Hey Jaskin & Uneven – for those unfamiliar with you guys; tell us who you are.
Hi, we are two easy going guys from Baltic states, Uneven (Latvia) & Jaskin (Lithuania), we live in Bristol and we love making music. We’ve been Djing and running nights for a long time. First in our home countries, then in London and now we’ve started a new event in Bristol dedicated to deeper side of drumandbass music called EPI-FIED.
We feel that there’s a real shortage of this sound at events these days, hence the idea for putting it out there.
I have read that you first tried to make music together in 2015 when you started a few projects – how did you guys meet in 2015 and what were these projects?
Jaskin: We’ve always had friends in common but somehow never met each other, even when dj’ing at same festivals.
Back in 2013 in London, Uneven was hosting a night at South Bank Centre Concrete Bar where he was inviting some guest DJs. Once he invited our friend in common The Corpus (known as Nutekk back then) and I came along to spin some tunes. That night was crazy, still can’t remember how did we get back home, but since then we became brothers. We both felt like we knew each other for ages, so it didn’t take us long to get into the production room with couple of beers and start creating.
Uneven: One of the first projects we started was “Reborn”. This came out on Regression Media last year. It wasn’t great in the beginning to be honest, but in one of the sessions we decided to revisit it and the track was “Reborn”
How does it work to produce music together? What’s your set up?
Tricky question, we don’t actually know how it works. We guess we have a connection and we just go with the flow. No restrictions, just throwing in ideas and seeing where we can go with them. Some ideas can be rubbish and some can be good, but generally we enjoy the overall process and we like having fun.
Ideally, we prefer getting into the room and working on stuff together. However, we find that working independently from time to time is a great practice too as it helps to bring some personal influence.
Uneven: We have some experience working on music and being away. When Jaskin moved to Bristol and I was still living in London we managed to make some really nice tunes by sending projects over the cloud. Now both being re-united in Bristol our process of making music is fairly simple. Normally we get in together either at Jaskin’s or mine, have few beers and let the ideas flow. In terms of the set up we work on Cubase, Ableton and Maschine as a DAW alongside tons of vsts and instruments. We do like hardware too, no wonder synth sounds are quite noticeable in our music. Favorite devices we use are: Nord Lead 2x, Korg Volca FM, Yamaha CS2X, Behringer DeepMind and Arturia Microbrute 2s.
Are you producing other genres than DNB (both as solo artists and as J&U)?
Yes, we do all sorts of music, but never revealed whatever happened out of drumandbass territory :)
You’re both from The Baltic; how’s the dnb scene in your countries and what would you say is the difference from the UK scene? Do you think your background has made an impact on your production?
Jaskin: Dnb Scene is generally quite strong in Lithuania in terms of good music, events and promoters. If you are in Vilnius, Kablys is a must-visit club. Also there is a “Rastaday” event hosted by “Baltic Champions” guys every Thursday delivering Jungle and DrumAndBass riddims. The same guys also run a drumandbass radio show on Lithuanian National Radio Station “LRT Opus3”. Obviously Lithuanian dnb scene is not comparable to the UK one, but it is still good enough.
Back in the days when I just discovered the genre of music like drum and bass it did indeed affect me a lot. I was literally blown away after the first gig I went to. It was Technical itch in Vilnius and after that I rarely missed an event. Big shout to my influencers Intakx, Rhodopsin and Rupas for introducing me to all the great tunes that I still love.
Uneven: Dnb scene in Latvia back in the days was quite strong and I was lucky to catch that moment when I was in my raving years. It surely made an impact to what I do musically now. Sadly, there’s effectively no dnb scene in Latvia these days.
You got a release out on none60 called ‘Safe Edge’ which is a 4 track EP. What can you tell us about that? How long has this process taken from ideas to release?
We both are really proud of this EP to be honest. All 4 tracks represent our sound in the most accurate way. It took about a year to finish it. We wrote the tunes fairly quick and when we signed the EP, we put them aside for a while to be able to focus on other projects. When we got the release date from Andy, we polished them up (always good to have a fresh look on old projects) and got them ready for mastering.
How would you describe your sound?
Deep, cinematic, emotional.
Are you DJing as well?
We are. Not as much as we used to but always up to get behind the decks.
What’s next for Jaskin & Uneven?
We got few appearances on various VA’s that should be out before the end of the year (watch out for some exclusives there). Then there’s an EP on Kos.Mos.Music in 2020 and 2 other projects that we are super excited about but can’t reveal anything yet. Keep your eyes peeled…
Any famous last words (shout outs, big ups)?
Big up to our friends and family, to people who support us and believe in us.
Get the album from none60’s BandCamp
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