I was studying composition, Nick was studying music production, so that's his background. 

Oh, right, I was going to ask what individual strengths you bring to your studio work, so I guess yours is composition and Nick's is more the way everything gets to sound?

Alfie: It's loosely that. That's certainly how it was in the beginning, but as time has gone on we've both expanded our skill sets. It's definitely not as clear cut these days. We have tracks now where Nick writes the melody and I start the drum programming. Nick still tends to have an overarching influence on production issues, mixdowns, things like that. 

And is it the same on your DJ dates? Is it a 50/50 split?

Alfie: Yeah, we normally play back to back, one track each. 

Would you say you had identical tastes when it comes to compiling music you'd want to play at a Dusky DJ date?

Nick: I'd say our tastes are very similar. We go through promos and dig for records and then we share them with each other. We discuss which ones we think would work for our style. It's not like we don't speak to each other and turn up at a gig with music the other one has never heard, he'll start off playing dancehall and I'll have brought a load of drum n' bass. 

Dancehall to drum n' bass sounds like a pretty good night to me! Is there any difference in the way you approach making music since you set up your own label 17 Steps in 2014? Does it embolden you with any extra sense of freedom?

NIck: I'm not sure it makes much difference from a studio perspective because we were already doing what we wanted to do before, when we were working for labels like Aus. The main difference is with the release schedule. We can put things out when it's the best timing for us, in reference to touring schedules. When we have music ready we can get it out much faster than we could before. 

 

Yeah, the label's been quite prolific in the relatively short time it's been running, you've had a lot of stuff come out. 

Nick: Yeah, it's been going well. We're actually going to try and focus on the label a lot more over the next couple of years, get the release schedule busier and bring through some new artists as well. 

So far, the bulk of releases on the label has been your own. Do you see it continuing like that?

Alfie: No, not at all. We've done some stuff with other artists and I think we've got at least another three EPs lined up from other artists. That's a trend we'd like to continue. We also did a compilation last year, 'Floor To Floor' and we enjoyed doing that, so we'd definitely like to do something similar again, get some new artists on board. 

We're still going to use it as a vehicle for our own music, of course, but more and more we want to be using it for other artists. We've always had an emphasis on quality not quantity so we won't be putting anything out just for the sake of it. 

The next three artists you mentioned are coming on the label, can you tell me who they are?

Nick: We've got BKR, which is an alias of Simon Baker. The next one after that is with Christian Piers, and after that is Bwana who works with Aus Music as well. After that, we'll probably do something ourselves and we've got a few other things lined up that we can't really talk about now. 

There are vocal samples in quite a lot of your tracks. What kind of vocal tracks in dance music have you been inspired by?

Alfie: I think there's a lot of different influences. In a lot of our club tracks, it's the use of classic sampling techniques, taking short snippets and rearranging them. I guess that goes back to hip hop, a lot of soul samples. There are still a lot of old soul acapellas out there, they do seem to work so well with house music and techno. 

Another big influence was people from UK garage, people like Todd Edwards and MJ Cole were inspirational because they would use particularly short samples. They had a certain style. Other stuff as well from drum n' bass to some of the old hardcore we used to listen to. 

What kind of hardcore did you used to listen to? Was it happy hardcore or more 94 breakbeat, proto-jungle stuff?

Alfie: A bit of both actually. Mostly what is now known as old school, but we did used to listen to a fair bit of happy hardcore. The majority of it I feel a bit embarrassed by, it definitely hasn't stood the test of time.

On your new album, with tracks like 'Sort It Out Sharon', 'Long Wait', 'Swansea' and 'Spruce' you've progressed from using vocal samples, those snippets we just talked about, to more song-based tracks. Does that indicate a growing confidence in making tracks with that kind of structure? 

Nick: We have done that in the past a little bit, on the first album, and I think we just wanted to explore that a bit more on this new album. I'm not sure it's a new confidence, but it's definitely something we haven't explored until now. It's a good opportunity to do it, on an album.

Can you see yourself going for a vocal single release? I sometimes miss the big vocal dance anthems you used to see crossover into the charts.

I'm not sure that's on our list of things to do but maybe it'll happen by accident when we're working in the studio. There's a fine line between cheese and accessible house music, it might be a bit much for where we're at musically right now.

How are you responding in the studio to the fact that the size of venue you're playing keeps getting larger and larger?

Nick: I dunno. I guess sometimes we feel more inclined to make big room stuff, but equally, we're still making a lot of underground stuff. You do want to make stuff that you're able to play out regularly, but you have to find a balance of making music that we like and music that'll work. 

Your own personal music interests stretch way beyond electronic dance music. Do your production ambitions also?

Alfie: Yeah, I think so. We've messed around with a lot of different stuff in the past but there's a line and sometimes it stops feeling like a Dusky project, it starts feeling like something else. That's something we'd love to explore in the future it's just at the moment we can't because we're on a tight schedule, we're touring all the time. 

But perhaps in the future we'd like to work on film scores or with vocalists? It's something I can definitely image us doing in the future, but for now we're focusing on Dusky.

As you finish the current list of UK live dates and we head towards the summer, are you going to want to be doing more live sets over the festival season in preference to Djing?

Nick: I think we'll be going back to DJing mostly. We have a few big festival dates lined up that we'll do live, but the live project was set up as a way to promote the album and once we've finished this UK tour it'll feel like we've completed that.

We'll bring out the live show again once we've got another album to present. A lot of the reason for doing it is that there are so many tracks on the album that we wouldn't play in our DJ sets. 

When you DJ you can sometimes be hidden away in a dark corner of the room but there's no escaping the spotlight when you're playing live on a stage. You have to become a spectacle. How do you please the crowds in those regards and are you as confident being the centre of attention in that arena compared to when you're Djing?

Alfie: That was definitely something we took into account when planning the live show. We've got a huge lighting rig and lots of visuals that we commissioned and that takes up much of the spectacle. That's very different from the DJ sets. Everything's synced up by times codes. We can loop it if we want, but there are always certain moments in a track which will be synched with the lights and visuals. 

But there is also an element of us performing more to the crowd. It is very different to what we're used to. We're getting used to it now, but definitely in the first few shows it was a very new experience after having done so many DJ gigs. It was very unfamiliar. More nerve racking, but also exciting, a new challenge. 

Have you had to smarten yourselves up for going on stage? I'm not saying you don't usually look smart! Just some acts might wear matching outfits or definitely make sure their shirts are ironed.

Alfie: Ha! I guess there is a little bit of that. You do think about it more. Sometimes, if you're DJing in a dark club you might wear a bright patterned t-shirt or something whereas, because of all the lights being projected, it doesn't look so good to wear something like that for the live show. There is more of a consideration.

What about a bit of eye shadow and mascara for the stage?

Alfie: Ha ha ha, oh Nick loves a bit of that. 

Tickets for the Dusky Live tour are available below for Glasgow, Leeds and Oxford.

Dusky Live at SWG3, Glasgow - Friday 17th February

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Dusky Live at Canal Mills, Leeds - Saturday 18th February

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Switch presents Dusky Live at O2 Academy, Oxford - Saturday 25th February

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