ZUU Music: How to Be Hated by (Almost) Everyone

ZUU Music is an amalgamation of several ambitions, frustrations, experiments & concepts which have built up inside me since first discovering how electronic music is made while in college circa 2008.

I have always enjoyed listening to electronic music ever since being a small child. Artists such as The Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin, Prodigy & Underworld all graced my household and c.d. collection at various stages growing up; as well as a plethora of Hip-Hop music which I largely consider to be an electronic music of sorts. It wasn’t until going to college, however, that I really understood how it was made or specifically why it appealed to me. Growing up as a guitar player made me intrinsically understand why I liked the guitar bands I did because I could play along in my bedroom & write my own guitar orientated music based around being in a band. I could appreciate the level of skill required to create the music which I enjoyed. This was not the case for electronic music.

I had no grasp of Protools or any DAW for that matter and no knowledge of what made an electronic song good or bad. My uncle always used to say ‘making electronic music is easy, it’s all just made by computers.’ – at one point I believed him & I couldn’t have been more mislead.

To say that I learned how to produce electronic music in the confines of a music college classroom is a lie. What sparked my obsession was when my tutor played over the classroom P.A. ‘I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend how to Dance‘ by the Black Kids, remixed by The Twelves. I overheard him say to another tutor, who was in the room, “check this out, how the kick dips the bass”. Needless to say, that track blew my mind. I thought to myself, “Yeah, how does that kick dip the bass like that?”. With a little research, I would later find out that this was a technique called ‘Side-chaining’ which is intrinsic to the sound of countless electronic music genres and after discovering this, I wanted to know more. I bought Protools and a computer from money gained by illicit means and began my journey. I have been completely hooked ever since.

A story about my background as a producer is not the subject of this article, however. As someone who is 22 years old and making a living from the music industry, I am feel as if I am in complete limbo. On one side of me, I have a slightly older generation (creeping into their 30’s and above) who think Dubstep is shit and always have done and who remember the birth of garage music in the U.K. Both genres emerged out of the same musical and social vacuum with the only notable difference being that they arrived during differing decades. They find it incomprehensible at the thought that they too would have been immersed in the scene had they been born 10 years later. The other category of people I find myself completely unable to relate to are the ‘MP3 generation’ in hot pursuit of mine maybe only 4 – 8 years younger who have never heard the sound of vinyl and can’t imagine a time when music was not instantly accessible and was experienced by everyone at the mythical ‘c.d. quality’ (44.1 16bit) as this was the only way to receive it.

How does this affect me? As an electronic producer careening into 2015, I have created a musical project which both of these two groups will hate and that possibly only appeals to a narrow band of like-minded music lovers my age. On the one hand I am trying to break through a thick smog of spotty kids with laptops making generic EDM who are prepared to sit on sound cloud all day long and have a strategy of ‘follow for follow’ in a desperate attempt to be heard. On the other hand my music contains current electronic sounds which to me are the intermixture of my influences, past and present. For me I am a million miles away from the 140bpm pristinely produced overplayed nonsense which is commercial dubstep. For the following reasons:

Thanks to the progression of technology, modern day stereotypical EDM can be created extraordinarily easily (I guess in a roundabout way my uncle was right after all). In fact one of the worlds most popular EDM producers Deadmau5 made a satirical track called ‘Carbon Copy Cookie Cutter’. He claimed to have made it in 30 minutes and is a combination of ‘Vengeance samples, Nexus presets and a brick wall limiter’. It truly highlights the lack of creativity found in the tracks currently becoming a surefire way to gaining a Beatport top 10.

Long before Mr.Zimmerman dropped this bombshell on the scene, I felt this sense of hearing the same samples, sounds and drops over and over. That’s why I decided to take real musicians into a studio for 5 days to create my own sample pack. I got two drummers in one room along with a keys player who played one of the most beautiful sounding Elysian pianos, a guitarist who played through only vintage pedals and equipment and also a tracking engineer which allowed me to be free to play bass and generally direct the sessions. I used old school recording techniques which fed into vintage microphones and outboard gear before finally hitting the digital domain. All of music we created was 100% improvised which brought character, feel and a human approach from the ground up. I then took the gorgeous raw breaks which we created and remixed it into electronic music. The result I would describe as ‘Loop-based hip hop electronica’.

My desire to do something different made me learn how to engineer in a professional studio and out of my own money kept going back to the same place to learn more and more the concept of real sound recording and how I can use this knowledge to create my own identity as a producer. Because I was sure as fuck not going to find it by downloading the same mundane pre-sets the other kids all had access to. I feel the result has benefited greatly from me putting my money where my mouth is and keeping it real working with other humans to create a musical experience which can be appreciated on a higher level.