Knowledge 091

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“‘Why Conductor?’ I hear you ask. The answer Being based in the greener and much less This kind of quality control is evident in the
SUPER
is simple. Apart from the obvious allusions to urban landscape of Norfolk can afford a greater ﬁ nished product. ‘Conductor’ spans a wide
conductors of music, the name tells the story of freedom in terms of headspace. “I ﬁ nd the range of sounds, from the big jazz sound so
the EZ Rollers and encapsulates a small piece of vibe and the attitude to the scene is different typical of the EZ Rollers, to a deeper Bukem
drum & bass history.” in London to anywhere else”, explains Jay. “All vibe, from dubby tracks to dark tunes that are
our music has always been written outside of heavy on bass and beats. Listen carefully and
So begins the opening paragraph of sleeve London. Obviously the best place to get the vibe you can hear elements of older Rollers’ stuff
CONDUCTOR
notes from the inlay of the EZ Rollers’ fourth for what you’re doing is going to the clubs and inﬂ uencing the new material too. All of which is
artist album. ‘Conductor’ marks the latest getting inspired by the crowds and they music iced nicely with a cherry on top by the fantastic
chapter in the Rollers’ 13-year history and is you hear there. But when it comes to writing vocals from Lady Roller, with appearances from
the culmination of a previous ten albums’ worth music, we’ve always felt free to do what we Tali and Messy MC along the way.
of experience for the band. Due for release on want and living outside of the bigger cities is an
June 25 on their own Intercom imprint, work escape really which I think is good.” “When we came to do this album, I had a sort of
began on Conductor way back in 2006. Since writer’s block and was feeling really uninspired,”
the phenomenal success of their ﬁ rst ever single It may sound like the perfect way to work – being says Lady Roller – real name Kelly, who completes
as a collective – ‘Walk This Land’, the EZ Rollers your own boss and having the luxury of being able the EZ Rollers trio, “but once I got out of London
now have under their belts an accomplished to take your time. However, this time around the and got to Norfolk where the guys are, we started
body work including albums, compilations, DJing EZ Rollers employed a pretty disciplined approach writing and all the creativity came ﬂ ooding through.
and live shows. It’s fair to say that the Rollers when it came to start work on this album. It ended up becoming a bit of a journey for me and
have set a pretty high standard of precedent for the lyrics on the album are quite personal.”
themselves – so, no pressure then? “We sat down with a plan before we started,” adds
Alex – the other half of the production duo. “These “Quite a lot of the tunes on the album came
“What we have got by now is a lot of experience of type of big projects take a long time, so I really quite late in the last six months really,” adds Jay.
putting albums together,” says Jay – one third of need to know where Jay’s coming from before we “You have to build up a momentum and get into
the EZ Rollers and 50% of the production brains start because if you don’t have a good idea of what a ﬂ ow and experiment quite a bit to ﬁ nd what
in the outﬁ t, “but no matter how much you know, you’re setting out to achieve, it can go on forever.” you want. You’ve got to be happy with it and be
you’ve got to have a creative ﬂ ow with it as well,” happy with the end result.”
he continues. “With this album we never really put “This time around we talked a lot in advance and
a time limit on it. We started thinking about it at the spent hours thinking about what we wanted to It’s impossible not to think of live drum & bass
beginning of 2006. We’d already written a lot of achieve. We made an effort to refer back the ideas when talking about the EZ Rollers. Alex and
tunes but then we thought ‘no, this isn’t really how we discussed at the beginning each time we made Jay were performing live sets as early as 1996,
we want it to be’. Fortunately, because it was for our a tune. It was the ﬁ rst time we’d spent so much and the release of the Rollers’ ﬁ rst artist album,
own label and there was no time pressure, we were time in advance planning. So we’d evaluate along ‘Dimensions of Sound’, debuted in tandem with
able to think ‘this isn’t what we want’ and were able the way and say ‘ok we’ve got all these tunes, but a live show with Lady Roller on vocals supported
to move on and try other stuff.” we need a tune like this now’, so we set about by a ﬁ ve-piece band. It would be fair to say that
writing like that from that sort of direction.” the EZ Rollers were the original live drum & bass
K42-44_EZ-Rollers.indd 43 8/6/07 19:33:52
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