Drum 'n Bass queen Reid Speed gets her name from the pace that she sets her life to. After talking to her for awhile, it begins to add up: Her music is fast, she talks excitedly, and even on the advent of her newly released CD, "Under the Influence," and subsequent tour, she is hard at work.
When she picks up the phone there is a maelstrom of noise that comes out of my receiver, for a second I think she must be standing in a wind tunnel, and then it abruptly stops. It turns out I have interrupted her in the middle of remixing a song when I called her at 2 p.m., our scheduled time. She tells me that it's 11 a.m., and this is true, in Los Angeles. After the little misunderstanding, she took the time to talk with the CT before her upcoming show at 9:30 p.m. Friday at the Lantern:
CT: What have you been up to recently? How has life been?
RS: Things are really good. I just did this CD that's on Moist Music that I'm on tour for. It came out like a month ago. I've been just touring a lot for the CD and just been in the studio just working on a lot of tracks. I have a bunch of new things coming out. I have a new label that's launching May 1st so that's in high gear getting all that ready to go.
CT: How is the label coming along? Heart Beats?
RS: It's not called Heart Beats anymore. Somebody jacked our name four days before our initial release date. There was some confusion at Beatport. We thought we were set, we had already filled out our applications and stuff but they actually let another person go ahead with the same name literally five days before. We were supposed to launch on Valentine's Day and March 9th I started getting all these congratulations from people like "I saw the label's up, oh that's fantastic." I was like "What are you talking about?" and it was somebody else.
CT: Oh no. That was my 21st birthday.
RS: Oh. Happy birthday.
CT: But yeah, that's too bad. What are you going to do now? Do you just have to rename it?
RS: Yeah, we have to change the name. The label is now called Play Me Records. We're set to go.
CT: What's cool about a record label is I feel like it gives you a chance to keep your ear close to everything and to look at things coming up. How was it finding those acts?
RS: It was great because I've been going through this business for so long I just know so many people, and a lot of people in the past two years who used to be really into drum 'n bass have made this switch to electro and those people, I really like their production quality. People who are just making drum 'n bass, they always use subs, and their music sounds really fat and has that extra "umph" to it. So that's pretty much what we're focused on because it's myself and SubSonic doing the label together, and SubSonic, he's killing it with drum 'n bass. He's like number one on BeatPort and TrackItDown all the time. So we're taking that sensibility of the really good production like intricate drum programming and heavy bass and translating that to other styles of music that we like as well.
CT: Is that how you've come along? I mean, "Resonance" is completely drum 'n bass oriented and then there's say, the Back to School mix.
RS: It's been like a circle. In '97 when speed garage came out I was playing a lot of speed garage back then and a lot of 2-step, but it never became really popular so I was playing this really unpopular music for a long time. Like 10 years, nobody wanted to hear it and now finally people want to hear it. A lot of people think it's new to me, but it's actually kind of like going back to my roots if you will. Getting a chance to finally have people like this music that I was trying to push 10 years ago is really nice. I never got it why nobody liked it back then; I always thought it was so great, I was like, "Oh, it's like jungle, but it's house!"
CT: Is that how you see the electronic scene moving toward? Like Dubstep?
RS: It's moving toward convergence. If you listen to the Hip Hop that's on the radio, The Black Eyed Peas "Boom Boom," whatever that song is. If you listen to Lil Wayne, and T-Pain, and all this Kanye West and then you listen to Dubstep and you listen to electro, it's just converging. Like all music is coming to a point.