René LaVice Richter Scale
Ram Records, 2016
Over the past 25 years Ram Records have gone from an underground label pushing the darker side of Hardcore Rave to one of the biggest forces in D’n’ B, unleashing artists such as Sub Focus, Wilkinson and René LaVice on an unsuspecting world. We caught up with Ram’s Canadian banger-specialist René in Saffron Road Studios in his current home of High Wycombe to find out how he created Richter Scale, a genre-skipping main room banger that takes the listener on a journey through EDM, Trap and finally blistering D ’n’ B.
Hi René! What’s the story behind this bonkers multi-genre track?
“There’s a festival in Toronto, where I’m from, called Digital Dreams, and the ad agency handling the marketing for Bud Light who sponsor the festival gave me a call out of the blue. They were like, ‘We want to have this big Bud Light moment at the event, and we’d like to commission you to make the heaviest bass drop ever.’”
A challenge any D’n’ B producer would find hard to resist!
“Yeah! So I was like, ‘Cool man, no problem! When do you need it by?’. They needed it the next day, so I said, ‘No problem guys! Usually I take a bit longer than that, but it’s cool, I got it!’ So the idea was that we’d have a seismologist on site with his equipment set up and everything; it was a multisensory event with visuals going along with the whole thing. We were gonna use every piece of pyrotechnics available at the festival, and it’s a massive production; the idea was to throw everything at it and go nuts. They weren’t really like, ‘hey we know a lot about music, make it like this,’ or whatever, but the consensus seemed to be that they wanted the main, heaviest part that’s going to hit the Richter scale to be Drum ’n’ Bass. I was like, ‘Okay, it’s an EDM festival and we’re going to rock up to the main stage and blast some Drum ’n’ Bass in North America – this is going to be great! Why the fuck not?’ The other thing they wanted to do was have it progress through genres. Like, I’m a really good sport, I love to challenge myself creatively, I love it when people are throwing wrenches into