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Black Sun Empire

In the studio with Black Sun Empire

Although drum ‘n bass and dubstep originated in the UK, the Dutch are more than capable to wobble a bass line or two as well. People like Martyn (Eindhoven, currently living in Washington DC), 2562 (The Hague), and Noisia (Groningen) nowadays belong to the international establishment. A few other grimey Dutchies hail from Utrecht, and do their thing under the sci-fi Black Sun Empire moniker. We looked Micha Heyboer, his brother Milan Heyboer, and their long time friend René Verdult them up in their basement studio.

How did you guys get together?
Micha: “Well, Milan and I are brothers.”
Rene: “And I was looking for two brothers. Just kidding, Milan and I were classmates in high school, and we both listened to the same kind of music that no one else listened to. So we basically didn’t have a choice, haha! We liked The Prodigy, Autechre, and The Orb while all the others were listening to Guns ‘n Roses. It took us a while to figure that that stuff was cool as well.”
“They were both drummers, and I fiddled about with synths and keyboards. I convinced them that electronic stuff was nice too, and that it takes less practice to do something with.”
Milan: “We had a sampler with one MB memory. This was around 1996.”
Rene: “We got together every once and a while, bringing our computers together. We had to press the space bar of both computers at the same time to put a track together. We were able to MIDI sync them, but we thought it was too much of a hassle, haha!”
Milan: “We started out making some gabber, triphop, that kind of stuff. We switched to drum ‘n bass in 1997. The first release came in 1999.”

Do you always work together or do you split up and do things alone as well?
Rene: “The three of us never work on the same track collectively. We all kind of do the same thing in the studio, so we take turns getting behind the controls. We always hope that the sum of our efforts turns out to be a cool track.”
Micha: “We work with Cubase, mainly because Logic is no longer available for the PC. But we have used other stuff like Cakewalk and Fruity Loops before. In the end it’s all about what you are used to.”

You’re not thinking about switching to Mac to be able to work with Logic again?
Rene: “No, we are quite Windows minded. We like to mess around with it, and be able to upgrade the computer with new features. If you buy a Mac, there is hardly anything you can alter. In the end we like the DIY side of working with computers.”

How come so many drum ‘n bass producers end up making dubstep?
Rene: “The question is: did dubstep come from drum ‘n bass? That’s quite a controversial discussion. The ‘real’ dubsteppers don’t think so, drum ‘n bass people do. It’s kind of an argument.”

What do you think?
Rene: “I think there is a strong connection between the two styles. We started out making Prodigy style stuff, Underworld, Chemical Brothers… The breakbeat and techno stuff we listened to before when there was no drum ‘n bass. But even when drum ‘n bass came around, we kept on doing side projects in other styles. And dubstep was the first thing that came so close to the drum ‘n bass sound, that we started making it under our own name instead of a moniker.”
“Some people say dubstep is the same as drum ‘n bass, but slower. But it has a very characteristic rhythm to it, a different feeling. And there is more room between the beats. Nonetheless it’s so close to drum ‘n bass that we can kind of internalize the sound that’s typical for Black Sun Empire.”
Milan: “The beats are very different as well as the sounds, and because the pace is slower, you can add some more funk. You can’t do that with drum ‘n bass where beats need to be more neat because of the speed.”
Micha: “We have been making drum ‘n bass for ten years now. After three albums and so many twelves it’s quite refreshing to pick up another style. We have tried making trance, but we didn’t get any further than one single, haha!”

Plastic Dreams and BSE
In order to promote both Black Sun Empire and the Dutch dance music export program Plastic Dreams, Micha, Milan, and Rene produced a special 7” single that will be one of the goodies in the Amsterdam Dance Event delegates bag. Seated behind a few synths and controllers, a big screen, and angry looking Genelec speakers, the guys take the track apart to show us how the Black Sun Empire sound is constructed.
Rene: “We often use existing beats, old breakbeats, that we cut up. But this track has original beats we made from scratch. We use Battery for our drum patterns. It’s quite difficult to put the right sounds together if it comes to tuning and feeling. If you cut up a break you don’t have that problem, because it’s a drum kit recording.”
“The intro is a modular sound with fast panning. And there’s an aggressive bass line that sounds once in the beginning of the track to kind of let the listener know what’s coming up, to tell him to pay close attention, haha!”
“The track has multiple bass lines, something that is quite an essential element of our sound. These blocks here are all versions of the same bass line, each with a distinctive character.”
Milan: “We tend to get bored quickly, that’s why we keep changing it up almost every other bar. If you’re making music you often doubt if the track is alternating enough. The danger over overdoing it is always lurking, that’s when you sometimes loose the theme of the track and need to take it back a few steps.
Another thing is that a track can loose its magic if you know how it has been made, but that feeling usually disappears a while after it’s released. In the beginning I’m usually like: ‘Shit that hihat was a pain in the ass!’, haha!”
Rene: “We went over the essential ingredients of the track now. This effect is used to build up the tension. It’s an off key sound that we use to create the typical dark Black Sun Empire atmosphere. And lastly there’s this child’s voice saying ‘This is a hard one’. I can’t remember where we found that. So would you like to hear the full track now?”
Yes, we do. The next three and a half minute the basement is trembling with the distinctive electronic dubstep sound of Black Sun Empire. Very impressive. It’s about time to head back home, and let Micha, Milan, and Rene get down to business as usual, because if it’s up to them we ain’t seen nothing yet..
Milan: “We are currently working on a new album. But it would be great to work with a singer, and eventually to produce stuff for a band.”
René: ‘But that’s hard to really plan, I guess it’s something that just happens eventually. It’s a matter of keeping your eyes open.”

Source: DJ Broadcast / Eric van den Bogaard