Crack

Crack is playing table football with Dave ‘Hyetal’ Corney and Matt ‘Julio Bashmore’ Walker and the score is 9-0 to Crack. The dreaded ‘whitewash’ is imminent, when from nowhere a crashing drive from Hyetal’s goalkeeper ruins Crack’s dream of cleaning out the Bristol production twosome.

You see, 10-1 just isn’t satisfying enough. Just like his plastic man’s thunderbolt strike, Corney’s first album offering, Broadcast, arrived in Crack’s office stealthily and without warning. Although we knew he had been working on it for some time, when it finally ghosted onto our desk it hit the stereo with perhaps a little less anticipation than it deserved.

Broadcast is an astounding record; an aural representation of someone taking a year out of their life to master their art and create a record free from commercial constraint and cliché. We were taken aback, not because his previous releases hadn’t hinted that he was capable of something so accomplished and expansive, but because very few records actually make you sit up, drop whatever you are doing and take full frontal notice.

As the speed of musical diffusion astounds and confuses, technology progresses and shrinking attention spans infect everyone with musical ADHD, any record that makes you do the aforementioned should be cherished. Harnessing influences as diverse as brooding John Carpenter movie scores, dubstep, trip-hop and even garage, talking to Corney gives you a real idea of what it’s like to be an electronic music obsessive living in 2011.

Like any mid-twenty something raised on a diet of hip-hop, garage and R’n’B, with his tastes maturing and diversifying with age, he quotes a baffling array of musical inspirations during Crack’s interview with him. On a simplistic level, this goes a long way to explaining why Broadcast is such a multi-faceted record. With as many tracks equally at home on a stereo- system as well as a nightclub, and at the same time retaining a level of immediacy as not to be placed in the chin-stroking ‘intelligent dance music’ bracket, Broadcast’s crossover appeal has already seen it receive highly complimentary reviews from a number of credible quarters. Dark, at times, intense, and a constantly intriguing listen, its stock is surely set to grow as the year goes on.

As he sits on Crack’s sofa discussing influences from his former metal band to Tangerine Dream, it’s not hard not to feel a tad dwarfed by his musical knowledge. An understated chap with a cheeky sense of humour, the look of satisfaction as his thunderbolt went in was visible. Things for Hyetal are looking as bright as this record.



So the album’s out now – how long did it take to put together?

Well, it took about a year to write the whole thing. I’d already released Phoenix on another label, and I guess I’d written that at the start of last year, or even before then. After that came out it marked the start of a new direction for me, and it seemed to be a sign that this kind of material could work on an album. So from before last summer until recently. It’s basically been in production for a year.

There are a lot of producers who never get round to actually doing an album, and you’re making one so early in your career. Was this something you always had in mind – that you wanted to make an album?

Yeah, definitely. I grew up listening to a lot of music that was essentially album-based. Albums have always been really important to me, and it’s always been an ambition to do one. I found myself falling into making dubstep and bass music, but my background is in more rock, song-based music.

So were you in bands when you were younger?

Yeah, I was in a whole bunch of bands when I was in school, of varying quality. There were a whole bunch of them, but the only one of any note was a kind of metal band called Dilutral...

That’s a proper metal band name!

Definitely, yeah. We stuck with that for a while, around the age of 16- 17. We were into that sort of scene, and at the time it seemed like a serious thing, in a band with your mates touring around the country. We self-released a couple of EPs and sold them on the internet – about 10/12 years ago now – so we were pretty early on the internet thing. We managed to sell quite a few.

You grew up in Southampton – when did you move to Bristol?

That would have been around 2003. I’d been doing the whole band thing and that was what was keeping me in Southampton at that point. But when that came to an end, I had a load of mates in Bristol and I’d been heading up here to stay and really getting into the music. By that stage I was getting out of the whole rock band thing and listening to more hip-hop, and I was making hip-hop as well. I was already up on a lot of early electronic music, I’d be buying Tangerine Dream records to sample and stuff like that. It feels like it’s all come full circle with what I’m doing now and using a lot of those influences on the album.

So. You say you’ve been influenced by Tangerine Dream – a lot of synth-based music from the 70s and 80s also influenced you right?

Yeah, I’d say late 70s early 80s was the high point for analog synth music, with that kind of technology really flourishing at the time. I’ve definitely referenced that in the album.

The time you’ve spent in Bristol has coincided quite nicely with a period where Bristolian producers have but been improving and progressing constantly. Have you found the area to be a musical hotbed for you to do what you’re doing?

Yeah, it’s definitely played a huge part in the music I’m making now. I came to Bristol as a proper hip-hop person, but it never fully clicked with me – I felt there was something missing. I guess around 2003 when the first Dizzee Rascal album had come out, that was an introduction to grime and stuff. I got a job at a record shop just a few doors up from where Rooted Records was based, it was called Disk and Tape. I’d walk past Rooted every day and they had a sign up in the window saying ‘Bristol’s only Dubstep and Grime Specialist’, which seemed crazy to me because I didn’t have any idea what those genres of music were. So I wandered into Rooted very nervously with my long hair and not looking anything like a dance guy and picked up some grime records. Plus their whole collection was completely integrated, so I didn’t really know what I was picking up.

You’d never come across dubstep?

No. To me it just seemed like grime without the MCs on it. I was treating it as, music is music. Then Rephlex did these records called Grime, which were amazing.

I didn’t know that – you wouldn’t normally associate Rephlex with grime music.

No totally, but they were really early on it – that was probably around 2004. They had really early stuff from Kode9 and Digital Mystikz on them, along with Plastician and Slaughter Mob and stuff like that. So that was how I kind of stumbled onto that sound.

So Rooted played a big part in developing you musically?

Yeah, definitely man. Y’know, I’d certainly never DJ’ed dance music, and Southampton didn’t have any independent record stores, and there was no sort of hip-hop scene there ...

It did have Craig David though.

True, it did have Craig David. And Artful Dodger. But I’d missed out on the whole independent record store culture, and especially dance record shops have a reputation for being sort of cliquey. But it was really cool, they were all really nice and that. And then I went to DMZ (one of the original London dubstep nights), it was almost like a pilgrimage. I just booked a bus to London and decided to try and force some friends in London to come out. I put a message on a local forum saying ‘look out for a guy with long hair dressed in an Adidas tracksuit top’. So I get there and I get a tap on the shoulder and it was this guy Tim, who’s a dub boy from Bristol. He took me and introduced me to a bunch of people – Pinch and people like that.

Were you producing at this point?

Yeah – really bad music! I was actually still on my MPC, which is what I’d been using to make my hip-hop beats, and using old hardware to try and find a way to make that work for dubstep. Then I realised that Tom, who I knew from Rooted, was actually Peverelist. So I’d go into Rooted and hand him CDs of my early, weird beats, and he’d actually listen to them, even though they weren’t very good, and give me feedback and helped me out.

The album has quite a underlying unnerving, brooding feel. Was that a conscious thing?

I think that when I’m working on my own I get a bit more introspective, so maybe I lean towards that kind of ‘brooding’ stuff. I quite enjoy collaborations, that’s obviously more fun, but writing by myself is a very personal process so that ended up being one of the aesthetics of the album. But also I think at points it gets a bit beachy – y’know, 80s beach music. As I said, I was writing it for over a year, so obviously it represents a range of emotions, the feel of that year.

With a lot of the current dubstep scene taking a turn towards the formulaic, would you say you were looking to disassociate yourself from that label and scene with this record?

I wouldn’t necessarily say I was trying to disassociate myself from dubstep – more that I was trying to distance myself from everything. I was really into all that stuff quite early on, so when it started to get quite formulaic I found it quite easy to move away from it. And then when UK funky got really big, that seemed to be a spawning ground for people with new ideas, and I got really into that, but I couldn’t make it. It’s so reliant on natural drum programming and groove, and I love listening to that sort of stuff but when I’m making music, but I like my drums to be really rigid and machine-like.

With so many Bristol producers really pushing on at the moment, would you say you feel part of a sort of collective, centering around yourself, Idle Hands, Julio Bashmore etc.

Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of exciting music happening, but it’s great that everyone seems to have their own tone and is doing something individual. Obviously, mine and Matt (Bashmore)’s solo stuff is completely different. That’s what’s always been great about Bristol, you look at its history of bands and musicians and even though there’s always a common thread of shared influences and ideas, they sound completely different. Even going back to Massive Attack and Tricky and Portishead – they all sounded completely different to one another.

So about your collaboration with Julio Bashmore as Velour – how did that come about?

I’m not quite sure how Matt and me found each other, but I’m pretty sure it was on the internet. I think it was. I really liked the stuff he had on his Soundcloud, and I think he liked my FACT mix. I’m not sure who first contacted whom, but there was a mutual appreciation there. We found out we had some really key influences in common, like Prince and Daft Punk. So we started getting together and bumping heads, and it ended up being a kind of R’n’B, house thing. Very eclectic.

You must be pleased with the reaction the album has received?

I’m really pleased – I had no idea how it would be received, I just did it. I only knew it didn’t sound like anything else in my immediate peer group. It’s great to see the reviews though. Hopefully people will keep on enjoying the record and come and check out the
live shows.


DOWNLOAD CRACKCAST 006 BY HYETAL HERE: http://tinyurl.com/5u3rfff


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Photo: Shift Eye

http://soundcloud.com/hyetal

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