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DNB Noize April Feature DJ
DJ KLR.
After growing up in a large family where music tastes varied from acid jazz and funk, cheesy pop and late 80's house,there was a clear diversity of music styles going on!
Prior to Drum & Bass KLR would listen to a lot of Metallica and other metal bands, then he gradually got into Old Skool & Happy Hardcore.
By the mid 90's KLR was hooked on underground music and after getting a set of Technics and buying some tunes he was off.
By 1999 KLR was involved with staging a night with MC AlleyKat alongside some of the other DJs around at the time - respect and shouts go out to the Coldshoulder, Critical, Mellow-D, Cypha & all the others that were there.
Mute:8 was formed soon after, with KLR, AlleyKat, Dyazide & Coldshoulder & Various nights were then organised (some of which were a success!) and from early 2000 through to 2003 KLR had played at various venues in Northampton, Sheffield, Watford, Nottingham, Milton Keynes, Rugby and more, alongisde some of the industries bigger names like Dylan & Tech Itch, Ray Keith, Twisted Indivudual & Nicky Blackmarket to name a few.
In 2005, under the Mute:8 Recordings banner, KLR started mixing on internet radio with DJ's Coldshoulder, Dyazide, Cypha & Smyla - alongside MC's AlleyKat & Hostile.
This show aired every Friday night from 7pm - 10pm. The summer of 2007 saw this brought to an end for various reasons.
After a bit of a dry spell KLR is now back and rolling every Friday exclusively on www.dnbnoize.com from 6 - 8pm GMT.
KLR joined Rogue Sequence in 2008 and is now hard at work in the studio, producing new material and working on an album of breakbeat and old skool based tunes, as well as a number of drum & bass singles.
The home studio set up has progressed to incorporate a mixture of hardware and software, giving the KLR sound a polished finish to the tracks - some of which can be heard at www.roguesequence.com.
KLR's writing style has a lot of musical riffs and padded breakdowns with rolling beats, although he has worked on various filthy beats with Dyazide, Cypha and Coldshoulder. Tracks will generally have a clean, rollin tech beat with crisp sounds and well blended samples.
Nowadays the main influences come from the more obscure labels, from the producers who like to break new ground - Offkey, Obscene, Hardware, Barcode, Subtitles and Position Chrome to name only a few.
As KLR would put it, this is what Drum & Bass is all about - pure energy, face peeling bass and seriously disgusting samples. To sum up in one word - TECH!
