THE TRACK:

Med School, 2017

Keeno, Enigma. The Bristolbased Drum ’n’ Bass producer breaks down the title track from his latest EP

Will Keen, aka Keeno, may just be a young lad in his early 20s, but he’s already carved a niche for himself as the master of heart-tugging musical D ’n’ B. After just a few releases on underground liquid D’n’ B labels (including the infamous Liquid Tones) he signed to Hospital spin-off imprint Med School in 2014, and has already released two albums, 2014’s Life Cycle and last year’s Futurist. We caught up with him in his Bristol studio for an exclusive peek at the title track from his latest EP, Enigma.

So, how did the idea for this track come about?

“Every morning before I sit down for breakfast I’ll just play keys for 15-20 minutes and see if anything happens. The initial idea that happens in the breakdown of Enigma was one of those ideas that I had. I didn’t know what to call it, so I just named it Enigma on my phone and that title just seemed to inspired me. The song has got a bit of mystery behind it; it’s moving in a different direction to the stuff that I’d written previously.”

How so?

“With Life Cycle and Futurist, I was impressed with how the music went down, how everything developed, and how the songs fit together, but they didn’t really work for DJs. Enigma is kind of like my first attempt at trying to adapt the mixable 16-bar D’n’ B structure, to put as much as I can into that to make it interesting musically, but also have it mixable and repetitive enough so that DJs can get their heads around it as well. The end goal in that is really to create as much contrast between the music and the beats, so there’s as much energy as possible when it drops. If the musical idea just kind of carries on over the drop that’s good for liquid-y, floaty tunes that just kind of roll on. I wanted contrast, impact and energy from this release, so I really focused on making sure that the drums and the bass are as tight as they possibly can be without sacrificing the music. I guess that’s just how the concept came about for the EP, and I want to build on that for the next album.”

Fitting slamming D’n’ B elements into a mix with emotional strings must require a few compromises?

“I think it’s more a limitation of how good I am at production rather than a compromise based on a stylistic decision. If I was as good at mixdowns as Break or Noisia I probably would be able to get the song exactly how I would want it to sound, but it wouldn’t sound like Keeno. People know my previous music and expect a certain thing, and if suddenly it’s perfectly polished and really clean and the sound design is incredible they’re not really going to recognise it as Keeno. I think it’s important that I focus on developing an ongoing style that leaves as many possibilities open in the future as possible. In Enigma I had to compromise with how prominent the strings were versus how prominent the bass was. I ended up sidechaining them and that was about as drastic as I could get.

“I literally could have cut the string audio when the bass played, but it just wouldn’t have flowed as well. These kind of small compromises to make sure there’s still a piece of music going on in the background when there’s a bass sound going on, I think that’s where the two things kind of meet. I guess I could have developed the music a lot more; I could have built on that original string motif and done something new with it for the second time around, but I don’t think it would have been an effective D’n’ B

“The end goal in that is really to create as much contrast between the music and the beats, so there’s as much energy as possible when it drops. If the musical idea just kind of carries on over the drop that’s good for liquid-y, floaty tunes that just kind of roll on. I wanted contrast, impact and energy from this release.”

tune if I’d done that, because it would have been too much in a four and a half minute tune. I could have done a ten minute version, but again that wouldn’t have worked – there’s the compromise. It’s on how much time I have to present this idea in a D’n’ B tune, and how much attention people have.”

Does working with Junglistic breaks make it easier to make this kind of music than big one-shots?

“Oh definitely, because people recognise breaks and it means that you can have them less prominent in the mix than they necessarily should be. Because people recognise a Think break you can have it in a mix at -25dB and people will still be able to pick it out. As I want these musical elements in the song so loud I had to fall back on the Jungle break to make sure that people were still able to groove with it. I could have put super clean, synthetic drums on top of this and it would have sounded sick, really clean and kind of like a Camo & Krooked tune I guess, but it wouldn’t have been the right thing for the strings – it wouldn’t have blended as well.”