From Brixton and Leeds to New York and Denver, dubstep has spread its roots across the world and created a culture with some of the most die-hard fans in the music industry.
Through it all, Tristan Roake and Andre Fernandez of Truth have contributed to the development of this ever-growing scene while creating a legacy of experimentation and vigorous advocacy for the underground.
Recently, we spoke with Tristan Roake, from his studio in Christchurch, New Zealand, to learn about the Truth story, how Mala helped them get their start, the difficulties of making it in the space, their desire to support burgeoning artists, Roake’s thoughts on gatekeeping and keeping the scene alive, their upcoming show on Halloween at Mission Ballroom, and lots more.
Tristan Roake: What’s up, man?
Maximilian Vanegas: Hey! How are you doing, man?
TR: Yeah, I’m good, thanks, bro.
MV: I guess I should say good morning.
TR: Yeah, basically. Not for you, though, right? What, 9 PM or something else?
MV: Yup, 9 PM here in the states. I don’t think I could say I know anyone from New Zealand. Did you grow up there?
TR: Yeah, so I grew up in New Zealand, was born here in Christchurch, in the South Island, and lived here till I was about 7 years old. I moved to the UK for about 10 years, and since then, I’ve been back here with a two-year stint in the USA, but apart from that, I’ve been living in New Zealand.
Christchurch, New Zealand
MV: What was it like growing up in New Zealand?
TR: Christchurch is a medium-sized to small-sized city, 400,000 people. So, the suburbs are all pretty close to the center. It’s really nice. Obviously, as a child, you don’t have any context of what place you’re growing up in. You just live. But when I moved to the UK, it gave me a really good perspective of where I was living. As a child, I just couldn’t wait to come back home. It’s a really great place to grow up and have kids.
MV: Can you tell me about your first significant experience with music when you were growing up?
TR: As a young child, there are a lot of photos of me sitting on my potty, listening to headphones and stuff, so I listened to a lot of my parents’ records.
MV: What kind of music?
TR:Kat Stevens, Steely Dan, Eurythmics, The Police, a bunch of others. I actually have their old record collection now, and there are some pretty cool records in there. Some I never listened to as a kid, Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream, stuff like that.
TR: As far as my most memorable musical experience growing up, the one that stuck with me happened when I was a bit older. I don’t know, probably 13, 14? I was living in Oxford, and there was this band from there called Radiohead, and one of my best friends at the time was like, “Hey, do you want to come to this concert on Friday? It’s Radiohead. It’s the album release party. It’s 5 pounds to go.” And I said, “No, I can’t do it. I’m not allowed to go out on a Friday night.”
TR: That show ended up being Radiohead releasing The Bends, which is one of my favorite albums of all time. But I didn’t go, and the following week, my friend had a Battle of the Bands competition at the same venue. It was earlier in the evening, and I was allowed to go to it. At all the intermissions, they played the live recordings of the previous week’s concert.
MV: That’s so cool.
TR: Yeah, and every song I would go to my mate and was like, “What’s this one?” He goes, “It’s the band from last week that you didn’t come to, you’re an idiot.” By the time they released their next album, I had moved back to New Zealand, and they were selling tickets for £200 in huge arenas. Meanwhile, I could have gone to this little intimate show, but I didn’t. So, in some ways, my most memorable musical moment is a moment that didn’t actually happen.
MV: It was the show you didn’t see that inspired you. That’s great. What was the venue called?
TR: It’s called the Zodiac. It’s a 400-capacity venue in Oxford. The band, Radiohead, are from Ebbingdon, which is a small town nearby. But Oxford, I guess, is their home stomping ground, as far as music is concerned. It would have been legendary to say I went to that concert. But, alas, I was just 13 years old and stupid.
The Zodiac, Oxford
MV: So you moved to the UK at seven and lived there for most of your teenage years?
TR: Till I was 16, about almost 10 years.
MV: And essentially, England is where you found your music fandom, specifically after this Radiohead concert that you didn’t see?
TR: Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, I come from a very musical family. So I was always playing instruments. I’d play saxophone, keyboards, and stuff. I was always into lots of music, but that was when I was first like, “Oh, I really love this specific sound.” So I became obsessed with that kind of music for a while. Then the same thing happened again when I got reborn into electronic music a few years later. The thing about electronic music was that it just sounded unlike anything else that was out there. Hearing Roni Size and Optical for the first time, I just felt like there were no other sounds in music like this that exist. It’s just crazy, different, weird shit.
MV: Was there a specific project in electronic music that was significant during these early days?
TR: Ooh, I think it would be Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation
MV: Nice.
TR: I also lined up outside the shop as a kid to buy The Fat of the Land when it came out. You could line up overnight to buy CDs back then. It’s ridiculous, because you can just buy it the next day now, but there was something special about lining up like that. So that was a pretty iconic album. “Firestarter,” “Breathe,” all those classic Prodigy songs. And then, Portishead, their self-titled second album, Portishead, is just an absolute jam. I can still listen to that; anyone will love it.
MV: What did the transition from fan to producer look like? What spurred that decision to start making electronic music yourself?
TR: I actually had no intention of doing music as anything more than a hobby. After I finished high school and went to university, I didn’t have much direction for what I wanted to do. At the same time, I got really into DJing and spinning vinyl, so I was playing a lot of parties at the time. Being able to cut my teeth playing at parties every weekend for my mates was a way I became really, really into the music. Without telling you a massively long story, when I started at university, I got involved with a University club. Usually, university clubs are like chess clubs, or LARPing, or usually related to a specific subject. But two other guys and I set up a club that was all around DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti.
TR: I was a DJ, one was a breakdancer, and the other was a graffiti artist. It was free to sign up, so we had 5,000 sign-ups on the day. We had decks set up, a breakdancing crew, a wall for graffiti, and it was just when everyone got cell phones, so we just had 5,000 cell phone numbers. We threw a party two weeks later, and there was a line around the block. So we just threw a bunch of parties and I was like, “Oh, this is actually really fun.” It did affect my university studies, that’s for sure, but I graduated. I had a few setbacks because of it, but basically, halfway through that, Dre and I were also really good friends…
MV: You met Dre at university?
TR: I met Dre earlier, honestly, through parties. Literally, the way I met Dre (Andre Fernandez of Truth) was standing on the dance floor, listening to drum and bass. Maybe it was EdRush and Optical, or maybe Grooverider…or Goldie. It was one of these artists who used to come through all the time. I notice this tall skinny guy standing next to me three gigs in a row, and we’d never met each other, but I could recognize him from the last gig, and he just passed me a joint. As time went on, we’d go out back to have chats, and that’s how we became friends, so…we definitely met through music, through drum and bass.
MV: You’re like, “Oh, hey, you’re as obsessed as I am about this, huh?”
TR: Yeah, yeah, because… and the thing is, at any club or any venue, there’s always a sweet spot. So it’s like, “Well, that’s the other guy that found the sweet spot.”
MV: I see, so you guys both had the hearing proficiency to know the best spots in the room, and that’s how you kept ending up next to each other? That’s magic.
TR: Yeah, it’s pretty funny. Actually, I hadn’t really thought about it that way either, but it’s definitely why he would have been standing in that same spot as me.
MV: So you didn’t do too well in your studies, but maybe the DJing and parties were the studies all along?
TR: Exactly. I mean, look, I graduated; it wasn’t that I did badly. I just didn’t try as hard as I could have. Give you one night where I was in a DJ competition and out till 5 AM even though I had an exam at 8 AM the next day. I wasn’t as committed as I probably should have been. But then, in hindsight, as you said, the studies really came from throwing events.
TR: When Dre and I got together and started throwing our own events, which grew out of our own experiences, it basically turned into a business that ran drum and bass events for about seven or eight years. We threw 200-plus gigs, a majority of them featuring acts from overseas who were brought into the country. So yeah, you’re absolutely right, those were my studies, really. Having this safe space at university to host events with a very, very low chance of failure.
MV: Did you know at that point you wanted to keep doing this for the rest of your life, or were you still toying with the idea of getting a “real job?”
TR: I basically came to this conclusion one day where I was like, “I’m never going to own a house. I’m never gonna have any savings, I’m gonna do music my whole life, I don’t give a f***, I’ll probably be dead by the time I’m 30.” All these things go through my head. “I’m just gonna do drum and bass, I don’t care about anything else.” And I was a bit scared to tell my mum and dad. And they were just super supportive, and I was like, “Oh, shit.”
MV: So you didn’t think you would ever be able to support yourself and have a successful career in the music industry?
TR: Honestly, my viewpoint was… I drank the Kool-Aid or whatever. I kind of believed the hype that everyone in my generation was fucked. That all the older generations own all the property and have all the control, and anyone younger than a certain age would never be able to buy a house or pay off their student debt. It’s the same thing people nowadays say about themselves. And yes, it does get harder; it has gotten harder even since then, but at the time, I was like, “Well, I’ve just got to accept the fact that our generation’s fucked,” kind of thing. But obviously, our generation isn’t fucked any more than any other generation in history. And, it’s actually all really positive.
MV: So you graduated in 2004, and you’re having success throwing shows. At what point does the official establishment of Truth occur?
TR: You never really know when you’re progressing and when you’re not progressing. Things are just happening all the time. Then it’s only in hindsight that you can see what was a critical moment and what wasn’t. So, Dre and I were throwing shows together from about 2000 to about 2007-2008. And in 2007, we met this guy, Mala, part of Digital Mystikz, who ran Deep Medi. He was the guy who gave us our break, basically, in dubstep. He was the guy who showed us dubstep as an art form itself. We loved it so much, so we just ran with it, and sent him a bunch of our music, and he championed for us. So, shout out to him because he was the guy who gave us the extra leg up that we needed for people to take us seriously.
Outlook Festival Boat Party
TR: We did a few tours around Europe and the UK before we even toured New Zealand. New Zealand’s the place where sometimes you have to leave for a bit and come back, and people say, “Oh, okay.” Because we’d switched genres, and we’d change our identity and stuff.
MV: What was the name of the crew?
TR: The crew before was called Urban Notion. Because drum and bass is a very urban emotion, basically. And then, with Truth, it just came out of thin air. That’s the name. It’s a different identity, it’s slower, there’s more space, there’s more simplicity. And it took us a couple of years before we went to the States, maybe 2009, 2010, is when we had our first US tour, at which time the US dubstep scene was still in its early phase. It was still in these 300-400 capacity, basement-type venues.
MV: Very much underground still.
TR: Yeah, underground, but it had a moment. It blew up, in about 2007, maybe 2006? Just off to the UK, it spread everywhere. And it was the first genre of music that I can think of that really proliferated after the advent of mainstream internet. With the internet, it was able to spread a lot faster than previous genres of music.
MV: That’s interesting.
TR: So there were scenes popping up in San Francisco, Denver, Houston, New Zealand, Australia, and other countries. So yes, our first tour was underground, but it felt big. When we came back, maybe a year later, Excision and Skrillex had blown up. It was 2010, and dubstep was just starting to blow up, so everything had completely changed. I think we came right before that change. It was a huge change; the crowds were different, the sounds were different, and the rooms were different. Previously, we’d go to a venue like Temple in San Francisco and play downstairs in the basement. When we came back, we were upstairs in the main room with way bigger stacks and go-go dancers and shit. We were like, “What the fuck? This is crazy! This is not the same scene.” But it was quite cool to see that change. It went from a point of us saying, “Oh, what do you guys do? Why are you over here?” “We’re here to do music.” “What music?” “Dubstep.” People would look at you blankly, “What the hell’s that?” “Oh, it’s slowed down, drum and bass, mixed with garage stuff, and some dub music,” and people are just like, “What the fuck is that?” And then coming back a year later and being literally in the line at the airport, listening to two 12-year-old girls arguing about dubstep in front of you, it was that much of a change.
MV: It’s cool that you were able to see and experience the US scene right when it began. What ultimately led you guys to move here?
TR: So Dre and I were always planning to come to the US. A lot of our contemporaries were like, “Why don’t you guys go to the UK, where it’s from?” And we’re like, “No, no, we see more potential in the US.” Because the scene, especially the deeper, darker scene, was very, very nebulous, and it was almost like an embryo being squashed out by the bigger sound in this more underground area. We’re like, “There’s so much potential for it to grow.” And so we’ve been planning to come, we just didn’t know when that would be.
TR: Then here in Christchurch, in 2011, we had a really bad earthquake, which basically destroyed the downtown and took out a lot of essential services. A bunch of buildings collapsed, a lot of businesses shut down, and there was no opportunity for young people. Basically, our entire friend group left. There were Melbourne, Sydney, and other Australian places being considered, but then Dre and I were like, “Why don’t we make this the time we go to the States?” So, we packed our bags and moved to Portland for three or four months, which we absolutely loved. It’s a place in the USA that, because it rains a lot more, is a bit greener. There’s a whole bunch of reasons, but it reminded us the most of New Zealand, that Pacific Northwest area. But we realized it wasn’t as good a hub for flights and stuff. We ended up spending a lot of money on flights. So, when we made the proper moves and got our full visa, we were properly allowed to live there. So we moved back to New Zealand for a brief moment and then properly moved to San Francisco because it felt like the real center for dubstep at the time.
MV: What did your friends and family think of this decision?
TR: I think because of what had happened here, because of the massive upheaval with the earthquake, I think people were just like, “Do whatever you want to do at this point.” It’s better than being in a ravaged city.
MV: It was really bad, huh?
TR: Yeah, you can look it up, but a lot of buildings collapsed and the roads got all fucked up and the whole city flooded for a few days, because of liquefaction, which is where buildings settle on their foundations and push water out of the ground. So there was silt everywhere, and it was very dusty. It took about seven to eight years to come back. Now it’s really nice, but for a long time, it was just a bunch of empty lots, half-demolished buildings, and construction sites. So, yeah, it wasn’t a great place for someone trying to pursue a music career.
MV: People weren’t focused on promoting concerts; they were focused on rebuilding the venue where concerts are held.
TR: Precisely. And look, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and there’s always someone who’s pushing the underground. It was really cool to see people finding random little spots that you’d never think could be a venue and throwing sick events in them. So people were still able to party, but it was on the periphery. You had to travel far away to go to a gig. So basically, moving to the States was a decision that seemed like a risk, but it also seemed like a great opportunity as well. We had a plan, but we didn’t really understand the plan. We were definitely optimistic, maybe more than we should have been. But in the long run, I feel successful. I feel like we’ve done really well. And I’m happy I can survive by doing music as my career, but also my passion.
TR: But those first couple of years were a real struggle. We realized when we started touring that everyone who wanted to book us would be like, “Oh, they’re only here for two weeks, let’s book out the tour.” Then, when you move to a country, there’s a bit less pressure. So then it’s like, “Oh, we’ve got to get gigs every weekend to survive,” and San Francisco is not the cheapest city, even back then. So, the reality of that was a hard lesson to learn. But we hit that up, then I ended up moving to Denver for a while as well, which was awesome with Sub.mission and Nicole, that crew. Dre has never left (the States), but after two and a half years, I moved back to New Zealand mainly because my daughter was turning five, so I was like, “She can go to school in New Zealand.” Dre, ever since then, has lived in the States. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and now he’s just north of Portland.
The Black Box
MV: How did becoming a father inspire your creativity and musical endeavors?
TR: Becoming a father was a massive inspiration. When I found out that we were going to have a child, it made me really think seriously about everything. “Is this the time when I can say we can do this with music? Where we can survive, where we can thrive?” So I decided, with my partner at the time, that yes, we could do it. But it made me get very serious about it. No more mucking around, no more being a 27-year-old. I mean, when you’re single or you haven’t got a kid, you can live off 80 bucks a week and you’re good. But once there’s another human being that you’re supporting, it’s a bit more serious. You can’t muck around anymore.
TR: So, yeah, I got a lot more serious and practiced my craft a lot more. My goal was to focus on production but also get more gigs and do it more efficiently. For me, personally, that was a very real experience that I think helped a lot.
MV: Let’s get back to San Francisco in 2012. You were doing monthly shows that turned into a radio show, which ultimately led to the culmination of Deep, Dark and Dangerous, all within about a year and a half?
TR: Exactly.
MV: Talk about a crazy year. What was going on during that time, besides the explosion of the dubstep scene, that led to so much growth and momentum for your endeavors?
TR: So we were living in San Francisco, finally, we’ve got a great group of friends around us, all into music, and at the same time, this bigger sound, the more midrangey, heavier dubstep became huge. And what happened was, a lot of the nights that cater to our music began to die off a little bit, but luckily, we got a hookup for this venue, Monarch, in San Francisco. It was a Monday or a Tuesday night, with a really, really nice Void Acoustics sound system.
TR: We deliberately said, “Look, we’re gonna do nights that play the weirdest, most underground type of dubstep that you can find, and create a place where people can come listen to it.” And because it’s on a Monday or a Tuesday night, only the people who are really into that sound are gonna bother to come out to it. And it was sick. Every month, it was packed. We had a bunch of amazing guests from Youngsta and J:Kenzo, to Khan and V.I.V.E.K, plus several others. It was really inspiring to hear this music on a really good sound system, with a crew of people who were super passionate about it. At the same time or a little bit after, we’re doing a radio show that we called Deep, Dark and Dangerous. And I guess the label itself came naturally from that.
Truth @ Monarch, San Francisco
TR: We were sent a lot of music for the radio shows and DJ sets. We also had music that we were sitting on and didn’t know where to release it. We were releasing on various labels, like Tempo, Rotten, and Smog, but nothing really fit perfectly for what we were trying to do. So we said to ourselves, “Let’s just put out some music on our own label and see what happens.” We hooked up with someone who could get us a vinyl pressing, and it all lined up. We thought, “Let’s just do a few releases, there’s no pressure, we’re gonna take it pretty chill.” In fact, I think after the first release, we may have waited for another year or something for the second release. We weren’t in a hurry. But yeah, it all coalesced really nicely. The name, Deep, Dark and Dangerous, is how we described it to people. We explained how it encompasses different things – deep stuff can be whatever you think that might be, dark is another thing, and dangerous is almost a wild card. It could be anything. So that was how we described the music to people, and it just made sense to call the label that as well.
MV: I’d love to talk about the third pillar of the label, the dangerous aspect.
TR: Dangerous!
MV: An audio engineer told me a theory about why music makes us feel the way it does. Why it triggers this dopamine response in us. He explained that the frequency of basslines is similar to the frequency of a volcano erupting. So, it triggers this fight-or-flight response in our primal brain that spikes our adrenaline. When it comes to dubstep and bass music, do you think our minds similarly interpret danger? What are your thoughts on why bass music makes us feel the way it does?
TR: Amazing. Yeah, I’ve never heard that before—the idea about the volcano, the frequency of a volcano, and the way it affects us. But, I mean, yeah, I imagine if I felt a volcanic eruption, I’d definitely be shitting myself. As I said before, we’ve had an earthquake here. That’s pretty crazy, the whole world vibrating and shaking. When it dies down, it feels like the land is moving, which it is. I do think that this is music that you have to listen to on a really proper sound system with the right amount of bass, because it’s all about physics. It’s making your molecules in your body move. When the bass feels warm around you, you feel like you’re enveloped in music, and everything has its place. And so, I mean, I definitely, completely agree with the idea that it’s something physical. It’s not just in your head. It’s your body experiencing this music, and that’s very primal.
TR: Every culture that’s ever been studied has music. I expect we found instruments in caves. Rhythm and music have been a really important way of communicating and expressing things. The other thing about music that I’ve found is the way it conveys emotional memories. I can remember the first feeling a song gave me every time I listen to it. Music really pulls on emotions. So I think when you hear music, you really feel it, and there can be a really strong response. It can be really emotional, making you want to move and everything. I’m not really answering the volcano thing, but that’s a pretty interesting theory. There are certain frequencies, obviously, that stimulate your body in different ways and in different places.
MV: Getting back to the Truth story, I’d love to discuss the years that followed 2012. You’re doing the radio show, you’re doing the monthlies, Deep, Dark and Dangerous has just launched. Were you supporting yourself entirely through music?
TR: Yeah, pretty much full-time music – we were supporting ourselves through the shows. I was also getting into a bit of debt, borrowing money and stuff for a while, which took a few years to pay off, but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. But yeah, it was all through the shows. I mean, the record label wasn’t paying anything.
MV: When did you realize you had made it? Was there a specific moment?
TR: So by then, I’m living back in New Zealand. I’ve got my own place and a studio I’m stoked to be working in, but it was still a bit of a struggle. Instead of buying firewood, I’d go to the forest and collect a bunch of fallen down trees and bring them back and chop them up. So I lived that life for a couple of years, and then one day I was like, “Oh, I actually have enough in the bank to survive and not constantly be thinking about money.” I think everyone’s been through this, where they haven’t got enough money. I know it’s crass or whatever to talk about money, but if you haven’t got enough money in the bank and it’s all you can think about, it becomes an obsession: “How am I gonna pay the next bill? How am I gonna buy food? How am I going to pay my rent?” But once you hit that threshold, when you have one extra dollar, all of a sudden, that stress isn’t there anymore, and suddenly, the whole world opens up to you.
MV: Nice.
TR: That was always my goal and definition of success for myself; the day when I could be like, “Oh, I don’t have to think about money all the time and worry about it. I’m now able to survive and support my family,” which is not always so easy. That probably happened, I’d say, 2017/2018, around then? Since then, there have obviously been ups and downs, that’s the nature of life, but it’s mostly been really positive since then, and I can only have a positive attitude about it.
MV: What advice would you give artists who are trying to support themselves and get to a point where they can pursue art full-time?
TR: I heard some pretty good advice recently, which was actually from Will, one of our managers, who said, “The money will sort itself out eventually.” When you’re struggling, if you’re an artist who’s really passionate about it, eventually, it will all work out. But when I say, “really passionate,” I mean that. You have to really be passionate about it.
Truth Manager Will Saltus
TR: You have to be making beats because you love doing it, or performing in front of crowds because you love doing it. It’s easy to love, it’s fun. It’s awesome, but also, in those times when it’s really tough, it’s fine to have doubts. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to have this beacon inside you that tells you, “This is what I’m supposed to be doing and want to be doing.” That’s the one big lesson I feel like I learned when I stopped doing anything else and was just doing music.
TR: ButI really struggled for a while when I first started doing music full-time. I was like, “Why do I feel weird? I should be super happy about this.” I realized that instead of using music as an escape from life, now I have nothing to escape from. It’s funny how your perspective changes, and now the same thing isn’t as fulfilling. Luckily, my dad was like, “Do you have a hobby?” And I was like, “No.” “Yeah, you need a hobby, bro. Get a hobby.” So I got into board games. And that helped sort out my mental health – to have another outlet for socialization.
MV: It seems like throughout the early parts of your career, you guys had a lot of people championing for you. Did that inspire you to help lift up other artists as you have done today?
TR: Yes, I think the feeling you’ve just described of helping other artists has evolved over the life of Deep, Dark and Dangerous. When we first started the label, we didn’t really have any expectations for it. We didn’t know how it was going to go. There were a lot of labels out there, and we were basically leveraging our artist name to try and build the label up as much as we could. When it came to guys like Mala, N-type with Wheel and Deal, Youngsta’s Tempo, or any of the people who gave us their love and respect and encouraged people to listen to us, we learned a really powerful lesson about helping others. One that I still think about at least a couple of times a week.
TR: Sometimes situations come up where I think, “How would they have dealt with this situation? or, “Would they have pushed this artist in this way, or that?'” To begin with, we didn’t really have that intention. In fact, we were like, “Should we even start a label? Is it going to be really hard to do?” We had no experience doing it. But now, it’s been really amazing, because
TR: What we realized is that when people send you music you love, and you release music you love, you can honestly and wholeheartedly say to people, “You should listen to this music.” It feels good to share it, and every single person saying that a certain track or artist is great helps that artist out. So it’s a good feeling to help someone else, and it’s genuine. I wasn’t expecting to have that experience with the label, but it’s been the most fulfilling part of it for me.
MV: The first time I really got to witness the impact you guys have was with Athena out of Maryland, who really exploded after being featured on DDD.
MV: One of the reasons I admire your legacy so much is because of the impact you’ve had on not only artists’ careers, but the scene itself. Besides creating a label and helping promote artists, what are some other things you think will help grow the scene and keep it alive?
TR: I’m gonna give you a non-answer to begin with, which is that I believe that some of these things happen almost organically. It’s a bit of a cop-out answer, but for that to happen, obviously, we need to have human contact. What I really appreciate about music scenes in general is the fact that they are communal. In every other aspect of our lives, things are becoming more and more separated and isolated, which has its own benefits, but it also has a lot of downsides. With music, you can’t really appreciate it at its fullest form until you’ve experienced it with a community, where everyone else is in the same place, getting down to the same vibe. There’s almost a herd mentality where everyone’s brains are synchronizing and stuff. And that’s one thing that I think is impossible to synthesize. It’s almost impossible to do it virtually, right? Yes, during COVID, we had a lot of livestreams, and they were amazing; they were a great way to bring people together. But when it comes to the real-life thing, I don’t think it’s possible to stop that from happening.
TR: Here in Christchurch, there’s a specific venue that was really amazing. It had an incredible sound system, they booked really amazing artists, but they weren’t really making much money. They were supporting the scene in a lot of ways that made you assume that it’s always been this way and it’s always going to be this way. When that venue shut down, it was like, “Oh, there’s a hole now, how do we fill it?” And of course, people did step in. I’ve seen this happen several times, especially in New Zealand, where there are a couple of places that you just never understood or appreciated until they were gone. The flip side to that is crews like Sub.mission in Denver. I think that the scene grew, to a large degree, because The Black Box consistently had really good nights, with really great lineups, on high-quality sound systems. You could almost guarantee that if you went to one and enjoyed it, you could go back again to the next one and enjoy it all over again.
TR: I’m a very strong proponent that if you experience music in its most primal form, and you feel it through your body, you’re always going to want to come back for more, because you have no other way to experience it that way. The scenes that are really flourishing are ones that have really good sound systems. That’s the biggest common denominator between them. With sound systems, you feel and experience the music, and you just want to come back.
MV: How do you think people’s interest in sound systems has grown over the years?
TR: I think people have placed a lot more importance on sound systems recently. In the last, maybe, five years, I think the emphasis on sound systems has continued to grow. In North America, in the last ten or maybe even five years, people have begun understanding more about the importance of sound and audio quality. I’m not saying people didn’t understand it; lots of people did, but more and more people are beginning to understand it.
TR: Countries like the United Kingdom have had a sound system culture since the 1970s, when a lot of Jamaican and West Indian people brought their own sound system cultures. That culture has continued to thrive there. There are a lot of bespoke handle sound systems in the UK that have been going for 20-30 years now. New Zealand had a really strong sound system culture, too. Other countries I can think of, Germany… there’s a bunch, but I think in the USA, there were certain actors who really understood it. Now, people will literally look at a flyer and be like, “What’s the sound system?” That’s one of the first things they’ll look at. And I think it’s a really positive change.
Truth at Mission Ballroom 2024
MV: Another theme that has grown alongside sound system culture is gatekeeping. I would love to hear your opinion on the matter and if you think it’s still an issue.
TR: Yeah, I’ve obviously seen a bit of gatekeeping happening, and I think it’s pretty counterproductive. If you love music and you’re into an artist or sound that not many people know about, but then you won’t tell them what it is because you want to keep it for yourself…that’s a very human feeling. “This is mine, and I want to have it for me; I don’t want everyone else to ruin it.” But people need to think about the artists that you’re preventing people from discovering. You could be their ambassador, sharing them with everyone. I just think that if you like something and you’re into something, you should share it with others. Because sharing music is really like giving a gift. And if you don’t feel like you have that capacity to share the music, that’s also fine, because most people find it difficult to talk to random people anyway. But, if someone asks you, and you’re like, “No, it’s mine,” that’s pretty weird.
MV: So we’ve talked a lot about the past, now I want to chat about the future. Specifically, what’s going down in a few weeks at Mission Ballroom in Denver, Colorado. What’s special about this show?
TR: Yes! Mission Ballroom is coming up in a few weeks. I’m excited to be heading back over for it. It’s gonna be amazing. First of all, the venue itself is really cool and it’s a really cool home for this music. When we first started making this music, we never expected to play in a venue like that [Mission Ballroom]. It’s music made for underground, dark, sweaty basements, and the fact that it works in a crazy big room is pretty epic. It’s Halloween weekend, which is obviously a massive weekend, and we’ve stacked the lineup.
TR: We’ve got Mala, who I mentioned is the guy who first brought us into the dubstep world. He was the guy who helped birth Truth. So, for us to be able to book him as our special guest for a show—that we consider our keystone gig of the year—is really special. It’s a full circle moment. I can’t count the number of times that Mala has put us on his shows: Brixton Mass in London, Outlook Festival stages and boat parties, and different gigs around the UK and Europe. He’s been a champion for a long time. So the fact that he’s able to come and play with us for this show is really special, and we’re super grateful that he’s making the effort to come out.
Outlook Festival boat party
TR: We’ve also got Joker, who I think was the first dubstep artist we booked in New Zealand. We used to promote a lot of drum and bass shows, but we also threw a few dubstep shows as well, and Joker was one of the first, if not the first, dubstep artists we ever booked in New Zealand. We’ll also go to Bristol and hang out with him there. He’s the absolute man. He’s really cool. Then the rest of the lineup is more Deep, Dark and Dangerous crew like Stylust B2B Wraz, Hypho B2B ColtCuts, and CØNTRA B2B Athena
MV: In addition to the artists, it sounds like production is going to be pretty spectacular. Can you explain why you chose to bring in Unify Mountain Soundz? What makes them special?
TR:Unify Mountain Soundz is pretty special. For starters, they have this massive HSD rig with battleaxes, which put out such good sound. I mean, the first time I ever played on a battleaxe rig was on a boat party in Boston Harbor with the guys that are now our management team. Ever since then, that’s been one of the touchstone sound systems. I think we’ve got either 16 or 18 of those coming into the building, which is a huge amount.
MV: Holy shit.
TR: But the really special thing that we’re doing as well is bringing on Sean Hennessey, the guy who designed and built these speakers, the guy who invented HSD. I remember meeting this guy when he was 21 years old in Carolina at a gig. He was just getting started, and now he makes some of the best speakers in the world. So he’s gonna be coming along as the sound engineer, tuning the system, making it hum, making it do what it’s supposed to do, which is pretty amazing to me. I can’t think of anyone else who’d be better at making that system sound how it’s supposed to, so I’m really excited for that.
MV: Making the weekend even more special, you’ve got the Portal EP coming out the day before the show. What’s going to be similar and what’s going to be different about this release compared to past work?
TR: It’s a collection of some of our most recent music. What we usually do is make music, test it on the road, play it as dubs for six months to a year, and then we’ll be like, “Hey, this is a tune that’s really gone well, we should release it.” So these are tracks made in the last couple of months that got really good reactions. We thought, “Let’s keep it really, really fresh with this release. Some of our freshest music that we’re most stoked with right now.” The opening track is actually out now, called “Alien Bass.” It’s a track that Dre played at Bass Canyon, and he posted a little clip of it, which went viral. And we’re like, “Wow. What is it about this track that’s spoken to people?” So we thought, let’s just get this track that’s hot right now out to people. That’s the opening track.
TR: And then, there are four other tracks on the release, all of which are different from each other in their own ways. One is quite aggressive, but also stripped back—hard to explain, but it’s really about the physics of the sound. There’s a track that’s more of a classic dubstep, dumping roller. And there’s a track that’s almost more fun and up there, energy-wise. Then, probably my favorite track of the release is this one called “Drift,” which is the final track. It’s also gonna be the second single. And that’s a track with an amazing vocalist called Dub Princess AKA Megumi Hope.
Megumi Hope AKA Dub Princess | PC: Mumu Moore
TR: We’ve released a few of Megumi’s records on Deep, Dark and Dangerous. Megumi is her alter ego, but her more well-known identity is Dub Princess. For this track, it’s more the Dub Princess side of her personality. The track starts very light and deep, almost a little bit melancholic and sad. Then it has this interesting drop where it’s melodic, but it’s got heavy bass, which then switches up to this absolutely gnarly section, which I’m really stoked to be playing out. It’s a really nice tune to play because it kind of evolves throughout the track. To be fair, all the tracks evolve quite a lot. My advice to most producers is to keep it simple, but I end up making tracks that change the whole way through. All these tracks follow that journey where it’s not just one thing, with each track taking you into a different portal of the Truth sound.
MV: Do you ever intentionally try to lean towards or away from tradition and/or fundamentals?
TR: I think that when you are creating, as far as my personal experience goes, you get into a flow state, and stuff just happens. You’ve got ideas, but they come out of nowhere. They don’t seem to have a formative stage. It’s like, “I should do this, I should do that.” It just starts to happen. After a couple of hours, you have a song, but then you might spend weeks and weeks tweaking it. So I think that the creative stage, in some ways, is hard tocontrol. And I think if you try to control it too much, you might lose something along the way.
TR: Sometimes it’s good to take an approach of making a lot of stuff, then coming back later and saying, “Hey, what are the ones we still appreciate and what are the ones we don’t want to play?” That’s our creative process. To answer your question about keeping things to a certain standard or format, or referencing things that have been before, I think that can be useful. I think what happens is that a lot of the time it happens unconsciously. We’re all shaped by our experiences and the musical influences we’ve had in our lives. But I think it’s really important to follow some set of rules as it relates to the physics of the sound.
Truth at Mission Ballroom 2024
TR: When you’re following the physics of the sound, there are certain rules that I think are really helpful to follow. You don’t have to follow them. Dubstep was born out of breaking a lot of these rules. There were a lot of rules in drum and bass that dubstep flipped on its head when it first started. “Why are the high hats so loud?” “Why is the snare so smothered and reverbed?” “That’s against the rules.” “Why are you putting reverb on your sub? You shouldn’t do that.” Well, people were doing it.
TR: But there are certain things that you can follow that are “best practices” as opposed to rules. When you do them, you guarantee a more consistent result. And when you’re making music that’s designed to be played on a sound system in a mix, you need your music to stand up and sound as good as everything else. So, following those production rules as far as quality is concerned, for me at least, is a very important facet. Sometimes it comes from the very beginning, and you just build them into your process. Other times, you get crazy and you’re making all kinds of shit and throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. And later on, you’ve gotta come and fix it. Which is sometimes fun and sometimes you’re just like, “Why did I do this?” And you have no way to fix it, especially if you’re working in a mud pie where you just muck around and make sounds to record and chop little bits out later on to use in your songs. And of course, well, you can’t go back to the start of your hour-long mucking around and re-create that sound. Now it’s just stuck in audio. So sometimes those ones are like, “How am I gonna make this sound good?”
Truth at Mission Ballroom 2024
MV: It seems like you believe things in life often occur naturally.
TR: I do believe that. I’m also a very strong believer that a lot of it comes down to hard work. I’m not saying that things are going to fall into your lap. You have to work really hard. For a long time, I struggled with the idea that my music’s not that good and the only reason people like it is because it persevered long enough. But for other producers, if you work hard, yes, more people are gonna hear your music and see what you’re doing. Time is a very powerful tool, and so is being consistent. Some people who go to the gym are like, “You have to go to the gym every day.” You go to the gym once every few weeks, you’re not gonna see any results, right? So there’s a mixture of things, but I do believe it’s natural in a way that things do just tend to happen. Organizations coalesce, people become friends with people who have the same kind of worldview as themselves.
MV: As we make our way to the end of the interview, is there any message you’d like to share with the Deep, Dark and Dangerous community?
TR: What I love about Deep, Dark and Dangerous is that it’s a community, and people look out for each other within it. I also want people to acknowledge and understand that within this community, there’s a lot of diversity and people who have different viewpoints. With a community like this, it’s important to respect everyone’s perspectives and take time to understand where they’re coming from.
Truth at Mission Ballroom 2024
TR: Sometimes, that can be as simple as asking questions or having a conversation, or trying to avoid an argument. But I think it’s been a very, very inclusive community, and I love and appreciate the fact that it’s diverse. It would be boring if everyone were the same. But my main message is that we have somuch love and gratitude for the people who have become part of this journey and made everything possible. Without them, there would be nothing.
As the Truth and Deep, Dark and Dangerous stories continue to be written, and the dubstep scene continues to evolve, we wait in anticipation of what move they will make next and how it will impact the future of the realm.
Grab your tickets to their Halloween event at Mission Ballroom here and keep up with everything they’ve got going on in the links below:
From Brixton and Leeds to New York and Denver, dubstep has spread its roots across the world and created a culture with some of the most die-hard fans in the music industry.
Through it all, Tristan Roake and Andre Fernandez of Truth have contributed to the development of this ever-growing scene while creating a legacy of experimentation and vigorous advocacy for the underground.
Recently, we spoke with Tristan Roake, from his studio in Christchurch, New Zealand, to learn about the Truth story, how Mala helped them get their start, the difficulties of making it in the space, their desire to support burgeoning artists, Roake’s thoughts on gatekeeping and keeping the scene alive, their upcoming show on Halloween at Mission Ballroom, and lots more.
Tristan Roake: What’s up, man?
Maximilian Vanegas: Hey! How are you doing, man?
TR: Yeah, I’m good, thanks, bro.
MV: I guess I should say good morning.
TR: Yeah, basically. Not for you, though, right? What, 9 PM or something else?
MV: Yup, 9 PM here in the states. I don’t think I could say I know anyone from New Zealand. Did you grow up there?
TR: Yeah, so I grew up in New Zealand, was born here in Christchurch, in the South Island, and lived here till I was about 7 years old. I moved to the UK for about 10 years, and since then, I’ve been back here with a two-year stint in the USA, but apart from that, I’ve been living in New Zealand.
MV: What was it like growing up in New Zealand?
TR: Christchurch is a medium-sized to small-sized city, 400,000 people. So, the suburbs are all pretty close to the center. It’s really nice. Obviously, as a child, you don’t have any context of what place you’re growing up in. You just live. But when I moved to the UK, it gave me a really good perspective of where I was living. As a child, I just couldn’t wait to come back home. It’s a really great place to grow up and have kids.
MV: Can you tell me about your first significant experience with music when you were growing up?
TR: As a young child, there are a lot of photos of me sitting on my potty, listening to headphones and stuff, so I listened to a lot of my parents’ records.
MV: What kind of music?
TR: Kat Stevens, Steely Dan, Eurythmics, The Police, a bunch of others. I actually have their old record collection now, and there are some pretty cool records in there. Some I never listened to as a kid, Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream, stuff like that.
TR: As far as my most memorable musical experience growing up, the one that stuck with me happened when I was a bit older. I don’t know, probably 13, 14? I was living in Oxford, and there was this band from there called Radiohead, and one of my best friends at the time was like, “Hey, do you want to come to this concert on Friday? It’s Radiohead. It’s the album release party. It’s 5 pounds to go.” And I said, “No, I can’t do it. I’m not allowed to go out on a Friday night.”
TR: That show ended up being Radiohead releasing The Bends, which is one of my favorite albums of all time. But I didn’t go, and the following week, my friend had a Battle of the Bands competition at the same venue. It was earlier in the evening, and I was allowed to go to it. At all the intermissions, they played the live recordings of the previous week’s concert.
MV: That’s so cool.
TR: Yeah, and every song I would go to my mate and was like, “What’s this one?” He goes, “It’s the band from last week that you didn’t come to, you’re an idiot.” By the time they released their next album, I had moved back to New Zealand, and they were selling tickets for £200 in huge arenas. Meanwhile, I could have gone to this little intimate show, but I didn’t. So, in some ways, my most memorable musical moment is a moment that didn’t actually happen.
MV: It was the show you didn’t see that inspired you. That’s great. What was the venue called?
TR: It’s called the Zodiac. It’s a 400-capacity venue in Oxford. The band, Radiohead, are from Ebbingdon, which is a small town nearby. But Oxford, I guess, is their home stomping ground, as far as music is concerned. It would have been legendary to say I went to that concert. But, alas, I was just 13 years old and stupid.
MV: So you moved to the UK at seven and lived there for most of your teenage years?
TR: Till I was 16, about almost 10 years.
MV: And essentially, England is where you found your music fandom, specifically after this Radiohead concert that you didn’t see?
TR: Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, I come from a very musical family. So I was always playing instruments. I’d play saxophone, keyboards, and stuff. I was always into lots of music, but that was when I was first like, “Oh, I really love this specific sound.” So I became obsessed with that kind of music for a while. Then the same thing happened again when I got reborn into electronic music a few years later. The thing about electronic music was that it just sounded unlike anything else that was out there. Hearing Roni Size and Optical for the first time, I just felt like there were no other sounds in music like this that exist. It’s just crazy, different, weird shit.
MV: Was there a specific project in electronic music that was significant during these early days?
TR: Ooh, I think it would be Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation
MV: Nice.
TR: I also lined up outside the shop as a kid to buy The Fat of the Land when it came out. You could line up overnight to buy CDs back then. It’s ridiculous, because you can just buy it the next day now, but there was something special about lining up like that. So that was a pretty iconic album. “Firestarter,” “Breathe,” all those classic Prodigy songs. And then, Portishead, their self-titled second album, Portishead, is just an absolute jam. I can still listen to that; anyone will love it.
MV: What did the transition from fan to producer look like? What spurred that decision to start making electronic music yourself?
TR: I actually had no intention of doing music as anything more than a hobby. After I finished high school and went to university, I didn’t have much direction for what I wanted to do. At the same time, I got really into DJing and spinning vinyl, so I was playing a lot of parties at the time. Being able to cut my teeth playing at parties every weekend for my mates was a way I became really, really into the music. Without telling you a massively long story, when I started at university, I got involved with a University club. Usually, university clubs are like chess clubs, or LARPing, or usually related to a specific subject. But two other guys and I set up a club that was all around DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti.
TR: I was a DJ, one was a breakdancer, and the other was a graffiti artist. It was free to sign up, so we had 5,000 sign-ups on the day. We had decks set up, a breakdancing crew, a wall for graffiti, and it was just when everyone got cell phones, so we just had 5,000 cell phone numbers. We threw a party two weeks later, and there was a line around the block. So we just threw a bunch of parties and I was like, “Oh, this is actually really fun.” It did affect my university studies, that’s for sure, but I graduated. I had a few setbacks because of it, but basically, halfway through that, Dre and I were also really good friends…
MV: You met Dre at university?
TR: I met Dre earlier, honestly, through parties. Literally, the way I met Dre (Andre Fernandez of Truth) was standing on the dance floor, listening to drum and bass. Maybe it was Ed Rush and Optical, or maybe Grooverider…or Goldie. It was one of these artists who used to come through all the time. I notice this tall skinny guy standing next to me three gigs in a row, and we’d never met each other, but I could recognize him from the last gig, and he just passed me a joint. As time went on, we’d go out back to have chats, and that’s how we became friends, so…we definitely met through music, through drum and bass.
MV: You’re like, “Oh, hey, you’re as obsessed as I am about this, huh?”
TR: Yeah, yeah, because… and the thing is, at any club or any venue, there’s always a sweet spot. So it’s like, “Well, that’s the other guy that found the sweet spot.”
MV: I see, so you guys both had the hearing proficiency to know the best spots in the room, and that’s how you kept ending up next to each other? That’s magic.
TR: Yeah, it’s pretty funny. Actually, I hadn’t really thought about it that way either, but it’s definitely why he would have been standing in that same spot as me.
MV: So you didn’t do too well in your studies, but maybe the DJing and parties were the studies all along?
TR: Exactly. I mean, look, I graduated; it wasn’t that I did badly. I just didn’t try as hard as I could have. Give you one night where I was in a DJ competition and out till 5 AM even though I had an exam at 8 AM the next day. I wasn’t as committed as I probably should have been. But then, in hindsight, as you said, the studies really came from throwing events.
TR: When Dre and I got together and started throwing our own events, which grew out of our own experiences, it basically turned into a business that ran drum and bass events for about seven or eight years. We threw 200-plus gigs, a majority of them featuring acts from overseas who were brought into the country. So yeah, you’re absolutely right, those were my studies, really. Having this safe space at university to host events with a very, very low chance of failure.
MV: Did you know at that point you wanted to keep doing this for the rest of your life, or were you still toying with the idea of getting a “real job?”
TR: I basically came to this conclusion one day where I was like, “I’m never going to own a house. I’m never gonna have any savings, I’m gonna do music my whole life, I don’t give a f***, I’ll probably be dead by the time I’m 30.” All these things go through my head. “I’m just gonna do drum and bass, I don’t care about anything else.” And I was a bit scared to tell my mum and dad. And they were just super supportive, and I was like, “Oh, shit.”
MV: So you didn’t think you would ever be able to support yourself and have a successful career in the music industry?
TR: Honestly, my viewpoint was… I drank the Kool-Aid or whatever. I kind of believed the hype that everyone in my generation was fucked. That all the older generations own all the property and have all the control, and anyone younger than a certain age would never be able to buy a house or pay off their student debt. It’s the same thing people nowadays say about themselves. And yes, it does get harder; it has gotten harder even since then, but at the time, I was like, “Well, I’ve just got to accept the fact that our generation’s fucked,” kind of thing. But obviously, our generation isn’t fucked any more than any other generation in history. And, it’s actually all really positive.
MV: So you graduated in 2004, and you’re having success throwing shows. At what point does the official establishment of Truth occur?
TR: You never really know when you’re progressing and when you’re not progressing. Things are just happening all the time. Then it’s only in hindsight that you can see what was a critical moment and what wasn’t. So, Dre and I were throwing shows together from about 2000 to about 2007-2008. And in 2007, we met this guy, Mala, part of Digital Mystikz, who ran Deep Medi. He was the guy who gave us our break, basically, in dubstep. He was the guy who showed us dubstep as an art form itself. We loved it so much, so we just ran with it, and sent him a bunch of our music, and he championed for us. So, shout out to him because he was the guy who gave us the extra leg up that we needed for people to take us seriously.
TR: We did a few tours around Europe and the UK before we even toured New Zealand. New Zealand’s the place where sometimes you have to leave for a bit and come back, and people say, “Oh, okay.” Because we’d switched genres, and we’d change our identity and stuff.
MV: What was the name of the crew?
TR: The crew before was called Urban Notion. Because drum and bass is a very urban emotion, basically. And then, with Truth, it just came out of thin air. That’s the name. It’s a different identity, it’s slower, there’s more space, there’s more simplicity. And it took us a couple of years before we went to the States, maybe 2009, 2010, is when we had our first US tour, at which time the US dubstep scene was still in its early phase. It was still in these 300-400 capacity, basement-type venues.
MV: Very much underground still.
TR: Yeah, underground, but it had a moment. It blew up, in about 2007, maybe 2006? Just off to the UK, it spread everywhere. And it was the first genre of music that I can think of that really proliferated after the advent of mainstream internet. With the internet, it was able to spread a lot faster than previous genres of music.
MV: That’s interesting.
TR: So there were scenes popping up in San Francisco, Denver, Houston, New Zealand, Australia, and other countries. So yes, our first tour was underground, but it felt big. When we came back, maybe a year later, Excision and Skrillex had blown up. It was 2010, and dubstep was just starting to blow up, so everything had completely changed. I think we came right before that change. It was a huge change; the crowds were different, the sounds were different, and the rooms were different. Previously, we’d go to a venue like Temple in San Francisco and play downstairs in the basement. When we came back, we were upstairs in the main room with way bigger stacks and go-go dancers and shit. We were like, “What the fuck? This is crazy! This is not the same scene.” But it was quite cool to see that change. It went from a point of us saying, “Oh, what do you guys do? Why are you over here?” “We’re here to do music.” “What music?” “Dubstep.” People would look at you blankly, “What the hell’s that?” “Oh, it’s slowed down, drum and bass, mixed with garage stuff, and some dub music,” and people are just like, “What the fuck is that?” And then coming back a year later and being literally in the line at the airport, listening to two 12-year-old girls arguing about dubstep in front of you, it was that much of a change.
MV: It’s cool that you were able to see and experience the US scene right when it began. What ultimately led you guys to move here?
TR: So Dre and I were always planning to come to the US. A lot of our contemporaries were like, “Why don’t you guys go to the UK, where it’s from?” And we’re like, “No, no, we see more potential in the US.” Because the scene, especially the deeper, darker scene, was very, very nebulous, and it was almost like an embryo being squashed out by the bigger sound in this more underground area. We’re like, “There’s so much potential for it to grow.” And so we’ve been planning to come, we just didn’t know when that would be.
TR: Then here in Christchurch, in 2011, we had a really bad earthquake, which basically destroyed the downtown and took out a lot of essential services. A bunch of buildings collapsed, a lot of businesses shut down, and there was no opportunity for young people. Basically, our entire friend group left. There were Melbourne, Sydney, and other Australian places being considered, but then Dre and I were like, “Why don’t we make this the time we go to the States?” So, we packed our bags and moved to Portland for three or four months, which we absolutely loved. It’s a place in the USA that, because it rains a lot more, is a bit greener. There’s a whole bunch of reasons, but it reminded us the most of New Zealand, that Pacific Northwest area. But we realized it wasn’t as good a hub for flights and stuff. We ended up spending a lot of money on flights. So, when we made the proper moves and got our full visa, we were properly allowed to live there. So we moved back to New Zealand for a brief moment and then properly moved to San Francisco because it felt like the real center for dubstep at the time.
MV: What did your friends and family think of this decision?
TR: I think because of what had happened here, because of the massive upheaval with the earthquake, I think people were just like, “Do whatever you want to do at this point.” It’s better than being in a ravaged city.
MV: It was really bad, huh?
TR: Yeah, you can look it up, but a lot of buildings collapsed and the roads got all fucked up and the whole city flooded for a few days, because of liquefaction, which is where buildings settle on their foundations and push water out of the ground. So there was silt everywhere, and it was very dusty. It took about seven to eight years to come back. Now it’s really nice, but for a long time, it was just a bunch of empty lots, half-demolished buildings, and construction sites. So, yeah, it wasn’t a great place for someone trying to pursue a music career.
MV: People weren’t focused on promoting concerts; they were focused on rebuilding the venue where concerts are held.
TR: Precisely. And look, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and there’s always someone who’s pushing the underground. It was really cool to see people finding random little spots that you’d never think could be a venue and throwing sick events in them. So people were still able to party, but it was on the periphery. You had to travel far away to go to a gig. So basically, moving to the States was a decision that seemed like a risk, but it also seemed like a great opportunity as well. We had a plan, but we didn’t really understand the plan. We were definitely optimistic, maybe more than we should have been. But in the long run, I feel successful. I feel like we’ve done really well. And I’m happy I can survive by doing music as my career, but also my passion.
TR: But those first couple of years were a real struggle. We realized when we started touring that everyone who wanted to book us would be like, “Oh, they’re only here for two weeks, let’s book out the tour.” Then, when you move to a country, there’s a bit less pressure. So then it’s like, “Oh, we’ve got to get gigs every weekend to survive,” and San Francisco is not the cheapest city, even back then. So, the reality of that was a hard lesson to learn. But we hit that up, then I ended up moving to Denver for a while as well, which was awesome with Sub.mission and Nicole, that crew. Dre has never left (the States), but after two and a half years, I moved back to New Zealand mainly because my daughter was turning five, so I was like, “She can go to school in New Zealand.” Dre, ever since then, has lived in the States. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and now he’s just north of Portland.
MV: How did becoming a father inspire your creativity and musical endeavors?
TR: Becoming a father was a massive inspiration. When I found out that we were going to have a child, it made me really think seriously about everything. “Is this the time when I can say we can do this with music? Where we can survive, where we can thrive?” So I decided, with my partner at the time, that yes, we could do it. But it made me get very serious about it. No more mucking around, no more being a 27-year-old. I mean, when you’re single or you haven’t got a kid, you can live off 80 bucks a week and you’re good. But once there’s another human being that you’re supporting, it’s a bit more serious. You can’t muck around anymore.
TR: So, yeah, I got a lot more serious and practiced my craft a lot more. My goal was to focus on production but also get more gigs and do it more efficiently. For me, personally, that was a very real experience that I think helped a lot.
MV: Let’s get back to San Francisco in 2012. You were doing monthly shows that turned into a radio show, which ultimately led to the culmination of Deep, Dark and Dangerous, all within about a year and a half?
TR: Exactly.
MV: Talk about a crazy year. What was going on during that time, besides the explosion of the dubstep scene, that led to so much growth and momentum for your endeavors?
TR: So we were living in San Francisco, finally, we’ve got a great group of friends around us, all into music, and at the same time, this bigger sound, the more midrangey, heavier dubstep became huge. And what happened was, a lot of the nights that cater to our music began to die off a little bit, but luckily, we got a hookup for this venue, Monarch, in San Francisco. It was a Monday or a Tuesday night, with a really, really nice Void Acoustics sound system.
TR: We deliberately said, “Look, we’re gonna do nights that play the weirdest, most underground type of dubstep that you can find, and create a place where people can come listen to it.” And because it’s on a Monday or a Tuesday night, only the people who are really into that sound are gonna bother to come out to it. And it was sick. Every month, it was packed. We had a bunch of amazing guests from Youngsta and J:Kenzo, to Khan and V.I.V.E.K, plus several others. It was really inspiring to hear this music on a really good sound system, with a crew of people who were super passionate about it. At the same time or a little bit after, we’re doing a radio show that we called Deep, Dark and Dangerous. And I guess the label itself came naturally from that.
TR: We were sent a lot of music for the radio shows and DJ sets. We also had music that we were sitting on and didn’t know where to release it. We were releasing on various labels, like Tempo, Rotten, and Smog, but nothing really fit perfectly for what we were trying to do. So we said to ourselves, “Let’s just put out some music on our own label and see what happens.” We hooked up with someone who could get us a vinyl pressing, and it all lined up. We thought, “Let’s just do a few releases, there’s no pressure, we’re gonna take it pretty chill.” In fact, I think after the first release, we may have waited for another year or something for the second release. We weren’t in a hurry. But yeah, it all coalesced really nicely. The name, Deep, Dark and Dangerous, is how we described it to people. We explained how it encompasses different things – deep stuff can be whatever you think that might be, dark is another thing, and dangerous is almost a wild card. It could be anything. So that was how we described the music to people, and it just made sense to call the label that as well.
MV: I’d love to talk about the third pillar of the label, the dangerous aspect.
TR: Dangerous!
MV: An audio engineer told me a theory about why music makes us feel the way it does. Why it triggers this dopamine response in us. He explained that the frequency of basslines is similar to the frequency of a volcano erupting. So, it triggers this fight-or-flight response in our primal brain that spikes our adrenaline. When it comes to dubstep and bass music, do you think our minds similarly interpret danger? What are your thoughts on why bass music makes us feel the way it does?
TR: Amazing. Yeah, I’ve never heard that before—the idea about the volcano, the frequency of a volcano, and the way it affects us. But, I mean, yeah, I imagine if I felt a volcanic eruption, I’d definitely be shitting myself. As I said before, we’ve had an earthquake here. That’s pretty crazy, the whole world vibrating and shaking. When it dies down, it feels like the land is moving, which it is. I do think that this is music that you have to listen to on a really proper sound system with the right amount of bass, because it’s all about physics. It’s making your molecules in your body move. When the bass feels warm around you, you feel like you’re enveloped in music, and everything has its place. And so, I mean, I definitely, completely agree with the idea that it’s something physical. It’s not just in your head. It’s your body experiencing this music, and that’s very primal.
TR: Every culture that’s ever been studied has music. I expect we found instruments in caves. Rhythm and music have been a really important way of communicating and expressing things. The other thing about music that I’ve found is the way it conveys emotional memories. I can remember the first feeling a song gave me every time I listen to it. Music really pulls on emotions. So I think when you hear music, you really feel it, and there can be a really strong response. It can be really emotional, making you want to move and everything. I’m not really answering the volcano thing, but that’s a pretty interesting theory. There are certain frequencies, obviously, that stimulate your body in different ways and in different places.
MV: Getting back to the Truth story, I’d love to discuss the years that followed 2012. You’re doing the radio show, you’re doing the monthlies, Deep, Dark and Dangerous has just launched. Were you supporting yourself entirely through music?
TR: Yeah, pretty much full-time music – we were supporting ourselves through the shows. I was also getting into a bit of debt, borrowing money and stuff for a while, which took a few years to pay off, but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. But yeah, it was all through the shows. I mean, the record label wasn’t paying anything.
MV: When did you realize you had made it? Was there a specific moment?
TR: So by then, I’m living back in New Zealand. I’ve got my own place and a studio I’m stoked to be working in, but it was still a bit of a struggle. Instead of buying firewood, I’d go to the forest and collect a bunch of fallen down trees and bring them back and chop them up. So I lived that life for a couple of years, and then one day I was like, “Oh, I actually have enough in the bank to survive and not constantly be thinking about money.” I think everyone’s been through this, where they haven’t got enough money. I know it’s crass or whatever to talk about money, but if you haven’t got enough money in the bank and it’s all you can think about, it becomes an obsession: “How am I gonna pay the next bill? How am I gonna buy food? How am I going to pay my rent?” But once you hit that threshold, when you have one extra dollar, all of a sudden, that stress isn’t there anymore, and suddenly, the whole world opens up to you.
MV: Nice.
TR: That was always my goal and definition of success for myself; the day when I could be like, “Oh, I don’t have to think about money all the time and worry about it. I’m now able to survive and support my family,” which is not always so easy. That probably happened, I’d say, 2017/2018, around then? Since then, there have obviously been ups and downs, that’s the nature of life, but it’s mostly been really positive since then, and I can only have a positive attitude about it.
MV: What advice would you give artists who are trying to support themselves and get to a point where they can pursue art full-time?
TR: I heard some pretty good advice recently, which was actually from Will, one of our managers, who said, “The money will sort itself out eventually.” When you’re struggling, if you’re an artist who’s really passionate about it, eventually, it will all work out. But when I say, “really passionate,” I mean that. You have to really be passionate about it.
TR: You have to be making beats because you love doing it, or performing in front of crowds because you love doing it. It’s easy to love, it’s fun. It’s awesome, but also, in those times when it’s really tough, it’s fine to have doubts. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to have this beacon inside you that tells you, “This is what I’m supposed to be doing and want to be doing.” That’s the one big lesson I feel like I learned when I stopped doing anything else and was just doing music.
TR: But I really struggled for a while when I first started doing music full-time. I was like, “Why do I feel weird? I should be super happy about this.” I realized that instead of using music as an escape from life, now I have nothing to escape from. It’s funny how your perspective changes, and now the same thing isn’t as fulfilling. Luckily, my dad was like, “Do you have a hobby?” And I was like, “No.” “Yeah, you need a hobby, bro. Get a hobby.” So I got into board games. And that helped sort out my mental health – to have another outlet for socialization.
MV: It seems like throughout the early parts of your career, you guys had a lot of people championing for you. Did that inspire you to help lift up other artists as you have done today?
TR: Yes, I think the feeling you’ve just described of helping other artists has evolved over the life of Deep, Dark and Dangerous. When we first started the label, we didn’t really have any expectations for it. We didn’t know how it was going to go. There were a lot of labels out there, and we were basically leveraging our artist name to try and build the label up as much as we could. When it came to guys like Mala, N-type with Wheel and Deal, Youngsta’s Tempo, or any of the people who gave us their love and respect and encouraged people to listen to us, we learned a really powerful lesson about helping others. One that I still think about at least a couple of times a week.
TR: Sometimes situations come up where I think, “How would they have dealt with this situation? or, “Would they have pushed this artist in this way, or that?'” To begin with, we didn’t really have that intention. In fact, we were like, “Should we even start a label? Is it going to be really hard to do?” We had no experience doing it. But now, it’s been really amazing, because
TR: What we realized is that when people send you music you love, and you release music you love, you can honestly and wholeheartedly say to people, “You should listen to this music.” It feels good to share it, and every single person saying that a certain track or artist is great helps that artist out. So it’s a good feeling to help someone else, and it’s genuine. I wasn’t expecting to have that experience with the label, but it’s been the most fulfilling part of it for me.
MV: The first time I really got to witness the impact you guys have was with Athena out of Maryland, who really exploded after being featured on DDD.
TR: Yes. So good.
MV: One of the reasons I admire your legacy so much is because of the impact you’ve had on not only artists’ careers, but the scene itself. Besides creating a label and helping promote artists, what are some other things you think will help grow the scene and keep it alive?
TR: I’m gonna give you a non-answer to begin with, which is that I believe that some of these things happen almost organically. It’s a bit of a cop-out answer, but for that to happen, obviously, we need to have human contact. What I really appreciate about music scenes in general is the fact that they are communal. In every other aspect of our lives, things are becoming more and more separated and isolated, which has its own benefits, but it also has a lot of downsides. With music, you can’t really appreciate it at its fullest form until you’ve experienced it with a community, where everyone else is in the same place, getting down to the same vibe. There’s almost a herd mentality where everyone’s brains are synchronizing and stuff. And that’s one thing that I think is impossible to synthesize. It’s almost impossible to do it virtually, right? Yes, during COVID, we had a lot of livestreams, and they were amazing; they were a great way to bring people together. But when it comes to the real-life thing, I don’t think it’s possible to stop that from happening.
TR: Here in Christchurch, there’s a specific venue that was really amazing. It had an incredible sound system, they booked really amazing artists, but they weren’t really making much money. They were supporting the scene in a lot of ways that made you assume that it’s always been this way and it’s always going to be this way. When that venue shut down, it was like, “Oh, there’s a hole now, how do we fill it?” And of course, people did step in. I’ve seen this happen several times, especially in New Zealand, where there are a couple of places that you just never understood or appreciated until they were gone. The flip side to that is crews like Sub.mission in Denver. I think that the scene grew, to a large degree, because The Black Box consistently had really good nights, with really great lineups, on high-quality sound systems. You could almost guarantee that if you went to one and enjoyed it, you could go back again to the next one and enjoy it all over again.
TR: I’m a very strong proponent that if you experience music in its most primal form, and you feel it through your body, you’re always going to want to come back for more, because you have no other way to experience it that way. The scenes that are really flourishing are ones that have really good sound systems. That’s the biggest common denominator between them. With sound systems, you feel and experience the music, and you just want to come back.
MV: How do you think people’s interest in sound systems has grown over the years?
TR: I think people have placed a lot more importance on sound systems recently. In the last, maybe, five years, I think the emphasis on sound systems has continued to grow. In North America, in the last ten or maybe even five years, people have begun understanding more about the importance of sound and audio quality. I’m not saying people didn’t understand it; lots of people did, but more and more people are beginning to understand it.
TR: Countries like the United Kingdom have had a sound system culture since the 1970s, when a lot of Jamaican and West Indian people brought their own sound system cultures. That culture has continued to thrive there. There are a lot of bespoke handle sound systems in the UK that have been going for 20-30 years now. New Zealand had a really strong sound system culture, too. Other countries I can think of, Germany… there’s a bunch, but I think in the USA, there were certain actors who really understood it. Now, people will literally look at a flyer and be like, “What’s the sound system?” That’s one of the first things they’ll look at. And I think it’s a really positive change.
MV: Another theme that has grown alongside sound system culture is gatekeeping. I would love to hear your opinion on the matter and if you think it’s still an issue.
TR: Yeah, I’ve obviously seen a bit of gatekeeping happening, and I think it’s pretty counterproductive. If you love music and you’re into an artist or sound that not many people know about, but then you won’t tell them what it is because you want to keep it for yourself…that’s a very human feeling. “This is mine, and I want to have it for me; I don’t want everyone else to ruin it.” But people need to think about the artists that you’re preventing people from discovering. You could be their ambassador, sharing them with everyone. I just think that if you like something and you’re into something, you should share it with others. Because sharing music is really like giving a gift. And if you don’t feel like you have that capacity to share the music, that’s also fine, because most people find it difficult to talk to random people anyway. But, if someone asks you, and you’re like, “No, it’s mine,” that’s pretty weird.
MV: So we’ve talked a lot about the past, now I want to chat about the future. Specifically, what’s going down in a few weeks at Mission Ballroom in Denver, Colorado. What’s special about this show?
TR: Yes! Mission Ballroom is coming up in a few weeks. I’m excited to be heading back over for it. It’s gonna be amazing. First of all, the venue itself is really cool and it’s a really cool home for this music. When we first started making this music, we never expected to play in a venue like that [Mission Ballroom]. It’s music made for underground, dark, sweaty basements, and the fact that it works in a crazy big room is pretty epic. It’s Halloween weekend, which is obviously a massive weekend, and we’ve stacked the lineup.
TR: We’ve got Mala, who I mentioned is the guy who first brought us into the dubstep world. He was the guy who helped birth Truth. So, for us to be able to book him as our special guest for a show—that we consider our keystone gig of the year—is really special. It’s a full circle moment. I can’t count the number of times that Mala has put us on his shows: Brixton Mass in London, Outlook Festival stages and boat parties, and different gigs around the UK and Europe. He’s been a champion for a long time. So the fact that he’s able to come and play with us for this show is really special, and we’re super grateful that he’s making the effort to come out.
TR: We’ve also got Joker, who I think was the first dubstep artist we booked in New Zealand. We used to promote a lot of drum and bass shows, but we also threw a few dubstep shows as well, and Joker was one of the first, if not the first, dubstep artists we ever booked in New Zealand. We’ll also go to Bristol and hang out with him there. He’s the absolute man. He’s really cool. Then the rest of the lineup is more Deep, Dark and Dangerous crew like Stylust B2B Wraz, Hypho B2B ColtCuts, and CØNTRA B2B Athena
MV: In addition to the artists, it sounds like production is going to be pretty spectacular. Can you explain why you chose to bring in Unify Mountain Soundz? What makes them special?
TR: Unify Mountain Soundz is pretty special. For starters, they have this massive HSD rig with battleaxes, which put out such good sound. I mean, the first time I ever played on a battleaxe rig was on a boat party in Boston Harbor with the guys that are now our management team. Ever since then, that’s been one of the touchstone sound systems. I think we’ve got either 16 or 18 of those coming into the building, which is a huge amount.
MV: Holy shit.
TR: But the really special thing that we’re doing as well is bringing on Sean Hennessey, the guy who designed and built these speakers, the guy who invented HSD. I remember meeting this guy when he was 21 years old in Carolina at a gig. He was just getting started, and now he makes some of the best speakers in the world. So he’s gonna be coming along as the sound engineer, tuning the system, making it hum, making it do what it’s supposed to do, which is pretty amazing to me. I can’t think of anyone else who’d be better at making that system sound how it’s supposed to, so I’m really excited for that.
MV: Making the weekend even more special, you’ve got the Portal EP coming out the day before the show. What’s going to be similar and what’s going to be different about this release compared to past work?
TR: It’s a collection of some of our most recent music. What we usually do is make music, test it on the road, play it as dubs for six months to a year, and then we’ll be like, “Hey, this is a tune that’s really gone well, we should release it.” So these are tracks made in the last couple of months that got really good reactions. We thought, “Let’s keep it really, really fresh with this release. Some of our freshest music that we’re most stoked with right now.” The opening track is actually out now, called “Alien Bass.” It’s a track that Dre played at Bass Canyon, and he posted a little clip of it, which went viral. And we’re like, “Wow. What is it about this track that’s spoken to people?” So we thought, let’s just get this track that’s hot right now out to people. That’s the opening track.
TR: And then, there are four other tracks on the release, all of which are different from each other in their own ways. One is quite aggressive, but also stripped back—hard to explain, but it’s really about the physics of the sound. There’s a track that’s more of a classic dubstep, dumping roller. And there’s a track that’s almost more fun and up there, energy-wise. Then, probably my favorite track of the release is this one called “Drift,” which is the final track. It’s also gonna be the second single. And that’s a track with an amazing vocalist called Dub Princess AKA Megumi Hope.
TR: We’ve released a few of Megumi’s records on Deep, Dark and Dangerous. Megumi is her alter ego, but her more well-known identity is Dub Princess. For this track, it’s more the Dub Princess side of her personality. The track starts very light and deep, almost a little bit melancholic and sad. Then it has this interesting drop where it’s melodic, but it’s got heavy bass, which then switches up to this absolutely gnarly section, which I’m really stoked to be playing out. It’s a really nice tune to play because it kind of evolves throughout the track. To be fair, all the tracks evolve quite a lot. My advice to most producers is to keep it simple, but I end up making tracks that change the whole way through. All these tracks follow that journey where it’s not just one thing, with each track taking you into a different portal of the Truth sound.
MV: Do you ever intentionally try to lean towards or away from tradition and/or fundamentals?
TR: I think that when you are creating, as far as my personal experience goes, you get into a flow state, and stuff just happens. You’ve got ideas, but they come out of nowhere. They don’t seem to have a formative stage. It’s like, “I should do this, I should do that.” It just starts to happen. After a couple of hours, you have a song, but then you might spend weeks and weeks tweaking it. So I think that the creative stage, in some ways, is hard to control. And I think if you try to control it too much, you might lose something along the way.
TR: Sometimes it’s good to take an approach of making a lot of stuff, then coming back later and saying, “Hey, what are the ones we still appreciate and what are the ones we don’t want to play?” That’s our creative process. To answer your question about keeping things to a certain standard or format, or referencing things that have been before, I think that can be useful. I think what happens is that a lot of the time it happens unconsciously. We’re all shaped by our experiences and the musical influences we’ve had in our lives. But I think it’s really important to follow some set of rules as it relates to the physics of the sound.
TR: When you’re following the physics of the sound, there are certain rules that I think are really helpful to follow. You don’t have to follow them. Dubstep was born out of breaking a lot of these rules. There were a lot of rules in drum and bass that dubstep flipped on its head when it first started. “Why are the high hats so loud?” “Why is the snare so smothered and reverbed?” “That’s against the rules.” “Why are you putting reverb on your sub? You shouldn’t do that.” Well, people were doing it.
TR: But there are certain things that you can follow that are “best practices” as opposed to rules. When you do them, you guarantee a more consistent result. And when you’re making music that’s designed to be played on a sound system in a mix, you need your music to stand up and sound as good as everything else. So, following those production rules as far as quality is concerned, for me at least, is a very important facet. Sometimes it comes from the very beginning, and you just build them into your process. Other times, you get crazy and you’re making all kinds of shit and throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. And later on, you’ve gotta come and fix it. Which is sometimes fun and sometimes you’re just like, “Why did I do this?” And you have no way to fix it, especially if you’re working in a mud pie where you just muck around and make sounds to record and chop little bits out later on to use in your songs. And of course, well, you can’t go back to the start of your hour-long mucking around and re-create that sound. Now it’s just stuck in audio. So sometimes those ones are like, “How am I gonna make this sound good?”
MV: It seems like you believe things in life often occur naturally.
TR: I do believe that. I’m also a very strong believer that a lot of it comes down to hard work. I’m not saying that things are going to fall into your lap. You have to work really hard. For a long time, I struggled with the idea that my music’s not that good and the only reason people like it is because it persevered long enough. But for other producers, if you work hard, yes, more people are gonna hear your music and see what you’re doing. Time is a very powerful tool, and so is being consistent. Some people who go to the gym are like, “You have to go to the gym every day.” You go to the gym once every few weeks, you’re not gonna see any results, right? So there’s a mixture of things, but I do believe it’s natural in a way that things do just tend to happen. Organizations coalesce, people become friends with people who have the same kind of worldview as themselves.
MV: As we make our way to the end of the interview, is there any message you’d like to share with the Deep, Dark and Dangerous community?
TR: What I love about Deep, Dark and Dangerous is that it’s a community, and people look out for each other within it. I also want people to acknowledge and understand that within this community, there’s a lot of diversity and people who have different viewpoints. With a community like this, it’s important to respect everyone’s perspectives and take time to understand where they’re coming from.
TR: Sometimes, that can be as simple as asking questions or having a conversation, or trying to avoid an argument. But I think it’s been a very, very inclusive community, and I love and appreciate the fact that it’s diverse. It would be boring if everyone were the same. But my main message is that we have so much love and gratitude for the people who have become part of this journey and made everything possible. Without them, there would be nothing.
As the Truth and Deep, Dark and Dangerous stories continue to be written, and the dubstep scene continues to evolve, we wait in anticipation of what move they will make next and how it will impact the future of the realm.
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