Bassy Beats

In a bass music/electro scene that becomes more and more crowded every day, Jack Beats are doing well to stand out with a sound totally unique to them, instantly accessible and flippin' easy to rave out to. Some kinda twisted hybrid between house, hip hop, dubstep, electro and drum'n'bass, the quality of their output and DJ sets makes even more sense when you look at the duo's pedigree: Niall Dailly is part of turntablism legends Scratch Perverts, and likewise Ben Giffen was part of hip hop DJ crew The Mixologists.

As such, their unique sound came pretty naturally, Dailly relays from his studio in the UK. “At first we were making music that we were feeling and didn't really know why we're doing it other than just the interest in it. And then I think when we hit the kind of dubstep things and the house music, and other people hadn't really touched that at that point and people responded well to it. After we had done two or three of those tracks people started associating that sound with us… And so we were kind of stoked and we have held onto that,” he reflects.

Alas, with great ability, comes great responsibility. “Originality is important and people associate that sound with us and it's a gift and a curse in some respects because being progressive is also important and it makes that hard because you have to keep finding new ways to reinvent it. And sometimes that's kind of difficult man because you might want to make a techno tune and people will get upset and say 'That's not what you do, you make these weird tunes'. But at the same time, when we get it right, it's fun. When you do do something that doesn't sound like anything else it feels quite good.”

Coming from that turntablist, jump-up background has also afforded them immense energy when it comes to rocking out on stage. Sitting in the booth flicking through CD wallets or staring at laptops you will not find during a Jack Beats set. “Earlier this year we started to do this dance music style live production thing with lots of visuals and heaps of people and started DJing where we were triggering the music off the visuals and it was really fun actually.” The only it lacked at the time was the ability of the duo to actually control the visuals themselves, a situation that's since been rectified. “…We do the kind of shows now with the video based productions, we trigger all of our visuals from DJing and it's much more exciting because we can bring our energy from what we always used to do,” he enthuses.

“The mixing and mucking around with tracks as we play and the energy of doing some stuff on the fly. I've been doing the same stuff for too long where you get into that kind of regimented thing where you think 'we have to play this song next' but what we do now is the track list is different every night and we still bring that new production to the DJ set but we can still play the way we essentially always have. And I think that's how we are going to perform forever.

“You know the best thing is it's really cool to play this new technology and figure out what works for you and what doesn't. It's cool man, there's so many ways and options of how to do stuff. And I guess we try to be progressive and not look as if we're worried about it but it's just what kind of floats your boat.”

But really, the audience is steering this ship, and drives the duo each time they play. “One of the best things from dance music is that energy you can get from going with the audience as well. If you get it wrong you get it wrong, but if you get it right then that's kind of what DJing is all about.”