Interview: Rennie Pilgrem - louder than bombs

Rave pioneer, godfather of breaks, TCR records head honcho, the DJ and producer who pushed breakbeat kicking and screaming into the limelight has been called many things. Thisisbreaks.com is calling him the quiet man of breaks. But is it time to make his voice heard once more?

• Download: Rennie Pilgrem exclusive TCR breakbeat classics mix

"You have to remember that I'd heard Emit 500 times before it even came out on record. I certainly stopped playing it for a while, but at the same time, people expect it of you. I remember going to a little club on Vancouver Island on a Wednesday night: it was a real party vibe, amazing. And I got near to the end of my set and they said: 'You are going to play Emit for your last tune, aren't you?' And I did a double take and said: 'I don't have it with me'. They were absolutely appalled! And then they actually sent someone home to get it so I could play it!"

Rennie Pilgrem is laughing gently to himself. We're in a quiet little pub in Notting Hill, but even here the soft chuckles of the man known as the godfather of breaks are at risk of being drowned out by the dull background chatter of a smattering of late afternoon drinkers. Mr Pilgrem is not a fellow given to shouting.

And yet, in all the ways that count, the TCR records founder has a voice that's louder than bombs. This is the man, after all, who pretty much invented modern breakbeat with his seminal 1995 record A Place Called Acid, a screaming barrage of searing 303 and explosive drums which persuaded more open-minded DJs on both sides of the Atlantic that big beat wasn't the only alternative to dull, repetitive and formulaic house music. He then tore a hole through the scene all over again half a decade later with his "Agatha Stomp" remix of Zero's Emit/Collect, a hoover-fuelled, smashed mouth of an anthem that still sends bodies flying round the room whenever and wherever it's dropped.

Of course, there was that period about a year after its release when the record became so ubiquitous that breaks night regulars would run screaming from the room upon hearing Emit's famous riff. But Pilgrem makes no excuses for continuing to make the tune a part of his sets, even adapting it for the live arena as part of his Rennie Pilgrem and the TCR Allstars collective.

"I've seen Josh Wink play and he kept playing little bits of Higher State of Consciousness in his set, but never actually dropped the full record," he says. "And he pissed off about 2,000 people, so you have to be careful.

"It's getting better now. I can play it again. But in any case, I hope the situation wasn't ever quite as bad as with that Freestylers track, Fasten Your Seatbelts. A standout tune, but it used to get played so much I actually wanted to smash it, so I know where people are coming from!"

The Emit remix, named after the seminal Agatha night in Rome, which pioneered the housier side of the genre (now known as tech-funk) coincided with Pilgrem's own shift in the same direction as the scene went overground. Half a decade later, you sense he regrets that move, and recent outings in the studio and on the decks have suggested a return to his breakier roots.

"What I'm looking for is tracks where it's got something going on that house music, techno music hasn't got," he says. "And you're not going to achieve that by making a track that just sounds like it's house or techno.

"Breaks has always said: 'I like that, I like that, I like that', and taken the ideas from other genres that it wanted, but the undercurrent is based on a real drummer. If you take that away and just have these very boring beats then it defeats the object. If there's nothing going on, I'll take a track and put a dirty break over it in Ableton."

Pilgrem talks with glee about discovering US producer Diplo, a collaborator with MIA and Santogold whose 2004 album Florida might once have fit snugly into the breakbeat canon.

"It's very old skool and simple, and uses lots of real breakbeats," he says. "Breaks is not an easy genre of music to make. 99% of producers aren't good enough to program their own rhythms, so I'm confused as to why so few people are using live breaks at the moment. I think that's something we need to get back to."

Pilgrem also namechecks Baobinga and ID's work and talks fondly of his love for the Bassbin Twins' breakier outings. "Tunes like Woppa are amazing, again really raw," he grins.

Dubstep is also a clear influence, although Pilgrem seems somewhat irritated by the flavour of the month prominence given to the genre. "People say: 'Oh, listen to the amazing bass sounds, but we were doing that 10 years ago with nu skool breaks," he says. "But I do appreciate the fact that it's so uncompromising. That's one of the reasons why it's doing so well: They are just doing what they do."

It's an attitude that contrasts strongly with that maintained by some of breakbeat's bigger names at a time when the music has dipped back into the underworld from whence it came. Of course, Pilgrem has seen it all before: as one half of rave act Rhythm Section with Ellis Dee he saw mid-tempo breakbeat almost disappear in the mid-90s as house music, jungle and happy hardcore dominated the music scene.

"When I hear people like the Stantons say: 'Don't call what we do breaks', that's kind of forgetting where they came from," he says. "In six months time when it all comes back these people will be saying: 'Oh, I was always into breaks.'

There's a sense of righteous indignation against those who do not respect the music in the way DJs and producers from competing styles do theirs. "Drum 'n' bass is in the same position as breaks right now, in that it's not very media-hyped, and it's gone back underground, but you don't hear those artists dissing their own scene," he says. "If you went to a drum 'n' bass night and they played four on the floor, people would think it was a joke. They'd be thrown off the decks or would have things thrown at them."

Does breakbeat have an equivalent to the mid-90s Rennie Pilgrem at the moment? Someone to rip the scene a new arsehole with a track like A Place Called Acid, a tune so brutally fresh that it sold 20,000 copies in 1995, spawned a platoon of imitators and forced Pilgrem to start DJing in order to take advantage of the huge gig offers which began flooding in from across the world?

There are plenty of contenders. And yet one would not be surprised if the scene turned again to the man who virtually invented it. Gird your loins, for the quiet man of breaks is preparing to roar once more.