Bristol based Behling & Simpson is the alias (and surname) of Ed Bayling and Sam Simpson who are developing their own strain of ‘slow house’ music. Both Ed and Sam have been active (and are well regarded) in the world of dance music for a number of years under a series of monikers, earlier this year they debuted as Behling & Simpson on revered Bristol imprint Future Boogie with a four track EP. The duo also released a white label re-edit of Faith Evans R&B anthem Love Like This, Julio Bashmore’s Father Father and have created a deep ‘slow house’ remix of Crazy P’s Changes.
Crazy P - Changes (Behling & Simpson Remix) by behlingsimpson
We invited Sam and Ed from their underground lair in Stokes Croft down to London’s Southbank for a spot of ice-skating and pub grub. After a delicious venison hotpot the duo took time out to chat about house music, the Bristol scene and the drum influenced 60 minute Skanking Sessions mix created exclusively for Red Bull Studios London.
What inspired you to start writing house?
Behling: Well, we've actually written house music under our previous aliases and done a couple of housey remixes over the years.
Simpson: Recently we had a summer where neither of us had a huge amount of gigs, or girls, so we locked ourselves in the studio. We started experimenting with writing house and the slower it got the more fun we had doing it. We sent the tunes out to some DJs in Bristol and got a really good reaction. So we pretty much found our ‘slow house’ niche by accident.
How did the Future Boogie relationship come about?
Simpson: The Future Boogie label is a really good example of how Bristol is a great city for music. We were sending it out to people who we sort of knew from going out and the tunes kind of organically made their way to Future Boogie through osmosis. They got in touch with us off their own backs and were like ‘let’s do something.’ It’s definitely encouraging in Bristol that you can do something like that, things bubbles through and eventually something good happens.
You did a couple of re-edits featuring Faith Evans and Javeon McCarthy. Do you guys have a bit of a Jones for R&B acapellas?
Behling: We’ve been using a lot of R&B samples, even early 90s stuff from the new jack swing era - it comes with slowing the tempo to a speed that is more in keeping with non-rave dance music. It’s fun to reuse that stuff - not in a pitched-up, chopped vocals, future garage, post-dubstep way.
Faith Evans - Love Like This (B+S Edit) by behlingsimpson
Simpson: With the Faith Evans tune we wrote it as an instrumental originally. We were looking for a hook and tried that acapella randomly and it happened to be in tune. I also think the re-edit of Javeon McCarthy and Julio Bashmore’s Father Father (which was on the flip of the Faith edit) came out really well as it’s on a similar tip,110 bpm(ish) with a big vocal, job done!
Julio Bashmore - Father Father (Behling & Simpson Remix) by behlingsimpson
Can you tell us about some of your key house influences?
Behling: There are pages!
Simpson: I’d say that jacking sound with drums that are big, chunky and have a lot of swing – music with a real hip-wiggling groove. Bumpty Chicago house like Derek Carter, DJ Sneak, also people like Kerri Chandler and Masters At Work.
Behling: Something that’s not a direct influence, but in hindsight has definitely informed our production, is late 90s to early 2000 techno, which was a bit faster and more intense. I guess the Italian sound with Marco Carola, Gaetano Parisio was layers and layers of drums with short loops doing very little for six minutes, but how they built up the percussion was really interesting. The way they processed it with loads of compressors, it was as if all the elements bounced off each other to keep it moving.
Simpson: What made it interesting for me was that people like Ben Sims were going back and finding loops from Latin records, sampling from vinyl, which gave them an interesting texture; plus the loops came from real musicians who were playing the music live. But eventually, loopy techno guys were just sampling other loopy techno guys, it wasn’t going back to original source material and it got dull.
In the studio what's yo set up and creative relationship like in the studio?
Simpson: We’re lucky enough to have a studio space in an abandoned bank vault in the basement of an old building in Stokes Croft - the cultural / crack centre of Bristol. We’ve been working together for so long we rarely piss each other off in the studio, and it’s good to have someone to bounce ideas off.
Behling: For a long time we had a loan of this late 80s Chinese bass guitar amp - we would mic it up in the recording booth, play our drum tracks through it and record them back into the computer.
Simpson: Also, the stairwell going down to the basement is solid concrete with a few metal railings, so it’s got a really nice natural reverb. Rather than using a clap from a sample CD, we’ll put a mic in the corridor and record us clapping along to a tune and mix it into the track.
Behling: Or we just chuck stuff down the stairs! Plus we’ve got a couple of old analogue synths that go out of tune and hiss a lot - but that makes them more interesting and distinctive.
So is it about taking stuff out of Logic?
Simpson: Yeah definitely. What I’ve been doing for another project is recording drums in my old Yamaha sampler at a really low quality and then recording them back into the computer. They go from being these clean hi-fi sounds with no character into weird lo-fi but glued-together beats. Anything you can do to stop your tunes sounding like Logic is vital. Part of the attraction in making electronic music is that you can process any sound from any source in the world and make it completely different. The fun of it is taking sounds and making them unique to you. For me that’s the craft.
Behling: It can get a bit daft sometimes. If it means taking my bike into the studio and hitting it to make effects or drum sounds out of it - then that’s what I’ll do!
Tell us about why this mix is different to some of the others you've done this year?
Simpson: We've done a couple of 'regular' DJ mixes, where we've done the usual thing of showing how our tunes work in the context of the dance floor, don't get me wrong, they're always good fun to do. But for Red Bull Studios we wanted to do something a bit different, so we've put together a set that is loosely themed around tracks that have influenced us. Tracks with drums that inspire us and maybe even tracks that we'd be likely to sample or steal drums from. Enjoy!
Track list:
Ray Barretto - Right On (Fania)
Sharon Redd - Never Give You Up (Prelude)
Jade - Don't Walk Away (Warner Bros)
Grace Jones - Pull Up To The Bumper (Island)
Jay Dilla - People (Stones Throw)
Peter King - African Dialects - Shanu Olu
Peshay - Rings Around Saturn (Peshay & Decoder RMX) (Science)
Om Unit - Cradle (Terror Rhythm)
Plastikman - Konception (Plus 8)
Fever Ray - I'm Not Done (Rabid)
Toasty - Angel (Hot Flush)
Marvin Gaye - T Plays It Cool (Tamla Motown)
King Tubby & The Aggrovators - Dub Fi Gwan (Blood & Fire)
Billy Paul - Let The Dollar Circulate (Philadelphia International)
Kyuss - Catamaran (Elektra)
American Men - Cccool World (Lucky Me)
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