We Discussed the Future of British Nightlife With Dubstep Pioneer Mala
This post ran originally on THUMP UK. Smirnoff's 'We're Open' project is about encouraging openness and diversity in music – allowing sounds to cross borders and bring people together. That's what inspired their film with Nadia Tehran, and it's why we're looking at people, groups and collectives bringing an ethos of openness to what they do. Dubstep has always been a famously open house, unifying faces from all different backgrounds beneath a banner of jaw-rattling sub bass and vivid atmospherics. And seeing as dubstep wouldn't exist without Mala, he seemed like an ideal person to talk to.

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We Discussed the Future of British Nightlife With Dubstep Pioneer Mala

Read out interview with the man himself, and listen back to sets from him and Silkie at our recent Bussey Building takeover.

When they were drawing up the shortlist for London's new night tsar, it would have been hard to find a man more qualified for the role than Mark Lawrence, known more commonly to the city's battered army of club-goers and nightlife natives as Mala. A pioneer who has brought dubstep to prominence in the last 15 years with his endless DJ sets—both alone and as one half of Digital Mystikz—seminal clubnight DMZ and label Deep Medi, Mala has had the London night in his blood since the early 90s, when he was shelling down the mic as a 14-year-old MC at jungle raves in his native south London.

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Restlessly creative, in recent times Mala has ventured with Gilles Peterson to locales as far flung as Cuba and Peru to work on the Mala In Cuba and Mirrors albums—efforts that seek to combine the "raw, melancholic London greyness" of Mala's own electronic work with the flair and flamboyance of the musicians he met in Latin America. His musical life to date has been marked by a curiosity that speaks to club music's core ideals: a way of living that exists to push culture forward and bring people together.

I caught up with Mala ahead of his set at THUMP and Smirnoff's Open House party last week to chat about the unifying power of dubstep, his journeys abroad and how nightlife has changed in his hometown since the early 90s.

THUMP: It makes sense to start with dubstep—as a scene, it's always seemed like a really open house to me, in terms of it attracting people from all kinds of backgrounds. To what extent you were conscious of that in the early days?

Mala: Growing up, I was conscious of London being very multicultural and diverse—my dad's Jamaican and my mum's English, so colour and race weren't things that I necessarily saw. It wasn't a thing to be black or white but as I got older, I saw that London was a melting pot for so many different cultures. As a result of being born and growing up in London, and with DMZ being based in Brixton, it was inevitable that dubstep would draw many different types of people together. We always tried to create a very universal vibe, anyway—there was never any VIP area or whatever.

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The idea of a group of people quaffing champagne behind a red velvet rope at Mass or Plastic People seems absurd.
For sure—it still exists in some places, but at the nights we put on, or play at, there's no place for it.

You've talked before about coming up with jungle—what was it like for you as a teenager, growing up around London's club culture?
I was introduced to club culture through pirate stations in 1992, 1993. You'd hear those records played, then go down the shop and try to buy them. And there you'd find the flyers for raves, and hear the adverts for raves on the pirates, and as a result it was inevitable that I was gonna go jungle raving. I was immersed in club culture from a very young age. When I look at my career, it feels like a logical progression to me.

Do you look around now, at all the clubs and record shops closing, and worry that London might be losing its club culture?
Obviously it's becoming more difficult for clubs to get a licence. We've heard that fabric is reopening and there are gonna be some restrictions put in place as a result of the case against it. I don't think any of us will really know what this all means for clubbing in London until 20 years from now. You get people like Goldie and Norman Jay getting honours from the Queen but so much of what they've done to earn them has happened in nightclubs, where that energy and those communities are born and grown.

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People often talk about "the London sound" and you can hear that in so many different types of music. What words would you use to describe that "London sound?"
For me, the best stuff coming out of London has a realness—there's an authenticity and rawness you can hear in most of it. I think UK soundsystem culture in general has a big role to play in that. The Caribbean migration in the 1950s and 60s brought that here, and you can still hear it in most club music that comes out of the UK. I think if you're an islander, as we are in the UK, as people from somewhere like Jamaica are, you have a burning curiosity to explore across the waters. And that is also present in the sound. I think the last thing is a sense of melancholy, which is in the dubstep we've made, as well as things like grime and drum & bass. I think that's to do with the environment we grow up in—a lot of concrete, a lot of greyness.

When you went to make the albums in Cuba and Peru, what did you take from those musical cultures to blend in with that typical London grey?
Cuba was challenging because it was such a different color to the music I write—very upbeat. It was quite challenging to marry the two sounds. A lot of it was incorporating acoustic instruments into what I do electronically. I wanted it to be authentic to Cuba in some way but I'm not Cuban or a musician like that, so it would have been impossible for me to write a Cuban album. I think the people of Cuba are really inspiring, most of them were very happy, and music there is something that happens together in families and among friends.

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Were there any memories in particular from those journeys that still stand out now?
Me and Gilles Peterson were playing at a house party in Cuba. It was in a residential area but someone had put this massive soundsystem in the living room of a house. Gilles started playing and after a while the police arrived. They said, 'OK, you can keep the party going till 3AM but everyone better be gone by then or there's gonna be trouble.' I was a little bit prang of playing anyway because on that particular trip I was doing some talks in Cuba for the British Embassy—so I didn't wanna get shifted, basically, by the Cuban police. But I thought, 'Fuck it, I'm gonna play anyway,' and while I was some guy came up and asked if he could join in. If that happened in London or America, I'd just think the guy wants to MC—so I said, 'Yeah, no problem man, jump on.' I didn't see it but he pulled out his trumpet, someone held the mic up for him and he just started vibesing over "Lean Forward." Me and Gilles were losing our shit. We asked him to come to the studio the next day and we did something together that turned into "Calle F," off the Cuba album I made.

That's a great story.
That's what I love about making those records—going into new environments and experiencing something for the first time. This is what we've been talking about: you can't shut down music venues because moments like that can happen. You can't cut off these places where people can connect, collaborate, and share something new together. It's too good.

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I guess if you bring all the themes we've been talking about together, you realize that nightclubs in every sense of the word are cathedrals of curiosity—not just musically, but sexually, socially, hedonistically, they're places where people can come together and explore.
Yeah, it's everything, everything—it's massive what can happen in some music venues. Without having the experience of those environments I wouldn't be who I am. Not to say that I'm anyone special, but it's offered me a very colorful experience of life and I feel very grateful for that.

While you were traveling, did you find any similarities between South London and the likes of Lima, or Havana?
The one thing that traveling to all these places has shown me is that you can be thousands and thousand of miles away from home, and have more in common with the people you're connecting with there than your next-door neighbors. It's just the way people tune themselves. With me, I'm meeting people that are into a certain type of music and with that music usually comes a mindset.

Obviously dubstep itself is a sound that is being made, imitated, and mutated by producers all over the world now. How do you feel about that, as someone who had such a big hand in pioneering the sound?
I think it's great. I don't really put the importance on myself as such, we're all inspired by something. To be honest with you, all I've ever really wanted to do making music is find a sense of freedom within self, and I hope that the freedom I find within myself while making and playing music translates to other people while they're listening, whether that's at home or in a club. Even if just for a few moments people can forget all the troubles and worries that we have to go through on a daily basis, and have a little bit of time to breathe and think for themselves.

How about yourself—what are you up to in the next year or so?
Lots of stuff for Deep Medi, lots of shows in South America and at festivals. I went to record in a country a couple of years ago and I've started making some music based on that, so I might do another project like the Cuba and Peru albums, I'm not sure yet.

Which country was that?
Ah, I'm not telling you, sorry. I don't wanna jinx it.

Fair enough. Thanks, Mala!