INTERVIEW WITH TORQUX

Dirty as hell with baselines from heaven, Torqux is our dub-crush right now. His Hotline EP has had huge success, so we caught up with the man himself to find out what makes him tick...

Q - So, tell us about your hotline EP… did you think it would hit the success it has?

A - The Hotline EP came about when Twist thought of the idea of ringing a dubstep hotline putting you through to filthy stuff. We sent that track to Rottun and they liked it so we made another 5 tracks and called it Hotline EP. We also did some edits for a few djs including Excision, Datsik, Skism, Funtcase, Barenoise and a few more.

We knew at least 1 track would reach the top 10 of the beatport chart, it had to really ! But to have 5 on them there at one point and 1 of them reaching number 2 was wicked

Q - Ok, tell us the number one artist or band, dead or alive, that you’d wanna see live.

A - My musical tastes changes all the time, I can't actually name one favourite track or artist because I like different things for different situations. But as you've said dead I think for me it has to be Bob Marley ! That would be amazing.

Q - What is dubstep to you?

A - Dubstep to me is face melting bass music. I love the stuff that stops you from dancing and you just stand there and try and process what the fuck is coming out of the speakers. I can appreciate other styles but for me it has to be hard and filthy.

Q - What do you think is going to be the next big genre?

A - That Drumstep thing is getting pretty big now. Its a lot faster then dubstep and goes perfect with drum and bass. I'm going to have to try my hand at it ! I just did a breaks remix that has a drumstep breakdown, so watch out for that.

Q - Best festival/gig you’ve ever played live?

A - Has to be the Winter Festival I played a couple years back in Spain. It was a breakbeat event (I played as my breaks alias Duel Calibre). Those Spanish ravers are nuts ! There's a video on youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsdqU5WeJM8

As Torqux I've played a couple times at Graffiti Breaks. Their events are always special, always have a theme and go all out on decorations and entertainment, as well as the great bands and djs.

Q - What would you change about the electronic music scene?

A - I would like to somehow get rid of illegal downloads, it really hurts the smaller artists.

Q - So, what do love about the UK?

A - Being from the UK is great, we have so many amazing artists here that set the trends. There's always big nights going down and the summer festivals are a good shout. If we had decent weather it would be perfect here !

Q - What’s your music goal?

A - My musical goal is to have a full band playing live. I'm not sure how to go about it yet, but I've got some Roland electronic drums, so the first step is learning the drums. How many members, what genres and tracks we make is a mystery at the moment. I would like to have a decent label running too but the timing needs to be right for that.

Q - So your using logic this these days… what pluggins would you suggest to all the dubstep producers out there?

A - With Logic there's not really dubstep specific plugins as such, its just an amazing program all around. The eqs, compression, reverbs, delays etc are all perfect to use. Its all about Massive really ! I used to use Fruity Loops and Reason but they felt a bit too limited and difficult to perform easy tasks.

Q - What can we expect next from Torqux?

A - Next step, I'm working on another EP for Rottun with Twist and collaborating with some other artists, and then hopefully a North American Tour. I've got a track forthcoming on Play Me Records called "Midriff". A 12 inch on Prime Audio with my tracks "Requiem" and "Psychopath" and a couple of remixes on various labels too. There's a few things in the pipeline but there's enough for you to think about at the moment.

Torqux has also been nice enough to hook us up with a bootleg by himself and Twist! check it out here