Article Preview - Roni Size: Creating New Forms 2

Roni Size's New Forms revolutionised electronic music. Ten years on, he's returned to his classic album with a fresh perspective.

Paul Tingen

Released in 1997, Roni Size's New Forms is one of those landmark albums that didn't just define a genre, but an era. Size took the drum & bass genre to a new level, finding new ways to incorporate live vocals, live instruments, and a jazz feel. New Forms won the Mercury Music Prize in the year of its release, introduced drum & bass to a whole new audience, and has gone five times platinum.

A decade on, Size has released New Forms 2, featuring a selection of the original tracks, altered with additional production and overdubs, plus three brand-new tracks. This news is sure to make purists' heartbeats skip a beat or two, and one wonders what made him risk accusations of sacrilege. The answer sounds like a case of burnout.

"I'd been DJ'ing solidly for two years, five days a week," explains Size. "It got to the point where I was doing five-hour sessions at Space in Ibiza, which was a massive challenge to me. Afterwards I sat down with [DJ] Carl Cox, and said to him that even as I love drum & bass, I didn't feel any more as if I loved the music I was playing. I said 'It's good for the moment and for putting smiles on people's faces, but it's not really me.' He recommended that I take time away from music, which is a hard thing to do, as I get offers every day to remix, or to DJ in the most exotic places. But I took his advice and called my agent and said 'No more gigs, no more music, from this point on.' I even stopped listening to music. You know how wine tasters clear their palate after each tasting? For me this was a case of clearing my musical palate.

"For six months I stayed at home, not doing much, and then I got a couple of emails from Universal saying that they wanted to release a deluxe edition of New Forms to mark its 10th anniversary, and did I have anything to add to the mix. And I thought: actually, I do. I wanted to do things that I couldn't have done 10 years ago, because of the technology, and because I didn't have the same knowledge as I have now. So my assistant, D Product, and I went through all my ADATs and Syquest drives and archives of floppy discs, all the formats I have used over the years, and loaded everything into a brand new Pro Tools LE system. Once I had everything in front of me in Pro Tools, I thought 'There's so much stuff here, double bass, live drums, vocals, that I didn't know how to use on the original New Forms.' So I started to pull it all together, and before I knew it, I had a new record.

"What I did not want to do was take anything away from the original, because it had so much space, and at the time it was quite groundbreaking. I didn't want to stir up anything of that, yet I did want to update it. There are people who never heard the original New Forms . For them this is a new record. What I tried to do is give the original a new coat of armour, making it sound like a record that could have been made today."

Down Sizing

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