Benjamin Damage: footloose and laptop free
The innovating DJ who’s walking the walk
Benjamin Damage draws from early rave, jungle and ’90s house to create nonconformist techno that’s brutal yet humanistic. On stage, he’s equally rebellious. Using a mixer and various hardware units, he’s ditched the laptop and started performing live in the truest sense.
Why do you prefer to perform without a laptop? “I find the screen takes up too much attention and breaks the connection between you and the audience. Having the hardware there makes you feel more like a musician than a scientist. I find watching someone watching a screen quite infuriating. That’s not to say that other people don’t do incredible shows using a laptop, but I feel more in the moment when everything is being produced straight from the machines rather than using different audio stems and putting delay onto tracks.” Presumably, everything’s channelled through a mixer of some description? “On the audio side, everything goes into a mixer. Sometimes I’ll use the Mackie 1604, which is a good, compact mixer, but the sound quality isn’t amazing if you push the channels so I don’t drive them too hard. For that early Prodigy sound or certain types of drum & bass, it’s great to drive the channels, but for techno or very bassy sounds I find it destroys the audio quality. I prefer to use a Midas Desk, which is better sounding but very big and doesn’t always fit in certain clubs. The MIDI sequencer is the brain that keeps everything in time and controls all the machines. I use a Sequentix Cirklon sequencer, which is amazing. It only acts as a sequencer, but it’s great to play with live because it’s very easy to change things on the fly.”
Do you use the same hardware you originally composed with? “Not everything is played live as it was made. I tend to break things down and recreate everything in the hardware, which is a much more logical way of designing a live track than chopping a perfect track to bits and putting it back together again. When you start from scratch, it always gives the track a different dynamic and vibe. The most important thing is to make the live set coherent, so I tend to think more about how the set flows from one track to the next and whether it’s exciting to hear rather than replicating a mastered product.”
What would you usually use when it comes to sound generation? “I used to use an MPC1000 as my sampler, but that’s been replaced by the Pioneer SP-16, which has some limitations compared to the MPC but the sound quality is very good. It’s got a Dave Smith analogue filter, which sounds fantastic and it’s very useful for bringing arrangements in. There are no recorded sequences, so having knobs you can grab to move different sections of the track is really cool. I also have a Roland TB-303, which is
my only vintage bit of gear. I looked into all the clones – and the filters and oscillators get close, but the envelope shapes are never quite right somehow. If you want to use an iconic sound, then you’ve got to nail it or make it better.” What do you use for adding effects?
“I use a NIIO Filter Distortion Bank. It’s quite an unusual piece of gear, but sounds amazing, When I was putting the live show together, I realised I needed something that would bring the sound together. It’s difficult to explain, because even though it’s a filter and distortion unit and doesn’t make a sound of its own, it’s very intuitive and musical – unlike the Sherman Filterbank, which sounds very harsh in certain settings. For live performances, you don’t want to accidentally touch something and have this squealing sound that deafens everybody; you want something that’s comfortable to play, like an instrument almost.”
What’s the most important element?
“The soundcheck – every room sounds different. It’s very important to get the sound engineer on your side, because he knows the room and what it’s supposed to sound like. When you’re actually playing, it’s quite enjoyable. You’ve got this muscle memory because most machines have their own interface, so eventually you know what to do without even looking at them.”
Does the live experience feed back into your production?
“Sure it does, especially if you’re playing stuff that’s not been released yet. Sometimes you get a very good reaction that gives you a new perspective and sometimes you feel very confident about a track you’ve written and the crowd are like, “what’s this?” It gives you a different perspective on your own ideas. Being stuck in the studio with no real frame of reference is completely different to being in front of a crowd. If you see someone perform, there’s got to be an element of danger or why bother?”
want to know more?
The new Benjamin Damage single
Malfunction/Binary is released July 13 on R&S Records