London four-piece Rudimental stunned us this spring with their urban cowboy video for "Feel the Love," the group's soaring track with John Newman that just hit #1 on iTunes in the UK. Keeping in the grand-scale crossover style of their biggest single, Rudimental's FADER mix bridges America and England with ease, filling the Atlantic Ocean between with countless tons of bass. They describe the mix as "getting dance music from 115 BPM to 180 BPM in less than an hour." Read an interview with Rudimental's Piers Aggett below, then scroll to the bottom for a full tracklist.
Download: Rudimental's FADER Mix
How did the group form? East London is a vibrant city for music. Once you're situated in one place you can build up a little name and end up bumping into a million people. In Rudimental there’s four of us: Piers (myself), Leon, a guy called Kesi and Amir. We’ve all had our different pasts. I grew up DJing on pirate radio stations with Leon, and the two of us and Kesi have worked together for a good four or five years. We produced a bit of house music, had a few underground singles we put out ourselves when vinyl was still around. Mainly sort of bedroom producing and working with what we had, then we met Amir about a year ago in the studio, and since then it’s been a really good team. It's weird, we're quite multicultural. I think that might help bringing different perspectives to the music. I think we can all represent a part of society.
Four people seems large for a production team. It's quite an interesting dynamic because everyone's got their own strengths and weaknesses. Amir is a guitarist, I’m a keyboard player, and Kesi is also a keyboard player, and he’s quite good on percussion and drums. And growing up here, we had old school garage, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep coming up, grime. With Rudimental you get a kind of mix of different genres and styles.
What's up with the rabbits in the promo pictures? The rabbit idea was just us having a few beers together and brainstorming. We were like, imagine if you had the MC of the song shaking rabbits around. Isn't there some kind of weird deep meaning there? It just sounded wacky, so we got a few mates to shoot it.
And then you've got horses for the music video. A couple years ago me and Kesi said, for a joke, wouldn't it be dope if you could have horses in the city and just ride around? Which is weird, because the pitch came in from a separate film guy, and we just thought it would be brilliant. Horses in the city? That doesn't happen in England at all. We actually flew out to north Philadelphia, and we got to meet all these really amazing people. At the end, you can’t really see my face but you can see Kesi’s face.
Is a full album on the way? At the moment working on the album, trying to release it by the end of the year. We just live in the studio, really. We’ve been making music for years, but with the recent run of successes we’ve stepped our work rate up. Not seeing daylight that much these days.
Tracklist:
Babara Jean English, "Im Living a Lie"
Outkast, "Prototype"
Coat of Arms, "Living Together"
Paper Crows, "Happier (Rudimental Remix)"
Rudimental, "Feel The Love (Rudimental's VIP Remix)"
Justin Martin, "Don't Go"
Mosca, "Getting me Down"
Disclosure, "Boiling f. Sinead Harnett"
Rudimental f. MNEK and Syron, "Spoons"
The Milk, "Broke up the Family (Hostage Vs RackNRuin Remix)"
Brother to Brother, "In the Bottle"
Wiley, "Eskimo"
Benny Banks, "Bada Bing (Rudimental Remix)"
Jay-Z and Kanye West, "Got to Have it"
Rudimental f. MC Shantie, "Deep in the Valley"
Kidnap Kid, "Vehl"
Labrinth, "Express Yourself (Rudimental Remix)"
Mount Kimbie, "Carbonated"
Prince, "187"
Jay-Z, "Friend or Foe"
Portico Quartet, "Steepless (Grey Remix)"
Rudimental f. Iman, "Runaway"
Rotate, "Blue Forest Grotto (Original Mix)"
Wretch 32 f. Ed Sheeran, "Hush Little Baby (Rudimental Remix)"
Noisia, "Diplodocus"
Fugees, "The Mask"
Andrew Beyer f. Kerry Leva Calyx, "In and Out of Phase (TeeBee Remix)"
The Ganja Kru, "Super Sharp Shooter"
Rudimental f. John Newman, "Feel The Love"
