We are very proud to welcome back mutant bass aficionado Rrritalin. Tim (as his mother lovingly calls him) and us go back a long way. Along with his fellow bass heads Codeshift, DJ Rum and Mash for Cash, Tim started throwing parties under the Yardcore moniker very soon after we threw our first Braindrop. They earned a real name for themselves, booking artists such as The Bug, Boxcutter, Breakage, Hellfish, Amit, Limewax, Vex’d – and gaining personal respect and big ups from the likes of Mary Anne Hobbes. After a few years of forward thinking line ups, they shifted their focus to music production, and launched a very popular radio show on the award winning Sub FM.
Tim makes high octane, exceedingly heavy rave-bass music. And he’s rather good at it too. He’s just enjoyed a very successful debut release on the excellent Coin Operated imprint (currently riding high at no 1 in the Juno “Speed Garage” chart) – and from listening to his unreleased dubs it looks like there’s big tings in store for this guy in 2011.
Rrritalin has smashed the Braindrop dancefloor to pieces every time we’ve invited him to play. Using the beat mangling powers of Ableton, his sets are full throttle, genre smashing, white knuckle rides through future rave murkage. You guys are in for a treat!
We caught up with Rrritalin to ask him some important questions about production, ADHD and Cornish Piskies. And you can download a sick mix from him at the bottom of this page.
BD – Hello mate how are you and what have you been doing today?
Ello! I’ve just come back from an interview for this hectic 4 year PhD in neuroscience. They were trying to fill 5 places from over four hundred applicants so it was pretty intense. I’m rather glad you haven’t asked me anything difficult about brains!
BD – What is Rrritalin? Describe your musical style.
R – Basically, full-on rave music: sirens, amens, bass, ragga and hiphop samples, with lots of chops and edits. When I’m writing tunes, I’m always trying to recreate my first ..ahem..rave experience. There’s sometimes a point where I have to decide between doing something technically polished but rather safe, or do something that really excites me but which is perhaps less controlled. I do the latter every time. I used to be frustrated by not being able to get the smooth sound of the top dnb producers etc, but now I really enjoy sounding a bit rough around the edges.
BD – Who are your biggest musical influences?
R -The Prodigy were my first ever purchase, and I’ve always adored their early work. They’re a definite influence, as is Luke Vibert. More recently, hearing Kanji Kinetic and Michael Forshaw have made a big difference to my sound. Other than that I’d say my own music gets influenced more by styles at a particular time, 1994 jungle for example. I love the way dance music feeds back into itself so I try and reference a lot of well known rave memes.
Favorite music though: FSOL, Squarepusher, Noisia, Bullion, Plaid.
BD – What can we expect from your set at Braindrop on 5 March?
R -A real mixed bag really: techno, jungle, oldskool, bassline, garage and a few daft bootlegs.
BD – Why did you call yourself Rrritalin?
R -I’d love to have some awesome story about having ADHD as a child, but really I just came up with it at random. The extra Rs came as a joke for the flyer at a warehouse party, but I kept them on to allow people to find me among all the billions of online pharmacy ads.
BD – When and why did you start producing music?
R -My first ‘tune’ was a mash-up of the Imperial March from Star Wars and some samples from Pinky and the Brain. I have no idea why I started doing it.
BD – What software / hardware do you use to make your music?
R -I’m strictly software at the moment. I use Ableton Live and a bunch of plugins. I can’t say enough good things about the audio editing in Live. The midi’s a bit weak but I’ve got this nice little vector-based midi composition tool which I interface with it on the rare occasions I get round to writing anything sufficiently melodic.
BD – Top production tip?
R -One thing I do is a kind of meta-resampling. I bounce the whole work-in-progress tune to audio, then start chopping it about, re-arranging it, and whacking it through plugins. Then I record the results and put snippets of it in the original session. It’s great, you come up with some crazy stuff that way!
BD – You’ve just released your debut EP on the Coin Operated label – any more exciting Rrritalin release news for 2011?
R -Yeah actually. This year’s looking great! I’ve got a second EP lined up with Coin Operated. It’s going to be kind of ghettotek mutated with techno and garage. I’m writing some tunes with Kanji Kinetic and I’ve got a couple of other collabs under discussion. Then there’s a track coming for a Swedish label called Input-Output, and I’ve also got a tune coming out on Kanji’s new net label, Mutant Bass, which I understand will also be putting out some McMash stuff. All the tunes on it are going to be free, so look out for that!
BD – Any artists who are exciting you at the moment?
R -Currently I’m really into Michael Forshaw, Luke’s Anger, Squire of Gothos, Broken Note. In terms of unreleased material I’ve been sent, Lenkemz and the McMash Clan (no they didn’t pay me to say that!) are both doing some really inventive stuff that eclipses most releases I hear. In terms of non-ravey stuff, for me it’s all about Bullion, Dj Rum and Phaeleh at the moment.
BD – You’re part of the excellent Yardcore collective. What’s next for the Yardcore crew?
R – We’re taking it fairly easy at the moment in terms of nights because of our other commitments. Codeshift is off to Prague, so expect some hectic nights in Czech imminently. He’s also producing some nice ambient electronica. Dj Rum is putting together an album and has just finished a remix for LV, and Mashforcash is doing a hyper-intensive masters in DSP programming, on the same course as Cursor Miner weirdly enough.
BD – All time favorite tune?
R – Prodigy – Weather Experience.
BD – What are your all top 5 mythical creatures?
1. Enki – a Sumerian god. He was believed to have handed down a set of rules which would cause civilisation to work: when to harvest crops, how to deal with murderers and so on; almost like a computer programmer for people. He was also the god of beer and cum, and allegedly invented arguments.
2. Chimati no Kami
A Japanese god whose portfolio used to be fertility has been demoted to god of footpaths and crossroads. I presume he’s gutted.
3. Good ol’ Cornish Piskies.
4. Baron Samedi: He’s got a lot of style, and inspired Papa Lazarou from The League of Gentlemen and The Mighty’s Boosh’s Spirit of Jazz.
5. I don’t know if this counts as Mythical, but there was a cartoon when I was a kid called Bravestar, which was like a cowboy show set in space. Bravestar had a horse called Thirty-Thirty who was always rocking this massive shotgun. There was some great dramatic antagonism, because the title character was always being very 80s about everything and trying to work it out with the baddies using diplomacy, while the horse just wanted to jump straight in and start lengin’ people down.
Thanks Tim! You can catch him at Braindrop @ The Macbeth on Saturday 5 March alongside the mighty Reeps One and The McMash Clan.
Download his amazing 2010 NYE set to get a taster of what Rrritalin’s sets are like live. Anyone who double drops Noisia with the Fresh Prince gets a big thumbs up from us!
Rrritalin NYE 2010 set truncated by rrritalin
And you can buy his fantastic Spack To the Future EP HERE.
Posted by chris in Featured, Interviews, Music.
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