Sub Focus: “A Style Of Dance Music Can Almost Come and Go Within A Year”

It looks like you're using an ad blocker. That's cool! We get it :)
You can support us by sharing this story or following us on Facebook.

Back to Top

Sub Focus: “A Style Of Dance Music Can Almost Come and Go Within A Year”

Coming up to two and a half years since his last visit, Drum and Bass legend Sub Focus is due to return to the land of Oz for Future Music festival where he will be showcasing his latest album ‘Torus’. He’s been a busy bee and he’s not resting yet! I caught Nick (aka Sub Focus) in studio working on his live set, with a few tricks up his sleeve it seems.

An interesting place to start is gauging the age old chicken versus the egg debate – does a DJ/producer determine a genres success of the temperament of the audience;

I think it’s an interesting time at the moment because genres come and go much more quickly. I mean it’s kind of mad. Because of the internet, a popular style of dance music can almost come and go within a year sometimes. It’s pretty crazy to watch that happen. I think that each style of dance musics health is governed by how many producers are doing it well at the time. It’s literally about how many good tunes there are in one scene. I feel like drum and bass is going through a good strong patch at the moment because there are so many strong producers around. But there have been years where I’ve listened to it and there’s not been enough good music to support the scene.

Furthering talk of genres, its become apparent that certain producers, when they hit he mainstream, represent or become a poster boy for it and furthering that, how Sub felt that Skrillex was the king so to speak of his world;

I like Sonny, I think he’s really good. I feel comfortable with whoever it is representing it really. Though, I think with Sonny’s music a lot of people really copied him, which is not necessarily the best thing for that type of music. But I love was Sonny does, his new stuff is really great. He did a special version of Chase n Status’ track ‘international’, which I’ve been playing a lot, so I’m a big fan of his stuff. Dance is strong at the moment I think because a lot of people are doing kind of cool things with lots of different styles. I don’t think I could really say who I’d prefer to represent each genre. I think it’s up to the people to decide and when people like good music, that’s what becomes popular. I feel like largely speaking, and some people may not agree with this, but most of the people who are popular are very good.

More importantly for his Australian fans was talk of the new live show and what we can expect, drawing on influence and inspiration from Daft Punk and The Chemical Brothers gets us all kinds of exciting;

I’ll be completely re-doing the set for the trip. We just finished a mini documentary about the live set, it’s got all the technical stuff behind it, which is up on my website for anyone who’s interested. I was very inspired by people like Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers, so it’s me performing all my tracks electronically. I’m using quite a lot of new technology for the show. One thing is these motion sensors, which allow me to use my hands in the air to control some of the sounds, so I’m showing it in a bit of futuristic way.

Read the rest of the interview here before Sub Focus plays Future Music 2014 alongside Deadmau5, Rudimental, Chase & Status, Gesaffelstein and more.

Comments

Related Posts