Noisia: flight of the navigators

A giant spaceship has crash-landed in an abandoned Czech military airfield. Eighty metres long and 20 metres high, its construction defies our understanding of aerodynamics. Its lasers and beams surpass our knowledge of light-speed. Its reflective textures radiate unlike any manmade material. No one knows where it’s from or how it got here; the airfield has been cordoned off from the rest of the known world. Its inhabitants are now under martial law, enforced by some of the biggest d’n’b DJs imaginable. Welcome to Let It Roll festival.

Five hours have passed since the ship first crash-landed. Friction, Wilkinson, Andy C and Netsky have all applied their own sonic law enforcement. There’s no other event on this scale dedicated to drum’n’bass, and the young, international junglist crowd bray at every sense-blurring double drop, VIP and dubplate. But now things look set to get serious, as three dark figures hooded in LED-rimmed shrouds take to the ship’s viewing platform with an even darker, sharper and more complex message.

A contrast to the rolling 170bpm consistency that’s gone before, these men communicate at a variety of tempos with a unique musical vocabulary and visuals unlike any of the previous acts. Their arrival is heralded by the organ-blasting ‘Anomaly’, one of d’n’b’s most-played tunes this season.

Before you can say “take me to your leader”, switches are flipped again. The sci-fi salvo of ‘Collider’ causes 25,000 fans to melt into an en-mass goosebump, before a brutish 13bpm breakbeat groove shifts us all five feet forward. ‘The Entangled’ follows, a spiked-out cathedral of a composition that, while d’n’b is its DNA, would sit just as comfortably on the palates of fans of Modeselektor or Justice.

Just like Let It Roll’s epic main stage and its surrounding high-production stages, everything about this entire performance is another level. Leaders? Both on this alien spaceship and the more abstract idea of a bass music field, Noisia are the only real leaders right now.

On the edge

“It’s the way we’ve set up our business. If we have an idea, we can go ahead and do it,” smiles shaven-headed 32-year-old Nik Roos, 12 hours later in the sunny garden of a five star hotel. No longer in his dark Jedi-style robes, he’s kicking back in vest and shorts, looking more like a holidaymaker than a spaceship captain. He’s flanked by long-haired Thijs de Vlieger (34), a tall, sincere man who boasts a constant furrowed brow and sharp wit. Martijn van Sonderen (32) is absent, having departed for a DJ set at another festival, leaving Nik and Thijs to host their ‘Noisia Invites’ stage at Let It Roll later that night.

“This whole show began as us sitting in a room and me saying ‘hey, let’s try making hoods with visuals and all this complex stuff’. Right before the show I was thinking ‘Jesus, this was a pretty fucking random idea’. Now we’re standing here, I hope it all works!’”

The ‘Outer Edges’ show is the grandest Noisia performance to date. A complicated, unique concept of real-time-triggered visuals and Ableton-performed beats, it’s a spectacular showcase of their own material. Some of it is plundered from their now 13-year old repertoire, but most is taken from their boundary-busting, brain-burning second album ‘Outer Edges’. In Thijs’s words, they’ve “waited for so long to do something on this scale”.

A web of networks, relays, MIDI triggers, custom graphics and a bespoke-configured modular set-up, it’s an ambitious performance – just like everything else they’ve pulled off since forming in 2002.

Outer control

Noisia aren’t just unique in their sound or stature within bass music; their entire setup is one of a kind. Behind them are a team of five people, all working and operating from a high tech studio/office complex in their hometown of Groningen, north-east Netherlands. Here, each member of the band has their own floating studio (literally floating on springs for optimum acoustics). It’s where they broadcast their radio show, run their three labels (Vision, Division and Invisible) and organise their Noisia Invites tours.

Somewhere among these commitments Nik, Thijs and Martijn also write platinum hits for pop stars and game soundtracks, too. Most importantly, everything is done in-house, stringently on their own terms, and executed with such slick Dutch efficiency you wonder if they’re the archetypical neuropunks our cynical digital age requires.

“We are certainly not punks,” laughs Thijs. “We’re not anti-anything. We’re really self-centred!”

“Maybe you could say we have a punk attitude?” counters Nik, in a bid to start the type of debate that the band enjoy. “We don’t give a shit about radio music or commercial music. Then again, you could also say we’re very conservative because we have offices and work regular working hours. What we’re trying to do is something we love in a sustainable and pleasant way.”

The seeds for this sustainable, pleasant process were planted from day one as they worked their way through all their favourite d’n’b labels from Renegade to Ram (“like label sluts!” chuckles Thijs), refusing to sign exclusively with any imprint before eventually establishing their own.

The same can be said for the way they’ve gradually caught the attention of fans globally. In the early days they were told to tour the UK constantly, rigorously and often pennilessly. Now they’re a worldwide whirlwind, with a significant quadrant of fans in the US who are hungry for more variety in the post-brostep implosion. Complete with regular Skrillex and OWSLA co-signs and line-up sharing duties, Noisia pack hard punches in the largest, flashiest and most unforgiving of electronic music markets.

While they’re best known and most prolific in drum ’n’ bass (to the point they won Best Live Act at the Drum&BassArena Awards without even having a live show), their signature detail-designed synthesis is known and noted from dubstep to breaks; there’s also I Am Legion, too, their hip hop project with Foreign Beggars. The 150,000 web/FM-syndicated listeners of their weekly Noisia Radio show and ravers at their genre-hopping Noisia Invites parties have also experienced Noisia’s widest musical tentacles.

“We’ve always made and supported all sorts of music,” nods Thijs in agreement. “But in the studio the last few years have been ‘let’s just make some heavy drum ‘n’ bass’. That’s what the people want, that’s what we love to play out.”

Meanwhile, as they dished out some of the most heavily played, technical benchmark-setting d’n’b tracks of recent years (‘Asteroids’, ‘Dead Limit’, ‘Incessant’), ‘Outer Edges’ was born. Stashing their best experiments in far-off electronic fringes, unearthing incomplete ideas and trying out contrasting approaches and techniques they’d never attempted before as Noisia, the concept to explore and develop every track to its furthest frontier gradually took hold. Not only does this paint the broadest picture of Noisia to date (there are elements of everything from skullstep d’n’b to rolling jazz drums via glitched-out p-funk), but also the most three-dimensional image of them as a group so far; some
of the tracks featured on the album date back to experiments from the mid-2000s.

No limits

“They’ve been sitting there on drives, just waiting,” says Nik. “They’re those moments when you get into something and go ‘oh that’s cool’ – but it’s not right for what you’re currently working on, or you’re not quite sure which way to develop it, so you keep it for another context at the right time. They’re seeds and we make them grow into identities of their own. They want to be something. And when you know what that is, and you like what that is, then you can work on it.”

One of the unexpected processes they applied in the initial stages of ‘Outer Edges’ was to explore the idea of hiring topline writers and vocalists just. Not in search of a crossover hit (they already do this under the alias Nightwatch for the likes of Kraantje Pappie, Kano, Wretch32, Korn, Hadouken!, Bridget Kelly, Alexis Jordan and many more mainstream acts), but to explore the potential of using commercial techniques to create a palette that can be processed and manipulated in an experimental context.

“It was worth exploring to see if it was possible,” Thijs explains. “But we can’t send someone a complex track and expect to get what we want back. The only time it’s worked is ‘Exodus’ with KRS-One years ago. He was awesome. But our music is too full to include another layer of stuff to grab the listener’s attention. Essentially we try to grab everyone’s attention all of the time in our music.

“In most other electronic music tracks the sound design is secondary to the song,” he adds. “With us, the sound design is the song. That’s what makes us stand out – that last 1 per cent. That, and the three of us have a good rhythmic ear for a groove.”

Outer space

Back to the spaceship, and every person in the crowd would agree with Thijs’ assessment. There’s humour, in both their announcements to audience and the short-sharp moments of daftness on tracks such as ‘Tentacles’ and ‘Asteroids’, and there’s surrealism in both the sound and graphics. And with the new tracks, there’s the refreshing rejection of any type of typical form and arrangement.

But what’s really securing them a loyal following from bass fans is this: as certain corners of d’n’b teeter dangerously close to the edge of EDM sinkholes, there is complete trust and transparency here. Noisia won’t compromise. They will continually forge a path that’s true to their ambition and the challenging ideologies set by the likes of Optical and Photek 20 years ago. Whether they’re throwing down neuro-science in a dirty d’n’b dungeon or headlining the world’s biggest bass music festivals on a massive spaceship, they won’t dumb down their approach.

“Many people like to think for themselves,” says Nik. “They don’t want to hear moralising things in music, they’re not gullible, they can take subtle hints from music and interpret them in their own way. Songs can be sad. Songs can be a statement about violence or politics or oppression but you don’t have to put a massive sticker on it. I had that from the older d’n’b records. They meant shitloads to me. The sounds were so abstract. You couldn’t point at a song and say it’s about this or that, but I felt things. So when you start doing music in your own way you assume that your music can trigger in the same way. It doesn’t have to be about anything, it’s about interpretation.”

Back to the giant Czech spaceship, and the band climax with their seismic remix of ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ and a VIP of ‘Dead Limit’. The response is two screams short of a riot. Right at this very moment, interpretation isn’t necessary and the message is abundantly clear: we’re only beginning to peer over the outer edges of Noisia’s abilities.

Noisia play their biggest UK show so far, ‘Outer Edges’, at London’s Electric Brixton on Fri Dec 9