“The term bass music is all too-often overused to bracket UK music of a certain low-end frequency together. But for xKore, his diverse productions and already brimming cannon of exquisitely produced music is deserving of a wide spread and eclectic bracket if you must choose to include him in one, that is. If it’s frenetic, sharply tweaked drum beats and musically reinforced, melodic bass lines you’re after, you can be safe in the knowledge that xKore‘s etched his name into uniquely heavy slabs of futurism soaked, contemporary dance floor music. Just ask the likes of Skream & Benga, Dillon Francis and many more household names from across electronic music’s leading lights, all of whom have cottoned on to his mean, lean experimental sound.
As xKore‘s sound progresses alongside his formative years, his growing trajectory shows no sign of letting up, as he continues to fuse together the best of all contemporary dancefloor music into his own brand of heavyweight destroyers. The future holds no limits for this titan of “bass culture” so make sure you don’t sleep on him for one second! Read the interview below!”
Hi xKore! How are you doing?
Hey, I’m doing great, happy that my release is finally out and happy to be back producing again after a long hiatus.
For the past few years I’ve been learning to program for a music related project, dealing with personal issues, and only releasing house music on the side as Sonny Banks, but the recent quarantine weirdly inspired me to start producing as xKore again.
Take us back to the beginning, how did you found your passion into producing electronic music?
I started on a site called Newgrounds.com. Animators and programmors would make animations and games and audio artists would provide them with free to use music. I was inspired by some of the well known artists on there creating really cool stuff and so I downloaded Fruity Loops and tried it myself. A few competitions and years later I was given an award for musician of the year from the site and honestly that gave me the confidence to start releasing my music in the big wide world. This mode of just creating tracks and uploading them as you are done is something that I have wanted to get back to, as opposed to the complicated process of releasing through labels.
You have over 10 years’ experience of working with electronic dance music. You have seen how the electronic music has developed. What is your opinion about todays ”Bass music”?
I feel like 10 years ago I came during a wave where FL Studio and Ableton were really becoming widely known and accessible, and so a lot of new producers were starting. Bass music was all about the Massive synth at that point, and all the top people were creating their signiture sounds in Massive. Then came Serum, which was the next “revolution” in sound design for bass music, and made it incredibly easy to make complex sounds in the same vain as Skrillex and Zomboy, which everyone now has access to. Granulizing is a technique that has become popular recently, especially with Flume‘s music, for creating complex sounds from samples or resamples rather than synthesis, and I feel this will be important for the next few years until the next thing. I find that the roots of change in bass music, being so sound design oriented, are often in new technologies and techniques being used by the artists.
In terms of the experience, I see a lot more artists releasing by themselves instead of with a label. I personally think this is a great thing.
How have you been staying productive during the quarantine period?
Having an excuse to isolate myself fully for months at a time has honestly been great, but there are a lot of worries and dangers that come along with that. The start of the lock down was kind of a shock to the system that let me reflect and focus on a single project that I wanted to do. Quarantine is actually a lot like my normal routine so there wasn’t actually that much change.
You released an EP called “Cyberface”. Could you share the creative process behind about this EP?
I have always been a big fan of the cyberpunk genre but it has never cleanly shown through in my early or dubstep releases, and so I wanted to focus on creating something “cyber” this time around rather than any single genre. When I started writing music, people on the internet used to be internet people, nowadays everybody is on the internet, even my mum. I had been thinking a lot about this huge change and how it now feels to use the internet or be in “cyberspace“. I find that themes in cyberpunk are pretty resonant with peoples experiences today and so that is the main thing I wanted to show.
What is your favorite song from the EP?
I would say it’s “Passenger“. I think that it has a very resonant and interesting theme for today. It’s based on a monologue from a artificial intelligence in the Ghost in the Shell series that talks about how the AI boosted and jammed signals in cyberspace to construct events that would lead it to the movies protagonist. In my mind, this rings true today. A growing number of people rely on digital information for the context they use to make decisions in their lives. This digital information is very easily manipulated and constructed, which leads to a sense of confusion, nihilism and chaos. The track, and the EP more broadly, sits in that kind of mood.
Your Cyberface EP include collaboration with Erotic Cafe. How did you end up working with these names?
Erotic Cafe‘ is an artist that I have known for a few years now. When I worked at the label Kinphonic as the label manager he joined there, but I had known his dubstep before then. His tracks are like secret weapons for other DJs so I absolutely recommend checking him out.
This quarantine period has been hard for music industry so now it’s time to support and support, any interesting new producers you would recommend to follow?
Erotic Cafe is a sick producer who is super technical and is trying a lot of new styles and methods with bass music at the moment.
Centra is an artist I have known for a long time, people might know him for his remix of my track “Need You” years ago, he has a great range of tracks and is super underrated.
Stereoliez is another artist I have supported for a long time, same deal as the other artists but more with a trappy and house kind of flavour.
Would you like to share something with the followers of Let the Bass Get You?
I feel like I put in a lot of thought and time into “cyberface” so it wasn’t just another genre release and I’m trying to express things that aren’t just cool sounds, so if you appreciate that in music I would be happy if you checked out my release.
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