Size the day

Roni Size reprazents for a hyperspeed, fast-food, post-DJ booth, virtual-studio world

Chew slowly.

You offer the motherly advice out of concerned desperation. Like oxygen, food and sunlight, keeping a fast tempo seems natural for Roni Size, who currently is wolfing down pasta with the same clipped urgency as one of his vapor-trail drum ‘n’ bass breaks.

“I can’t. I’m so hungry.”

There’s no doubt Roni Size and his collective, Reprazent, are far too hungry to slow down. But as Size’s makeshift meal — squeezed into a long afternoon of interviews — indicates, food is only part of the focus of their manic appetites.

Instead, the drive is musical and cultural. If the runaway technological obsession of the year 2001 feels like the rising action to some experimental sci-fi film, Roni Size and Reprazent want to write the score. Their hunger stems from the desire to create a cultural soundtrack that captures both the break-neck immediacy and increasing lack of boundaries to information that have come to characterize your times.

“It’s very, very easy now to access things,” says Size, whose excitable British lilt also operates in fast-tempo, stream-of-consciousness bursts. “It’s very quick. That’s the culture we live in. There was a point in time where you used to hear a record, right, and you’d say, ‘Ah, what’s that record?’ And it took you three months to finally find the name of the album. And then you find the name of the album, and you have to go to the record store and you have to order it. When you get it, you cherish it, and then you smell the wrapper, and open up the wrapper and you play it. That’s what it used to be. Now, you just get your MP3 — you type in the name, download it and you’re done — it hasn’t even got a smell to it.”

In the mission to represent this atmosphere of immediacy, Size’s sometimes frustrating but constantly maturing stylistic genre, drum ‘n’ bass, seems uniquely capable. Just as the violent extroversion of rock ‘n’ roll in the late ’60s was indicative of the civil unrest of that time, the hyperactive tempos, deep layers of sampled sound and electronic platform of drum ‘n’ bass are all indicators of the fast-paced, hypermediated and ruthlessly digital society in which we live.

But as culturally appropriate as drum ‘n’ bass may be, you don’t want to make the mistake of confining Roni Size and Reprazent within it. Indeed, part of the collective’s mission is pulling their brand of music from the labyrinth of electronic esoterica and spiking it with the more accessible sensibilities of well-rounded musicians.

“The first thing you have to do, right, is discard what you said,” Size says. “We’re not just drum ‘n’ bass producers. That’s not what we are. We come from a whole history of making music. We’re not just drum ‘n’ bass DJs. We’re not just DJs. ... We have a history of being able to just perform music. I make R&B, I make soul, I make hip-hop. We all venture in different styles of music, but this is where our heart is. But don’t put in your magazine that I’m a drum ‘n’ bass producer. There’s a lot more to us than that. One of the reasons why we put a live show together and entertain you is because that’s what we are. We want to entertain, man.”

Indeed, while Roni Size and Reprazent may aspire to an advanced and futuristic musical aesthetic, they are simultaneously rooted in the tragically outdated tradition of classic showmanship. Reprazent’s attention to live performance is an anomaly in the electronic school in which they operate. While audiences in the age of the DJ have been seduced by kinetic lingo like spinning and programming, live performance in such genres has all too often been reduced to a simple matter of playing records.

When Roni Size takes the stage (rather than DJ booth) with fellow producers Die, Krust and Suv, vocalists Onallee and Dynamite MC, drummer Rob Merrill and bassist Si John, it’s a throwback to the days of the rock-‘n’-roll-road-warrior supergroup. They draw from experiences on the road and bring them into the studio, which in turn gives them a reason to hit the road again. “We’re trying to take the best of [studio albums] New Forms and In the Mode, and our history, and just put it into whatever projects we are working on immediately,” Size says.

Roni Size and Reprazent’s model for composing and recording effectively has worked in exact opposition to convention. As the group evolves, attention to live performance has increasingly taken precedence over studio-based work. “I think with New Forms, we didn’t [draw from live performance], because we’d never even been on the road as a live act. New Forms was a studio-based record. In the Mode was a record that we made for the stage, because it took us so long to translate New Forms onto the stage. In the Mode — it was very, very easy to turn it out on stage because we made it with that intent.”

The group’s allegiance to the road has become so intense, in fact, that they’ve decided to liberate themselves from the studio altogether on their next release. This is where that sense of identification with post-modern culture and technology once again enters the picture. When you assume that Roni Size and Reprazent still work in a studio, you have forgotten the rules of technological immediacy.

“Now, we’re not necessarily sitting in the studio,” says Size. “We just recorded the third album on the road. We’ve all got laptops, and we’re working on the road. We’re on the bus, we’re in the airport, we’re in the laundry, we’re in the hotel room and we’ve all got our own laptops with Pro Tools and samplers and everything. We’re working on the road everywhere. So, the studio? Where is the studio? That’s the question. The studio is wherever we feel we can open up our laptop. Wherever there’s a power point — you know what I mean — we will work.”

No matter how accessible or fast or even complicated technology makes his creative process, however, one fact remains certain: Roni Size will still have to eat.

“I’m going to finish my pasta now,” he says.

“OK. Enjoy it.”

Matt.hutchinson@creativeloafing.com

Roni Size and Reprazent perform Thurs., March 22, at EarthLink.Live. Show time is 9 p.m. Tickets are $18 in advance, $22 day of show. For more information call 404-885-1365.??