It Takes Two

New York City – In dance music, as in life, opposites attract. Some of the most electric sparks of brilliance result from the simple, yet unlikely collision of two disparate entities. In the case of Londoners Layo Paskin and Matthew “Bushwacka!” Benjamin, it’s a remarkable pairing fused by the idealistic spirit of Acid House which, as DJs and producers, has them presently poised to be the tech-house underground’s breakout act and their second full-length, Night Works, stands as one of 2002’s more anticipated electronic albums.
As a boy, the wide-eyed Benjamin was playing percussion in the London School Symphony Orchestra, but in 1988, hooked on hip hop, he packed it in for Acid House’s cutting edge, joining up with seminal U.K. rave crew, the Rat Pack. Only a year later, he was one of their top DJs. Graduating from a studio-engineering course, he found work making loads of tea and honing his production skills at a studio called The Watershed, owned by Mr. C, the erstwhile U.K. pop star (with The Shamen) and seminal Acid House figure otherwise known as Richard West. It was here where the “Bushwacka!” – now widely regarded as one of the finest production engineers and in-demand remixers on the scene – met another one of Mr. C’s protégés, Layo Paskin.
Paskin, the son of an architect and writer, was a veteran of the London warehouse party scene. At 16, he was putting on funk parties, later joining Mr. C in throwing an event in a space that eventually became The End. Designed by Paskin’s father and eventually owned by Paskin and Mr. C, The End – located in a central London district where rare all-night operating licenses are granted – has become one of the world’s very best venues for quality electronic music. Tasteful, yet unpretentious, The End stands as one of the few examples in clubland where tremendous forethought was given to the well being of the DJs and the audience alike. Comfort and sound are equally important. The glass-encased DJ booth sits barely above eye level, smack in the middle of the main room’s dancefloor. (A somewhat smaller lounge is located adjacently.) DJs and clubbers share eye contact in a spot-on environment that, on the right night, can offer the world’s most magical club experience.
Currently ensconced in their own residency at The End (“All Night Long”), Layo & Bushwacka! make truly unique fashion that not only satisfies the discerning underground critics, but the chart-following superclubbers, too.
Initially known as The Usual Suspects (not to be confused with the U.K. drum-n-bass producers of the same name), their initial production forays were aimed squarely at the dancefloor. Tracks such as “Nightstalking” and “She Disrespek’ Me,” laden with ruff breaks and liquid basslines, set them apart from the rest of the sample-driven Big Beat fodder of the time.
The duo dropped The Usual Suspects moniker in 1999 and “Deep South” (the first Layo & Bushwacka! single) began to introduce a new sound, fusing together techno, underground house, electro, and old-skool breaks with Mississippi Delta blues, dub reggae, and smoky downtempo beats into the blueprint which became their first album, Low Life. Released on the club’s own End Recordings imprint, the album won the hearts of critics with its eclectic mass of converging musical styles and momentarily brought the pair onto the radar screen of the British dance music machine.
Then, while no one was looking, they released “for the fans”, a limited-to-1,000, black-labeled 12-inch of an untitled track. Structured around the bassline from Devo’s New Wave classic “Mongoloid,” the track later revealed as “Love Story”, became a hotly sought-after club anthem. (The original black-label version trades for $50 on eBay.) It took the Layo & Bushwacka! blueprint to another level, attracting the interest of major and independent labels alike.
Finally settling on XL Recordings – the U.K. home to The Prodigy, Basement Jaxx, and The Avalanches – the duo hunkered down in Benjamin’s West London-based Plank Studios. The end result (no pun intended) is Night Works. Seamlessly edited into a smooth collage, the album is sonically deceptive, making for a comfortable listen for the armchair, but on the dancefloor, it rears a monstrous low-end assault. We caught up with Layo Paskin and Matthew “Bushwacka!” Benjamin on a recent trip to New York City before they played a hot Subliminal Sessions set at Discothèque.

DJ Times: How did you two meet?
Paskin: We met through Mr. C.  I’d known Richard for ages, having done parties with him and things in the early ’90s. Matthew was working in C’s studio, The Watershed, doing a bit of engineering and Richard and I had been having meetings and things to do with the concept of The End. We met around that time.

DJ Times: What drew the two of you together to work in the studio?
Paskin: It was pretty organic, really. One day I was in the studio recording and Matthew was doing some engineering on it and, as I was writing, Matthew would say that he could hear this bit or that bit and eventually I said, “Why don’t we work on a track together?” I didn’t want it to be this kind of situation where the engineer does all the writing and I take credit for the tracks. We worked really well together and enjoyed it and just kind of grew, step-by-step from there. Then we did a few more tracks, Matthew and I started DJing more. It’s been very natural, no particular idea in mind.

DJ Times: Those first tracks ended up being the Usual Suspects material for End Recordings, right? How did this evolve into what became Low Life?
Paskin: I think Usual Suspects stuff was a precursor to what our sound is now. These were our first things that we did together. From Day 1 of doing the album, we really wanted to look at the way we kind of did everything. It was very open, no rules. We did what sounded good. No 4/4 [beats] on Low Life. Different tempos, different styles of music we enjoyed, joined together. It’s always very different doing a 12-inch single, as compared to an album. With an album you’re not confined by the rules of the dancefloor.
Benjamin: The Usual Suspects stuff was just 12-inches for the dancefloor. There’s not much more to it than that, just making tracks from the heart. The album is something to sit down and listen to, isn’t it? It’s not a collection of club tracks.

DJ Times: So Low Life hits the streets, your profiles as producers shoot up, you
start DJing more. Then you start to think about where you go from here. What made you choose to make the jump from what is your own label [End Recordings] to a bigger label [U.K. major independent XL Recordings]?
Benjamin: Well, we felt we couldn’t take it any further on End Recordings, which is a small independent label, without marketing and worldwide contacts. We couldn’t do any more than we did the first time around. I think the first time around, critically, we couldn’t do much better than that.
Paskin: It was that, coupled with a lot of interest from a lot of labels. One conversation is happening between us on one level, and then loads of interest from a load of majors on another level. It’s like, how many albums will Matthew and I make in our lifetime? Two, three, four albums – together? And the thing is it takes you two years or 18 months or whatever to make one. If you can spend all that work and have loads of critical acclaim and do really well, but because you’re on a small label with only so much marketing and distribution, it sells a tenth of what it could sell, at the end of the day you’ve made the same quality product, but all that work’s only going to go so far for you. The quality has to stay the same, but you want more and more people to buy the album. And the more avenues there are for doing that, the better. I think with XL, we’ve chosen as close to an independent-thinking label as we could with major connections.

DJ Times: How did you approach making Night Works vs. Low Life?
Paskin: Some of the most experimental tracks on the album – and even some of the ones that didn’t make the album – were the first ones we did. You know, “We Meet At Last” – the guitar-driven one? That was one of the first ones we did, after “Love Story,” which we’d released as a limited 12-inch on End Recordings. We did some more experimental stuff, should we say, than the usual dance stuff, early on. We approached it with more, I suppose, studio proficiency, and I think that we wanted to get that across. There’s a lot more depth to the way that the tracks were written. There had to be progression. There had to be some different influences, trying some different things, work with different ideas, getting very open ended. One of the things that is new on the album is the use of guitars. It wasn’t really by plan, but just by the way of working in the studio, on certain tracks guitar seemed to make the most sense with what we were doing. It was just something we were kind of drawn to.

DJ Times: Was the whole album done in Matthew’s Plank Studio?
Benjamin: Everything.

DJ Times: How do you work together in the studio? Who does what?
Paskin: It starts off with me sourcing sample material. 
Benjamin: We usually go into the studio with some kind of idea as to what we’re doing, the nature of the track.
Paskin: We sometimes discuss it while DJing. We might hear something like some good downtempo somewhere and decide that we’ll work on that. But then I’ll source a load of sample material. Matthew obviously is constantly evolving his studio techniques. Maybe he’ll have another piece of equipment, another software program, he’s continually pushing the boundaries. One of the other great things is that Matthew’s studio is never static. You’re never working with exactly the same things you’re been working with all the way along. There’s always something new, which is good because it keeps the interest level very strong. There’s more process and manipulation available. Then I’ll come in with 50 records and we’ll go through things. We’ll build the tempo and basic structure, but then what tends to happen is we write around the samples and sometimes we keep them, but oftentimes we take them away and what is left, we work with. From the process of recording we’ll come around again to what we already planned. You see, we often go through a journey sometimes for us to get there. The last stage of recording is purely Matthew, with broad interjection from me, and is about the balance and finesse of mixing, which Matthew’s incredibly skilled at. You can really hear the quality of the sound on the album. That’s Matthew for hours and hours, with me obviously present.

DJ Times: Matthew, is there any specific approach or idea you have in mind when you’re mixing down a track?
Benjamin: I just use my ears, making it sound right, making it sound better.
Paskin: But that’s from years of being involved, though…
Benjamin: Writing-wise, once we’ve got the samples, then we start playing around with them. I usually just come in and add treble or a little bit of this or that. Every track is different. It doesn’t matter how it’s done; it’s what it sounds like in the end. Sometimes you’re in the studio and you spend a long time and nothing’s happening; sometimes you’re in a short time and a lot happens.
Paskin: It’s a lot like jamming, isn’t it? Sometimes there’s a real vibe in the studio and you’re writing line and line and line and sometimes you come to a cul de sac, and one of us won’t be very happy with where a track is going, so the other will say, “Here’s the track,” and we’ll play it line by line and say, “Do you like this line?” Then we get rid of all the lines we don’t like and sometimes you’re left with a more stripped-down version and you start off again.

DJ Times: Are there any specific studio toys that you like?
Benjamin: I like everything in my studio.
Paskin: Logic [Audio] obviously is a key component. We didn’t use the E-MU [sampler] as much this time, did we? [Looks at Matthew.]
Benjamin: The ease of having a sampler within the computer has taken the pressure off having to use a hardware sampler so much. There’s a lot of time we could play something off the hardware sampler and then re-route the sample into Logic. Every track is different.
Paskin: It is constantly developing. There’s always something. Matthew just recently got a new program and that has tons and tons of synths in it and it’s a whole new avenue.

DJ Times: Are you relying a lot more on software synths and plug-ins rather than outboard gear these days?
Benjamin: For the end effect, but when it comes to writing the lines, it still comes from in here [points to his head].
Paskin: In a lot of studios, people [program] drums on the keyboard, but Matthew does it almost like live drumming.
Benjamin: It’s more natural.
Paskin: And it gives you a good groove. It’s less forced, which in dance music is slightly unusual, as most people use the “track-and-field” method [taps fingers on the table to illustrate running feet].

DJ Times: So let’s get specific. How was a track like “Love Story” done?
Paskin: It was a wintry evening… [laughs]. It started off with me introducing Matthew to Devo and Matthew liking Devo and writing the best bit of the whole thing. It’s the key, really. We had sampled together a lot of blues sounds and got one from a combination of about three and Matthew followed the bassline with the piano line and really everything else grew from there. Then the strings were written on the top to Nina Simone coming in…
Benjamin: We used the Novation and a Waldorf Micro XT, the bassline was obviously sampled, the piano was played and sampled in as a snippet of a chord…

DJ Times: Is it true, Layo, that you didn’t really like the track after you’d done it?
Paskin: No, that’s not really true. You know, sometimes when you go record shopping and you buy about 10 records and there’s one record in there that you kind of really like, but you’re not sure about it – it’s a weird thing. I kind of knew on one hand that what became known as “Love Story” was a really big record, but there was something I wasn’t quite sure about. Matthew pointed something out the other day in an interview. He said since that we only did a limited version [the original “untitled” black-label release on End Re cordings] we kind of knew subconsciously it was going to be a big record and that made it an even bigger record.
Benjamin: We’d gotten a couple of acetates cut and played it at some festivals last year and [the reaction] wasn’t an instant thing. It was never an instant track from Day 1 for everyone. For example, recently Deep Dish, in their infinite wisdom, came up to Layo and said how they really liked “Love Story.” And he turned around and said, “No, you didn’t. I gave you one of the first test pressings two years ago and you didn’t like it.”
Paskin: He said, “The black one?” It’s still in my “maybe” pile. But sometimes, it happens. You hear someone else play it and you’re like, “What’s this?”

DJ Times: How do you approach DJing together?
Benjamin: We either do half-hours each or hours each, depending on how long we’ve got. What happens after that is entirely up to what kind of mood we’re in that night.
Paskin: There’s no plan – ever. Our record boxes are always changing and each of us have our little record that we play a lot. It’s nice because we get to travel together. We support each other and try to pick each other up if one of us aren’t feeling in the right mood or whatever, and try to help. It’s also about coming up into the booth, tweaking the sound, getting a vibe in the crowd. It’s very much a “team” thing, but it’s good because in the places we play we get to play most of the night.

DJ Times: Is there a certain way that you both read each other?
Benjamin: I don’t think that it’s really any different than any other DJ out there playing a set. You’re there to make people dance and you do it to the best of your ability. If the crowd’s feeling like it needs a bit more energy, you give them a bit more energy. You can take it deep when you’re on a good night, so you take it deep. The only difference is you get a chance to go to the toilet!
Paskin: There’s balance there musically.
Benjamin: We have similar taste.
Paskin: There’s different balances that work. I think that when you have good taste in music you can go in different directions. We’re very aware of being entertainers and making the crowd have a really good time. We’re not there for ourselves; we’re there for them. We’re not playing every tune that we think is good – [it’s not] “fuck you, we don’t care what you think.” It’s very much about them enjoying themselves. For most people that go out, they don’t really give that much of a shit. They just want to have a good time. If you can make a crowd have a good time by playing good music then I think you’re doing the right thing.

DJ Times: You’re not residents at Subterrain anymore and have graduated to your own night at The End, All Night Long. What’s the scoop?
Benjamin: For me, the key factor is that there aren’t any other DJs on the night. We’re playing all night and what we’re doing in the main room is getting piped through to the lounge. In my personal headspace, it’s an idea that came from here [points to head] that’s really worked. It could have backfired, but to see that it works and it’s really going off is great. Then we have Peppermint Jam [DJs from the German label] up in AKA [the restaurant/bar, which adjoins The End]. It’s been fantastic.
Paskin: When we thought we could do it, we weren’t nervous.

DJ Times: It’s a real testament to how far the two of you have come as DJs, to be able to command a headlining residency of your own in London.
Paskin: That’s what makes us feel really good.
Benjamin: Our album launch party in the U.K. was wonderful. The thing about it is, the crowd is wicked. It’s all older, more experienced clubgoers, as well as young people. It’s great to see all the older people coming out.
Paskin: It is different because it’s a fresh thing at the club. With Subterrain, there was us, [Mr.] C, there might have been a good guest. It’s a mix of people all enjoying different people. Now, they’re only there for two reasons – us, or to be at The End on a Saturday night. There’s no confusion. The crowd is a bit more uniform.

DJ Times: Besides The End, of course, where are your favorite clubs to play and why?
Benjamin: We love Back To Basics in Leeds. We’ve only done it a couple of times and it’s the best crowd north of the M25. Ibiza, obviously. It’s one of the most spiritual, tribalistic places in the world, and it’s got an amazing energy. There’s a cheesy, rubbish, commercial side to it, but the other side is very stylistic, sophisticated, musically educated.
Paskin: Brazil, for many reasons. New York. I love coming here – for lots of reasons. I think those places are good because we have a nice network of people that we know. I can happily come to these places and not play and just socialize, which is a nice thing to say about a city you work in as well. The thing that New York has that London doesn’t –as compared to the rest of America, too – New York seems to have resisted that sort of brand-name takeover. When I’m in New York, there seems to be a lot of boutiques and bagel shops and lots of little independent companies, not all these Mc Donald’s, Starbucks, and things like that.

DJ Times: What’s your perfect DJ booth like?
Benjamin: Three turntables, Pioneer CDJ-1000 [CD players], big mixer with full-sweep EQ and a crossfader, maybe a sampler and some effects.
Paskin: The booth would be like The End, in the middle of the room, so people can see you, but perhaps a little higher.

DJ Times: No specific preference for any mixer or anything?
Benjamin: Not really. We DJ all over the place and there’s not necessarily one mixer I like over another. I would like a security guard at the door of the booth, because at The End people are always stuffing their coats and things in the booth and there’s no room.

DJ Times: Layo, as a DJ who also owns a club, how did that perspective help you in putting together The End?
Paskin: Well, what C and I tried to do with the club is put together a venue where underground music could be played that was as nice for the DJ as it was for the punters themselves. If you’ve been to the club, attention was paid to the DJ’s aesthetic – the sound system [a custom built ThunderRidge system], the DJ booth [three turntables, a large multi-channel Soundcraft mixer, built in the middle of the room so the DJ can interact with the crowd]; the punter’s perspective – adequate bathroom facilities, friendly staff and security, a water faucet so people have water to drink. After years of throwing parties in warehouses, at the time, London didn’t really have a venue that existed within that framework. I think we’ve established the club as one of the finest in the world and one that DJs and dance music fans from all over the world respect.

DJ Times: You’ve been coming to the U.S. to play since 1997. What’s your perspective on the scene here?
Paskin: While we’ve played here a lot since 1997, we haven’t regularly been to that many cities, so I’m not fully in touch with what’s really happening. What often strikes me as funny is how, even now, some of the best dance music there is to offer and some of the best producers are from America and there’s no system like we have in the U.K. to support them. Radio doesn’t really exist here the way it does in the U.K. with KISS-FM and [BBC’s] Radio 1. We like playing in America. We love New York and cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles. The people are really into what we’re doing and we’ve made lots of great friends.

DJ Times: Even if the U.S. never had its own real “Summer of Love” like the U.K., do you think the scene and the music will survive the kind of negative attention that electronic music is receiving here?
Paskin: We went through these same issues in the U.K. years ago and, while the authorities made it difficult in the beginning, obviously, the music hasn’t gone away.