Dave Q of Dub War and electronic composer Badawi collaborate on The Index
Best know for establishing Dub War in 2005, Dave Quintiliani aka Dave Q knows a thing or two about pushing musical boundaries. Dub War, now a raging monthly at LOVE, is widely celebrated for forcing Dubstep, the wobbly bass-influenced sound of London’s edgy underground generation, upon New York, the last bastion of house and techno purists. Now Five years into that battle, the front lines between the scenes are irrevocably blurred, opening new space for fresh explorations.
To that end, Dave has teamed with experimental Dub composer/producer Badawi on a new label, The Index, a Dubstep project that will feature Badawi’s work along with several remixes and reworks by established genre busting artists like Shakleton and Headhunter. We locked our own Bianca Merbaum, a self-described diehard house-head in a room with the dubstep don to see what he had to say on the first Dub War parties, what sets New York dubstep apart from its UK birthright and why some of the best ideas happen behind the decks… Meantime, although she’ll never openly admit it, post-interview we found her houseness secretly digging some bass-shaking anthems from the bins at halcyon. “Research,” she claims… or has Dave Q taken another prisoner in his Dub War?..
Halcyon: I want to start off by talking about what you are best known for – your Dub War parties. Considering it was the first dubstep party in New York, were there any challenges starting it, considering there wasn’t really a big audience when you began?
Dave Q: I never went into starting Dub War with the goal of it being anything major. The first few were in the basement of Sputnik, which is really an amazing space. It has amazing sound but it’s quite out of the way to get to. I just thought ‘alright, what the hell if no one shows up, no big deal I just want to play music for people.’ The first few were like 30 – 40 people, really quite small but everyone who was there knew it was something kind of special. I mean the music was really something special. It’s very intense, especially on a sound system, it had such physical impact so after doing the first couple it would get a little bit bigger but I still never expected it to keep going.
H: Well look how far it’s come. And now you have launched The Index. Can you elaborate more on the vision?
Well the fringes of dubstep have been the most interesting stuff for me. So Index is kind of an effort to go back and start from scratch in a sense and get something out there that is completely unknown to people. A lot of people who are very into dubstep will hear it and think ‘what the hell is this’ because it’s quite weird and experimental.
Yeah I heard some minimal and dub techno in there.
Well the idea to start a label came from the producer Badawi who produced the first record, El Topo. The Index is basically an outlet for his music that is sort of like dubstep but has it’s own interesting twist. Badawi is a musician I’ve had a lot of respect for a long time, going back to the early mid-’90s. When he started coming to Dub War and getting inspired by the music we were playing there he then started taking that inspiration into his own productions and music. So the project is really a collaboration between the two of us. The influences are partly coming from Middle Eastern music because Badawi lived in Israel for a long time and studied Middle Eastern percussion. He’s also a contemporary composer so he brings a lot of avant-garde sounds that’s just very much outside the electronic dance music world and fuses all lot of different sounds together.
Do you produce?
A little bit, but the label is really going to be Badawi’s productions with remixes from other people from the dubstep scene. So I’m really helping run the label, curate it and help market it.
Do you have an idea where you want it to go?
With The Index we want to take the source material that Badawi is creating and allow it to be a reworked and distributed. We want to put some productions out as fragments, some in digital form and some in several 12’’s but you have to sort of perform them together. For example as a DJ you can play the parts together to do your own interpretation of the piece by mixing them in your own way. We wanted to mess with form and format in that way. We want people to experience it and be more actively involved in deciding how the work gets interpreted and put out to the world. We want the productions to be mysterious so that these fragments come out and people have to figure out how to work with them how to use them.
I’m intrigued. It seems that there are a lot of overlaps with different genres and experimentation in the more modern strains of dubstep in general.
There has been heavy house, UK funky and minimal techno influence in some of the more interesting producers and I think that is part of the reason why Dubstep has found a new audience in the last year or so. A lot of the people who come from Minimal Techno or House who like that music but haven’t been as inspired in recent years suddenly have something they can relate to but it’s different. I feel like dubstep breeds life into their genres a little bit where it was missing and vice-versa. Dubstep producers have tapped into house and techno for influence and it’s kind of been mutually beneficial I think for both scenes to draw inspiration from each other. Its been bubbling up for a while but I think that kind of hybrid has arrived in recent years and there’s been a bigger audience for it.
And you brought it here!
Yeah, it’s been my hope to do exactly that, to do it in a New York way, and that means playing stuff together that wouldn’t necessarily get played together. In London Dubstep is more regimented and follows more of a formula. But in New York, there’s more of a degree of freedom to play what I want to play and put interesting combos together. I just want to make it interesting. The New York audience tends to be more open minded to different styles and tempos all being played together where in London it’s harder to do that.
And that’s where The Index comes in?
Well about The Index, this whole recombination thing I was saying before really comes from Dub, the basic idea of dub is taking the raw components of a song and abstracting them and recombining them in a different way. Like reconstructing and deconstructing. So we’re trying to apply that aesthetic to the label that kind of plays with the formats of the media that are available. Badawi does digital production, but he’s a composer so he records live string and percussion, so it all just kind of gets combined. There’s no specific source of material. It’s pretty open.
Had you always had it in mind to do a label, or did he just happen?
I honestly never had a plan to have a label necessarily, although it’s always something I’ve been curious about, but it was never my goal to do it. Badawi had all this new music he was working on but he wasn’t sure how to make it come together. So one day at Dub War he was standing next to me and it kind of dawned on him we should do a label together.
Sometimes the best ideas happen at parties.
Yeah I was standing right behind the decks!
Don’t miss Dave Q and the Dub War crew when they visit Bless Up! at halcyon on the 3rd Thursday of each month for a warm up session prior to their monthly event at LOVE
