Having stuck our necks out and predicted that dark horses Hybrid would steal the limelight at the Homelands Ireland festival, Digital Beat was relieved and thrilled to learn that they lived up to our expectations and produced one of the most intoxicating live performances of the day.
Having made the transformation from being renowned breakbeat trance studio boffins to a fully-fledged live act with ease, the relatively unknown Welsh trio then returned a week later to play their first ever DJ set in Ireland, rocking Dublin s Velvet club like never before.
And it s not just Irish clubbers who have succumbed to their charms in 1999. Throughout Europe, Hybrid are rightfully regarded as one of the most exciting new dance acts in the business, largely thanks to the release of one of the year s most acclaimed albums in Wide Angle, a collection that doesn t so much break down musical barriers as remove them altogether. So who are Mike Truman, Chris Healings and Lee Mullins, and how did they get here?
Their story begins seven years ago in Swansea. Chris Healings remembers the first encounter like it was only yesterday.
Myself and Lee used to DJ in Swansea and when Mike brought us in a house remix of Pink Floyd s Another Brick In The Wall that he d been working on, we were bowled over. We instantly hit it off and decided to DJ and remix together. Our influences were Way Out West, BT, Quincy Jones and film scores. We just wanted to make good music, but with a little bit of flair and ingenuity.
Two years later, Hybrid s remix career was flourishing, as the band s then pioneering fusion of breakbeats with progressive house and trance was championed by luminaries such as fellow Welshman Sasha. By the start of 1998 they were one of the most in-demand remix teams in the UK Alanis Morisette, Jazzy Jeff and Carl Cox just a few of the acts who ensured dancefloor credibility by getting Hybrid in to do the mixes and when Distinct ive offered them a long-term deal, the remixes ceased to allow the band to make an album that would avoid the structural predictability of much club music, and instead innovate and inspire by looking towards the broader musical corpus to see how far we could push it.
Mike Truman was finding dance music less and less inspiring: You know where all the samples have come from, you know where the beats have come from and you ve heard all the riffs over and over again. What s the point in listening to it?
Enter Sacha Puttnam. The composer and musicologist was hired to add an element of orchestral discipline to Hybrid s electronic experimentalism, but found his rulebook was soon discarded. Puttnam recalls: We did exactly what Debussy did. In his day, you weren t allowed parallel fifths, but he started using them and suddenly that s his own sound. So when Hybrid were not worrying about academic restrictions, suddenly you had all these harmonies you re not supposed to have. And they work.
Puttnam brought Hybrid to Moscow to record six tracks with the Russian Federal Orchestra. Persuading the record company to foot the bill was easy, as Chris tells us.
We found it cost the same money to use this ninety-strong orchestra in Moscow as it was to hire a twelve piece string section in London. We were there for about four days and about eighty-three of the Orchestra couldn t speak a word of English. But we were well pleased with the results Sacha s a right talented little bastard.
The next step was enlisting vocalist Julee Cruise, best known for her work with David Lynch on Twin Peaks.
We had worked with a few vocalists but weren t getting what we wanted. Julee had that otherworldly quality we were looking for, explains Chris. Cruise s demos so impressed Hybrid that they ended up using her on four tracks on Wide Angle, one of which was the mesmerising Digital Beat Single Of The Fortnight, If I Survive .
Wide Angle s twelve tracks took over a year to record a long time for music that often gets knocked out at the rate of a track a day. The aim was to make an album that would stand the test of time, and to that end Hybrid succeeded Wide Angle is one of the few dance albums from this millenium that people will be listening to well into the next. Already there is talk of a follow-up, and, as you might expect, the aim is to try something completely different. Chris is keen to get working on it. One idea is to do a kind of unplugged breakbeat album. Another is a suite of music in which the melodic instruments play the beat and the percussion instruments play the melody.
Whatever the outcome, you can be sure that you haven t heard the last of Hybrid. n
Wide Angle is out now on Distinct ive.