Breaking the loop

When the London/Italian wide boy Paul Pesci flew into Dublin in March 1996 to DJ at the first night of a new club called Quadraphonic, drum'n'bass was a mere pup of a sound. Sure, there were the superstar Dons like LTJ Bukem and Goldie, making noises both on and off stage with choice releases for labels like Good Looking and Metalheadz, but drum'n'bass was still trying to find its feet on the floor. Even before it could do just that, it would splinter again into ever-smaller scenes and schisms. The sound of the underground would become, in time, the sound of many undergrounds. Keeping up with the Goldies-next-door was easy - you just went away and created your own sound.

Three and a bit years on from his remarkable Irish debut, Peshay is still chattering away excitedly about his new album. He was talking like this back in 1996, and the spiel is, granted, much the same: "I want to show eight or 10 years of influences, the music that I grew up listening to and dancing to, and put it all into my style. It's about showing people where I'm coming from, and where I'm going or would like to go. That's why there's so much variety on the album - it's not all one long drum'n'bass loop." This time, though, the sounds he's hearing in his head are also spinning around on a shiny CD for everyone else to enjoy.

Miles From Home is a drum'n'bass album like no other. A skinny greyhound alongside the hairy wolfhound excesses and surplus weight of, say, Two Pages or Saturnz Return, it naturally outpaces anything the Dons who have dominated this race to date have produced. More importantly, it's an album you will find yourself listening to again and again. A jazz album in all but name, it moves, grooves and shakes sweetly and fiercely. Alongside the straight drum'n'bass workouts, where everything clicks wonderfully into place, there's also room for the sultry soul swing of Summer In The City, with the former Galliano singer Valerie St Etienne adding some sighs to the mix, or the title track, where disco diva Kim Mazelle pours in some garage sugar, Peshay is delighted with the reaction. "Flipping hell, I'm over the moon! When you do an album, you do the best you can do, but you do it in isolation. You do what your heart tells you to do - but you don't know how people will receive it. So far, though . . . "

So far, Miles From Home leaves every other debut this year trailing in its slipstream. Despite three years of record label shenanigans ("When you're an artist, you soon find out that there is nothing you can do about that sort of thing within major labels, you just have to sit down and ride it out") and setbacks, Peshay's delivery is on time and on point. He, more than anyone else, realises that it's now more than just the sound of drums and bass coming together. "I wanted it to be minimally drum'n'bass, but with other stuff on it so that people who think they don't like drum'n'bass could also listen to it. That's why you've got the electro thing and the soulful vocals and the hip-hop track - it's all part of what I've grown up with. Yeah, drum'n'bass can be a bit limiting. But I'm showing that it doesn't have to be."

Peshay talks a lot about growing up and the sounds which have grown up with him - and a lot about jazz. A music obsessive from an early age, his first dip into jazz came via his mum, a classical singer. This fascination has stayed with him though years of DJ-ing at outdoor raves with names like Genius, to his early stunning productions like Psychosis, and on to today's position as drum'n'bass's most wanted.

So after listening to Peshay telling you why some Weather Report track or other changed his life, you'd expect him to be buying large into this "drum'n'bass is the new jazz" malarkey. Not so. Peshay disagrees, and disagrees fervently: "No, it's not a jazz for the 1990s. If you listen to what a lot of people are making, there's absolutely no funk or no groove or no music in it, not to mind jazz. Some people, maybe; most of them, no. "It's about sound and texture, but also about the movement in the bass and the horns and the pianos and the Rhodes. There is so much movement in jazz, so much fluidity, it's a really intricate, technical kind of music. John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Weather Report, Pharoah Sanders, Art Blakey, they're the people I've probably had the longest musical relationship with, and the ones who've had the most influence on my work as a producer."

Not for Peshay either the relative safety in numbers afforded by been being the member of one scene or another. "I'm a maverick," he says calmly. "I'm the sort of person who always wants to do something different, and not go down the same road as everyone else. I don't like to copy anyone else - I can be inspired by someone else, sure, but I can't take it straight from them. For the scene to go forward, more people have to be more original and go down their avenues rather than everyone using the same map."

Because of this, he has little time for the cliques which hold sway. "Of course I want everyone to like it - but I don't care if certain people on the scene say this, that or the other because you can go around in circles all day with that. I don't really care what the so-called Dons think because I know that once you make good music, you are accepted. It's very important, when you are making your album, not to be swayed by what you think other people will make of it. You've got to go away and do the best album that you can do for that era. I've done that - it's the sound of me, from my heart."

Indeed, it could be the album which finally sees some cohesion coming from the drum'n'bass world - or which at least influences some other people to take a leap into the unknown. "I can't hold up the drum'n'bass scene on my own," he maintains, "it needs about 20 or so people to hold it up and show the world what it can do. People have to start getting a bit more musical, people have to start experimenting a bit more, or it's going to get staid and boring. And an audience gets wide to that - they know when people are just going through the motions in a studio. The bottom line is, there are just too many people making shit drum'n'bass and that is what bringing the scene down."

While he cites Photek ("he's my best mate and I have respect for him for what he does, because it's like nothing that anyone else is trying to do and he does it in a way that you can understand") and E-Z Rollers as artists he admires, there is no doubt that Peshay works to his own rules and standards: "I apply the pressure myself and so I can control it, I decide when I do this or that, not someone else." As artists go, there are few as forthright as Peshay. But perhaps more importantly, as albums go, there are few which walk as tall or as far as Miles From Home.

Miles From Home is released on Island Records on July 26th.