Interview: Darkstar

Everyone loves dubstep, right? From Pitchfork to NME, people are falling over themselves to praise a genre formerly restricted to lads from Croydon. But engage Darkstar’s James Young on the subject and the circle jerk is brought to an abrupt halt.

Dubstep is done,” he says. “I think it’s completely had its day. It sounds cold but it makes no difference to me if it stopped now.”

Yikes. While many consider James and his musical partner Aidan Whalley part of the new wave of producers borne from that very scene, they disagree. Even when they were swapping ideas as students they were hard to pin down; James had a predominantly electronic music background, Aidan’s tastes were band orientated. Common ground was a shared love of 2-step, sci-fi and a sense that they didn’t quite fit into the scene that surrounded dubstep’s seminal FWD club. “We were never at home with it,” explains James, “when we made tunes we thought they were better than what was getting played, so we thought ‘if they’re not going to play it, fuck them.’”

This stubbornness finds expression in their off-kilter aesthetic: minor harmonics, processed vocals and a taste for retro-futurism. Recent single ‘Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer’ combines garage syncopation, 8-bit synths and vocoder phrases while previous crossover hit, ‘Need You’, married a harpsichord figure with a robotic vocal beamed in from a dystopian future where robots are too busy nursing broken hearts to take over. All their records, even the early experiments, reject the big room mentality for an affecting emotional economy. Strip away garage signatures and Darkstar make songs, not tracks. Skewed, melancholy pop songs.

It’s this sensibility that caught the ear of Kode9, whose Hyperdub label proved the perfect home for their sound. Forget trite ’nuum theorising, Darkstar feel a deep connection with the eighties synth pioneers. “I was brought up in a very industrial town; I worked the worst jobs you can imagine.” James’s gestures are broad as he describes polishing metal for 12 hours a day. “It strikes me as odd that people like the Human League and OMD had been through very similar things to what Aidan and I had been through. To me it was more than coincidence.”

If the pop thing doesn’t piss off the bassheads, their next move will. Their album will see the boys ditching the vocoder altogether for a shoegaze-driven sound. “We’ll probably get a lot of flack,” says James. “I think people will be quite shocked.”

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