At some point in their careers, most DJ/producers in today’s house music scene are faced with a decision on where to take their music. They can throw a sampled loop atop a few steady drumbeats, hope it fits in with every other track played in your typical club set and probably do just fine. Or they can throw out the rulebook and attempt to carry house music to previously unseen vistas. If you haven’t noticed already, the London duo known as Basement Jaxx opted early in its career for the latter—and house music hasn’t been the same since.

For with the success of early classics like “Samba Magic” and “Fly Life” all the way up to their 1999 debut LP Remedy, the Jaxx—Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton—have emerged alongside Daft Punk as the standard-bearers for innovation in the global house music community. And just like their Parisian soulmates, they plan to push their sound even further from clubland’s accepted norm.

In the beginning, even their early supporters probably never predicted they would go this far. As Ratcliffe says in his part of the following interview, he began his adventures in the dance music community as a producer in the U.K. hardcore scene, the rave-oriented precursor to drum-n-bass. Buxton, in the meantime, spun house, and when the two first connected, the goal was to make records in the style of Strictly Rhythm. Releasing a string of exceptional EPs on their own Atlantic Jaxx label, however, the duo soon started to stray far away from the deep house purism of their roots, incorporating samba, hip hop, jazz, downtempo elements, ska and whatever else they could get away with into their tracks. Hardened, yet adventurous house jocks like Armand Van Helden, Danny Tenaglia and DJ Sneak rewarded the Jaxx by adding their efforts to their sets, as it was becoming apparent that the rules governing house music didn’t really apply to Basement Jaxx anymore because Ratcliffe and Buxton were re-writing them.

The same went for their raucous DJ sets in London, which sealed their reputation as one of the most exciting musical forces in Britain. Building up slowly from a 200-person capacity pub in London’s Brixton district to their massive Rooty monthly warehouse parties, the Jaxx pushed a defiantly eclectic and undisciplined style to a club culture accustomed to seamless mixes and stylistic sameness. Throwing caution and beat-matching to the wind, the Jaxx somehow managed to transform career-costing DJ mistakes into assets. Much like the Chemical Brothers’ legendary Heavenly Social nights, these parties pushed the Jaxx over the top, garnering “Best Club Night” accolades from the fickle English press and landing them a deal with England’s XL Records. After a pair of blistering sets at the 1999 Winter Music Conference, the duo sat back and listened as Astralwerks won a stateside label bidding war.

By the time Remedy was released later that year, the secret was out. With an eclectic collection of tracks like “Red Alert,” “Rendez-Vu” and “Bingo Bango”—each of which topped the Billboard dance charts—the Jaxx proved that their music could translate to the ears of those who never made it out to the clubs, namely newfound legions of salivating mainstream music journalists. Now with the release of Rooty [XL/Astralwerks], Ratcliffe and Buxton surprise their fan base by moving even further into the realm of pop songcraft.

Of course, tracks like the R&B-flavored “Romeo” and the modern-rock ready “Where’s Your Head At” will most certainly demolish any dancefloor they’re played on this year. Indeed, recent B-Jaxx sets at Miami’s Winter Music Conference and New York’s Centro-Fly club delivered this sound with a new force. No, the mixing didn’t enter Tenaglia territory, but it was more than made up for in the tracks themselves. Cranking through Centro-Fly’s relatively sharp system, cuts like the quirky, Prince-like “Breakaway” and especially the roaring “Where’s Your Head At” immediately ensnared a Saturday night crowd ready to party. (In fact, the set became notable in NYC terms because it represented the rare instance when a weekend Centro-Fly crowd acknowledged the DJs at all.) But, in addition to the clubby party starters, the album includes wild cards like the brooding “Broken Dreams” and “All I Know,” which show the Jaxx entering into non-dancefloor territory. Rooty may challenge and initially confound the Jaxx’s followers in house music, but then again, their music always has, and it hasn’t hurt them yet.

Over the years, Simon Ratcliffe has usually helmed the production side of the Jaxx, while Felix Buxton has handled the promotions and the DJ considerations. In this interview, both were asked separately about their individual strengths and roles in creating the Basement Jaxx sound. And their responses give a constructive model for those looking to expand club dynamics with a little imagination and a lot of excitement.

Simon Ratcliffe

DJ Times: What sort of gear did you start off with when you did drum–n– bass, and what did you learn from drum and bass that you brought into house?

Ratcliffe: Well, the equipment is the same. It’s exactly the same thing. The equipment we’ve had hasn’t really changed over the last seven years or so. Just samplers, that’s the main thing we use—samplers and a desk, a 24-track desk and some compressors. When I started doing drum-n-bass—well, it wasn’t really drum-n-bass, it was the beginnings of drum-n-bass, like hardcore, really. That kind of reggae, dub-influenced hardcore. And the first record I released was done without a computer or anything. It was done with a 24-track reel-to-reel machine and I DJed from breakbeat albums. I DJed the beats onto one track, then on the next track, manually, I played the bassline all the way through the thing. There’s no sequencing, no computers, nothing. It was very loose and very, very rough. It kind of had a sort of energy about it. I got myself an Atari after that and learned how to use computers, the principles, really. It’s the same with any music you’re doing, really. We try not to let technology get in our way. We sort of only use the minimum technology anyway. I don’t want to get too caught up in equipment. You can direct your energy in the wrong way, I think.

DJ Times: Were you using any outside studios for this album?

Ratcliffe: No, it’s all done in our place.

DJ Times: How do you work with compression on your drum tracks?

Ratcliffe: We usually compress the basics of the track. The beat we’ll compress. Like a loop or a riff, we’ll compress that with the beats, and we’ll send that as a group into the compressor, and the compressor we usually use is a Drawmer. I forgot the serial number, the model number. It cost about £300, and it’s a stereo compressor. It’s got a soft sort of sound to it, a warm feel to it. We usually kind of crank up the beats and put the whole thing through the compressor, and bits of music might be compressed with the beats as well.

DJ Times: You’re known for your erratic and adventurous drum programming. How do you work with beats? For instance, on “Same Old Show,” just before the end of the track and the beat stutters…

Ratcliffe: All of these kinds of things could be at any stage. It may be actually towards the second half of the writing process. We’ll probably start with a basic groove, and once we think we know where it’s going, we just try to make it more exciting and more interesting. We go back over it and try to fuck up the beat patterns and rhythms and try to make the thing a bit more chaotic, a bit more crazy. Maybe during the end, we do those things. We go over it and put in little fills. But there are some tracks which we’ve just started, we had beats in the first place and started with weird beats in the first place and we’ve built the songs around the weird beat pattern. It’s all one and the same, really.

DJ Times: What are you using for sequencing?

Ratcliffe: Cubase, on the Atari. We’re moving studios, so we might get new equipment soon. We’re going get a Mac soon, a real step into the future for us.

DJ Times: I didn’t know they had Cubase for the Atari.

Ratcliffe: It’s not Cubase for the Atari, what’s it called? Oh, it’s one of those programs, I don’t know what it’s called. But I have Cubase for the Mac, actually. But I don’t think that’s what we’re going to be using. So who knows? The thing is, at the same time, while I don’t like to get too involved with technology, at the same times, us—me and Felix—get overscared of changing. Because if we change we worry that our whole sound might change, because we’ve always recorded in the same studio with the same equipment. We’ve always kept it exactly the same for years and years. And I think we feel if we move now, the whole thing could change. But that’s ridiculous.

DJ Times: What are you using for bass sounds? Like on “Get Me Off,” it’s particularly grimy and nasty, and you’ve got several going on through that song. Are you using Virus?

Ratcliffe: We’ve got a JD-990, a sound that we’ve created on there, combined with a sine wave off of a Juno 1SX, just a very basic bass sound. And that’s about it, really, on that.

DJ Times: What do you feel about the 2-Step tracks coming out?

Ratcliffe: Well, at the moment, a lot of it sounds quite boring, I suppose. It kind of happened that it was exciting, and now it needs to move on a bit more. But there is some very cool stuff. I like it. I think it’s wicked. I think it’s the sound of young England, really. It’s very English; it’s very raw. It’s exciting, and as with all these things, like drum-n-bass when that happened, a couple of good things come out and about a hundred things come out which are just copying it. So it needs to do something else, but as a form of music, I think it’s wicked. It’s really exciting. It’s cool. The emphasis is on the bass. It’s funky. It’s more black-sounding than most house music, I suppose. And also, what I like about it, there’s a side to it that’s going back to rave, in a way—when I say rave, I mean to, like, 12 years ago, like ’89, ’90, when breakbeats were first being used and people like Stanton Warriors. They’re doing stuff that’s…in a way, it’s like what breakbeat was 10-12 years ago. We’re influenced by it, definitely.

DJ Times: Tell me about how you use your samplers.

Ratcliffe: We don’t really use sampler effects, really. We use them very straight, really. We have samplers, like Akais, with lots of memory, like 32 Megs, so we can get loads of stuff in there, lots of space. We don’t really use the filters and effects. We use the filters sometimes to make something sound softer if it sounds too hard. But we don’t really use the samplers, the inbuilt effects. We usually use outboard effects. All we’ve got outboard-effects wise is a Boss SE-50 and the Digitech StudioQuad. That’s all we have.

DJ Times: How are you using live instrumentation on tracks like “All I Know”?

Ratcliffe: Well, on that track, we started with the guitar bit. The guitar, it was kind of the rhythm, and the chords. And then keyboards I played on top and came up with a couple of phrases that seemed to work and positioned them as necessary.

DJ Times: In the sequencing process, I take it.

Ratcliffe: Yeah.

DJ Times: How many tracks are you recording with on this album? How many layers are in the tracks?

Ratcliffe: A 24-channel desk, and we fill it up nearly every time. Normally, there’s like two or three sounds on every channel. We need a bigger desk, actually, with 36 channels, at least.

DJ Times: What desk do you have?

Ratcliffe: It’s a Soundcraft Spirit Studio.

DJ Times: How does the track start first?

Ratcliffe: It changes. Sometimes, with “Red Alert,” we had a loop and we pitched the loop up and put it through a filter, a Moog synthesizer, and filtered it. And that’s how that started. Then we put some beats on it and the vocal. And that was that. Other things, they might start with a vocal—trying to think…other things we write as we go along. “Romeo,” we wrote that as went along. We came up with the riff and we put some vocals on it, and then we had to decide whether it would be housey or whether we wanted it to be more mellow and we were trying to work out how strong the beat element should be. And we decided to make it as basic as possible, but try to take the emphasis away from the house beat—because there’s so much music that goes boom-boom-boom. And as soon as you hear that house beat, the track sounds more normal. It doesn’t sound as interesting. So we kind of try to reduce that house beat element while still making it playable in clubs, try to strike a balance. Vocals first, music first, beats first—it really depends. It’s different every time.

Felix Buxton

DJ Times: Are you still doing Rooty? And why did you start to do the underground club night again?

Buxton: Yeah, we’ve been doing that since we started doing this album. Just because, really, that’s the only way you can test things out. Any experimental records we’ve got to play, or anything like that, it means you got the freedom to play them. So definitely, if we’re doing a big Basement Jaxx gig, there’s not a lot you can do right off on a tangent, because you can lose people, and they’ve come out to have a good time as well. But at our club at home, people trust us, so we can do anything. And any ideas we’ve got for tracks, we play with them. Like “Where’s Your Head At,” that’s definitely been the biggest for us for the last couple of months.

DJ Times: Coming out to Rooty, what do you give the regulars on a typical night?

Buxton: I always try and play some current, fresh R&B and hip hop that people may not have heard, which may not be what they’re used to dancing to. Because definitely, some of the Bounce stuff, what’s it called, “Southern Hospitality” by Ludikris, tracks like that you’ll play in England, like the Bounce thing, people don’t understand, but you always try to play something like that to show people different musical energies, and maybe a couple of classics that they haven’t heard for a long time, maybe one sort of downtempo, one Latin track. And towards midnight, half-12, we start playing house and a bit of 2-step, just trying to make it all sound alive, not being scared to stop it and play a slow track or an old funk track or anything.

DJ Times: As a DJ, how often are you rotating different records? How long do records last in your bag until they leave?

Buxton: Until there’s a better one. I mean, there’s definitely a couple of tracks in Miami that I’ve been playing for Miami for a long time, about two tracks. But I find it hard with other people’s tracks, to find really good ones that will last and will keep going. DJ Times: What are those tracks? Buxton: Just one track that’s gone down really well, particularly on Saturday, because I almost blew the sound system with it. It’s called “Airfrog.” It’s on Spec Records, which is Sweden. And I think it’s about a year old.

DJ Times: Are there are any producers or labels right now that are spinning your wheels?

Buxton: I don’t know. Right now at the moment, it’s kind of hip hop and R&B that I prefer, because production-wise, it’s a lot more cutting-edge. Often, club music, it just all sounds the same. The more experimental electronics are going on in R&B rather than in electronica, which is odd.

DJ Times: What should a DJ know about songwriting if they’re going to get involved with it?

Buxton: In a way, it doesn’t need to be classic songwriting or anything. The main thing is that you’re putting across a certain vibe, a certain personality in your music. That could be by chopping samples together, it could be…you could like scratch your anthem, if you’re an amazing scratcher, and then chop that all together, and that could be what you’re saying, and that’s great. So it’s just finding what’s true to you. For me, I suppose, I’ve always loved songs, so that seems natural for me, to sing a song. It doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways. The idea of instrumental records is great, but it’s very hard to make an individual and unique instrumental record, where you really look at the structure and deconstruct it and start from scratch.

DJ Times: As DJs, you’re known for not being very fussy about your mixes.

Buxton: In Miami, someone came up to us and said, “How do you create such a fucked-up mixing style?”

DJ Times: How do you do it, then?

Buxton: Twelve vodkas and not really giving a shit.

DJ Times: But what is the philosophy? Is there a point to not really giving a shit? Because a lot of DJs really do care about that sort of thing.

Buxton: The main thing is that the music is more important than the mix! And I think that with house music DJs, they forget that, and they say, “I’ve got two records and they blend absolutely perfectly together.” But you say, “Individually, are those tracks doing anything? Are they changing people’s lives or are they really making them have a good time or making them dance their asses off?” Is it just a banging beat? The main thing with a beat is it should make you dance, not beat you into submission. Definitely, when I started DJing, I used to try and get the perfectly smooth garage mix. And that’s a certain thing, deep garage, that whole vibe of just going on and on, or with deep techno—it’s the same. You get into a dreamlike state and you stay there, which is cool, and there’s something to be said for that. But I just want something different. Well, definitely at our club. I think that [when] that whole thing just started out the DJ booth kept on being knocked by people who were dancing. And then the crowd started cheering whenever this happened. And so I used to just stop the record and make a feat of it and play sirens and that would get the crowd going crazy. And there wasn’t even any music playing. And I think with DJing, you’ve gotta remember there’s an energy with the people, and you’re just trying to enhance that and push it to new levels and you’re using the music to do that and you have to do something with the music to get it like that. It’s not necessarily even playing it! [laughs] It’s being with the crowd and saying, “Yeah, we’re going off somewhere together and who knows what’s going to happen next?” Being attentive. Like fucking up a mix, that’s what you kind of do. You go, “Blllll!” And people go, “What the hell’s going on?” And you go, “OK, I’m going to do something else now. Are you listening?”

DJ Times: So you’re still recording?

Buxton: Well, we only finished the album a few weeks ago. It’s so new, it’s ridiculous, and now we’re signing off on the artwork. When we get back, we’re going to finish a couple of tracks for Ronnie Richards. He’s a reggae artist and he’s doing an album on our label, so we’re going to quickly finish that off and maybe do a remix of “Romeo.”

DJ Times: There’s a lot less DJ-oriented tracks on this album. Are you moving away from the dancefloor?

Buxton: I don’t know. Maybe. We’re just trying to make modern songs and not really thinking if they’re pop, dance or anything. Just like it’s a song and that it’s different. With “Romeo,” the thing is that we were unsure—we tried to make it really clubby, but we had a quiet, mellow version that we played at our club and people really went for it, and it was like, “Hang on a minute. It isn’t even banging yet and they’re really going for it.” So it was like, “Why should we make it banging? You can’t make everything just like boom-boom-boom.” It’s difficult to judge with that. Because you want to challenge things a bit and say, “OK, we’re not going to have the big banging beat, because that’s the obvious thing to do.” I don’t know. We’ll probably do a banging beat mix of it.

DJ Times: There are a few tracks you’ve done, like the Eminem/The Jam-sampled track, that didn’t make it onto the album. How do you distinguish between what you’ll play in the clubs and what makes it onto an album like Rooty?

Buxton: With The Jam/Eminem thing, that was…if we had that as our own album track, it wouldn’t really feel as if we’ve created the whole thing, because it’s a bit of his voice that you appreciate and you think of Eminem, the whole story and a bit of The Jam. And it kind of worked, but it’s not really pushing the boundaries or doing something incredibly creative. It’s very much a sample cut, which is good to do, and it’s great to play. But we never clear the samples. We only did a couple thousand copies and that was it. It’s nice to do those things, because it makes it special for the DJs who are really into the scene and really check out these things.

DJ Times: What sort of mixers do you like?

Buxton: Well, at home, I’ve got a [Pioneer] DJM-500. They’re great because of all the effects and the things you can do with them, although the sound, I think, is slightly colder than some of the mixers. It’s got this modern kind of digital effect-y sheen to it. It’s got four inputs, and it’s got your flangers and pitch-shifts. It means I can play an instrumental or something and I can stick an a cappella over the top and sheen it by putting it through the pitch-shift. For things like that, it’s really cool.

DJ Times: But do you request anything from the clubs when you mix?

Buxton: We’re getting more and more minimal. It’s great to have a mic there and have some effects as well, because it means that you can kind of mess around with things. If you want to have a little break from the whole thing, you just do something on the mic and put on massive effects and spin records around and you can make a wall of sound.

DJ Times: Do you bring your own effects?

Buxton: We used to—I’ve got a reggae siren, I’ve got a friend of mine, he does reggae sound systems. We used to take that around. But that’s at home at the moment. With all these toys, you love them for a bit, and then you kind of get enough of them. The siren’s like “Eeeeyooooooo!” and that sort of thing and like reggae bleeps and things. You can only hear a certain amount and then you want to hear something different. So we do our own acetates of sound effects, like helicopter noises and swishes and “Basement Jaxx in the house.”

DJ Times: Was there any attempt to make this new album sound different than Remedy?

Buxton: Well, we just sought to carry on with what we’re doing and try and not be restrained by what we feel we should do. We definitely felt more freedom, because we had confidence in what we had done before, so it was to make new tracks and worry as little as possible. With Remedy, we were analyzing every stage—“Is this cool? Is this going to work?” We hadn’t put an album out there, so we didn’t know what would happen. This time it was just, “Let’s kind of get on with it and just try loads of things and try not to get caught up in it. Let the music do the work for the thing.”

DJ Times: Where does the kitchen-sink approach to your music come from? Like the sample on “Broken Dreams,” where does that come from?

Buxton: It’s actually a “Spanish Holiday” record I bought in an old people’s charity shop. And that’s just kind of…well, the sample you hear at the beginning is only one side of the track because the left and the right are really separated. We just had the one sample and the flute is on one side of the recording, so we kind of stripped it out of the beginning. And now, hearing it at the beginning, it is kind of ridiculous. Just hearing the beginning of the record before, and the sample, it’s like, “That sound is lovely.” Forgetting the flute by itself, the vibe of the thing going round and round, that was cool for me. That will give me the right vibe. And with the trumpets coming in at the second half, I was really into the Buena Vista Cuban jazz, that whole thing. So it’s kind of giving it a bit of that feel and a bit of a dream feel.

DJ Times: How are you working with the music these days?

Buxton: I suppose I’m always buying records and getting samples. That’s just something I do. I buy loads of crap records until I find something interesting. I’m always thinking about lyrics and melodies and things. Simon’s always going, “Are you sure we don’t need something on this track?” And I’ll go, “Well, maybe just a few little items here and there.”

DJ Times: You’re the one who usually sings with the effects on your voice. Are you also working with the Vocoders?

Buxton: Well, on “Breakaway,” I think that’s just a straight pitch-shift. Normally, we’ll get some grooves. Simon might pick up the guitar. I’ll get the mic and just sort of do some stuff and record it straight onto DAT.

DJ Times: If someone like Jennifer Lopez came up to you and asked you to work with her, would you do it?

Buxton: No! Not Jennifer Lopez. I do actually like a couple of her songs. The mixes have been put together very cleverly. But someone from the hip hop community that we respect, like Busta Rhymes or Missy Elliott.