The Secret Weapons

Echo Drama is a nine-piece dub, reggae and hip hop group who released their debut EP, Bury The Weapons, towards the end of last year. The group discovered during the process that they were leaving close to an entire album’s worth of samples out of the final edits of the tracks. While Schiftan could recognise these samples had potential, knowing what to do with them was another matter. “When we were tracking the EP, we started doing a lot of the overdubs and layers, ‘cause we did kind of get pretty serious with the production of that first record, and in putting in all these layers, we got to the editing stage and we had to axe all these things. I was always kind of going, ‘Oh, that doesn’t really sound right for the track, but keep the take because the percussion sounds could work in a remix,’ and the others were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that,’ or ‘Keep that synth sound, that’ll go well with this,’ or whatever, and we just had this wealth of things we didn’t want for the record. We figured, well, you could almost build another record off that. I guess getting dubs done as reggae tracks is a tradition in the genre – initially we were just going to make a straight dub thing with mainly instrumentals, kill the vocals and just make it something that’s purely dub. But then I kind of got thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be good to branch out to other genres?’

“We discussed the remix thing, and before we’d really done anything to make it happen, our keyboardist Steve [Phillips], who works under the alias Composite, he sent me a mix of a track without telling me he’d been working on it, just really hush hush. I got it late one night and I put it on and I fucking loved it. I drafted a plan [the next day].”

And so, their next record, Remix The Weapons was born. Of course, the birth wouldn’t be complete without a bunch of live shows. “We’ve been enjoying them so much – a couple of the guys have said, ‘Man, I actually think this new version is better than the original, we should use it all the time!’ I think we’re just getting into it because it’s a change and it’s exciting, but I’m definitely going to see how it goes down at these shows and if we get a lot of good feedback on it, it’ll be something we can keep up our sleeves and pull it out at shows. It would be a shame to let them go completely because we’ve worked on them for a few weeks, so they’ll probably pop up again. This was a bridging thing for us – it was good because we were producing something new, but making product whilst on a budget. It was a way to keep making new music and raising towards next year and wanting to record a new album.”