New York City – Roni Size still hasn’t found what he’s looking for. It doesn’t matter much to him that New Forms, his 1997 debut, arrived loaded with crossover possibilities. By dressing as a proper album, clocking in at an epic Two-Plus Hours, New Forms extended drum-n-bass – which, at the time, here in the States, was in diapers – beyond the 12-inch record. Furthermore, by taking his Reprazent crew – Die, Suv, Krust, Onallee and Dynamite – on the road live, with drums, upright bass and banks of Roland sequencers, Size broadened the genre’s reach beyond the rewind and into the realm of microphone check.

“He understands the importance of a live show,” says his manager, Simon Goffe. “Getting artists to do that, your typical response is, ‘Oh man, we’ve got to get musicians together, we’ve got to rehearse and tour and get a road crew – it’s expensive.’ You don’t get any money out of touring – but Roni can go out and DJ with nothing but a box of records and make a fortune. But he chooses not to. He’s doing it because he loves doing it and sees the value of it. He wants to play to the drum-n-bass kids, but he also wants to reach a wider audience.”

But still, a wider audience is not entirely what Size is looking for.

It matters even less to him that his latest, In the Mode (Island/Def Jam), comes two years after drum-n-bass’ hyped commercial potential had waned. The music was always far better suited for fashion-show runways, or as the soundtrack to a Madison Avenue ad agency’s car campaign, or as a metaphor for the compression and acceleration of late 20th-Century time hurtling toward a new millennium. In short, its value was faceless. But with In the Mode, Size stands, alone now, in a post-Goldie sort of way, as a marquee figure, the temperamentally jazzy artiste, in a genre that has returned to an underground it should never have departed.

While drum-n-bass has returned underground, it was because of his marquee status and his preference for vocals that gained Size the respect of Method Man and Rage Against the Machine’s Zach De La Rocha, both of whom rapped and raged, respectively, on In the Mode.

And it’s the vocals that keep Size and crew above board. The first single, “Who Told You,” for example, features MC Dynamite’s syncopated toasting. On “Dirty Beats,” over a looped Rza-like violin figure, Dynamite’s vocal expresses Size’s self-conscious awareness of his art, and its value: “Coming down, new sound, you should be thankful.”

But mostly, Size, with Reprazent, has been the overseer of morphed, backward looped, snappy, gritty noises that flow like a highly distilled liquid tension. And, like OPEC, Size’s Bristol crew has upped the production on the assembly line, including work for their long-time label, Full Cycle. Two years ago, Size and DJ Die wrote and produced, with Leonie Laws, Breakbeat Era’s Ultra Obscene, answering the question: Can estrogen and drum-n-bass co-exist? Late last year, DJ Krust’s Coded Language (Talkin Loud/Mercury), along with an expected release from Suv, reaffirm the notion that the Reprazent crew might be the closest thingBristol has to the Wu-Tang Clan.

But still, Size has not found what he’s looking for.

Today, Roni Size is pacing a small slab of sidewalk on 12th Street in New York’s East Village, hands in pockets, his studio tan looking uncomfortably burnished in the blazing sun of late August. In front of him, a contractor on his knees spreads wet concrete with a metal hand-paver.

“I suppose I could be doing this,” he says, pointing down at the man. With the face and severe eyes of a man unsatisfied, the face of a man who hasn’t quite located what he’s looking for, Size knows he’s not going to find it today while doing scores of photo shoots and press interviews.

“From New Forms we found that the quality of the samples was really hissy, the breaks weren’t fat, they were noisy and harsh,” he says. “And it took us 180 shows to get around those problems. And we’ve still got one or two problems now. We still haven’t got the drums bang-on – almost. But we’ve got to get the breaks bang-on in time, which isn’t humanly possible. When it doesn’t sound right, that’s when people aren’t getting it. Do you know what I mean?”

DJ Times spoke with Roni Size to find out just what he means.

DJ Times: Since New Forms to now, how has the recording process evolved for you and the crew?

Roni Size: It’s totally different. Before, we had the studio and we were learning about certain things that we would use to get sounds that we wanted. And then we made a bit of money the last time out, and so now we’ve got one of everything. We’ve got an E-MU E6400 [Ultra sampling synthesizer] and the E-Synth [sampling synth] as well, a Roland sampler, [Akai] MPC 2000, [E-MU] SP1200. Some people like to use just one machine, but if you can, I’ll use my MPC to get a certain groove on the drums.

DJ Times: You’re known as a perfectionist seeking the perfect snare.

Size: With the MPC, if I have a beat in my head, rather than sit there and program it, I can hit it and get exactly what’s in my head, and then I’ve got the basis of a groove – it’s just for kick, snares and hi-hats on the rolls. I’ll use my E-MU for all my fat basses, and I’ll use my Roland for all my sounds.

DJ Times: Makes for a fairly dense sound?

Size: I think on New Forms, a lot of people heard the jazz, and they didn’t pick up on the other elements we were tapping into. And we’ve always been trying to create a wall of sound. On a track like “In and Out,” we’re trying to create a wall of sound – it hasn’t got the elements of jazz, hasn’t got the elements of punk, these are sounds that I’d been processing for the last two years and then they eventually all start to fit together. And that’s the way I make music now – through processing my sounds and finding them a home.

DJ Times: Aside from samplers, though…

Size: I got a brain in my studio, and my brain is my [Digidesign] ProTools, which I’ve had now for over two years. And my ProTools makes life a blessing. It’ll do anything you want to.

DJ Times: Did you use ProTools on New Forms?

Size: Not at all. We didn’t have ProTools then. We learned how to use ProTools on Breakbeat Era. That’s when we really started to get into it. It’s allowed us to layer vocals, process sounds, give you a different quality in recording, the versatility to be able to switch from track to track. You can be working on one track, and then you can go over to another track and just pull that one down, pull another one straight back up and it’s there instantly, exactly how you left it, instant recall. Say, for instance, I had Ben Watt come in and do some guitar work on the album. I would just go through each song, by loading up, and he would just play along to each song, and we could do 10 songs in a day. You boot down and you boot up, and you don’t have to try to re-set anything, it’s all there for you.

DJ Times: You said that you’re using the sampler different now than you were on New Forms. How?

Size: I think when I was using the equipment, it was trying to learn what the box could do. And the box would start throwing things at us, and we’d say, “Oh great, box, really good, box.” A lot of accidents would happen, and you take those and turn them into something. But now it got to a stage where we say, “OK, box, can you do this?” “Can you do that?” And the box says, “Yeah, sure.” So we’re telling the box what to do. First it was like box talking to man and now it’s the other way around. Now, what’s happening are me and the box are interacting together. We got a good relationship. With the box sometimes, something will happen, and that’s great. And sometimes I’ll tell it what to do, and it works.

DJ Times: So accidents did occur more on New Forms than on this new record?

Size: During that whole era of learn ing how to get the best ideas on record, we were making records real quick – we’d make records in an hour, two hours and then never go back to them. What we learned from New Forms is very different from what the listener learned. About how to make sure that the records sounded like the show – in fact, it sounds better on stage.

DJ Times: You sound better on stage than you do on record?

Size: Definitely, there are elements that are on stage that happen which you can never re-create again. If you catch that vibe and get it into the studio, then I think you’re on to something.

DJ Times: I would think it’s more difficult to re-create a producer’s medium like drum-n-bass in a live set-up.

Size: Let me explain. We all make music away from each other, so we’re never really in the studio at the same time. The way that this album worked was I put together 10 to 15 skeleton ideas. And I gave it to all the DJs [Die, Krust, Suv] to get some feedback. They went out and came back and said, “This is working, this isn’t working.” We went to rehearsal, as if we were rehearsing for our live set-up, and we spent three or four weeks getting stuff together for the show. Everybody was fucking around with the sounds, making more sounds. I gave everybody the sounds, and everybody brought their own. Krust does the strings, Die’s got a lot of the guitars and melodies, I’ve got the all the basses and melodies, and Suv’s got all the dropping points. In rehearsal, we’d just layer up, add more bass, add more drums, and then take it straight to the studio and record it. So that’s why the live show sounds exactly like the record, if not better. And what we did as well, when we mixed down the tunes, we put every sound down to DAT, onto CD and sampled it. This is what we learned from before, because before we found that the quality of the samples was really hissy, the breaks weren’t fat, they were noisy and harsh. It took us 180 shows to get around those problems. And we’ve still got one or two problems now.

DJ Times: What kind of problems?

Size: We still haven’t got the drums bang-on – almost. We’ve got to get the breaks bang-on in time, which isn’t humanly possible. When it doesn’t sound right, that’s when people aren’t getting it.

DJ Times: You sampled fewer records this time around, no?

Size: On New Forms, we sampled a lot of records. I love sampling records, but we wanted to create our own wall of sound. So we went and bought these old keyboards and equipment and did research on how to layer up and get a thickness out of sounds, but it’s quite subliminal as well. You couldn’t actually hear it, but it was there. And we achieved that. We got some great Yamaha keys, and some really old Rhodes, but we don’t play the Rhodes.

DJ Times: You don’t play the Rhodes?

Size: No, we use it as a character. We’ll use it as a scale, or we’ll take seven or eight chords and play them backwards. You won’t hear me playing the forward Rhodes, it’ll be backwards. Subliminally, it will be there mixed backwards with an acoustic guitar going backwards as well. It sounds like a wall of ound. You can’t tell what it is. Create the melody by playing it forwards and then I’ll just take it, sample it and reverse it and get that sound [imitates the sound made by a backward tape loop]. I know what I want to get from certain machines.

DJ Times: Describe some things that you like to get from certain machines.

Size: Again, let’s take the MPC2000. I love the groove on it. If you play something into it, and once it starts going over itself, it’s got its own groove. The SP1200 as well, it has its own groove, in addition to what the MPC does to the kicks and the snares. It gives them that body that I’ve been looking for, which is all over hip hop, which I can’t really get out of any other machine. Once you put that through an SSL desk as well, then you’ve got this sound which is recognizable, which is the heart of hip hop, which everybody knows it’s about the MPC2000 and SSL mixing board and that’s what we’ve used on this album.

DJ Times: Describe the beginning of a track. Are you loading original ideas for melodies and beats?

Size: It’s all stored in the hard drives. An original melody might be played on a keyboard, but I think what’s most important to me is to have every single sound immediately available. I’ve got this hard-drive set up, and I’ve got five samplers, and I’ve got one sampler filled with all my bass sounds. I’ve got another sampler filled with all my kicks and snares, another sampler filled with all my breaks, another sampler filled with all my sounds and loops and keys, which I’ve processed on all my vintage machines, and Rhodes. And I’ve got 160 MIDI channels. So anytime I get an idea, rather than spending 20 minutes trying to load up the bits and bobs – I never switch my equipment off – if I get something in my head, I’ve got patches of everything, hi hats, tambourines, kick snares, processed breaks, breaks from records, basses I’ve made. It’s all there and I can access it within 10 seconds. I can be in my bed, get an idea, and go and access it the way I want to access it, because my stuff’s never turned off. I just go in, and I need a tambourine, I’ve got 70 different tambourines, different loops, different shuffles, bam, kick snare. I want to create this vibe, so I go through all my string pads and go through my module and whatever. I’ve got this bass sound in my head – bam. Once I’ve got the skeleton idea down, I’m happy, and I can leave it, and I can come back and add to it. Sometimes it’s working out the arrangements as well, especially the vocals. You sit down and leave it, and then you go and start singing along with it in your head, and then you go back in with whatever just went into your head. That’s what I did with Zach on the “Center of the Storm” track. The whole intro, all we did was have a beat, and I wanted to give it a fill, and the melody in the beginning, with the string and the bass, that one came from my head. I was just in bed, and I went straight into the room and had this orchestra set-up, and I played that in and had someone come in and play bass to follow it. And that was just straight from me talking to the machine. That was me, from deep inside me, not from anywhere else. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do – go right from here [points to head] directly and quickly as possible to the machine. Before, you’d have a hard drive and to boot it up would take 10 minutes. By then, the idea is gone. And then you’d hit a key, and then the idea is really gone. You’re distracted by the keys. So the secret is to go right to my patch, straight in, and I’ve still got my original vibe.

DJ Times: How important is the live show to you?

Size: That’s just not important to me, that’s important to life itself. I don’t mean to get deep. To have the both work together, that’s what I want to see. That’s why I think The Roots are an important band. I love what they do. They’re the only live hip-hop band, really. And when I saw Prodigy, I love what they do, and I figured let me put the two together and give it my interpretation. And that’s what you’ve got. You’ve got the Prodigy meets The Roots. I was confirmed that I kind of got it right. I was on tour, I was at Glastonbury and we ended up playing just before The Roots and just after Prodigy. People don’t know where to put us. They don’t know whether to put us in a rock arena, or the jazz arena, or hip-hop arena.

DJ Times: Reprazent crew is sorta like a drum-n-bass version of Wu-Tang.

Size: I’ve got my kids on there, vocalists. Dynamite’s got some shit coming out. Yeah, the angle that we covered with New Forms was that angle. The angle we covered with Breakbeat Era was that angle. What we did with [Krust’s] Coded Language was that angle. What we did with Full Cycle, there’s that angle as well. And what we did with this record, there’s that angle. And then on the next record we’ll be able to combine all those five angles into the next record. You can just see that we’re trying to tap into all those areas until we actually find somewhere where we can actually have our own niche, our own platform.

DJ Times: Can the recording process get any easier? What are some of the things that you wish you had that you don’t?

Size: A laptop, right here right now, with all my ProTools set up, which you can get, but I haven’t had the time to buy one yet. Everything that I have at home, in my lap – that’s what I need.

DJ Times: I’m sure you’ve lost ideas.

Size: Always. That’s personal, though, you keep that one for yourself. You can’t bug over seeing a girl on a bus, and your eyes meet, and you fall in love for that minute, but the bus is gone, and you just have to walk away. You can’t do a thing about it then. The same thing with an idea, once it’s gone and you can’t remember it, maybe one day it’ll come back, but you have to forget it until that happens.

DJ Times: And the lyrics are yours?

Size: I’m a producer, I make sure that the arrangements work. You can hear that the vocalists on this album have a relationship with the producer. You can hear that. There’s a lot of technical stuff going on with this record.

DJ Times: Give me an example of how you, as a producer, have a relationship with the vocals in the studio.

Size: On “Who Told You,” I needed a vibe there and the tempo was totally irrelevant. And there was a part in there where there’s syncopation between the vocals and the beat. I was totally in tune with what Dynamite was doing. He put the flow, I put the beat, and I also chopped up as well in ProTools the vocal, because we didn’t have this piece I needed. So we took the “Don’t” and I made it “Du-Don’t to turn quick” and took another piece from somewhere else and I made a whole line out of nothing. In about six takes I took two words from here, two words from there, chopped them up, put them together.

DJ Times: So the lyrics for “Staircase” are not yours?

Size: Actually, that’s my little dig at the press. The press, in England, anyway, sometimes goes beyond the music and it becomes a personal attack. A lot of rumors get started in the press, and they’re never true, that’s where it all starts, and many times it’s just off the mark. They [a lot of press] hear the name drum-n-bass and jungle, and they think, “Nah.” But once they see it and they’re like, they’re like, “Wow.” They feel stupid for not believing it, and then they go back to the beginning again, read about it. It’s not until you actually see it that you’re convinced that there’s not much that you can compare it to.

DJ Times: Of all the drum-n-bass producers, you seem to be the one most enamored with vocal tracks.

Size: I love the vocal shit. Love it. I heard “Dirty Beats” for the first time last night, and it sounded incredible. You could hear every word, and that’s what’s important when you’re playing vocal tracks out, being able to hear every word and sing along. You see kids, they don’t know any of the tracks, and still they’re bugging. It’s almost like they do know the tracks, but they don’t, so when they do know the tracks, and start to sing along, they start becoming part of the show…

DJ Times: A nasty bassline like the one on “Balanced Chaos.” How the hell do you get that?

Size: Use a Yamaha keyboard, an old bastard, and just fuck around with it, go back and sample all the stuff back up. It’s all about processing. I’ll just mess around with a machine for two hours, with the DAT tape running, and I’ll just go back and sample all the bits…

DJ Times: How long will you work on one bass line until it’s what you want?

Size: Couldn’t tell you…it’s there. With this one, it’s more about the intro. It’s kind of a cross between old-school house, old-school funk. I made this intro for me, and I put it on the shelf and Bryan Gee heard it and loved it. It was just a guitar loop that I had.

DJ Times: So you have a collection of material at home that’s just for you?

Size: Yeah. Totally, never see the light of day. You know, first, you have to make music for yourself. If someone else likes it, then it’s a bonus.

DJ Times: What about the DJing aspect?

Size: I don’t DJ. I’m done with DJing. Don’t get me wrong, what I want to do is do 20 DJ shows worldwide for free, and all they have to do is pay for travel. Not the big companies, though, they’d be for clubs in Europe and clubs in Brazil that can’t afford to get me over. When I get the chance, I’ll do a free tour – me and one bag and Dynamite, all the underground clubs that can’t afford my fee, as a DJ. Just to get me out, I charge a lot of money. Also, I still want to develop the Full Cycle label. And the live shows as well. I really enjoy doing the live shows. When I hit the keys on my bass pad, boy, I love that shit. The whole floor shakes.

DJ Times: DJing started it all for you, right?

Size: Yes. My older brother bought a pair of decks, and that’s when it all started for me. They’d keep me schooled on hip hop and reggae, the whole thing. Yamaha P300 they were called, with a Gemini mixer from New York, an old shitty Gemini. I always found mixing very easy. I never had a problem with that. The first time I tried it, that was it. I can not remember not being able to mix.

DJ Times: And how did music-making begin?

Size: When I learned how to program on a Yamaha RX17 drum machine. Quantizing, putting together beats, learning how to program, and from there I bought a S330 Roland sampler and S550. There was a thing on the Roland, this function called “sub-tones,” and it was amazing. I’ve never heard any other sampler do anything like it. It’s like ghosting samples – ghost copies of samples, incredible. You could use one sample like 50 times without using any memory and change each individual point on it. The first sampler I used was the Akai 950 – kind of hard to learn it.

DJ Times: As far as DJing goes, how much money would you go out for?

Size: That’s irrelevant. But the reason why I tell you about money is because DJing takes me away from my studio, and I really need to be in my studio, and for me to be able to come out of my studio, it’s got to be an impressive figure. It’s just to compensate for me to recover. To Brazil and back, that’s two weeks. In two weeks’ time I can record an entire album in my studio.