Throwback Files: Mala DMZ

My 2009 interview with Mala of Digital Mystikz and DMZ

Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

In 2009, I interviewed the British DJ and electronic music producer Mark Lawrence, aka Mala of Digital Mystikz and DMZ, for the now-defunct New Zealand music magazine Rip It Up’s very nascent and short-lived website. From memory, this was to promote Mala’s second New Zealand tour, but in all honestly, I’m finding it hard to find the details for those shows online. As it turns out, not everything on the internet is forever.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that, later in the month, Mala will be playing his first New Zealand shows in more than a decade in Christchurch and Auckland at The Loons and Neck of The Woods on the 28th and 29th of May, respectively. You can grab tickets and check out his Australian tour dates over here.

Emerging in the early aughts just as UK garage mutated into dubstep, South London producers Mala and Coki – aka Digital Mystikz – were instrumental in shaping the sound of British dance music in the 21st century. Their dark and atmospheric sound yielded dubstep classics “Bury Da Bwoy”, “Haunted”, and “Anti War Dub”. Since the duo’s 2010 albums Urban Ethics and Return to Space, Mala has continued to push his sound in new directions, taking his dubstep rhythms to Cuba for 2012’s Mala In Cuba and Peru on its 2016 follow-up, Mirrors.

Alright, who is Mala?

Who am I? I’m a twenty-something guy from South London. I'm half Jamaican, half English. I guess I run DMZ, one-half of Digital Mystikz, and Deep Medi.

Cool, so could you tell us about DMZ, Digital Mystikz and Deep Medi?

Well, DMZ was set up by myself, Coki and Loefah back in 2004. The only reason why we started DMZ was because we didn’t want our music to be misrepresented, and at that time, there was almost no name for the genre of music we were writing. We would go to record shops, and record shop owners would be like, ‘What type of music is this? is it slowed-down jungle or drum and bass, or is it garage?

There wasn’t a definitive description for it, and it’s always a good thing when there isn’t a definitive description, but at the same time, I didn’t want to give it to a distributor at that time that was going to say, ‘Oh, this is garage, or this is this, or this is that,’ when it clearly wasn’t any of those things. So, that’s why we started up the label, so we could release our own music. We were never interested in releasing music with any major labels or anything like that.

DMZ’s also a club night which we started, we just had our fourth birthday last weekend actually, and we started the night because there was only one other night in London that was playing this type of music, which was FWD>>, and then that was happening on a Thursday night. We started our thing on a Saturday night and we started off with maybe two hundred people or so coming down for the first event, and the one we just had in the weekend had fifteen hundred people there. So, you know, we’ve been growing consistently throughout the four years. Again, it was just another way to showcase the music that we were into and the music that we were writing.

Cool, and Digital Mystikz?

Yeah, Digital Mystiks is myself and Coki when we’re writing this music. It’s funny actually, cause we didn’t know what type of music we were writing, you know? As we say now, we were just getting on a beat or whatever. I remember listening to Hatcha play our stuff on pirate radio, and we needed a producer name as such, and we were listening to the music, and we were like, ‘What type of music is this?’, and then we just thought Digital Mystikz.

Digital Mystikz, cause obviously all the stuff we write is electronic, we use computers, software and hardware, and we were more into the unknown side of what we were doing; and I guess the more unknown side of life; you know? We’d look at the sky and ask questions and look at the system and ask questions about it. We always talked about how our music had some kind of mystical [quality to it]. Not mystical in a far fetched spiritual kind of way, I guess just mystical in that we didn’t quite understand what we were doing or where this mood we were creating was coming from. So I guess it was mystical to us in that respect. So, it wasn’t like Digital Mystiks was just our producer name, we actually thought Digital Mystikz was the type of music that we were writing; and the name just kind of rubbed off on the music really.

And Deep Medi?

Deep Medi? I set it up, I think, about 2006; maybe. I formed Deep Medi because I was getting sent so much music from around the world by people who were getting into the style of music that we were doing, and I wanted a bit of an outlet, really. I felt like I was in a lucky position where I was going into certain record shops and I was playing events up and down the UK and had started travelling abroad as well. I really setup the label in the mindset of a development thing for musicians and artists who I was feeling. Now we have artists on the label that are from the UK, and as you know, I just released the first release from Truth, who are guys based in Christchurch in New Zealand, and I‘ve signed guys from Finland, and my first international signing was the prolific and ridiculous Gothtrad from Japan. I don’t really know what the sound is on Deep Medi, but there is a particular sound that I think resonates through the music that I release. I feel really privileged to be working with these artists because they’re writing some ridiculous music that I feel deserves to be heard.

How did you originally become involved in music?

Well, I got into music through the jungle, really. I was like eleven or twelve, and I accidentally bowled into a pirate radio station that was playing hardcore and jungle, and ever since then, I’ve been listening to music in a really heavy way. You know, feeling every single beat that’s played, and every single note that’s played, and it got to stage where I wanted to be involved in music and when I was young I was involved in jungle, making mix-tapes and all that kind of thing, and you play at little parties and little clubs, and it just evolved.

BONUS:

While I was putting this together, I remembered that this was actually the second time I interviewed Mala. I’m not sure exactly who I interviewed him for originally, but a version of that interview is still online over at Aotearoa’s leading online reggae, dub, dancehall and ragga platform, Niceup! You can read that story here.

FIN.