An interview with the Line Noise artist of the year: Basic Unit
Plus Calibre, P.Horse, Nathan Fake and more
In 2024, I awarded the Line Noise album of the year to Xylitol, for the devastating Anemones.
This year I took a slight change in tack. I want to give the album of the year award to a record that A) really took my breath away and B) that possibly hadn’t been covered so much in other media.
The obvious choice was the re-release of Timeline by mystical drum & bass duo Basic Unit, an album I compared to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled in a post from June 2025.
To recap, this is what I wrote: “I find both Timeline and The Unconsoled utterly riveting, like being beamed to a parallel universe where everything is just a little bit different and you can’t work out why. (Or a dream state, maybe.) You can’t make easy assumptions about either work - so you can’t afford to turn away from them for a second.”
But I didn’t want to give the record of the year to something originally released in 1998, no matter how devastatingly futuristic it still sounds today.
The problem was solved in November, when Basic Unit quietly released Redux, a six-track EP of new material that showed that their magic still flowed. The lightbulb went off: I would have an artist of the year, rather than a record of the year, and that artist would be Basic Unit.
And so I got in touch with Ben England, half of Basic Unit with Rick Dallaway, and he was happy to talk. You can hear the interview now on the Line Noise podcast. Or you have edited highlights below. Paid subscribers, incidentally, will get the whole interview transcript. Enjoy!
Ben Cardew: How did you and Rick meet?
Ben England: We met at school. We met at the age of 12. And because our surnames, in a very English way, are alphabetically next to each other, he sat in front of me, right at that age when I guess you’re starting to be social creatures. So yes, we’ve known each other since we were 12 years old.
Ben Cardew: You started off musically as Punchunella, making progressive house, right? How did that happen?
Ben England: Basically we were ravers, so Rick and I had been out clubbing and we’d been going to raves for those years and then writing music as well.
And then suddenly, kind of a shift happened in ‘93 maybe, where there were some house records that we liked, that were kind of coming in - the early, early part of disco-influencing house records. We had written these two [Punchunella] tracks and had gone into a record shop in Birmingham and handed them a cassette. And then they phoned back and they said, “Yeah, we really like it.”
We went into a studio with two dudes who polished it up. We were on two Amigas using tracker programs, so the version that we did was, I would argue, quite different. That was our short-lived progressive house music phase.
Becoming Basic Unit
Ben Cardew: There were two Punchunella releases, San Trancisco and Return to San Trancisco, which was ‘94/’95, and then in 1997 you pop up as Basic Unit. Obviously, for someone like myself, who didn’t see what happened in between, that’s a very different proposition. How did you go from one to the other?
Ben England: Historically, that’s what I tend to do. You get into one thing, then you burn out on it and then you get into something else, then you burn out on it a bit…And I mean, we were only 17 when we did that [Punchunella].
I remember going into the record shop and already being kind of over that kind of style, and giving them a tape with some sort of early jungle stuff on it. And they were like, “Nah.”
And then literally what happened was both me and Rick went to Leeds. Rick did a mechanical engineering degree and I did a fine art degree. That’s the three years that’s the gap. And then Basic Unit started pretty much as soon as I finished my degree; we kind of got some gear together and decided to start doing that, which was ‘96.
Ben Cardew: What was your first single? There were two in 1997. Scorpion backed with Caves, which was released on Nocturnal, and White Blossom backed with Silver Wolf, which came out on Moving Shadow.
Ben England: I think White Blossom / Silver Wolf was written first. But the other one came out first. So Scorpion and Caves is a bit odder, although actually the first records that we sent to Moving Shadow were much more in that vein, they were quite odd. Those two tracks were a bit of an anomaly.
White Blossom was like... when we sat down and set our studio up and tried to kind of write music and we’re coming in every day and doing it... White Blossom is probably only a half-a-night track. So, things happened quite quickly for that, which was amazing.
Ben Cardew: How did you hit on your sound? As you say, it’s quite odd. It’s not like anything really out there on the drum & bass scene at the time.
Ben England: I think naivety, accident. It was out of its time, I suppose, but also I had a very distinct set of what I didn’t want to hear. And there was a lot of stuff that we were obviously - like a lot of people - really interested in what was going on technically within drum & bass at that point, a real high point in terms of widening our heads and what people were doing production-wise.
We were trying to do those things, but without necessarily having had the kind of experience to know what we were doing, you know? I think we kind of missed the very early jungle era and we were probably a bit more influenced by techno, more than a lot of people at that period.
Sound & Style
Ben Cardew: You’re sometimes compared to techstep, which was going on around about that time, ‘97/’98. Do you agree with that? Did you like techstep?
Ben England: No, I’ve always felt it a very odd comparison whenever I read it. I don’t think we were techstep. But maybe it’s not for me to say; other people can hear what they hear.
We always struggled to write… not struggled to write… but we’re not really particularly driven to write dance-floor music. And a lot of techstep... we didn’t associate ourselves with that side of things. I think we associated ourselves with having been listening to more Source Direct and Photek and those sorts of things. And I never really felt we were full-on techstep, if that makes sense.
Ben Cardew: To me, it sounds a bit Autechre, in a way. Was that something you were listening to?
Ben England: Hugely, hugely, still do, still listen to them regularly. Chiastic Slide... there were a few albums that were going around. I wasn’t exclusively at home listening to banging drum & bass all day long. So there were some really big albums around when we were making Timeline. I remember OK Computer was out around that year, ‘97. There was a Tricky album called Angels with Dirty Faces. I think Plaid was there.
Timeline
Ben England: Timeline was a specific desire or a plan to write something that was specifically to listen to.
We’ve gone from, like… obviously doing a lot of the stuff on Moving Shadow, which was always a bit more leftfield, but we’re still trying to write drum & bass. Then the guy at Nocturnal was like, “Do you want to write an album?” And we said, “Yeah, that’ll be a fun project.”
So we set the parameters of the project up, which was that it was a storyline from beginning to end. So it was kind of a concept album. And then we set parameters for what that was going to be. And then I think we did the whole thing, from start to finish, in six weeks. Me and Rick were living in the same house and my mate was also living with us, who did the artwork for Timeline. So it was a real vibe in the house. It was a product of that.
Ben Cardew: Did DJs play your music much?
Ben England: Yes and it’s weird, because a lot of people that I’ve loved that are credited with being hugely influential didn’t necessarily get a huge amount of DJ play. John Peel, he played Timeline quite a lot on his show.
And then the second album we did after that, Panta Rhei, he played one track off it every day for a week and then left the most amazing voicemail message on my phone, which was amazing to hear. But then, as a friend of mine once said, he would play a spade dragged across concrete.
Ben Cardew: The legend was you made just 500 copies of Timeline on CD. Is that true?
Ben England: Yes, yes.
Ben Cardew: Was that because you thought it wouldn’t sell or because you wanted it to be limited?
Ben England: That was up to Steven Nocturnal [Steve McGuinness who co-founded Nocturnal]. He was a character. He had previously had a business selling really rare records and made a good bit of money in there and then basically burned the whole thing in like a year or two on us.
It just wasn’t profitable, I don’t think. Even shifting those 500, I don’t think was an easy task. And there was never mention of vinyl because it just was... it was confused. It wouldn’t sell. And I don’t think it would have done.
I think he tried to do some marketing but it’s an odd record, sat in a weird position, because the drum & bass scene wasn’t very open, didn’t really get the experimental music scene and vice versa.
Ben Cardew: Am I right that Mixmag called Timeline “unlistenable”?
Ben England: Yes, it did. Yeah.
Ben Cardew: Did that bother you?
Ben England: I was funny, there used to be a magazine called Mixmag Update, which came out weekly. And the dude in there, to this day, I do not know who he was, but every time he reviewed our records, he was the nicest. He was just like, “These guys are amazing, unsung heroes.”
Then the guy that wrote for Mixmag, or it might have been Muzik, he said, “Yeah, it’s bordering on unlistenable but maybe it will make sense in 50 years,” which is kind of a nice U-turn, really. He wasn’t saying, it was shit. He was saying, “I don’t understand this at all,” which actually was not an unusual opinion at the time.
Ben Cardew: As Basic Unit, you carried on releasing music until 2003. Did you stop making music together then?
Ben England: We’ve never really stopped but it just becomes harder and harder to do it. We moved to London and we dipped our toe in the world of trying to be more commercial in terms of seeing what the music industry in London had to offer. Did some advert stuff, which was fun at the time. But I’ve continued to write all the time. As much as I can, I write every day. So, it never stopped. It just it felt like there was no output for it, for what we were doing.
The state of drum & bass
Ben Cardew: How did you feel about drum & bass in the early 2000s, because I fell a bit out of love with it around this time. The obsession with making ever darker bass lines.
Ben England: I have a suspicion that anybody that writes or is into drum & bass kind of goes in and out [of it]. I think it’s a really unique style of music and it has ups and downs. That area that you’re talking about, where I fell out, there are people now, that’s their favourite era.
When Ed Rush and Optical came in, that era of not really chopped up breaks and it was like a loop and a big bass line and analogue synths and all that, I appreciated it, of course, but it wasn’t what we were into at all. And then you try and write it, because obviously you want to be sort of relevant.
And then Bad Company came along and they just wiped the floor with everything in terms of what they were doing, dance-floor wise. And then Marcus Intalex came along with the light side and he lighted it up. I really loved Marcus and I really loved Digital. I thought he was a fantastic artist with Deadline and all his records.
And you saw from the drum & bass scene this point where it’s seemingly able to be so out there but still within a genre, which is, I realised, more and more what I really like. I’m a kind of a purist in some respects, that I like genres, but I also like things that are really on the edge of the genre.
Ben Cardew: When I listen to Basic Unit, it sounds really well produced. I can imagine it took an insanely long time to do. Is that true?
Ben England: You mean in terms of…
Ben Cardew: …well, polishing it and making sure it sounds just right.
Ben England: We probably thought it sounded shit. Comparing yourself is a horrible thing. Again, it’s like, “How did you get your sounds?”. We weren’t working with necessarily the most up-to-date gear that everybody else was working with. So you’re trying to get the best out of it. And I think it’s amazing for that. But the best stuff really sounds great in and of itself. Do you know what I mean? The best it can sound at the time.
If we compared it next to, again, an Ed Rush and Optical track, or a Pendulum track, technically… I think one of the most outstanding sounding drum & bass records is Adam F’s Metropolis. I think he did that in a proper studio with an SSL desk and so on and so forth. You know, we were never going to compete with that with a crappy Akai sampler.
It was always a battle for us. I think any drum & bass producer is always battling their own production. You always want it to be better than it is. And what was amazing about Timeline, which you only realise in your later years, is that it was really well produced for itself. It was a really good version of what it was. But if we had written a more standalone drum & bass track at that time, it would have been weaker next to better produced stuff.
The Making of Redux
Ben Cardew: And so you did Redux, which came out at the end of 2025. They’re new, new songs, right? Was it easy to slip back into the Basic Unit mode?
Ben England: It was surprisingly easy and since then it’s been surprisingly difficult. I think I absorbed it. And I was like, “Oh god, yeah, that’s where we were.”
The way that we had written Timeline was really unusual. So everything else we’ve written was Rick and I in the studio, bouncing ideas, doing stuff, whereas Timeline, the way that we’d set it up was that he would design the sounds and I would do all the programming.
He would go in, in the evening and write on the sampler, just make these mad sounds that then have interesting modulations and things that you could do with them. And then he would come out, give me the thumbs up, say, “Oh, blah, blah, blah. If you do this on this, it’ll do...” and then I would go in and program it on headphones.
And then we’d finish at 3:30 in the morning, he’d go in and listen to it, and then we’d record it down. And those are the versions that are there. As far as I can remember, no tracks got started that didn’t get finished. Everything that got written, got written in a day, and the version that you hear is what was recorded at the end of the night. So I think there was an element of setting it up like that meant we were coming out trying to impress each other, you know? “He’ll like it if I do this.”
We’ve been trying to recreate that situation now. Obviously, being older, we no longer live in the same house. So Rick sent me a bunch of sounds. I said, “You do a bunch of stuff,” and then I just hit this point… I tend to work in projects and for vibes I can really get on a particular thing. So then I programmed Redux and it just felt possible. It was all coming back to me. And since then, I’ve been trying to try to do something else without repeating.
Time Signatures and Chaos
Ben Cardew: Can I ask a really nerdy question about time signatures? It’s kind of hard from outside to assess what time signature something is. And it doesn’t sound to me like it’s 4/4.
Ben England: Everything is 4/4.
Ben Cardew: But you’re doing things that, for me, it almost feels like it’s almost about to go conventional, and then it doesn’t. The snare hits where you expect it to for one bar and then it doesn’t again.
Ben England: That was that was one of the things that I truly loved about drum & bass, that after this era, almost within a few months of that, that style had disappeared and it’s been resurrected to some extent.
But there is a point that happens when you’re programming something that is amazing, that I used to love, that I hear in other people’s records, where you kind of get lost in where you’re at in the bar, it starts to freak you out. But you have to trust the artist enough, that they’ll get you to the end result, or give you a point somewhere that resets it and goes, “Oh, right, it’s there. The start of the bar’s there,” or whatever it might be.
But there’s a point in the middle of it where it all starts falling apart, where there’s this kind of chaos, which just lights up my brain. One of the things that is so amazing about Autechre live sets, you have the confidence in them that you have to let go. It’s like if you’re watching a movie and at some point you let go, “I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what applies but I’ll just enjoy being here and relinquishing any idea that I know what’s going to come next.”
Some listening
Brooklyn Funk Essentials - Take The L Train (To 8th Avenue) (Calibre remix)
Arthur Baker / Lati Kronlund’s Brooklyn Funk Essentials were one of those bands I can remember hearing about in the 90s and if streaming were a thing I would definitely have checked them out.
As it wasn’t, I didn’t, which means I missed out on the utter genius of the original Take The L Train (To 8th Avenue), a song that sits on the velvet-y border between ambience, jazz and 90s funk, sinking like an orange sunset over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Liquid don Calibre has been paying closer attention. His gorgeously languid drum & bass remix of Take The L Train has been closing his sets all year and already sounds like a classic, locating the sweet spot between melodicism, ambience and jungle energy, like LTJ Bukem used to do. Calibre’s ambient remix, which rounds out the package, is well worth your time too.
A lot of music these days references the unhinged darkness of hardcore rave / early jungle. So why did Brainstorm by P.Horse (I’ve also seen it as Phorse), a producer I had literally never heard of before, reach out to me?
Maybe because the song sounds so rowdy and energetic that it took me back to first hearing hardcore in the early 90s and being blown away by the idea that thousands of people were losing their shit to music this beautifully chaotic. Brainstorm is not exactly original - a mixture of chopped breaks, rave stabs and Beltram hoovers - but the song is loud and raucous enough to make any doubts disappear beneath waves of frantic energy, an inner cheek rubbed raw and bleeding.
Walls of quivering synths; the drums from 2 In A Room’s She’s Got Me Going Crazy (as notably used by Moby in Go); the tempting whiff of UK Garage; enough echo to destroy a swimming pool; and voilà: we have Bialystock, the first taster of Nathan Fake’s new album.
It doesn’t sound like much. But Bialystock is one of the most out-and-out satisfying pieces of electronic music you will hear all year, a simple - but not really - joy that hits all of the pleasure points, repeatedly, as it leaches all over your brain.
Daniel Brandt - Nothing to Undo (Tangerine Dream rework)
Why am I so excited by this song when there are, at a conservative estimate, at least 75 Tangerine Dream albums I have never heard and possibly never will?
Because it’s Tangerine Dream, innit? The masters of kosmische float and rolling synth modulation, a group whose electronic heft is like the walls to a celestial kingdom, once breached never to be returned from. And because, perhaps, Stranger Things - aka the most Tangerine Dream TV show in existence - is back and we’re all bugging out to menacing permutations of analogue synths as we cower behind the sofa in terror.
Or maybe it’s because it’s great that a band can still producing material as evocative and fresh as Tangerine Dream’s rework of Daniel Brandt’s Nothing To Undo 55 years after they made their recorded debut, even with the band’s founder long dead and no one even approaching an original member in the line up, a vast stretch of musical inspiration that transcends times, space and mortality. So, erm, yeah, pretty good.
(Oh and right on time: Midori Hirano’s new single Illuminance, which is the absolute spit of classic Tangerine Dream.)
Rufige Kru - Still the Same (Submotive remix)
There’s a bass line I like to call the “quiver” bass. Popularised by Micky Finn and Aphrodite on Bad Ass in 1996, it sounds not so much heavy as queasy, its undulating rumbles suggesting an upset excitement in the pit of the stomach.
Submotive’s remix of Rufige Kru’s Still The Same, taken from the recent Alpha Omega Remixes EP, has an off-colour peach of a quiver bass at its core, the guttural convulsion adding a wonderful layer of ill ease to the song’s metallic drums, turbo rave synths, echoing dog barks and CASISDEAD vocal snatches. The production here is off-the-planet - but there is still a beating heart at its rotted centre, which is sure to be of comfort as you run heaving to the toilets.
Fabio Frizzi - Sette Ragazze de Classe - Synthesiser (Danz CM remix)
Just one month after the release of her excellent album LÄRM!, Danz CM is back with the release of the charmingly esoteric and yet deeply funky compilation album Synth Utopia Volume 2, assembled by Danz from the cream of the Cam Sugar catalogue of Italian original soundtracks.
The 18-track album includes the work of legends such as Ennio Morricone, Vangelis and Hans Zimmer, as well as composers who really should be better known, such as Nico Fidenco and Fabio Frizzi. And it is toward the latter we turn, with Danz CM’s absolutely peacocking remix of Sette Ragazze di Classe (Seven Dangerous Women) - Synthesiser.
The film that it is taken from apparently involves seven women who decide to seduce as many aristocratic men as possible and you can so imagine the protagonists strutting their artistic stuff to Danze CM’s space disco remake of Sette Ragazze di Classe before, I don’t know, ascending to a higher plain, or however the film may play out.
Things I’ve done
2000-25: The Century in Electronic Music
I contributed two write ups to Resident Advisor’s admirably ambitious round up of the best electronic music of the century: Pepe Bradock’s Life and Radiohead’s Kid A. Obviously, I’m biased but it does seem like a pretty impressive attempt to coral a quarter century of electronic music into some sort of form. And yes, obviously, things were missed. But if you don’t find at least 20 favourites in each list then your tastes are even more obdurate than mine.
One Minute Review - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Live God
AKA it’s pictures from a part you weren’t invited to. Do we need yet another Bad Seeds’ live album? All will be revealed in my latest One Minute Review.
You want to know my five best gigs of 2025? What do you mean, ‘no’? Sure you do. It will only take a minute - well one minute 35 - and you can do it on YouTube.
While I am at it, can you please subscribe to the Line Noise YouTube channel, if only because it will make me happy? It does have some videos you might enjoy.
AND I have reactivated the TikTok account I created in 2017 and totally forgot about because this is totally normal behaviour for someone in his 40s. Content - guaranteed. Quality - TBC.
The Playlists
Available via Apple Music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.
And Spotify (for the moment): The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest.
Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.