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J Majik
Profile J MAJIK
At first glance you assume it's just another studio gadget. A cog in the complex machinery of modern music making. Look more closely at the TV monitor flickering away in the corner of Jamie Majik's bedroom, at his home in north west London, and it's real purpose soon becomes clear. The hundreds of tiny digits neatly arranged on the screen actually represent money. Obscene amounts of hard cash being won and lost in a matter of seconds.
Whenever Jamie and partner Danny J need to escape the studio next door, they usually dive in here and engross themselves in the latest shifts in the stockmarket. As indeed you would if, like Jamie and Dan, you had thousands of pounds of someone else's money riding uneasily on it. "We've got this scheme going with a broker called a T20," explains Jamie. "He buys the shares for us but we don't have to pay him for 20 working days. If the value's gone up at the end of those 20 days, you get a nice cheque at the end of it. If it's gone down, you get a bill for the difference."
Sounds innocent enough, but when Jamie tells you about another (unnamed) junglist who had to shell out £16,000 at the end of one month's particularly unlucky trading, you realise this is no game. So what's the most that Jamie and Dan have lost in one go? "We did have to pay out a couple of grand once," admits Dan, "but we don't really look at it like that. Some months are better than others, obviously, but we're definitely up on the year as a whole and that's the important thing."
Jamie confesses that he's always had a soft spot for gambling: "When I'm away DJing, there always seems to be a casino just around the corner from the hotel. I always seem to find them! But you've got to go into those places expecting to walk out with nothing. You do see some real casualties in casinos, people who haven't washed or shaved for days because that's all they're thinking about."
For Jamie and Dan on the other hand, music is the real drug. Jamie has spent just about every weekend this year in some far flung corner of the world as part of the three deck back-to-back package he's put together with Adam F and rapper Phoebe One acting as MC. Enough to tire the most dedicated of producers out you might have thought. Not Jamie, however.
Rather, he's thrown himself into one of the most prolific and creative stretches of his career, producing more than 30 new tracks from trademark string-soaked drum & bass to film scores and deep house. And his current Infrared label compilation 'Night Vision' is the first proof that he's in no mood to churn out identikit copies of whichever shade of drum & bass happens to be in favour this week.
Nestling alongside exclusives from Photek, John B, Total Science and a host of newer names dug up personally by Majik, Jamie's tracks are eerily cinematic, unashamedly musical and generally stick two fingers up to the sub-heavy metal fag-end of techstep.
Like all other producers, he and Dan moan that the scene will become stale if people continue to copy rather than experiment. Unlike quite a few, however, they've got the balls to put their money where their mouth is. "There are always great things happening in the scene," Jamie says, "but I can't pretend it's not frustrating sometimes. There are certain things you'd love to try but you just know people will be like 'what the fuck?' when it drops on the dancefloor."
"Yeah," adds Dan, "if it hasn't got a bassline that gives you a headache then some people aren't interested."
"Of course there are fantastic tunes that are quite minimal and stripped down," Jamie rejoins, "the problem is with all the people who want to be Optical or Ed Rush but obviously aren't up to the job."
Even the name of Jamie's label, Infrared, is meant to imply covert or undercover dealings - because when he set it up it was as a low key outlet for material he reckoned would be too unconventional for anyone else. And despite roots stretching as far back as 1993 hardcore classic 'Six Million Ways To Die', Jamie says he always considered himself to be a music maker rather than a drum & bass producer and believes junglists shouldn't be afraid to branch out into different genres and speeds. "No-one accuses Todd Terry of turning his back on house because he made a drum & bass album," he observes, "I love drum & bass, but it doesn't stop there."
He credits Danny, his studio and label partner for over a year now, for helping to widen his musical horizons. With the dextrous, self-taught jazz pianist on board, it's understandable that Jamie should want to push things forward. Refusing to be restricted by the confines of the dancefloor, they've expanded into film soundtracks, already soundtracking a film on extreme sports and providing tracks for Hollywood movies 'The Jackal' and 'Rogue Trader.'
Jamie says he's loved the bold atmospherics of film soundtracks ever since hearing the music to 'E.T.' and 'Jaws' as a kid. Surrounded by the film industry from birth - his parents both work in movies and he spent much of his formative years hanging around filming lots - it seems like a totally logical progression to him.
"It's funny," he says, "I never really intended to have a career in music. Because my family were in the movie business I always figured I'd end up doing that too. When I went into the studio to make 'Six Million Ways To Die', I was just a kid messing around with beats. It wasn't until it did really well that I thought 'hang on, this could be quite a neat way to make a living.'"
Even the enviable Infrared back catalogue - Lemon D, Goldie, Peshay and 4 Hero's Dego have all given tracks or collaborated with Jamie in the early days - happened more by accident than design. "I was just putting out records when I could, in between college work," he says, "There was no grand plan; these were just people I met going out. The scene was so much smaller then I guess. When I released my first album four years ago, I think there'd only been about three or four proper d&b albums actually released. I didn't have to put adverts in papers or go on tour to promote it. You just can't do that now."
Danny's co-option, however, has given Jamie the freedom to push the label. Even if certain friends of Majik's were a little suspicious of him at first. "I remember meeting Goldie for the first time," Danny laughs, "he was eyeing me up and down with a look that said 'who's this, moving in on Jamie?!'"
Certainly, 'Night Vision' is the album to push Infrared into the breakbeat superleague. While it may be the likes of Majik, John B and Photek (whose unsettling minimal smash up 'Subway' is an undisputed highlight) who catch the attention of the record buying public, it's relative newcomers like Total Science, System 3 and Futurebound that really help define the label's maverick sound. The CD opens with a VIP mix of 'Blame', a track he wrote for Everything But The Girl's latest album. Unconcerned that some purists might scoff at such an overtly mainstream collaboration, Jamie says: "It's like a dream for me working on something like that. You can't ask for much more than having a voice like Tracey Thorn's to work with. And whatever people say, I believe it's great for the scene. There's still so many people who haven't even heard drum & bass. If people hear that track and start discovering the music for themselves, that's got to be good for drum & bass."
Jamie's stance will no doubt upset the people who want to keep drum & bass music 'pure' and rooted in 1993 forever. But he is right to stand up against the snobbery than tends to stifle the creativity and energy of the scene from time to time. Jamie points to LTJ Bukem for example: "He's stuck to his guns, but he's had to move completely away from drum & bass and almost created his own scene in order to do it. That's not right. D&b is a flexible music and there's room for it all."
In the studio and on the dancefloor, where his DJ sets with Adam F shun the usual desperation to play the most upfront dubplates in favour of a mixture of old and new, J Majik is a man patently unafraid to take risks and stick his neck out. We need people like him more than ever.
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