Having just celebrated their 5th birthday, record label GetMe! have recently clubbed together with Dam Mantle and Becoming Real to work on their latest release which will be available on 12” and download from Monday. Both producers experiment with dark, often quite haunting sounds, to produce tracks which experiment with a variety of different genres drawing influences from grime, hip-hop, wonky, and juke.

Becoming Real: I think what its changed is actually how I treat making music, and what it is to make music, and maybe re-arranging my own thoughts on what it is to be an artist

Paramnesia opens with diced, hyper-jittering repeating beats, laced with short slices of vocals, gradually building to an almost chaotic close of densely layered electronica; whilst Her Woes starts off with a mix of dark beeps and clicks, before gradually opening out to give it a much more atmospheric, almost tropical feel. We caught up with Becoming Real and Dam Mantle to find out more about how their collaboration impacted their solo work, what the highlights of their recent project were, and what they most wished they’d said to each other when they still had the chance. 

Dazed Digital: What was your favourite moment during the working of this release?
Dam Mantle: Playing it out of a sound system after finishing it.

DD: What was the greatest lesson you've learnt from the collaboration?
Dam Mantle: Don't get stuck in one place, let your music change.

DD: Will it change your usual solo work now?
Dam Mantle: It's just a track - thousands of people make music everyday; it's fairly unimportant really in the scale of things, it's just a track built to play alongside other tracks within a set, I see it as a form of DJing or a part of the process, it's for a certain environment, it should be heard loud, you should be able to feel it. I guess that's half of what I meant with last question, it's not always about making music for this context.

DD: What was the one thing you've always wanted to say to the other but haven't?
Dam Mantle: Thanks for those Terror Danjah instrumentals.

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Dazed Digital: What was your favourite moment during the working of this release?
Becoming Real: Favourite moment was probably, simply having communication with more than just myself when working on a release, nice to be stuck in limbo with other people for a change.

DD: What was the greatest lesson you've learnt from the collaboration?
Becoming Real: I don't think I've really learnt any lessons, maybe what I can take from it is that I'd want to collaborate more, working on your own can be pretty claustrophobic sometimes.
 
DD: Will it change your usual solo work now?
Becoming Real: I think what its changed is actually how I treat making music, and what it is to make music, and maybe re-arranging my own thoughts on what it is to be an artist, I feel privileged to be able to make music as my full time job, and working with other people normally helps stretch ideas into places you might not have uncovered yourself. All the ideas are already there and all the choices are already there, they are just being waited to be shaped and made in a certain way, and working with other people means you have parallel perspectives, like two slip streams of ideas to cruise through.
 
I guess what I mean is with more eyes and ears you can build up a bigger picture, or 'deeper' piece of music, as the wealth of experience brought to the table by each person means (most of the time) a richer set of tools to sculp with...
 
DD: What was the one thing you've always wanted to say to the other but haven't?
Becoming Real: The pleasure was all mine b-i-t-c-h.

Dam Mantle Tracklist:
Imani - E W Wainwright Jr
Obfuse - Floating Points
Needs Deodorant - Mono/Poly
404 - Global Communication
Percolator - Cajmere

Becoming Real Tracklist:
Track 4 - LFO
Rising Sun - Magnet
Marriage - Gold Panda
Frieden - Wolfgang Voigt
Dominas - Carl Craig