While some musicians choose to hide out in the studio for months, Dominic B and Mark Yardley of Stanton Warriors test fresh dubplates on the ears of clubbers before tracks are considered final. “I can go to the studio and say, ‘I played this last night at a club, and it was good, but this beat goes on too long and this bass line is a bit too loud,’” says Dominic. “Then we redo the tune, cut out another acetate, play it again in the club the next day, check the reaction, and come back and fine-tune it.”

The U.K. natives believe their relative obscurity in parts of the world actually helps them gauge what’s working for a crowd and what’s not. “The beauty of DJing all over the world – from Moscow to Cape Town to Europe and America – is that when you take to these crowds, they don’t really know who you are,” says Dominic. “We don’t have a massive reputation like Carl Cox. For example, we were playing in Moscow with Fatboy Slim and Paul Oakenfold, and the crowd was there for them. But we played a dubplate, which no one had heard before in Russia, and everyone sort of screamed and danced. To us it was a really good indication that a track’s working. It doesn’t matter how many people around you say your track’s good, if the press likes it or your girlfriend likes it. The best test of a track is a crowd, especially a crowd from a really weird part of the world that isn’t influenced by all the trends – one that just really likes what it hears.”

Aside from the Technics 1210 decks and Allen & Heath mixers Dominic B and Yardley are accustomed to using in clubs, the duo brings an Akai S3000XL sampler, a Novation Bass Station for triggering samples, and an Akai MPC2000 for laying down preprogrammed beats. Dominic takes care of most of the DJing duties while Mark’s live remixing is the frosting on the cake.

“We could be using pretty much the same set of records every night, but over the top of those records there would be things going on that I wouldn’t have done the night before,” says Yardley. “I’ve got so many vocals sampled up on zip disks that I can use, and I can filter vocals and put effects over the top of the tracks. Doing a lot of gigs, if you just had one box of records, and you’re just playing the same set every time, you’d get bored as hell. We’ve got to keep it exciting for ourselves, and I think people vibe off that excitement that we’re obviously feeling when we’re playing.”

The challenge they face in getting a crowd excited is that they don’t follow a single path in producing dance music. On their first mix album, The Stanton Session (XL), hip hop, house, and garage are mixed mercilessly. And the duo hints that the album of all-original material they’re now working on will be a similar mish-mash of styles. “I’m from the school of thought that you haven’t got to be so genre-specific,” says Dominic. “You know how DJs are – they just play 2-step or just deep house. I come from a way-back-in-the-day hip-hop vibe, and I love American deep house, 2-step, and all sorts of things. When we did the CD, we thought, ‘People probably aren’t going to get this because one minute it’s a breakbeat tune, next minute it’s a rap coming in. So what is it? Is it 2-step? Is it breakbeat? Is it hip-hop?’ But really, the only way we can tell about how to do a track or a compilation is how we feel about it, and that’s our barometer basically. Two years ago we did a remix of Busta Rhymes, and it was one of our first pivotal mixes. Most people were like, ‘You can’t put a hip-hop vocal over a 2-step beat!’ And we were like, ‘Well, we have done it, we were paid for it, people are dancing to it, and people are buying it!’”