Why Digitalism & High Contrast Are Two Artists Who Put Billon Into A Trance

In the Heartbreakers series, we look at the dance floor tearjerkers that make your night special, whether that's at the height of your high or the plateau. Electronic music has the power to break hearts and this is an appreciation of those songs. This week we turn to young Rinse FM talent Billon AKA Robbie Lamond and Ed Butler, who each pick a dance floor track that helped shaped their youth. 

ROBBIE LAMOND - DIGITALISM "JUPITER ROOM"
The journey up until I arrived at this song was very transitional, it wasn't a rebellion or the need for a totally new musical wardrobe but a natural progression into the discovery of a new side of music I had begun to tinker with.

Dance/electronic music had been in my life since my early teens, being a fan of acts like Faithless, Radiohead and Prodigy. It was however, my curiosity that brought me from playing in bands and listening to guitar music, to exploring production and submerging myself in the exponentially growing French electro-house scene in the UK.

It was just after I had finished school, when I was discovering the whole French music scene; I was deciding what I wanted to do with my life, whether to go down the classical or jazz routes. I was exploring production as a hobby at the time and was seduced by the analogue sounds of Justice and Soulwax which really got me interested in discovering more.

The fact that Digitalism were a band made it feel easy to transition to. They were a band but an electronic one that used guitars. It was easy to understand, the guitars were familiar yet there were sounds in their tracks that drove my curiosity and helped begin my love affair with music production.

"Jupiter Room" was a track I'd been listening to for a while on my iPod, along with a lot of other nu-disco, French house and Ed Banger type stuff. I was drawn to it mainly because of the way the tracks developed, the journey it takes and also the analogue sounds it uses. At that time around the age of 18 I was pretty naive in knowing what it took to create sounds like the ones in "Jupiter Room"; I was only mucking around with production and not taking it to seriously - it took me a couple of years to appreciate the quality of sound design that goes into this kind of dance music.

I had been going to club nights quite a bit in London but I hadn't heard the track. I actually heard it first live at Summer Sound System festival. I had never seen them before and I'd been listening to the track on the way to the festival. I had slept for about an hour in two nights and had actually fallen asleep standing up watching Soulwax but It was an epic moment when I heard "Jupiter Room" live for the first time. I knew it was coming after hearing the first drum hit.

For me the best thing about this track is the way it evolves. From the dark tension to the euphoric building chords and the way it drops with an analogue distorted arp, it was definitely a turning point in me wanting to produce music full time. Everytime I heard it played after that, it always brought on that trance-like state, getting lost in the journey of the track.

ED BUTLER - ILS "NO SOUL" (HIGH CONTRAST REMIX)"
I heard this record for the first time at a rave in the middle of the Gloustershire countryside circa 2003. I can't actually remember the last time I heard it before re-visiting it for this feature. I was struggling to pick a record at first as there's so many for different reasons, but this just came to me, lodged in my brain, and felt right.

I have a particular connection with this record for many reasons. It reminds me of raving in the woods with my great friends for one. Another reason is that it comes from the time when I first started being obsessed with making music and DJing. It was around the time my family had just moved from the house we had lived in for as long as I could remember, a lot changed and I started thinking a lot about what I wanted to do with my life and where I wanted to be.

It also makes me think of when I knew very little about how music is created so I heard it in a different way, now I tend to concentrate on individual elements a lot more rather than just listening to the whole. I still get into that state now but it's only every so often when it catches me off guard, and usually when I'm listening to older stuff.

The mixture of elements in this remix seemed at the time like they were totally unique. I was already really into garage and house music and my brother was heavily into jungle and constantly playing it in the house but wasn't massively keen on a lot of the drum & bass and jungle at the time, mainly because it was so dark and didn't strike much of a chord with me.

This track just seemed so futuristic but also classic, and so full of emotion. The garage bass, pizzicato strings and twinkling keys: it's really melancholy but the amount of references to years gone by make it loaded with emotion. It feels like there are ghosts of old records flying around, which kind of makes me feel happily sad and reflective, like looking through old photographs.

Billon won't be falling asleep in the dance anytime soon - you can catch them playing the Rinse FM 20th Birthday at Ministry of Sound this Saturday, and follow them on Soundcloud here.