Electric Selection – Emalkay

Birmingham dubstep producer

Enjoy an exclusive Lonely Hertz Club mix by Emalkay then read on for an interview with the producer.

Every day around the world people are creating monsters. Each day something, somewhere gets out of hand.

Martin Knowles, AKA Emalkay, created his own monster in ‘When I Look At You’ – a warped, android ballad in the dubstep genre. Take a cruise on YouTube and you’ll see that as of April 2011 it’d been streamed six million times. That’s a lot of cassette tapes if people were still paying!

“It won’t die, it won’t go away. No-one’s heard it more than me,” laments Emalkay. “It keeps playing when I go out, you can still hear it. It is a good thing and I reckon there must be something in that track that’s addictive. I didn’t even spend a lot of time on that track, I wish I could explain it.”

Far from an isolated occurrence Emalkay has been jostling within the pack of dark garage producers that transmogrified into dubstep around 2003. However he’s recently upped his game with a series of total club bangers. From his raved-up ‘Crusader’ track that hints at his age to the most recent ‘Fabrication’, an electric roller that fizzes with Friday feeling. “‘Fabrication’ got all this Radio 1 attention,” laughs the producer. “Up until now they’ve been neglected. It used to be the case that you’d have to make a certain sound to get noticed, but I think the dark stuff as well – if it’s done right – gets the same kind of attention.”

Emalkay lives in Birmingham, something of an anomaly in the scene. But you get the impression he’d be doing this music even if no-one was listening.

He started making tunes as an escape from life on an estate, simply a diversion: “It was just a way of handling time and for me it’s just something I really enjoy doing. I just got hooked on it and decided to get an agent and do it as a career.”

Now residing on Caspa’s Dub Police label, Emalkay has serious options, since eight years of producing gifts him a record bag built of many styles. As dubstep’s most improved producer, each of his releases are now is slavered over by bassheads online, a fact that has increased his profile but also worries this old-timer. “The iTunes generation, they just go on there and look for what they want and they just want to quickly buy it. And YouTube and MySpace just caught on so quick; it just accelerated from the ground up and before it would have taken a lot longer. So now the sound just develops so quickly and artists just come and go.”

Emalkay Eseentials – ‘Fabrication’ 12” (Dub Police), ‘When I Look At You’ 12” (Dub Police), ‘Crusader’ 12” (Dub Police)

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