iLS [UK]

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iLS [UK]

Postby admin » 15 Mar 2017, 16:33

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BIOGRAPHY

Ils was born Ilian Walker, his mum making up the name while she was pregnant with him and reading Homer's epic book The Iliad. "I've always been called Ils from school days," the DJ/producer recalls. "It was handy only having three letters when the first Atari came out, cos for the highest score for Space Invaders you could only have three initials."

He grew up in a hippy commune, and the first music he was exposed to was Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon' - an album left to him as a present by a departing squatter. The other record that was a big influence on the young Ils was 'Never Mind The Bollocks' by the Sex Pistols. "I remember that was being blasted from the house all day long," Ils smirks. "Then the first thing I ever bought, when I was 11 or 12, was Grandmaster Flash + the Furious Five 'The Message'. Everyone in my street was into electro and breakdancing and I saved up for that for about three months." Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones inspired the young Ils to pick up a guitar, after Ils heard that the punk rocker learned to play the instrument in two weeks with just one finger. The fact that Jones also lived in the neighbourhood, on Shepherd's Bush Road, brought it home to him that he too could be involved in music.

Ils got into bands in his teens - big time. He joined school bands, swapped instruments around a bit, got put onto funk bass duties. "When I was 18 we used to club together and book into a West End studio," he recalls. "That's where I first saw the Atari and sampler at work. I was always pissed off at how shoddy our school demos were. When I saw beats coming out of a sampler I had a vision of finished records, as opposed to messy demos. I was getting annoyed with people not turning up, and started coming to the conclusion that I could probably rely on myself more than the super-flaky people I was hanging around with at the time."

Disenchanted with unreliable band-mates, Ils got his own sampler and did some business training courses, going through the Prince's Trust start-up system. He did a business plan, got a grant, set a studio up and began advertising in Loot as a full studio. By this time Ils had got involved with drum + bass pirate stations ("it was like having those old funk breaks sped up, your own youth culture as it were"), and knew that to make drum + bass all you needed was a sampler and an Atari. "I knew there was loads of young DJs who wanted to do dubplates for their pirate stations,' says Ils. "Most were booking into these big expensive studios with engineers who were good at live mics and guitars and stuff, but not good at Cubase or samples. I spent a year learning how to use my equipment, and soon would get people's dub plates finished in four hours. That whole DiY concept of music I liked, and I slipped straight into that subculture."

The first Ils release was on Rugged Vinyl, though he soon gravitated up to LTJ Bukem's Good Looking imprint. "He was a DJ who knew what his sound was, he was out on a limb at the time," believes Ils. "Working for him for as many years as I did possibly alienated me from the rest of drum + bass. When I came out of Good Looking it was like 'Where do I go from here?" After mid-90s success and critical acclaim, Bukem told the artists on his label one day about his financial difficulties. "He pulled us in for a meeting, said he had a forty thousand pound tax bill and that none of the artists would get paid for two years," Ils remembers. "It was annoying going into clubs and having your track played, or it's tune of the month or something, and you weren't getting paid for it. I had to bunk tube fares to get to a club to hear my own stuff getting played. I had six singles out on Good Looking and I was having difficulty retrieving any payment." Luckily his studio engineering work kept paying the bills - just.

DISCOGRAPHY

Studio Albums:

Idiots Behind The Wheel (1999)
Soul Trader (2002)
Bohemia (2005)
Paranoid Prophets (2007)
33 R.P.M. (2013)

Singles & EPs:

About That Time 1998
Ils / Deekline / Donna Dee - Untitled (12") 1999
Music 2002
The Next Level / Music 2002
No Soul Remixes 2002
Unknown Artist, Clint Mansell, Ils - Requiem / Overturned (12", S/Sided, W/Lbl) 2002
Ils Featuring Valkyrie - Cherish 2005
Angels 2005
Ils vs. The Who - Baba O' Riley 2006
Loving You (Part Two) 2006
Next Level Part 2 (12") 2006
Everyone's A Crook vs. Ils - Love Will Tear Us Apart 2007
Everybody Needs A Shrink / Burn Again 2007
Sabotage / About That Time (Remixes) (12") 2007
Hate Is An Illness 2008
Dark Skies (Single) 2013

DJ Mixes:

Y4K (2003)

MORE INFO https://www.discogs.com/artist/4506-Ils
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Re: iLS [UK]

Postby lampard.serg » 16 Mar 2017, 07:15

INTERVIEW with ILS

Ils has been one of the top breakbeat producers since the late 90s. His fourth and most recent album, Paranoid Prophets, came out in 2007 and since then things have been relatively quiet on the release front.
Earlier this year he returned with a single called Real Life featuring Baymont Bross & I-Wunda on Pooty Club Records and now he's released a sample pack called The Sound Of Breaks on Loopmasters. We spoke to Ils to find out how he approaches making tracks.

How do you approach a tune, what comes first? I usually start with a beats combo, but it is great to have a killer melody loop to start with when possible.

Does your approach differ depending on which genre you are making? It doesn't really differ that much, but some melody lines and loops suit a genre or get 'lost' by changing the BPM too much, which would definitely affect the choice of BPM / genre for the track.

What time of day do you work best? 11am start is good; I have become a morning person after years of working all hours in the studio!

Where do you get your inspiration / motivation from? A good lead riff or a new beat is usually enough to start the ball rolling.

What do you do when you're not feeling inspired? I usually listen to some early years James Brown / Maceo tracks to get me going.

Where is your studio set up and what does is consist of? I do a lot of prep work at home, when I think the idea is strong enough I take it my studio in Fulham for final / high volume mixing work.

What's the boring, workhorse plugin / piece of kit that you use all the time? It used to be the Akai S3000xl sampler, which has been replaced by the ESX24 Logic based sampler.

What's the best piece of equipment you've ever used? The Akai S3000xl.

Which sequencer do you use and why? It used to be Cubase in all its forms, but now Logic 9 is the industry standard, so I use that now so my work can be accessed from any studio.

Any new studio technology or gear you're liking at the moment? The NI Maschine is good fun for jamming with.

Any advice you can give us regarding mixdowns? A mixdown is only going to be as good as your speakers. After all, if you can hear something isn't right you can always change it.

What production technique do you think is really overused / annoying? The standard answer would be Autotune, but then again, people have got so good at programming vocals through this effect that it is still capable of pleasing.

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started out? Erm... turning up the bass too much on mixes does not always mean your bass will sound louder in a club. In fact, your whole track can get 'sucked under' by over enthusiastic sub bass EQing. Tell us more about your sample CD for Loopmasters and how you approached it... I thought most producers already have good kicks and snares, so I tried to make a package that would compliment that with 'live breaks' that work in dance music. I also wanted to make a sample pack that I could use if I was stuck on a desert island!

What else have you been working on recently? I enjoy working with and producing live bands as a hobby.

What do you have coming out soon? I have another album out in 2011 with Distinctive Records.

What tracks, producers and labels are you feeling at the moment? I like Tinie Tempah's production outfit, I think they can give some US based producers a good run for their money.

Who would you like to co-produce with? I think working with some of the big dubstep producers could be fun, it reminds me of the old drum & bass production ethics, I quite like Devlin too.

If you could remix any tune you like what would it be? Probably anything by Radiohead / Devlin.

Done any interesting remixes recently? My friend works on Placebo's management team, they have loads of new indie guitar groups, I get sent a lot of ideas from that camp.
Last edited by lampard.serg on 16 Mar 2017, 07:32, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: iLS [UK]

Postby lampard.serg » 17 Mar 2017, 08:43

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Ils ‎– Bohemia

Label: Distinct'ive Records ‎– DISNCD151
Format: CD, Album
Country: UK
Released: 09 May 2005
Genre: Electronic
Style: Breaks

01 Intro (Reprise) 2:09
02 Tiny Toy 5:41
03 Angels 5:25
04 Cherish 4:43
05 Feed The Addiction 4:38
06 Ill-Logic 5:51
07 Storm From The East 5:59
08 Precious 3:32
09 Razorblade 4:16
10 The World Is Yours 3:42
11 Loving You 4:13
12 West Coast 5:16
13 Over My Head 4:57

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