The language student about to take bass music by storm

You find fresh and exciting music at the most unexpected times. A 1am tweet from someone I follow led me to the Soundcloud of a 19-year-old producer called Timbah.

Timbah’s debut release for Bad Taste Records has got some of the most respected tastemakers in bass music, such as Xfm DJ Mary Anne Hobbs, excited about his music future. From Nottingham but now living in Sheffield, he first started dabbling in music four years ago, at the age of 15, when a copy of Reason found its way into his hands.

“I used to make really, really stupid beats,” he says the week before the release of his EP, “I used to play them to friends at break times at school – they were pretty embarrassing, like DJ Hazard style drum & bass, often with family guy quotes or something planted in at various places.”

A few years later, having started university, he decided to produce once again culminating in his first EP release.

“I’ve drawn influences from a lot of places – quite often from people I know who make tunes rather than big name producers,” he says, “I’d hear what my mates are making and think ‘I could use that in one of my tunes because we use similar software and VSTs.”

I ask him about individual tracks on this EP.

“The title track, Can’t Love Without You , was one of the very first tunes I made and it took quite a while for me to get producing others. I can’t really just sit down and make something – I have to be in a particular mood.”

“I think there’s a unifying theme for the tunes that are on there, in terms of the structure of music I’m most fond of, where the ending is inevitably a lot softer than the middle, and sort of wraps up the tune in a nice way.”

Listening to his EP and gauging other peoples’ feedback, there are continuous comparisons made to James Blake’s multi-textured bass music.

“I definitely was going for a sound similar to him at first,” he says, before pausing. “But I don’t think my tunes sound anything like his now – I just try and capture a nice vocal quality on tunes in the same way he does.”

Referring back to Blake’s 2010 Bells Sketch EP for Hessle Audio, he comments:

“It blew my mind because it seemed somehow like a halfway stage between dubstep and LA beats – I was like ‘I need to make music like that,’” he says, “Then the remix he did for Untold’s Stop What You’re Doing is arguably still my favourite beat.”

Timbah has the utmost admiration for his music.

“The fact that he can create music that heads can listen to and praise as pure originality and then equally infiltrate the mainstream charts with music that embodies those qualities filtered down is nothing short of genius,” he says.

The conversation about Blake leads him onto making observations about bass music in general in 2012.

“It’s really hard to talk about bass music in these times because it encompasses such a broad spectrum of music,” he says, “But there’s definitely more of an inclination to house and techno in 2012 than before – you can tell that from the artists who are dominating the scene at the moment, like Joy Orbison, Boddika and Blawan.”

“Where I see myself in it is difficult as well,” he says, “My main aim is just to keep things different.”

“I can’t get all the exclusive new beats from the best people in the scene, so I reach into other genres so people are still hearing things that sound new to them, and I can’t produce with the technical skill of the best producers of the scene, so I just make what sounds good to me.”

The young producer is pleased with his first release but right now music is just a hobby:

“I’m currently studying Russian, French and Spanish at university,” he says, “I’m well into that – at the moment, music is a creative outlet that I take a lot of pleasure in, but I enjoy my university course so much that it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll abandon it.”

He will spend the next year of his education in the Russian industrial city of Yaroslavl.

“Maybe I’ll try and take bass music there.”

Timbah – Can’t Love Without You EP Preview by Bad Taste Records UK

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