Lynx – Taking It Back

“If I’m honest last year I had one foot out of the scene. I was assessing my career and thinking how I love ‘deep’ drum & bass but started feeling like I needed to diversify.” As, in this writers opinion, one of its most underrated producers Lynx has spent a majority of his drum & bass tenure building and cementing his reputation on the underground. Tracks on Creative Source, Soul:R and Metalheadz are testament to this. A small hiatus was spent working on a non D&B project which, for various reasons, will sadly never see the light of day. Positively, some time away helped reinvigorate Lynx’s creative process when it came to it his musical bread and butter. “Doing that album changed the way I was thinking about writing music. It’s really helped my drum & bass and allowed me to find a way to break out of being just a ‘deep’ producer. A way of expressing myself so people know it’s Lynx without being confined to that niche sound.”

“If I’m honest last year I had one foot out of the scene. I was assessing my career and thinking how I love ‘deep’ drum & bass but started feeling like I needed to diversify.”

Benefits of this new found expression are heard on his comeback single. After appearing on Andy C’s Nightlife 6 and with it being almost twelve months since his last proper release, Take Back The Night signals a return to drum & bass form for Lynx. Bouncy, piano driven and a vastly more uptempo affair, Take Back The Night works the dance floor in a manner some of his previous material may not have done. Though there’s no masking the obvious; it borrows just a little from what is possibly his most well known tune to date. But we’ll come back to that later. “Originally it was an instrumental track” he says, “I was playing it in my sets and it went down really well. I finished it off and then sent to Andy for feedback to see what he thought of it. He started playing it out pretty much around the time he was getting tunes together for Nightlife 6. He ended up choosing it, along with Shimmy, for the CD and snapped it up for Ram at the same time.” Holding all the parts of Take Back The Night together are the familiar breaks and bass of Lynx’s 2007 anthem Disco Dodo. Aware he could be accused of going ‘back to the well’, precautions were taken to make sure it didn’t sound like he was simply rehashing what is generally considered to be his career defining moment. “I didn’t want people to think I was rinsing another Disco Dodo style track. I approached Andy and asked how he felt about me putting a vocal on it just to change it up a little bit and not be too obvious with it.” So with that in mind Brighton based singer/songwriter Newsome was brought in and a vocal mix was laid down in time for its inclusion on Andy C’s three disc opus. There’s no doubt a big tune lingers long in the memory. There’s certainly no escaping the fact Lynx is responsible for what is still one of the most unique records of the modern D&B era. Did he ever worry Disco Dodo would grow to become bigger than him? “Probably not at the time. If you ask me now then yes. It’s certainly one that I can’t forget for better or for worse. If one tune becomes more popular then no matter how much musical credentials any of the others have they get overlooked by just one. I guess that’s my crutch one way or the other.”

“Ram is a label I’ve respected for over 15 years”

Lynx is now looking forward to what potentially lies ahead for him having re-established himself via one of the biggest labels the scene has. A release on Ram Records isn’t going to do him or his reputation any sort of disservice. It’s yet another name to add to list of labels who have put out his music during his career. “Ram is a label I’ve respected for over 15 years. Obviously in the UK they’ve become massive with acts like Sub Focus, Chase & Status etc. For me its cool to be a part of that. I’ve released on a lot of labels but there was still a few that I felt I’d like to release some music with. Ram was definitely one of them.”

A new found confidence to take risks musically, a reignited spark for the beats and generally feeling happier in himself as an artist, you sense he’s excited to once again be back in the game. Not so quick to be pigeonholed, by himself or others, it’ll be a totally different Lynx you see from now on. There’s even a willingness for the usually fiercely independent producer to align himself to an imprint exclusively in 2014. “I think now is the right time for me to sign exclusively to a label. One that can channel and focus my creativity. It feels like the perfect time for me.”