Lincoln Barrett: Producing Drum & Bass

Lincoln Barrett’s musical journey started in the box, but 20 years on, he’s reinventing his trademark liquid funk sound with vintage hardware.

Inspired by the original pioneers of jungle and drum & bass, Lincoln Barrett (aka High Contrast) found his own way into production. Since signing to Hospital Records in 2000, he has become one of the genre’s biggest names. Drawing on an early obsession with film soundtracks and sound design, he developed a signature liquid funk sound, pumping out anthems with epic vocals and drum & bass remixes of household names like Adele, Kanye West, White Stripes and Coldplay. Even nowadays, a new High Contrast track just has to be premiered on BBC Radio 1 on a Friday night for audiences to be singing the track back as he DJs the next day in a massive club. His recent album Restoration is heavily inspired by the old Roland and Akai hardware samplers used by the hip‑hop pioneers.

Sound & Vision

“I had no interest in music until I was about 16,” admits Barrett. “Certainly not contemporary music. I was interested in film from the earliest possible age, so I collected film soundtracks. My sister got me Goldie’s Timeless album and I thought ‘What the heck is this?!’ I’d never heard jungle before. It was the most alien thing, and I couldn’t get my head round it. So I was immediately turning it off but kept going back to it, trying to work out exactly what this music was. Hearing those cut‑up, sped‑up drum loops being edited with a lot of sound effects. I also noticed there were sounds in there that I recognised from films, and then the strings were quite cinematic and haunting. But there was no context to it for me, I was coming at it completely blank.

“When I was 16 I went to college, and friends I met there were already into jungle and buying vinyl. I realised there was this whole scene where people are making music, often in bedrooms with very simple setups, and they’re sampling films that I love, and people are actually dancing to it. I felt this was tailor‑made for me, because the one thing I do know about is movies.

“At the same time, I got a free CD‑ROM on the cover of a computer magazine with a demo version of Cubase. I didn’t know anything about music production, but it did allow me to throw some samples together and start very basic explorations of making drum & bass. This was all at the start of the Internet, so I was able to download things like the Amen break and bass sounds but there was no real sense of an online community around drum & bass for me.

“It was only when I was 18 and I was able to actually get into clubs that I heard sub‑bass for the first time! Back then the sub‑bass was just pure sub 808, so there was no way I was going to hear that on my home stereo system. I think that has stuck with me, because I focus more on the melodies, the samples and the sounds rather than the bass and even the drums sometimes. That’s kind of my contrarian approach to things within drum & bass. I actually try and de‑emphasise the drums and bass element!”

Out Of Step

“I started very basic production around 1996, 1997 without any help from anyone. It took me a long time to figure out what I was doing, but by around 2000 my tunes were starting to sound... not professional, but they were sounding interesting, I think because drum & bass was so dark at that time. There was the whole techstep era in the late ’90s and I really didn’t connect with that. At the same time, I started to listen to house music, specifically Chicago house, the deep house sound, and New York garage. I loved all those sounds. At the same time there was Daft Punk happening and the whole French filtered house thing, which I loved. And I fell in love with disco. I wondered, why aren’t we getting this in drum & bass? So it kind of became my mission to try and do that whilst also tying it in to hip‑hop — the way you would have those funk, jazz and soul samples in hip‑hop.

“I was studying film at university but the music took over my life. I was being very prolific, knocking out track after track and honing the craft. It wasn’t club‑ready so people didn’t want to sign it, but they could see that I was making this kind of groundbreaking stuff. The liquid funk movement was starting to happen, as pioneered by DJ Fabio. Then it just so happened that London Electricity played in Cardiff and they ran Hospital Records. I gave them a demo when they played at the club because I was a resident DJ at the club. We just hit it off because I was playing soulful drum & bass and they were too. They listened to the demo and then they just rang me up and said ‘We want to sign you for an album deal.’ Going from a complete unknown to getting signed for an album was just fantastic.

“That immediately threw me into the scene, getting my stuff out on vinyl. Then that led to gigs and doing my first international gigs, and that led to a residency at Fabric and then getting played on Radio 1 by Fabio. It all happened very quickly off the back of that. And I also like the fact that they signed me for an album, because usually in dance music, and especially in drum & bass, the focus is on singles.”

Learning By Doing

At the same time, Barrett was still teaching himself the art of production. “I guess it’s good to have mentors and people, but I think nothing can beat figuring stuff out yourself and finding your own way of working. Like my first album. The production was very raw, some of the tracks could barely get mastered, because the production was so raw. But it just reinforces my philosophy, which is: if the ideas are good enough and if it makes you feel something powerfully enough, then the production almost doesn’t matter.

“The way I look at it is I don’t actually make songs, but I make things that kind of have the impression of a song. There are a lot of people making drum & bass now who are getting full vocals and it’s proper song structure. But I’m more interested in repetition and loops, finding the moment of something that I love, and repeating that. I would say it’s somewhere in between like proper songs and what other people normally do in drum & bass.

Restoration is High Contrast’s seventh album, and leans heavily on vintage sampling technology.“I think the other thing that creates that distance from normal songwriting is that I love vocals, but I try and use them just as another element in a track, and not give them the kind of dominance that a proper song would have. I treat the vocal as if it’s a Rhodes keyboard or the bass. There’s been some repeat uses of vocalists over the years, but generally I’m trying to find a new sound each time. But the majority of what I do is sample‑based, so that I’m sampling a track first of...