Of all the former Drum and Bass heads who’ve decided to slow things down and turn their hand to the 140 bpm side of production, few have made the transition look quite so seamless, or enjoyed quite as much success, as Si Kryptic Minds and Leon Switch.  Example magazine favourite ‘Beerz’ of Manchester caught up with Si to get the exclusive scoop on the new album, some words on the much discussed DnB to Dubstep cross-over and whatever else happened to come up before his credit ran out.

First things first: the new album. We can exclusively reveal the record will be entitled “Cant sleep”, named after that deep, melodic track that has been rolling out across dance floors since the start of the year (you heard it hear first!) Si kept the details of the actual content relatively close to his chest, but we can confirm the album will see the duo further develop their interpretation of the 140 sound, although we have been promised some “slower stuff” and some “more experimental, arty stuff” ( make of that what you will). There will definitely be one collaboration with Youngsta.  

For all the hype surrounding the release, however, the naming process itself was hilariously mundane, as Si explains “it was very difficult to come up with a title…obviously Can’t Sleep’s been playing for a while so I just said to Leon, ‘what do you think of Can’t Sleep’ and he said ‘yeah, yeah, yeah!’” There was a similar level of spontaneity involved in the decision to actually produce the record, “we hadn’t really initially planned to make an album, it just sort of happened”.

So where exactly did all the tracks come from? As we understand it, the backbone of the record will be formed by a couple of well established bangers in their own right: “Can’t sleep” obviously being one and “The Fifth” being the other (yes it is getting a release, and, yes you did hear it here first!). The remainder of the album grew naturally from Si and Leon’s wealth of (often unheard) productive talent, as Si explains, “I spoke to Leon and said ‘look we’ve got so many tunes here, we’ve got about 40 unreleased tracks…if we just take back some of them tracks like “The Fifth” and “Can’t Sleep” and a few other bits...and write a few arty, more experimental bits, then we’ve got an album”.

But as we know, they haven’t always produced slower stuff. The Essex based duo spent the best part of a decade churning out DnB releases on a barrage of different labels, (Metalheadz ,Renegade Hardware , and of course their own project “Defcom records” to name just a few), culminating in the 2007 release of “Lost All Faith”. This expansive album represented the sheer variety of sound the pair had unearthed within the genre; by many viewed it was viewed as a masterpiece. For Si and Leon however, this album would be the final flourish, the finishing touches to their Drum and Bass legacy (at least for the foreseeable future).

At a time when the scene in general was beginning to loose its way, the duo felt as though they had squeezed out every last drop of fresh creativity from the 170 sound, “it was just really stale for us…I feel like we’ve said everything we wanted to say. We’d gone from making dark amen tunes to neuroey stuff to orchestral pieces”.

DnB wise, it was difficult to see where else was left for them to go, although that is not to say that Si view’s the scene as dead, or even stagnant. Like many others, he sees the future of the sound in the current work coming from labels such as Autonomic and Shogun Audio, “I bumped into D-Bridge the other month at RAM at Fabric…his music, I think, is amazing so if I we were going to do any 170 stuff I’d definitely give it to D-bridge first to see if he wanted to put it out. I think all them guys: Instramental, D-Bridge, Alix Perez, Sabre, Icicle, they’re just taking it somewhere different…They’re the guys that have really brought it back. A lot of the bigger labels, I just don’t think they are what they use to be. It’s these smaller guys who were coming up a couple of years ago, it’s their fresh sound and outlook that’s made the bigger labels think ‘oh my god, we’ve got to change a little bit”.

For Si and Leon the big change came in 2009 with the birth of their first full length Dubstep album, ‘One of Us’. Now producing and performing under the collective alias “Kryptic Minds”, “one of us” was to be the debut release on Loefah’s forward thinking ‘Swamp 81’ imprint; the anticipation was massive and the record did not disappoint. Following on from the success of the ‘Minor Nine’ release, Kryptic Minds produced an album of deep and spacious half step rollers as if they’d never known how to produce anything else.

What is perhaps most amazing about this transformation is the relatively narrow scope of their 140bpm influences, as Si explains “we don’t actually listen to Dubstep… And unless it’s like the people I’ve mentioned, we’re a bit rubbish at listening to demos as well. I should really spend a bit more time doing that but if you just want to make music yourself, you don’t want to listen to too much stuff”.  

Clearly, Kryptic Minds do not lack creative inspiration, at one point during the interview Si casually remarked “if we’re really on a writing buzz, we can make a tune in six hours”! So what exactly is it that has kept their output so high and so varied, for so long? One crucial factor is ensuring the tracks remain fresh, “if it takes much longer than a week, we’ve generally lost the vibe to the tune so then we just scrap it and start again”. There is also the ‘two heads are better than one’ dynamic; Si told us “what Leon is really good at is just rolling a tune out, whereas for me it’s got to sound perfect before I can go on. For example Last week, I was working on a tune at home and was almost gonna scrap it. But Leon came round and was like ‘it’s cool, roll it out’. So I rolled it out, cut it to dub, played it the next day and it sounded lovely!”

Whatever the formula is, they’re definitely doing something right and “Can’t Sleep” should be no exception. Although, as Si admitted, the details are still a bit sketchy, the album, (both vinyl and digital) is set to drop some time in March or April 2011 in a deal with Black box records. Now all we have to do is wait.