BASS DROP and THE RIOT CLUB! Present DILLINJA

BASS DROP and THE RIOT CLUB!  are joining forces once again, our last few shows have been a sell out so don't wait too long to grab a ticket!

There are few producers on the drum’n’bass scene who are as respected and revered as Dillinja. With his trademark combination of dirty stomach churning basslines and tighter than tight beats, his reputation has grown steadily as one of the most influential drum’n’bass producers around today. 

Dillinja was reared on a musical diet of funk, jazz, reggae and rare groove, genres which proved to influence him enormously, but it was the 1980s electro explosion which really captured his heart. It was as the genre metamorphosised into hip-hop that he began to buy records and started DJing. His hunger for hip-hop was well satisfied in South London, as local parks hosted free events where hip-hop, soul, rare groove and reggae could be consumed in vast quantities. The influence of these events on Dillinja, where the likes of King Tubby and Jah Shaka made their presence felt with their mighty earth-shaking reggae sound systems, was huge. 

Dillinja began to shadow a local guy who had made Jah Shaka’s amps, and not long after, at the age of fifteen, Dillinja was making his own custom built amps and bass bins; a hobby that soon became obsession, with his teenage bedroom so full of audio equipment, he had no choice but to put his mattress atop the speaker cabinets and sleep there. However, when the infamous Criminal Justice Bill was introduced, seriously clamping down on sound systems and the events where they were played. Dillinja decided that rather than compromising his system, he would call it a day, sell of its components, and enter the heady world of music production. 

With musical experience gained at school playing both the drums and violin, Dillinja easily picked up the required skills, hanging around the Digidub Studios in Camberwell to get a feel for the engineering side of the process. He began to furiously produce tracks, so many at one point that he was putting out two releases a week, plunging any money earned straight back into the kitty for mastering and pressing costs…and bus and train fares for self-distribution to all the specialist records stores. Dillinja: “I wasn’t making any money for years, I just had such a love for the music. I was knocking tunes together in my room, getting a hundred white labels pressed and running around with them to record shops myself. It was a great learning process and I loved it”. It is an often cited fact that by the age of 23, Dillinja already had 50 releases under his belt. 

His initial records were all on white label, including his first ever release “Tear Off Your Chest”, produced with Batmix, but within a couple of years he went on to form a myriad of labels such as Cybotron, Logic, Target, IQ and Deadly Vinyl, the latter being home to such Dillinja early classics as “Sovereign Melody” and “Deadly Deep Subs”. 

As well as his own, Dillinja went on to record for many other drum’n’bass labels, including Bryan Gee and Jumpin'’ Jack Frost’s V Recordings and Philly Blunt labels, Hardleaders, Prototype and Goldie’s pioneering Metalheadz imprint. Dillinja used these labels to show his unique musical versatility; while labels such as Philly Blunt and Lionheart Records showcased some of Dillinja’s more raw jungle based sounds, as in “Muthafucka” and the reggae-fuelled basslines of “Lionheart” (produced with Bert), his seminal 1994 Blade Runner sampling release “The Angels Fell” was at the helm of the new wave of drum’n’bass encapsulated in the cutting edge Metalheadz sound. It is this fusion of dark basslines and tightly produced beats that has become Dillinja’s trademark sound today, a sound that has resulted in Dillinja being called to remix for the likes of David Bowie, Bjork, Faith No More, Soul II Soul, Basement Jaxx, Amon Tobin, Artful Dodger and Jeru the Damaja. The various aliases under which he has recorded include Trinity, Capone, Cybotron and The Specialist. 

FULL LINE UP TBA