Final Fridays hold a special place in the heart of Denver’s dubstep community. For some of us these nights are sacred – how often do we have the opportunity to witness legends in action? So when artists like N-Type show the same passion for these nights as we do, there’s no denying the warm, fuzzy feeling it sparks in our bass-fueled souls. After living up to his tradition as an orchestrator of the scene, a musical visionary, and a timeless party conductor behind the decks, I had the honor of sitting down with N-Type to score an exclusive peek behind his enduring devotion to all things bass music. N-Type may be a pioneer and purveyor of classic dubstep sounds, but his unbridled excitement for the scene’s future inspires the same giddy awe as his place in its history does. The Rinse FM staple, founder of Wheel & Deal records, and original dubstep producer offered rare insight into the evolving state of the culture with an infectious excitement familiar to anyone who experienced his set.
UK grime is blowing up the US underground... how do you feel about that phenomenon?
I think its wicked. I’ve been playing grime tunes and listening to grime since the early, early days. Like if you can even find any early mixes of me it was all, ya know, grime, dark two-step, and dubstep... but it should’ve blown up ages ago out here! I can’t believe it didn’t! Our UK emcees... well, I love UK emcees. I love American emcees but my favorite guys are from the UK.
I’ve heard people say it’s because they don’t understand the accents.
Yeah, I can see that, there’s so much in there to listen to as far as lyrical content... I love grime.
What do new initiates to grime need to listen to if they want to dive into the genre?
Just listen to fuckin Rinse FM... the stuff on the internet, there’s a lot of stuff, its been piling up for years. Wiley is easily one of the best, the godfather – he’s my favorite. Then you got that Skepta, Jme, Frisco, the list goes on, you know what I mean? The new guys like Stormzy are breaking through here now, they’ve been around for awhile but they’re doing wicked things... Preditah, there’s loads of people man. Grime is sick. When we do our raves in the UK I try to sort of put grime and dubstep together. I think they’re the sort of music I was into when I started coming through. I mean I love jungle and that as well... my favorite music is jungle, drum n’ bass, a lot of UK stuff really. I like US hip-hop, hip-hop is cool, but yeah man. Really grime’s like UK hip-hop with a different vibe, you know what I mean.
Yeah, sometimes when I play grime for people here they think its trap music...
We’ve embraced trap in the UK though! There are people producing trap-style tunes, and bringing that back into the grime style. But man, I even noticed tonight, I played a few grime tunes and it just popped off. I can’t believe it didn’t blow up earlier.... One of the influences for the way I play is definitely grime. It had that London attitude, the music was slightly more edgy. It had a vibe to it that was slightly different from your slower, more experimental stuff. So I bring them both together, that’s my style. I play a lot of instrumentals. I like the vocals, but I’m an instrumental man.
How do you find tunes for your RinseFM show?
I kind of come across people. Sometimes its word of mouth, sometimes I’ll receive something from the original guys who I always get tracks from so I know I’m getting something good. Obviously you can’t pick through everything but you can pick through the things that you like. I just keep an ear to the floor. After awhile you kind of earn a quality stamp so you know what you’re getting is good but I like to keep my ears open to everything, man. There are a lot of new artists who are learning things a lot quicker than we did.
Influence of the internet?
What I’ve seen with the internet is I’ve seen that genres and trends are moving a lot quicker than they used to back in the day. We dubstep guys kinda got the beginning of the internet hype, so it helped us with what we were doing, but now I’m seeing trends come through and they’re there for like six months, then something else is new. There’s so much information on the internet, people are listening to the tunes and hearing the tunes a lot more than we used to before. Like, we’d hear em in the dance, and then if there was a tape pack you’d hear it regularly on the tape pack. But other than that, that was it. Times have changed a lot from back in the day. I sound like an old man, don’t I?
-Amye Koziel