Derek Walmsley speaks in depth with DJ Crystl, one of the lost legends - discussing his production techniques and his thwarted career (signed to London, but never made an album) as well as his resurfacing with the sample-pack FUTURIZM and a remixes album.
Derek - "What makes Crystl’s records stand out is the full-frequency attack and mesmerising detail he and his studio buddies created from that break, a bit of multi-tracking, and some reverb and delay. He could make drums sound like whirlwinds, futuristic machinery, or gamelan orchestras. The wildest fantasies of the 20th century pioneers of electronic sound – of how music could be created from noise, and how the use of everyday sounds could take music out of the concert hall and to hitherto unheard places – were realised in jungle and the music of producers such as Crystl."
Crystl on Amentalism: “It’s all sliced up completely, and then pitch-changed, and then different snares are added, and then there’s transient manipulation, and then there’s different plug ins which go on it, and then there’s parallel compression. It’s almost like making a fucking track, on one drum..... It would be displayed over the keyboard in every little segment... I would play physically, manually, all of my drums, all of the edit, record it in, then quantise if it needed it. It’s all hand played. I didn’t ever draw anything.”
Crystl on cartoon physics: "I make the drums animated"
The Hertfordshire/Hardcore Continuum nexus, ahoy! - "By around 1993, he fell into making tracks for North London dance label Lucky Spin. “They were a couple of Hertfordshire brothers. And I was doing the artworks and stuff. I did the first tracks for them and carried on.”
Crystl on his creative wellspring: “Organised chaos, in my head. I’ve got one of those very noisy brains. I find it very hard to organise myself, actually.”
If not the One, then one of the Ones - "Warpdrive" was a track that rearranged my brain, made me see-hear how looping a break wasn't an easier option to programming a drum machine, but a new discipline, an emerging science, a field of competition.
That and the sheer violence of it - that crashing, collapsing break that first comes in at 2.24.
Then "Let It Roll" - incredible cut-glass breaksmanship
Here's a playlist I made that has most of Crystl's tunes in it, in more or less chronological order.
Benny L's remix of "Warpdrive" forthcoming on the remixes project
The rest of the Crystl corpus is good but doesn't quite impact to the same degree as "Warpdrive" and "Let It Roll".
This is an exciting effort
"Here is a group trying to accomplish one thing - that is, to get to the future" - Crystl uses the sample from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (never heard of it? me neither) before Nico and Trace do on "Amtrak"
Also nice use of a synth wash from The Black Dog's "Virtual"
Talking of expensive mainstream-movie flops of the 1980s.... now, is that a sample from the Jim Henson movie in there?
