CLASSIC ALBUM
Dom & Roland Industry
Moving Shadow, 1998
“Its funny,” begins the normally interview-shy Dominic Angas. “Until recently, I don’t think I’d ever bettered that album.” He’s talking about his debut LP – the iconic, “I t’s genre-forging masterpiece, Industry. A collection of super processed, forward-thinking, breakbeat science. A jewel in the legendary Moving Shadow label’s crown. And a body of work that forged its own dark, techy and technical drum & bass path, as the g enre was really starting to take giant steps.
Not even in his 20s then, Dom (and the Roland sampler that shared top billing with him), bunkered down and made the album he wanted to hear. “I was young and in that life-changing, tumultuous time, I was just doing it for me,” he says. “I don’t think I write, or wrote music for people, per se. I write because it needs to come out.”
It was a dream of his to join the iconic Moving Shadow drum & bass imprint, known for pushing the creative envelope. And life on the label was good. They allowed him free rein to try what he wanted, leaving him to chop and twist drums and synths, until he had a truly unique sound to his name.
Inspired by dreamlike, high-tech sci-fi films like Blade Runner, he’d spend weeks dreaming up music befitting its neon-lit dystopia. “I was fascinated by these science fiction sounds I’d never heard before,” he says. “And ultimately I was merging that into everything I made. I wanted to create these alien sounds in the studio that no one else had.”
When released, his futuristic jungle opus of an LP would help change the scene forever – pushing it in new directions, as other artists took Dom’s baton and ran off with it into the future. “I could name 101 people that have taken my ideas, and they’ve made great careers out of them,” he says. “But, you know, it’s basically what I did too. I think that’s ultimately what music is. It’s just someone taking something that came before and trying to make it their own.”
Track by track with Dom
Thunder
“It was very inspired by [the legendary Metalheadz DnB club night at the] Blue Note. The whole ‘switching up breaks’ thing. I remember actually all of the breaks in that were put through a grey and very cheap distortion pedal that I bought in Maplin [laughs]. And, for me it was all about having a slightly different distortion sound to everyone else.
“And I also realised that the older the battery that I put in it, the better it sounded. I tried to look for drained batteries to see if I could get a different crunch out of it. Back then it was always about hunting for weird things. Eccentricities like that, to try and get something different to what everyone else is doing.”
Remote View
“I was quite fascinated by the ‘rem
