Evolutionary: Alan Fitzpatrick

When looking at techno artists emerging over the past few years it is hard to find any that are maintaining the seemingly unstoppable momentum of Alan Fitzpatrick. Hailing from Southampton the Drumcode mainstay and 8 Sided Dice boss has been winning plaudits across the globe for his constantly evolving brand of bass heavy techno.  Set to land in London on the 26th of October for Drumcode’s Halloween party we caught up with vinyl loving techno aficionado to  discuss his rise through the scene, thoughts on the current climate and plans for the future ahead of the event. 

When looking at the growth of your career it seems fairly meteoric. Did it seem as rapid as it looks when looking at your discography? Tell us more about your journey to where you are now as an artist.

Yes it did seem rapid! In electronic music things can happen very fast in certain situations and I was lucky to find myself in one of those.  If I go way back I guess I developed the taste for all things electronic as a teenager when dance music was riding a bit of a high. It had been a decade since the whole free party explosion and electronic music had been more or less accepted into the mainstream as a major genre, with a massively developed network of clubs around the UK with all the big cities booking world class international DJs week in week out.  So with such a vibrant scene naturally I wanted to be part of it and began sneaking into clubs under a fake ID, listening to mixes and tracks and at that point a lot of the tracks I wanted to listen to were only on vinyl which began my love of the format so I stumbled into DJing as a means of playing the tunes I wanted to hear as a teenager with lots of records and a set of turntables.

From there it was just a simple case of playing local parties for fun until I enrolled on a music technology course after leaving school alongside my friend Dave Robertson (Reset Robot), I dropped out of the course due to a job offer but he stayed on and we continued making music together with our DJing still limited to small local parties. It was only in 2008 that you could look at anything that resembles my career properly so to speak when I had just launched my own imprint 8 Sided Dice and the first release blew up. The track was called ‘9 Hours later’ and after play from the likes of John Digweed  and Dubfire, things started to move quickly for me with a remix for Mistress Barbera on John Digweed’s Bedrock quickly following and it was then that I began to think that perhaps I could do music for a living. People talk about ‘big breaks’ and I suppose those two tracks were mine despite it taking another few years before I could consider myself a full time DJ. I still think I’ve got a lot to do and achieve before I’m anywhere near satisfied and would tell anyone that my career, sound whatever you’d want to call is firmly a work in process.

You first came to my attention when you signed with Adam Beyer’s seminal techno imprint Drumcode and after hearing your early efforts for the label I thought you’d been around for a lot longer! You’re now a firmly affiliated member of the Drumcode crew. Tell us more about how this came about.

 Yeah, I have a really good working relationship with Adam which all started back in 2009 after I had remixed a track by Fergie called ‘To The Core’. Adam had received a promo of it, had started playing it in his sets and got in contact to say he’d be interested in hearing some of my unreleased music for Drumcode and we just moved on from there. Since then I have done an album, a bunch of EPs, singles and remix for Adam, Ben Sims and others and have really enjoyed being part of the drumcode family in the early stages of my career. It has been good to be in such a stable and creative environment that has given me so much support at what has been a crucial stage in my development as an artist.  We’re all really good friends on the label now , with a real family environment so whenever we get to play together like at the Drumcode parties it makes it all the more special. I am very grateful to the label for how they’ve showcased my music and hopefully I’ve repaid that by having some successful releases for them and have plenty more in the pipeline for the future.

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