Boy 8-Bit
Location: London
Website: http://myspace.com/boy8bit
Bio: BOY 8-BIT’s name and music may be on everyone’s lips and ears right now but even if it’s only the spiralling, super-melodic masterpiece ‘Baltic Pine’ ... (more)
– championed by everyone from Pete Tong and Fake Blood to Cassius and Annie Mac – that you know, there’s an awful lot more to be seen and heard from this Boy – AKA DJ/producer David Morris – in the weeks and months ahead. Indeed, there’s a brilliant brand new double-header called “The Keep’/’Restricted 18’ on This Is Music incoming. Both tracks bristle with bonkers energy and hooks the size of South Dakota. But despite his not inconsiderable success in the electronic world already, not that much is known about this self-confessed former rock junkie from Penzance.
“It’s true,” said David. “I grew up listening to Guns N Roses, Metallica and a lot of heavy metal and my first steps into dance music came when I discovered that there was a copy of The Prodigy’s first album ‘The Experience’ on the other side of a Slayer cassette I was given. Oddly, I found myself listening more to The Prodigy album and feeling somewhat guilty about it. But then I got into house and wanted to see how electronic music was made. Coming from Cornwall, I had no thrust into the dance scene – we only had one Our Price and that was it. So you’re only influenced by chart dance and when you’re a kid and you have social groups, that’s bad – I was still a bit too young to go to clubs so got into The Chemical Brothers, the odd jungle tape and old hardcore stuff. My first night experience was a club called Groove Juice when I was 15 and that was funk, big beat and breakbeat.” Welcome to 1995. The best is yet to come. As is the second Prodigy album ‘Jilted.’
“Of course, I then went out and bought ‘Jilted’ – the first two Prodigy albums were a big influence early on. But in 1996 I bought my first album on vinyl,” he recalls. “It was a Shy FX album jump up album and that made me want to make jungle so I started working on my computer, an Amiga and I had Octamed. And I had an 8 bit sampling cartridge - which is where the name came from, and I started making music on that, 4 channels of 8 bit sound.” Believe it or not, the Boy’s earliest recordings were jump-up jungle business. “The tunes didn’t have names – they were just jump up!” he laughs.” I was using things like Public Enemy and movie samples and the riff from Warren G – ‘Regulate.’ Not massively inventive, but it was a start!”
From there, our Boy decided to take things more seriously and embarked on a software engineering course at University. And then things swerved again. “When I finished Uni I went and worked in a theme park and during my time there I got thinking about electronic music again and started to make stripped back tunes. This was electro-clash time – so Miss Kittin and The Hacker and Stuart Price’s mix of ‘Silver Screen Shower Scene’ were key references for me.”
But the real turning point came when Theo Keating – AKA Dj Touche and more recently Fake Blood – played a club show in Penzance in 2002. The Boy wasted no time in giving Keating a CD and to his delight “he got back to me saying he was into the stuff on it.” What was on that, we wonder? “One track was a re-edit of Colonel Abrahams – ‘Trapped’ which he then put on his Essential Mix.” The breakthrough and recognition he was looking for had come at last. After that, Boy 8-Bit put out a couple of releases on Theo’s Body Clap label (‘Turbo Loaded’/’Long Jenne Silver’). The year is now 2004. And then we took that name and it became a night for 2 years at T Bar, which was where I got into DJing and buying records again! It was a really good testing ground, seeing what records worked. We had six hours and I learned the art of DJing – starting slower and building up. It’s something I appreciate a lot more now.”
Remixes aplenty followed – including key reworks for Dave Clarke and Armand Van Helden’s ‘When The Lights Go Down’ – “but the one that got the attention was a remix of Black Ghosts called ‘Anyway’. Or to look at it from a slightly different and newly emerging perspective: “that was the first tune to be blogged!” A slew of tracks soon followed. Now living in London,
there was a release on Trouble and Bass called ‘Fog Bank’ in 2007, the mad Decent thing ‘The Suspense is Killing Me’ (by this point, Diplo was a fan) and then last year it was the mighty Essential New Tune ‘Baltic Pine’ on This Is Music that really cut through. But don’t even try and pigeonhole Boy 8-Bit – he’s way too esoteric. “I have a set of influences and I try to encompass everything I like into dance music,” he says. “But ultimately I just make music I like. I listen to soundtracks, Tangerine Dream, eighties electronic scores, heavy metal, video game music sadly – but to put it broadly – everything.” We can’t forget the key remixes Boy 8-Bit has delivered in the past 6 months either, with a razor-sharp electronic take on Florence’s ‘Drumming Song’ and a particularly rich, melodic electro-tech mix of La Roux’s ‘Quicksand’ finding favour with the likes of Annie Mac and Pete Tong.
But it’s now 2010 and as a DJ and a producer, the year is ripe for the taking. Already championed by DJ Zinc, the booming club track ‘The Keep’ could well be a contender for Essential New Tune Number 2, while ‘Restricted 18’ could be a key release for Boy 8-Bit: it bristles with deep Berlin energy and could easily find its way into the sets of M.A.N.D.Y., Gui Boratto and anyone with a love of good old-fashioned melodic electronica. But what’s up next? “More singles and more records! I’d love to get another Essential New Tune but in terms of ambitions, I feel like I’ve already achieved my goals. So I just want to carry on doing this.”
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