FreQ Nasty
Location: London/LA
Bio: FREQ NASTY a.k.a. Darin McFayden
BORN
I was born in Suva in Fiji, in 1969.
FAMILY
I grew up in Fiji until I was 3 or 4 and then ... (more)
moved to New Zealand, so I actually grew up in Aukland. In terms of music, my dad used to play in bands in Fiji when he was a kid. I remember him telling stories about how he was in bands when he was really young, about 14 or 15 and sneaking out to play in bars. I remember him saying when he was 14 or 15, he was earning more in a week than his dad was in a month from playing in bands. So he’d sneak out and play at night and sneak back in and go to school the next morning. He said it was crazy – because they were all so young, they used to have to hire security. They used to play at these really rough bars in the outskirts of Suva so they’d have to get the bigger, older guys to protect them. The shows were rowdy, fights breaking out – this was in the outskirts of essentially a small town in a third world country in the ‘50s. So he was playing music and he always used to have a guitar in the house, we used to play and sing to music. I remember the records he used to have around – the Beatles, a lot of old blues records, Muddy Waters and bluesey and jazz guitar-oriented stuff. Probably the Beatles records were my mom’s, she was more into the pop side of things. I used to flick through his records but I never really listened to the blues and jazz stuff till much later, until I started playing guitar. I loved the Beatles records, but the other records I couldn’t even tell you what tunes they were, I can only remember the sleeves.
MUSICAL ROOTS
I started off playing drums in school at 13; I was into that for a few years. My dad always had a guitar lying around the house but I never really made any effort to play it until I was 14 or 15.. I was 14 and really wanted to have this guitar that I could see in my local guitar shop window; I decided I needed to have it and I was willing to do whatever it took to get it. So I got this job and it was torture, cutting holes out of bits of plastic for a spa pool company 8 hours a day, it was awful – I remember thinking, “I’m going to get that guitar and then I’m never going to have another shit job like this again!” It was quite powerful really, it was a turning point. Just previous to that I remember going to the dentist when I was 13 with my mum. We walked in and checked in with the woman on the desk and sat down, and I was sat there looking around the room and I was watching the woman sitting there. Then I went in and did whatever I’d had done – maybe they drilled my tooth or pulled out a tooth or something, so I was in that morphine haze that you have after the dentist, and I was saying to mum, “What does that woman do behind that desk?” And my mum said, “Oh, I think she just answers the phones and does what you saw when you were in there.” And I was like, “No, but what does she do though?” And my mom was like, “That’s kind of what she does.” I was outraged, like, “All day?” And my mom said, “Yep, all day.” And I was like “What, every day, all week?” And my mom said, “Yep, every day all week.” I was absolutely fucking astounded. I mean, dad’s job was sticking bottles of wines in crates when we first moved from Fiji to New Zealand, so it’s not like I had no idea of shit jobs, but I think there’s a point when you’re a kid that you realise when you’re out of school you actually have to do something with your life. So when I was 14 or 15, I really wanted to get that guitar and spent 6 weeks of my summer holidays to do the most tortuous, monotonous job – by the end of it, I remember thinking “This must be how adults feel all the time!” Everyone has their reasons for doing jobs, especially when they have kids – our parents did everything they had to do for us, sometimes working two jobs to make ends meet, so it wasn’t that I didn’t understand life can be hard work. But I was determined to never work another shit job from that point – unfortunately that wasn’t how it worked out at all (laughs) – that was my first of many, many shit jobs! When I finally bought the guitar after all that work, I think I wore it I around the house for about three weeks straight! And then shortly after buying the guitar, a friend of mine was moving away and he had a Marshall stack – a seriously big Marshall 4 speaker cabinet and an amp head. I moved that into my bedroom and then about a week after that, my parents made me give it away! There were a few of us that played instruments at school and we used to get together and play whatever we could, which ranged from Eric Clapton and blues songs through to whatever was on the radio. I remember one of the guys in the band got a sampler - it must’ve been around ’88 - an Ensoniq Mirage. I remember borrowing it and it was a big eye-opener. At the time, I was into Public Enemy and hip hop with a message – KRS One and that. I really wanted to make those kinds of records, so I started sampling things up and thinking, “This is the future.” It was another level, you know? I think he then got the next sampler up, the EPS - the same sampler that Massive Attack made their first records with - where you could have a sequencer, a keyboard and 8 tracks of your samples playing. That really opened my ears and eyes to the fact that you could make an entire record all by yourself at home - it was kind of like the new punk, in a way. Even though the music was totally different, it was that same vibe, a total DIY culture.
FIRST PROJECTS
Growing up in New Zealand at the arse-end of the world – I think it’s even different with Australia, because in Australia you at least have that contact with Asia and Sydney’s kind of a big city – but New Zealand is really on its own. I think when you grow up in New Zealand, the idea is to just get out into the world, which is why so many New Zealanders travel so much. I moved to Australia from New Zealand, about 19 or 20 years old, and stayed there for about a year and a half, travelling around and hopping over to Asia, making music. That’s when I was making my first doodlings, anyway. All the instrumental music I loved came out of England, and the vocal music I loved from NYC, but I decided to make a move to London. When I first turned up in London, there was just so much music. In New Zealand, you’d get the big pop bands that were doing big tours, but a lot of bands bypassed it because the market wasn’t big. So I really wasn’t prepared for it – every night in London, you could go out and see something fucking amazing, whether it was some big American band coming over on tour or some really underground shit or a rave. So really, I spent the first couple years just soaking up loads of good music. I saw a lot of energy come out of the Asian scene, bands like Fundamental were like the Asian Public Enemy in London. The first time I saw them, I remember the visuals being so striking – they had a picture of a woman in a classic niqab outfit [fully covered in a veil, with only the eyes exposed], with her arm outstretched holding a gun. They had loads of really intense, confronting images like that. It reminded me a lot of Public Enemy when they first came out, and they’d come onstage with fake Uzis. Fundamental’s approach was really powerful to me. It was like getting a music education everywhere I went.
I was making music the whole time, but I wasn’t really fussed where it went. I remember one of my roommates’ boyfriends worked in a vinyl shop on Edgware Road and I used to go up there around ’93, ’94 – just at the point where the rave scene had kind of split into happy hardcore and darkcore. Literally, you’d walk into the store and one side would be happy hardcore and the other would be darkcore! I remember thinking the happy hardcore stuff was kind of cheesy and weird, but I liked the darkcore stuff that was heavier and darker with reggae samples - I guess that was the beginnings of jungle. Through a friend of a friend who had been travelling in LA, I managed to join up with Sour Records, which put out the UK Apache and Shy FX “Original Nuttah.” Shy was on that label, T Power was on that label, and the whole thing started blowing up around jungle. Then Botchit and Scarper started doing the pop/breakbeat stuff and Matt (MJ Cole) started engineering them, and some of the jungle stuff, and then later the garage stuff. It was just interesting because that one studio was an intersection for the burgeoning jungle scene, speed garage scene and breakbeat scene, and loads of seminal artists came out of it. I think that’s why some of the early Botchit and Scarper releases were so varied - people were making half time jungle records because it was the same engineers that would be making the jungle stuff! It was interesting to see people’s different takes on the different types of music. There were different styles of dance music before that obviously, but in the mid 90s was when things really started to break off into genres and subgenres that were forming quite distinctly. It was very exciting times just because of the sheer amount of music coming out.
DJING/MUSIC
London just keeps surprising me. I keep expecting to turn up in London and just finding it all dried up, like - “Sorry, it’s all over. London’s been spitting out new genres every six weeks for years and it’s done now, the focus is somewhere else.” But it doesn’t. Every time I come back, something amazing has developed. Most recently the whole bassline house and nichestep thing and all of those sorts of underground garage vibes have come back again, but i’s a significant advancement on what was going on with garage back in the day. All of these genres are an ongoing evolution and they seem to come up in the press, which announces such-and-such new genre. But there’s a linear relationship right back to disco for all dance music and, especially with UK-based dance music, back to James Brown and Lee Scratch Perry, really. That’s the DNA of dance music: the deep-end bassline of dub music and the drums of funk. London still seems to have this thing of spitting out a genre – a distinct genre – every 18 months. So I think it’s as exciting as it ever was, there’s loads of good new music out there and it’s interesting to see where those things come from. If you look at the garage side of things, there’s that bumpin’ four-on-the-floor bassline stuff coming out and there’s dubstep, which draws its roots from garage as well – so there’s two radically different, distinct scenes that have branched off from the same place. And there are some great records that came out in-between 2 Step garage and dubstep. I remember when Tempa were putting out those Horsepower records of crazy, chopped-up drums and mental syncopations - not really on the double time, but not really on the half-time, like dubstep, either. I thought they were really interesting phases in themselves; they never took off into a scene but who knows, they could have if some journalist had picked up on it and gone, “hey, you know those mental syncopated rhythms that sound like a jazz drummer on amphetamines, I’m going to call it such-and-suchstep” – perhaps that could’ve been a scene in itself. So at every stage in the evolution of dance music, there’s really interesting points that maybe don’t get the hype to become a scene as such.
PRODUCTION
Switch and I were touring in Australia, on a big festival circuit. He was either playing before me, or I was playing before him, it kinda swapped around every night, so we’d hear each other’s sets every night. I seemed to keep going up to him when I’d hear a certain tune and say, “Man, that was heavy – what was that?” And he’d be like, “Oh, that was mine.” And then he’d come over to ask me about a tune that I’d be playing, and I’d say “That was mine!” So we had a similar sensibility, even though we have a completely different sound and style. We both started saying that we should get together in the studio sometime. We were both in Sydney a few weeks after and we knocked a few things out, but we didn’t have much time. And it coincidentally turned out we were both in New York a few months later, so we took some time and booked a couple studios there. We wrote some beats and then started looking for vocalists. Diplo was doing a night in Cielo in New York and he told us we should work with this girl that was at the club, and that was Santi (Santogold), so he introduced us. When she came into the studio with us, we played her the tune - she sat in the booth and said, “Don’t record me yet, I just have to work out the melody.” She was sort of just mumbling over the beat, there was no melody, it was just the rhythm and we told her, “That sounds dope – keep going!” She kept insisting that the melody was coming to her, but we told her, “No, just do that, it sounds wicked.” She said, “You’re JOKING, I haven’t rapped since I was fifteen – what are you talking about?!” But we made her go into the booth and do it, we recorded it and then wegot her to record the rest of the vocal like that. When we finished it, I don’t think she knew what to think of it at first – because her band was very guitar-oriented, and what was shaping up to be the Santogold album wasn’t at all electronic. But I think as the tune got out there and so many people were buzzing on it, she got much more into it. It transpired afterwards that Diplo hadn’t even heard her sing when he introduced us, he’d just heard she was good! (laughs) But she’s awesome, really talented and a great songwriter. Dave and I did a bunch of stuff together, some Baltimore tracks, ‘Creator,’ which was – electronic meets dubstep meets something – and a few dancehall type songs. That was the beat with the heat, really. We have a bunch of stuff lying about but we’re both so busy.
THE MIX
I kind of thought, “Have I gone in too intense to start out?” It’s balls-to-the-wall from the very beginning! But you know what, that’s the way I’m playing these days – there’s so many good, full-on tracks out at the moment, I just come out and go BAM! – and then think about chilling out. A lot of the Baltimore stuff I was playing two years ago has now been replaced by Reso and L-Vis 1990 who are starting to make a UK version of Baltimore – which is produced a lot better and a lot heavier on the dancefloor. I was into the Baltimore vibe but when you play it out, it just sounds tinny. The UK version has taken the basslines and beats and made them heavier and a lot more playable. It’s good to see that scene’s really opened out, and I really wanted to represent some of the dubstep scene too because I’ve been working with a lot of those cats. The reggae and dub-inspired end of breakbeat has a very close relationship to dubstep anyway. And there’s also a strong techno flavour that runs through dubstep – the section in the middle of the mix is very much about that. There’s a techy element to some of the Baltimore stuff too. I just knew I wanted to get certain tracks in, or certain genres or subgenres, but I ended up finding that the relationship between the tunes wasn’t about genres – it wasn’t “it’s a breakbeat tune” or “it’s a dubstep tune” or “it’s a Baltimore tune” or whatever else – it was more about the feeling of the tune, the intensity of it. I probably played more tunes and more different genres than I otherwise might have done, but there was a feeling that runs through all of them and that was the relationship to me, rather than the genre. I love heavy bass and beats, and I love that beautiful techy sound, but it’s the shared basslines that give the mix a linear feel. It’s odd because really, there isn’t a straight up breaks tune on the mix. I feel a strong relationship between the tunes but it definitely wasn’t my intention to not put any breaks. It’s bassline and breaks all the way through, just different permutations of them.
FABRIC
It was wicked playing on the stage in Room One when I did the Video Nasty Experience. It’s a really controlled, close environment. It’s a good sized room but the crowd is right there and there are no blind spots in the room and the sound’s obviously superb, it’s perfect. Everyone just gets the full impact and I think we had about 6 or 7 odd screens up there with the 3 VJs and 2 MCs and a drummer, and the decks and effects and stuff. It was one of my favourite gigs actually, being able to take that into fabric, where I’ve played since it opened. Fabric’s always been amazing; it’s a place where you can just do what you want. It’s rare that you’ll have such a big crowd that is so into cutting edge music and not necessarily genre specific. It’s not like if you’re playing a techno club in Berlin or playing a jungle club up north or playing in a breaks club in Australia - you can go out there and bust out some crazy jams and the crowd will respond.
THE FUTURE
On the mix, you can see I’ve done a lot of collaborations with guys over here like Heavyweight Dub Champion, a live dub and reggae band from over here that use all old analogue equipment. I’ve done stuff with Propa Tings, who’s another producer from over here, on what we call Gutter-step - which is a mixture of Baltimore and dubstep. I’m working with some of the cats out here, because LA and San Francisco are poppin’ at the moment. I’m also spending a lot of time working on a website called www.giveback.net – which allows artists to associate their music with different causes. You can take a track, input it into the system and raise money for something you’re passionate about. So if you read about something like the Burmese monks being attacked, or environmental issues, or a political problem or a human rights issue, you can dedicate one of your tracks to the problem. You can energize your fan base to come onto the site, learn about the issue and hopefully help raise money to achieve your goal. The money they donate is going directly towards a specific project you’ve set out beforehand, and shows that music can have a huge positive effect on the world, even more widely felt than just making people feel good on the dance floor…. www.Giveback.net
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