Other Side of the Tracks: East London Club Trax on Growing Up East

East London doesn't just stop at Hackney Wick. It isn't all bike repair coffee shops and whitewashed artist spaces housed by daddy-funded sculptors fresh out of Camberwell College of Arts. Not everywhere's gone the sad and sour way of Shoreditch High Street on a Saturday night in the heart of summer. Places like Hornchurch, Whipps Cross and Hale End challenge the notion of the East as a mythical land of unlimited creative potential, cheap rent and property investment opportunities.

If the Evening Standard view of East London – all food pop-ups and fashion start-ups – is a media-driven narrative that affirms the idea of the capital as being nothing more than a playground for the young and wealthy, two guys out of Ilford are indicative of a place, both real and imagined, that thrives on the kind of genuine creativity that goes hand-in-hand with relentless hard work. Alex Deamonds and Dean Lyon are the men behind East London Club Trax.

The pair produce and play out the kind of fractured, steely, tough house that fits perfectly into the continuum of London dance music. Deamonds and Lyon were childhood friends who bonded over "N64, Sega Mega Drive, WCW Mayhem and playing knock-down ginger on the estate," before getting into grime when they were about fourteen. That early electronic innocence took a backfoot when the pair discovered that, sometimes, just sometimes, clubs seemed willing to turn a blind eye to underage patrons. "The first club I went to, and I could only have been 14 or 15 at the time, was Legends in Barking," Deamonds recalls. "We went with my mate Luke and his girlfriend and her mate. We literally walked in there with school shoes on and no ID, totally chancing it. Somehow got in and the music was sick. Back then the policy was strictly 90s R&B, bashment, soulful house, garage, and grime."

That heady blend of club-ready, rough sensuality and UK sensibility has bled into the label's releases thus far. Take "Air Max 97" by Deamonds with its militantly stiff low end stampede or Lyon's churning, tribal workout "Zimba" and you get the sense that the pair have synthesised their influences, combining the relentless shapeshifiting of the Night Slugs crew, the jerk and tug of Jersey club and the wild swing of UK Funky to produce an ever-growing body of work that might peek beyond the boundaries of the city itself but always comes back to the reality of small, sweaty clubs in dank, dark, London side streets.

Starting a label is not the simplest thing to do, so what was the motive behind taking on the world? Both are keen to stress that it didn't happen over night. "I'd always been making tracks but I began getting offered DJ bookings, mostly in the West End and didn't really feel the tracks I was making at the time would fit into my DJ sets. So they were just sat there on hard drives," begins Lyon, "around then I'd just graduated from uni so I had loads of time on my hands and thought it would be a good opportunity to spend time working on beats. During my time at university I went to a lot of funky raves so most of my tracks reflected that. I also started making house and re-editing my old grime tracks as well. After a while I began to be less genre specific. Then me and Al started working together on tracks more and it basically snowballed into that!"

Deamonds' snowball began, oddly, in a shed. "I'd been trying to make stuff for a while and then I made a track in my friend's shed with no soundcard. I sent it to a few people who were like "Actually, this is sick". So I wrote a B-side, nipped down to Music House Studios in Tottenham Hale as soon as I could and that was that – I wanted to write more and make more. My day job is quite stressful and I work quite long hours, so ELCT gives me fire to try and live my passion wherever possible. That's why I do it."

Their defiantly London-centric take on bass music has found a wider audience thanks to their appearances on Rinse.fm. These blistering sets of molten-warped, bent-out-of-shape house and demented bashment refixes are exhilarating throwbacks to the glory days of the anything goes pirates. They're unpredictable, diverse, occasionally confounding and often thrilling, transmissions from DJs happy to eschew pointless wizardry for depth charge track selection. The seemingly chaotic energy they generate is, in fact, the result of careful planning. "I've recently really pushed myself to utilize Serato to its full extent, so what you're hearing at the moment in DJ sets is time spent organizing my library, building playlists." How does that personal organization impact on the listener? "Well, the more often you do that kind of thing, the better you'll know the tracks you want to work with. You cut out the potential for mistakes. You just get better."

That approach seems axiomatic of the label's output thus far. There's no glut of low quality material, no latching on to en vogue artists for instant credibility, no needless hype. As Lyon says: "I think growing up on this side of London has given us a particular style of music influence. Not to say other areas don't have their own unique sound too, but the personality of the sounds we're attracted to, and want to make, and more importantly, want to release, were nurtured in the East." But, as Deamonds stresses, "we're not exclusive to East London however, it's anything that resonates physically with us."

ELCT should be resonating for some time yet.

Follow Deamonds on Soundcloud//Twitter
Follow Dean Lyon on Soundcloud//Twitter

The East London Club Trax White Labels Vol. 1 compilation - featuring exclusive material from the pair - is on sale now.