Inside the DMZ Mala

Back then everyone in the scene was either an MC or a DJ, and in the early 2000s, I decided to take music more seriously. Coki and I saved a bunch of cash up and bought identical setups: the same little mixing desk, a pair of studio monitors, and a PC. Slowly we started to figure out how to make music, and things started taking shape. We were constantly referencing music that we admired to see if we were sounding a little bit like those artists, from a quality point of view. Not much thought went into it though. We just did it.

Before I was djing regularly, Big Apple Records’ DJ Hatcha was playing music from myself and Coki out in the clubs. We were amongst the crowd, witnessing the audiences. People didn’t even know it was our track; they would just be vibing out to it. When I eventually started djing in clubs, I quickly landed on lineups with big drum and bass and jungle DJs like Kenny Ken, Micky Finn, Nicky Blackmarket, and Randall.

Dubstep didn’t really exist like that yet, so we didn’t have a sound to tap into. I was set on making 1994 jungle, because for me that happened to be the year when all of the music I loved most was produced. 1993 to 1995 jungle and drum and bass, those years were killer. There’s nothing else that sounds like 1994 jungle. I was trying to recreate that, but soon realized that I’d never be able to capture a sound like that because I didn’t have the equipment that they were using back then, nor did I have access to the sounds that were getting passed around during that time. From there, other types of frequencies just naturally began to take shape.

I’ve known Coki since we were about eleven years old. We went to the same secondary school, SGT Pokes as well. From early on we were close friends and experienced many, many things together, musically. We met Loefah later through some friends. He was known as “Hardcore Pete” because he had this massive collection of hardcore and jungle from 1992 to 1994. Being so close, sharing that love for music early on and having that group dynamic really made us a force, which is why we used to call ourselves the DMZ sound force. We’re very different as people and all had our strengths and weaknesses; we were like a transformer in a way, pushing DMZ forward. The strength we found in that group allowed us to open the door and provide a platform for so many people to come through. It wasn’t just one person’s mindset; it was four people thinking about things and putting their time, love, and energy into it all.

After nine or so releases, Big Apple shut down. It was at a point in time when record sales were declining, so having a record store became very challenging, and John, who used to own Big Apple records, decided that he’d had enough. If Big Apple didn’t close, I imagine we would have wanted to continue doing music with them, but it did close, and the next best thing was to just do our own thing.

The reason we started DMZ was for our own self-preservation and to be our own guides, our own navigators. To drive ourselves. For me, the whole thing was never about ownership or control; it was about providing an environment and a platform that allowed people to be themselves and feel empowered. It’s about trying to understand what an artist is trying to achieve and encouraging growth in that direction. Because that breeds and promotes longevity, and, ultimately, we all want to do this forever.

It really was about the obsession of hearing our music on the big sound system of Plastic People during FWD>>. The reason we started the DMZ night was because we really enjoyed FWD>>, but it was never on a Saturday night. The party was in the East, and we were South Londoners and wanted to start something over our way that wouldn’t interfere with FWD>>.

We’d heard about a spot called Mass and went down one Wednesday to check it out during one of the techno nights. They had a turbo sound system, and within five minutes of entering the place, we were sold on it. I remember going back to Loefah’s that night and calling up everybody to see who could play the first event. We called Hatcha, Plastician, Youngsta, and Skream, rushing to get things ready for our first dance.

We designed the flyer there and then and got the lineup ready, we just needed something else to complete it all. And that’s when the slogan came about: “Meditate on Bass Weight.” That said it all really. We didn’t want some random spiel or overly descriptive nonsense more or less saying, “come check out the new genre.” We didn’t have any pictures on the flyer either, just text. The intention was for it to be as minimal as possible, strictly about the music. We just had the artists’ names, what buses you could take to get outside of Brixton and the slogan to round it all off.

Listening to what was happening at that time, it was clear that everything was getting faster and faster. But for us, there was something quite beautiful in taking things away and combining all of our different musical loves, from jungle and drum’n’bass to dub and reggae, house to garage, and techno. These were all of the styles that I enjoyed listening to as a teenager. Somehow what we were producing at that time took shape and a good friend of ours from back in the day, DJ Hatcha, who used to work at the Big Apple Records store on Surrey Street Market in Croydon, picked up on what we were doing. Each day of the week a market took place on Surrey Street, you’d have people shouting out: “Pound of bananas! Come and get ya’ apple and pears.” And that was literally what you would hear walking down the strip on the way to Big Apple Records.

At that time, FWD>> was happening at Plastic People where Hatcha and other DJs were pushing the darker two-step sound. So, when he heard what we were doing, he was like: “Oh, I can play this!” By this point we had a whole harvest of beats which we handed over to him. Some nights, Hatcha wasn’t just playing one or two Digital Mystikz records, half of his set became Digital Mystikz, which is how we ended up signing music to Big Apple Records. I’d gone to a couple of the other labels as well, but they were the only ones willing to take the risk. Arthur, known as Artwork, was one of the A&Rs at the label and it was him and John that ran the Big Apple, who really believed in that music that we were making very early on. I was a youngster in my early 20s then, and having people make that kind of investment in you meant a lot, even if it was just one record with 500 copies pressed.

At that time, the music was labelled as abstract and completely unknown on so many levels. I used to go around to all the record shops in London trying to sell the record, but people wouldn’t take it because they didn’t know where to place it. It wasn’t house, it wasn’t garage, it wasn’t jungle, and it certainly wasn’t techno. They didn’t think that they could sell it.

Growing up in the nineties, pirate radio was all that we listened to. We’d attach a coat hanger to the aerial and hang it out the window to pick up pirate stations back in 1992. Listening to dream.fm, call.fm, energy.fm, don.fm or whatever we could tune into. Pirate radio and dubstep go hand in hand, as do pirate radio and grime. It’s that underground mentality. A lot of these mainstream platforms may go on as if they’re promoting the underground but don’t be fooled, they only start promoting it when they know that it’s no longer a risk. They only promote things when they’re deemed safe.

I was never that keen on doing radio, so I didn’t have my own show, but before we were DJing, we would give our music to Hatcha, Youngsta, Kode9, and others that had shows. Coki and I would sit at the end of my street, have a little Guinness, have a little smoke, and be sat in the car listening to pirate radio, because that’s where we’d pick it up best. I remember the excitement and anticipation of waiting to see if any of your tracks were going to be played. It’s hard to put into words how it felt to hear your music being played on those iconic stations back then.

Exactly, it’s okay that you don’t own it. It’s okay that you don’t know what it is. Just to experience something as a one-off. And that’s what the dubplate mentality and culture was all about, it’s okay just to hear something and not know who made it. I love that too, and I still very much think that’s an important part of what I try to do with music.

For me it was listening to pirate radio as a 12-year-old and stumbling across these mad kind of breakbeats, it felt so “me,” but I had absolutely no idea of who made it or where it came from. I always loved that feeling of not knowing. As humans, it’s impossible to understand everything. I sometimes think that’s one of the human flaws: to over-analyze everything. Some things are not meant to be understood from a three-dimensional point of view because some things are multidimensional, so how can we possibly understand it in its entirety?

Music is the same as that, sometimes we’re not supposed to understand it, but it makes us feel a certain type of way and it tickles our imagination. That’s why we fall in love with certain things and become addicted to the experience of going to a dance and soaking up the environment; becoming one with the energies and frequencies that are present. It’s free for the listener to interpret and imagine as they will. There is a little bit of the magic and the mystery that’s retained when you don’t know anything.

We were pretty militant in that we didn’t give our music to many people back then. But that just always felt right for us; it felt right to give it to a selected group of people that we knew would play the music in the right way. Cutting dubplates seemed to be a good way to control who had your music. I guess the first dub that we cut was Pathways for Hatcha to play at FWD>>. That record went on to become our first release as Digital Mystikz.

That used to happen a lot back in the day, everyone was cutting their tunes to play at the DMZ or FWD>> parties. So the week of the events, Jason at Transition, where we used to cut our dubplates, would be ridiculously busy. You’d have to get your order in first because the plates might run out. My studio used to be right across the way from where Jason had the mastering house, so I was always pretty lucky getting dubs.

It would happen in stages, not to liken the process to a conveyer belt, but that’s maybe the most straightforward way of explaining it visually. You’ve always got stuff moving; the system is always in place. If you knew a certain dance was coming up and wanted to cut a few tracks, you would finish up those tracks, mix them down, go listen to them in the car, listen to them at home and then listen to them on a couple of different systems to make sure that they were sounding right. It was so expensive to cut a dubplate that I used to have to make sure that what I was creating and cutting was done to the absolute best of my ability because I couldn’t afford to recut the dub the weekend afterwards. The track had to be ready and on a certain level. We didn’t have the luxury of trying tracks out on the weekend via USB and then rejigging it the next week if it sounded a bit off. I’ve still got loads of my old dubplates in the studio which sound a bit crackly, but they still play today, and that’s nearly 15 or 16 years on.

Yeah, I do. We do an event in Bristol called The Weekender. It’s a Deep Medi event with Teachings in Dub who have booked many of the UK sound-system legends like Aba Shanti-I, Channel One, Jah Saka, and Mark Iration. What we’re trying to do with this event is bridge the gap between the new school, which is us, and the old school meaning the classic, traditional sound-system roots and reggae crew. Even though our music is massively inspired by that time, there aren’t many dances where those two scenes meet. On the Saturday night, I always play one hour of 2005 to 2007 stuff, so I bring out all my old dubplates then and there. Up until those sets I’d forgotten about half the tracks that I’d made.

I had started Deep Medi with the intention to put out some stranger kinds of music. Around that time, we did a DMZ in Leeds, where Skream played. Back then, I recorded all of those old sets on minidisc. I remember listening back to his set a couple of days later and calling him up straight after like: “Yo bruv, this track you played of yours is sick,” as I hummed out the tune. However, he informed me that it wasn’t one of his tracks, it was from a guy called Iron Soul, which today everyone knows as Kromestar. That track was “Kalawanji” which ended up being Deep Medi’s first release.

I was getting sent so much music because of the position I was in through DMZ and felt as though Deep Medi was the perfect opportunity to provide a platform for all of the music that I loved and wanted to do more with than just play out.

To elevate means you elevate yourself in order to elevate others. There’s no good in you being at the top of the tree, and everybody else is on the ground; then all you’ve done is isolate yourself.