VICIOUS CIRCLE INTERVIEW

Words by Charlie Vice

Hailing from South London, the three man collective known as Vicious Circle are notorious for their hedonistic antics and full on attitude to the quality control of their music. After an absolute smasher of a set at Clwb, we caught up with two thirds of VC, Dan and Simon, to see what’s going on.

First off, thanks for taking the time to have a chat. Did you guys start out as a unit? Or did you meet individually through DnB?

Well we met well before DnB. We used to live in a flat together, just going raving and getting wasted for a couple of years. Two of us did a sound engineering course, got a computer and just cracked on really. I’ve also known Aaron from Universal Project for a long time, since pirate radio days years ago, and we all used to dj so I guess it just started from there.

So do you find that any of you in particular tends to take control in the studio?

It depends. I mean we all do bits in the studio, sometimes one of us will do something on our own or we all sort of work on it together; so it depends really. With DJing as well we tend to mix it up (no pun intended.) We sort of base it on whoever’s been doing the most work in the studio, they tend to get the most gigs.

Can you tell us about your relationship with Universal Project?

Well we’ve known Ruxspin from UP for a long time, before we were even making music; they brought us into it really. We were doing stuff in the studio and they started to get into it, it sorted of gave us that little platform to get out there. When they sent over the parts to their classic ‘Jackhammer’ we were able to do a remix that was supposed to go out on UP’s imprint but got snatched up by Clayton and put out on Hardware. And from then on really our relationship with Renegade began to flourish.
The whole tune made something for us to do as a project together. We were mates before anything. Our old studio is in their flat so naturally you can imagine they were always around spending a lot of time with us writing music.

Can you tell us about your new LP with them?

It’s been a long time coming! We’ve done a lot of tracks, probably going to do an eight track vinyl release as well as the CD. We’ve probably written 12 tracks already, but there are seven we definitely want on vinyl. The problem is that we’re constantly changing what we want on there and deciding how we want to put it out. That is whether it’s going to be one part or two EPs. But it’s almost there and we want it to be right! Though now it’s getting closer to the summer, which is probably not the best time to put out an album, so we may have to wait until September to put it out. But we’re on the case now and ideally we’ll get it out for mid June.

Is the label just an outlet for your own ideas?

We just wanted something of our own, you know. I mean obviously UP have had a label of their own for ages but we just wanted something that we can do something slightly different with. A lot of the labels that we have released with, especially Renegade Hardware, requires a specific style. With the album, we’re trying to mix it up and basically cover the spectrum of drum and bass that we like.

As far as artists go, who do you want to collaborate with?

I don’t know, Break, Iggy Pop, D-Bridge. We’re feeling a lot of the kind of more musical stuff, like Instra:mental. It’s more about the music as opposed to repping what everyone else is listening to.

What was your most memorable night at The End?

Definitely the last one man, it was a fucking free for all! A bit chaotic and the mixing wasn’t as good as it usually is but we just went in there wanting to play tunes that we always wanted to hear at The End, or that just meant something to us.