Technimatic Selects: Three Tunes From Their Genre-Defining New Album

Ever since Goldie's "Timeless" was released in 1995, the complete drum and bass album has been the holy grail of anyone in the genre looking to elevate their form to artistry. In a genre that's often maligned as being primarily concerned with visceral elements, it's a tough thing to pull off. UK duo Technimatic have taken on that challenge with their new album, Desire Paths, released on Shogun Audio – and they've actually succeeded, triumphantly so.

Desire Paths is at once sonically intrepid and thematically concise, never slumps into pastiche, and sits together as a body of work in an effortless way. In drum and bass, albums like this only come along once, maybe twice a generation. We tracked down Andy and Pete, selected three tracks that show the range of the album and got them to give us an inside look on how they came about. Check it out:

Pete: We had a few demos on that one. But as soon as the Lucy Kitchen vocal arrived, the tone of her voice had a folky tinge to it, something you don't really associate with drum & bass, but yet it worked amazingly well on it. She came up with the melody. The track is a very simple one, really. We pared it back as much as we could to let the vocals, the real magic, shine through.

Andy: We got put in touch with Lucy out of nowhere. We'd only ever spoken to her online and knew very little about her. Because we didn't really know her, we just let her do her own thing. It wasn't until afterwards when we listened to the recordings that we were like, "You know what? She's absolutely smashed it." We're definitely going to work with her in the future.

Pete: "Tectonic" was a track that went through quite a lot of forms. Andy and I are constantly in battle with ourselves sometimes. We make all this musical D&B, which is really nice and blah blah blah, right? But we're always like 'we need to make something harder, for the dance floor, for the DJs'. After many, many false starts, the track seemed like it had potential.

Andy: I remember we sent it to Friction and we were dead keyed up about it, we thought he'd be impressed that we'd gone down this other angle. He actually wrote back and was like "Yeah, uh, it's alright. Not quite what I was hoping for'. We left it for a good six months and then went back in on it. It's a funny one, isn't it? It's one of the tracks on the album that took the longest.

Andy: Mucky Jeff is a character that is very instrumental in the foundations of Technimatic, but that's as much as we're prepared to say. We always want the music to do the talking, and if a jazz-funk fusion comes out of what we're making at that time, great. As long as it has sounds that we both love, then it doesn't really matter what it is. This track is the end result of that thought process.

Pete: It came about, in it's infancy, because we'd been up to our eyeballs in drum & bass for a few months and we thought we should cleanse the palate for a little bit and see where it leads. The initial element of the track was the beat at 130bpm. I think I can be fairly confident in saying that we're not gonna play it live, though!

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If we gave you any more of these tracks for free, it'd be a crime. The record as a whole is an important treatise of the places that drum & bass can go. We encourage a full listen. But okay fine, we can't get enough either. Check out another cut off the record, but from the perspective of a grocery cart:

Buy the record: iTunes // Beatport // Vinyl // CD

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More Shogun:
Stream Rockwell's Genre-Busting Insta-classic, "INeedU"
Drum 'n' Bass Don Friction Goes Back to Basics with "Battle Scars"
The Best Drum & Bass Albums You Missed in 2013