OPTICAL

[Wood]

Optical



The word sick has taken on a new meaning of late in the Virus camp. It's not that long since you'd hear Ed Rush and Optical use it as a mark of quality, a superlative lavished on only the most twisted up and ingenious of musical moves. Their style was never about darkness, they would point out, it was about sickness. They even named a track - 'Sick Note' _ in honour of the concept. But it's sickness of another, much more literal kind, that's been on their minds more recently. Because, as Matt Quinn will be the first to testify, the last 12 months have been a bit of a sick time for he and his absent (through sickness) cohort Ed Rush. As he himself puts it: "It was the worst possible time it could have happened. I think we were just on the verge of cracking it."
At the end of last year, the duo looked simply unstoppable. They'd dropped the spectacular 'Wormhole' album in 1998 and then cemented their DJ premier league status in '99 by blowing away Glastonbury and The End on countless occasions over the summer. That was when disaster struck. During the recording of their incredibly accomplished second album 'The Creeps' _ Matt refuses to say which track, as if even that might incur bad luck _ the pair that founded a career on pushing things to extremes found that they'd pushed it too far. The speakers blew that night. Matt estimates they were the fifteenth pair to go since he and Rush joined forces. But much more significantly, their ears blew with them and they developed acute tinnitus _ more of a screaming than a ringing in the ears, by all accounts. Wow. Must have been quite a hard tune!

"No, it wasn't. You'd be surprised," says Matt in the label's office and studio in Fulham. "A lot of the 'horrible' things were made quite quietly. The ones that hurt my ears are the sessions when we got fucked, smoked a bit too much weed and it got turned up too loud. But I know what did this - it was the raw break, a very tinny raw break. Still, we won't do that again!" A hectic touring schedule, bad diet, lack of sleep and generally caning it may have also had something to do with it, he admits. "Things were going wrong before that," he recognises now, "we were just badly run down." And then, of course, there's the air travel. Any international DJ spends a fair chunk of their life above the clouds. And anyone who's been on a plane knows it does nasty things to your ears. Whatever, Matt's decided he's going off the idea.

"It's funny because it's got worse the more flying I've done," he laughs. "I have been known to really freak out, especially if I'm at the back for some reason. The stewardesses tell me that if there's a crash you're much more likely to survive if you're sat at the back, but I'm still not convinced!" So is the tinnitus ever going to get better? "The doctors I spoke to do are working on this gene therapy thing but it's going to be a long time. And I've got lots more living to do before then so I don't really think about it. So no, it's one of those live-with-it things. And I am living with it. Didn't think I'd be able to but it's not that bad. Some people have got it and after a few years they don't hear it anymore. At first I didn't believe that it goes into the back of your mind after a while. But now I'm okay, so long as it's not dead silence, that's what I don't like. Those vocal booths downstairs _ I send people in but I can't go in there. That's my worst place. That's why I like computers. Constant noise. That computer [indicates particularly noisy unit] saved my life!"

Typically, just as Matt recovered to the extent he feels able to go and DJ again, another injury struck him. He accidentally knocked a monitor off a tabletop, tried to catch it and put his back out in the process. "I was in agony. I had a bed set up here for six weeks so I didn't have to move anywhere. I've literally been told by my doctor not to even pick up my record box. It's not good and it's not going away, because I'm lifting fucking records all the time. So now I have to be a bit of a pansy and let someone else do it. And it was really bad enough with the whole ear thing."

And so tonight, when this interview finishes, Matt will be heading off to Brighton to cover for a (you guessed it) sick Ed Rush at the Zap club, with Fierce in tow. "He's carrying my records and, to be honest, I'm borrowing a load of his tunes too. I've not really been on it with tunes recently. Apart from our album and a stack of new tunes from Andy C I haven't heard that much other stuff." It's this sense of the extended family around Virus sticking together in the face of adversity that comes across as 'The Creeps' overriding atmosphere. With Matt's brother Jamie (aka Matrix) and Fierce, not to mention MCs Ryme Tyme and Basim, all contributing to the album, it has the feel of a Wu-Tang style community collaboration, something Matt's been keen to develop.

"I wanted to see if we could experiment with the vocal thing without trying to do the obvious pop chart thing like those cheesy hybrid efforts that happened when d&b was getting more recognition, cos that's crap. People like Roni Size and Dynamite have really inspired us for the same reasons. "I said to Ryme Tyme, look, you don't have to just be the guy who comes to the rave every Saturday night, you could think bigger than that, we all could. It's like we're setting out to conquer the world, but we want the stuff on the label to have a bit more horizon to it."

Accordingly, 'The Creeps' lends a new light on the duo's sound, taking it into the realms of spiky, rolling breakbeat funk, leaving the sonic excesses of older tracks like 'Alien Girl' well behind. "We were thinking more about the ideas and about writing an album," he says, "the ups and downs rather than just 'blurghhh', cos we've done that. And now Bad Company are right there with that cutting edge nasty style, I can't do that anymore because of my ears and I've grown up and I don't really need that all the time. Also, I know for a fact we'll never be able to better the songs we did in that arena. I will not make a better tune like that than 'Alien Girl.'"

For Quinn, it's a major achievement that it's come out at all. In a moment of uncharacteristic unconfidence, he even admits: "I'm not as happy with some of the mixes but I'm happy that we even managed to do it at all. So to most people it might not be as as good as the last one but to me it's a miracle that it happened." That's certainly not the impression the listener gets _ quite the opposite. In fact, the traumas and tribulations of the past year seem to have given birth to a new sonic confidence and strength to explore infinite possibilities.

Similarly, drum & bass is growing up too, taking on new guises and introducing a new sound that's far less paranoid about battering people about the head to keep them on the floor. "I think the d&b underground is strong but I don't care it's not getting the recognition that the other things have got," Matt states. "That's a good thing. When it was, a few years ago, I was there too and it wasn't that much fun. More glitzy and stuff but it's not that much fun. There aren't half as many bandwagoners and although there's a lot less music and a lot less coverage, it's alright. The core people are all still there, even if there isn't mountains of the stuff around like garage. I see it being like reggae. Reggae is always there in HMV and the specialist shops. It has its own life and that's how I see drum & bass. Ain't gonna go massive, but certain people will cross over."

He seems genuinely surprised at the suggestion that they might be able to sell enough records soon to reach the Top 40 without the help of a major. "Never thought about," is his reply. "To hit the top 100 you only need 5,000 sales in a week and we've done 10,000 in a week sometimes. Different shops I guess." As for the state of new acts entering the d&b arena, Moving Fusion are Matt's current favourites. "People should have a look at them because they're really doing it for me, consistently. Everyone's still on the Bad Company tip but they should check out those guys. Bad Company are great but _ it's not their fault - they've kind of sucked up the limelight for all the other young producers, even though they are the best of the bunch."

As for those he doesn't approve of, he won't be drawn: "I don't slag people's music off because I've heard it all already about my own from other people!" In truth, Matt admits to having not closely followed the scene recently, preferring to get on with his own music and, increasingly, the video productions he's learnt to make on the computer. He also seems distinctly unbothered by the fact. And that, however much Matt might talk it down, is the confidence you'll hear all over 'The Creeps,' a maturity that comes from experience, good and bad. That and the realisation that disaster can either defeat you or spur you on to new heights. Let's be glad Ed Rush and Optical chose the latter.

Words: Ben Willmott
Picture: Courtney Hamilton