Loadstar - Bristolian Rollers

James Hutchins, - on 9/7/12

Compiled of Gavin Harris and Nick Hill, formerly and respectively known to the world of drum & bass as Xample and Lomax, the Bristol duo have surpassed the highest expectations in recent years by fusing their individual styles and creating a pioneering sound that imbues club dance floors, iPods and huge festival arenas with incredible energy and impeccable musical precision. We caught up with Loadstar ahead of a busy schedule and their long-awaited album release, Future Perfect, now set for sale in October 2012.

You’ve just dropped the new single Second Skin/ Terror Drone on Ram. Talk us through this release and your decision to give it away for free. We’ve kept people waiting a while since our last full release, and this being a single leading up to the full album release later this year, we wanted to offer something for free, something we can give direct to everyone who has supported us and a different format for us to reach out to new fans of dnb/bass music. We like to keep our tunes diverse, so giving away 2 tracks different in style is a good taster for what’s to come on the album.

You’ve remixed for Chase & Status, Wolfgang Gartner and even Ed Sheeran. What’s your general approach to remixes? We approach every remix differently. First and foremost, we only remix tracks that we are really in to, by doing this we are instantly inspired to give the track our own stamp! We tend to take the key elements out of the original and try and construct an intro around them, once that is done we then have the direction to move onto the main ‘drop’ of the tune.

We're seeing a lot of drum and bass producers experiment with tempo. Can we expect a non-drum and bass release from Loadstar? Yes definitely, dance music has opened up so much in the last few years giving much more freedom to producers to write at different tempos. While drum and bass is still our main thing we don't want to be fully constrained to one tempo and we have been writing tracks and experimenting at 140 and also 128, more housey/electro templates. Expect to hear some of these tracks featured on our album.

If there’s one label you would love to release on, what would it be and why? XL would be a great label to release on as its got a lot of history and has released some of the best music in the last 15 years from the likes of the The Prodigy, Radiohead through to The XX.

If there were three DJs of any genre you could have play at your birthday who would they be and why? 1. Jeff Mills, One of the original pioneers of techno music, gave me one of my most memorable nights ever in the main room at Space in Ibiza! 2. Andy C, We have always looked to Andy as being at the forefront of drum and bass and seeing him play so many amazing sets at the legendary End club in London means he would have to be on the list! 3. John Peel, what a legend and a legacy he has left, had such good taste in music and was one of the most diverse DJs.

The Loadstar album is long awaited! Is there any information you can let us in on regarding its release? What can we expect from the album? Well its finally finished! A lot of people will probably think we have been sitting on it for months, in actual fact we have been consistently writing new music. We set high standards for ourselves and do not want to release anything we’re not 100% happy with, so now the time is right and we finally have a real diverse selection of tracks and currently working on the tracklist. Expect to see a number of singles over the summer with the album dropping in October.

Any post-album plans you can fill us in on? Loadstar Live perhaps? Yes we are planning a live show and putting the whole thing together at the moment. We love performing and putting on a real good show, so this is a step up from our DJ sets and we are really excited to launch this at the end of the year. 

Listen to Loadstar on Pulse Radio.