Interview with Jungle’n'Wobbles
Last week I found this site called Jungle’n'Wobbles. I’m not sure anymore if it was through facebook or twitter. Maybe it was just through random googling. Anyways, I must have seen a short line mentioning something about creative commons music and the name of the site didn’t seem familiar so I clicked to check it out. I landed on a wordpress page with a questionable multitude of colors and fonts, the kind of stuff that makes graphic designers cringe in pain, but most people seem to ignore. The top bar was what struck my interest.
Their main focus seemed to be their radio program. So, if you are under proper listening conditions, please do take a couple of seconds to initiate the streaming of one of their random radio sessions archived right here before proceeding to read any further. Thanks.
Not only did they operate a radio show, they also seemed to blog about free music, host a DJ sets archive, maintain an index of netlabels and curate their own releases in parallel under their own netlabels. Reading diagonally they seemed to be about all things dub. Ambient dub, reggae dub, techno dub, 2-step, techstep, jungle, drum’n'bass, dubstep. Jah man! Feel da bass! What?! No link to Enough Records Dubstep compilations and releases?! Have to email them about it!! I thought to myself. And since I was already considering emailing them anyway, why not write a small interview for netlabelism at the same time? So I sent them a few questions and Quoob was kind enough to reply.
Can you tell us a little bit about who runs Jungle’n'Wobble? And why it was formed?
Right, where to start?… Behind J’n'W it’s two of us, me [aka quoob aka Fabio] and tre791 [aka Alessandro], both from Rome. We have known each other for over a decade and also lived together in Amsterdam for 3 years. Here in the Dam we developed a maniacal love and interest for underground stuff, for anything that was unknown and dirty but sonically interesting and exciting. Then me and Alessandro lost contact for a while, he went back to Rome and I moved to Scotland, where I’m still living! And once we met again we decided it was time to put our brains together and do what we always dreamed of doing… start a radio show.
Our common ground of interest was electronic music, and in particular dub, which evolves naturally into jungle and drum ‘n bass. Dubstep was the trend of the moment so we decided to add it to the list. I should add that those genres were also the soundtrack of our years spent in the Dam. But the main reason was to create an outlet for all the amazing underground producers that might never get the chance to hear their productions played on air otherwise. Millions of beautiful tracks and projects are out there but nobody knows about it just because MTV doesn’t play them! So… here we are to blast them tunes!
Well, at this point it was just a matter of getting out to the public. Jungle’n'Wobbles Radio was born in September 2010. We thought that we needed to let people know what we were broadcasting, and even more importantly: promote those producers and their work, their links, their websites. So we set up a blog where we would post anything related to those main four genres that we believe deserves attention, our podcasts, events and sometimes art.
We started out very slowly, with playing tracks we downloaded here and there and then contacting those producers and netlabels we were showcasing during the show. Slowly the word spread… People loved our attitude and passion but I think that even more than that, people just loved the attention we gave them.
I noticed on your site you operate several things at once, a blog where you post new audio finds, you run a radio, host a dj set podcast of sorts and operate a netlabel on top of that?
A year on we asked ourselves: what’s next? Well, the answer to that was: “Let’s create our own label.” Allesandro and Mauro started Ephedrina Netlabel, which we consider a kind of lab-label where experiments are proposed to bigger audience, with no limitation of genres. Because we were already running a blog and a radio show, it was pretty easy for us to promote those releases as well. About a year later I started nurturing the newborn DubCombe Records (specialised only in dub, digi dub, dub techno) which is mostly looked after by me, though important decisions are still made by the two of us.
So by now we run two netlabels, and everything is completely no profit. I think we might be crazy. The second release for DubCombe is happening on the 1st of June. The producer is Mildtape from Turin, Italy and the EP is called ‘Coat Rack’. We met Mildtape through J’n'W and we wanted him to release with us and now this is really happening. The podcast and the other shows you see on the radio are an attempt to make Jungle’n'Wobbles more interesting, and always more appealing to more and more people and again, giving the opportunity to other passionate individuals to have their shot and little piece of fame!
Did this connection happen as a natural process of how you guys are used to promote music online?
The connections are born naturally. Like I said before, people love the attention we give to them and they are more than happy to share their material and art and we just have to push it in the audience’s face until they wake up and understand that Skrillex is nothing more than a musical McDonalds.
We wish we could do more, to be honest, do proper ads and good publicity, but we live on zero budget so all the promo has to be done on social networks, blogs etc which are still free to use. The whole is pretty much improvised or at least was in the beginning, now we know were to post things and for who… What we do is basically try to make people interested and they will make others interested and… domino effect! This means we will continue operating in more of an underground scene, but maybe this is what makes J’n'W so real.
Where do you find the motivation to operate all these things at the same time?
Right, join me for a little experiment. Put the best record you have at home on the turntable, or your favorite tune in your iPod. Put the headphones on and press play. Close your eyes and think about what you feel. The memories, the goosebumps, that tickle in your stomach. Then, think of the best live show you’ve ever seen, the best club party you’ve ever been to. Now stop and remember the fun, remember the faces, the vibrations of the bassline in your heart, the happiness, got it? Well, that is exactly what motivates us. Music and all the beautiful things around it.
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BEAUTIFUL!!!!
A MILLION TIMES THANKS!! ;)