IYRE
My My Music interview with Drum and bass DJ and producer Iyre.
For this interview, I had the pleasure to enjoy a long chat over zoom, with the one and only Iyre.
Critically acclaimed, and touted as DJ Mags ‘One to Watch’ 2024, his creative trajectory has been life changing. I hope we’ll all get to see him on regular basis at a UK residency soon.
Intro
I’m a Sri Lankan DJ and producer, with released tracks with labels including Goldfat, Hospital Records, Soulvent and UKF.
I originally started making Dubstep in the 2010s, under ‘iClown’ before moving into drum and bass.
What music has initially inspired your creative journey?
I’ve always been involved with music. I moved to a Methodist school and music was always a part and parcel of our education. Then influences from friends; during the teenage years, we started getting ourselves exposed to rock music, metal music and hip hop.
At school, I played in a western-like brass band and also led it, for about three years. At the same time, my father came to understand that I was musically talented. So he made sure that I had a had a formal musical education. It was amazing, and included me being put forward for London College exams.
When I was at university, one of my friends showed me a collaboration project that Skrillex did with a band called Korn. And that was probably when I realised that electronic music could be amalgamated with like acoustical elements.
Then acts like Noisia, Kill the Noise, 12th Planet and Knife Party. It motivated me to become then really invested. And then when I heard Pendulum, I could see how they seamlessly emerged rock and metal elements into drum and bass.
What are you finding challenging right now?
Being a Sri Lankan artist and trying to navigate in the UK scene is quite difficult.
It would be easier for me to make bangers right now. For artists who are more unique, they have to kind of step back and keep on what they believe is the right path to tread. For people like us, it's a little bit difficult now in comparison to about two years ago, because when COVID was here, people had the time to digest more serious music.
Right now it feels as if, it's a little bit difficult to navigate within the drum and bass scene. What they're looking for is a little bit different to what we produce right now.
That's how life is, you have ups and downs. But the important factor for me personally, is to stay true to your lane and stay true to what you believe in as a musician and stick to it.
What artists do you feel a strong connection with, musically, spiritually and in terms of being aspirational?
Most probably Tesseract. They're a band from the UK and I've been a huge fan since forever. I saw them in India - I flew to Bangalore to see them live. And in terms of Sonics, probably Tesseract and there's a band called Textures as well.
They're from the Netherlands. Those two bands probably are my biggest inspirations and bands like Meshuga, for example, love them. And these aren't necessarily drum and bass.
And the way I see it, it helps as a producer, if you source inspirations from genres other than drum and bass. And if you like what they do, eventually those sonics, get integrated to your workflow as well.
You use some of the sonics into your music and the outcome is inevitably going to be very different from what you hear.
So that's basically going to help you as a producer to come up with like a really different kind of a sound.
How can the current scene and clubbing experience be improved or supported further ?
First and foremost, as DJs, it's our responsibility to introduce new music to the dance floor. And sadly, most of the time it's basically people looking for those social media moments and playing the same songs all over again and doing those double drums and triple drums.
It doesn't make sense to me. I just want to be a DJ that can be trusted with good and new music. It's basically what I'm looking at right now.
And luckily, in terms of places that I've played, most of the places gave me freedom to be myself.
For example, on my UK tour last year, I opened for Worship who’s artists are all superstars. They were like, ‘just do you’ play whatever you believe is ideal.
I just pulled out like the deepest grimiest set I could imagine. And people resonated, which is the amazing thing.
So in terms of what we're seeing right now in the UK scene, maybe the promoters have to give a chance and see what happens. Go for a varied lineup in terms of the sonic.
I understand that selling tickets can be a little bit difficult as well with the economy right now. But maybe have a few of us guys into the lineup too.
What are you releasing or working on right now?
There's a few soulful bits which are probably going to come out with UKF, about four to five tunes with them, hopefully looking at an EP kind of a scenario.
There's the UKG tune which is going to drop on the 18th April, which has Pavan from Foreign Beggars too.
Support, Iyre