Nightmares On Wax melt down hip hop, house, techno, funk and soul grooves and pour them into a new mould.

THIS IS THE SECOND TIME IN A MONTH I'VE BEEN TO LEEDS to conduct an MT interview, and I'm beginning to wonder if the magazine should open a northern office. Last time it was LFO, this time it's the turn of fellow WARP Records artists Nightmares on Wax to grace the magazine's pages, and so, as if by magic (actually, after a three-hour train journey), I'm in the company of George Evelyn, Kevin Harper and a modest collection of hi-tech musical gear which includes a Cheetah Master Series 5V controller keyboard, an Akai S950 sampler and an Atari Mega 1 computer running C-Lab's Creator sequencing software. The setting is the living room of Evelyn's home in Leeds, and the gear gets used by Evelyn and Harper for pre-production work - for actual recording, they prefer to head down to Sheffield, and FON studios.

The duo's path to music-making via DJing during the past decade is a by-now familiar one. Having met and become good friends in Bradford during the breakdancing days of '84, they decided to take up DJing and landed a half-hour weekly spot at a new club, Downbeat, in Leeds. The half hour subsequently turned into half the night; they began putting together their own megamixes on tape, and in time they turned to making their own music. Harper elaborates:

"It came to a situation with us buying records where I'd say to George 'I'm not happy with that, it would've been better if they'd done this or done that'. Obviously we wanted to hear what we wanted to hear, so we started making our own music."

Starting from humble beginnings with a Casio SK1 home keyboard and a Yamaha MR10 four-track, things began to look up when they bought an SH101 and put together a tough dance track called 'Dextrous'. Unable to find anyone to release their music, they set up their own record label, Poverty Records, in 1989 and pressed up 1000 copies of a three-track 12" which they then distributed around Leeds, Sheffield, London and Manchester - while one copy found its way to the desk of a certain Assistant Editor in Ely. 'Stating a Fact' by Nightmares On Wax on one side was a hip hop track, while 'Let It Roll' and 'Dextrous' by Nights On Wax were in a house/techno vein. It's this versatility which to this day characterises what Nightmares on Wax are all about.

The 12" was enough to bring them to the attention of the then nascent WARP Records, and a remixed version of 'Dextrous' subsequently became the second release on the Sheffield label. Last year saw the release of the powerful follow-up single, 'Aftermath', but it's 1991 which looks set to be Nightmares On Wax's year. With the release of the four-track A Case of Funk EP and CD Single on August 12th, and the group's debut album, A Word of Science on September 9th, Nightmares on Wax are at last getting the chance to show their real versatility. The EP/CD Single contains two tracks which will also be on the album, namely 'A Case of Funk' and 'Biofeedback', and two tracks which won't - the radically funky and tuff '21st Kong' and the aptly-named 'Strange'.

Nightmares on Wax like to confound people's expectations, and so it is that the album's opening track, 'Nights Interlude', is a mellow soulful track with a touch of jazziness to it which will surprise anyone who only knows 'Dextrous' and 'Aftermath' (both of which are included on the album). Similarly, the dreamy, down-tempo 'Playtime', with its shuffling rhythmic feel, is not exactly what fans of manic bass tracks will be expecting. 'Back into Time', with its slowed-down Steve Miller 'Fly Like an Eagle' sample, captures more of an old hip hop feel circa 1988, nicely laid back, while 'Coming Down' is the hardest, rawest, most unrelenting track on the album ('Coming Down Hard' might have been a more appropriate title), and 'Mega Donutz' and 'How Ya Doin'' are both wacky rap tracks.

If this seems like an impossibly diverse collection of tracks, think again. Nightmares On Wax have an all too rare ability - first glimpsed on record on the Poverty Records 12" - to fuse hip hop, house, techno and funk sensibilities. And after many years DJing hip hop, house and techno to a youthful dance music crowd, Evelyn and Harper aren't about to forget what it is that catches people, regardless of the style.

"We're not trying to make our music difficult to listen to, you can always catch that groove", says Evelyn. "As long as that groove comes in, you're there, and whatever else comes with it will come naturally. But also our ears aren't just aimed at the dancefloor, and we've tried to make an album that can be a listening album, too, so it can please everybody. After a manic night out, there's always something mellow you want to listen to when you get home."

If Evelyn and Harper don't like to be categorised - and they don't - it's perhaps because there are more musical dimensions to them than categorisation can cope with.

"We've noticed that in a lot of our interviews, and in people's outlook on us, we're either put in the bass category, the bleep category, the techno category or the clonk category", observes Evelyn. "But to us we're just Nightmares On Wax. We don't try to put ourselves into any category, we just do what we feel. All that category business is out of the window, for us."

Harper: "When it comes to making tracks, we never know what we're going to do, we just do it, and whatever comes out is what comes out."

"We want people to realise that we're not following anybody", says Evelyn. "With every track we put out, we want to change something on the scene, even if it means people are going to be copying us. We want to inspire a lot of people and be remembered."

"Like all this bass business", elaborates Harper. "We've done it, we've proved ourselves with tracks like 'Dextrous' and 'Biofeedback', and now there's no point in us carrying on doing the same thing. There comes a point where you've got to move onto different things. Like now we want to get a hard funk feel in our music."

MOST OF THE TRACKS ON A WORD OF SCIENCE WERE recorded at FON studios, where Evelyn and Harper chose to work in the programming suite rather than the main studio.

"We find that in big studios the sound is too clean, and you just lose that feel as though it's come from the street", explains Evelyn. "In fact, it's not even from the street any more, it's made in a £100,000 studio or whatever. You end up with so much quality that you just lose that street feel. We didn't want that to happen with us.

"Another problem with big studios is that there's certain effects and certain sounds that a lot of other groups would recognise. It's like 'Oh, you used that, that and that effect'. We want everything we make to be just ours."

Like their WARP labelmates LFO, Nightmares On Wax decided against releasing an album last year.

"If we'd wanted to, we could have had an album out then, but we knew it wouldn't have been what we wanted", says Evelyn. "The worst thing you can get yourself into is being under pressure, and we didn't want that. Working in the studio should be enjoyable. I think that's why we feel happy about the album, because we know that we haven't had to rush anything."

With the pressure off, Evelyn and Harper were able to dictate the hours they worked in the studio, rather than have their working hours dictated to them by the harsh necessities of commercial deadlines. The result, according to Evelyn, was a working atmosphere conducive to creativity.

"We'd do two or three days in the studio one week, then a fortnight later we'd do two or three days more", he recalls. "When we got into the studio we were on an instant vibe, from the first piece of rhythm that was on that computer just going round and round, and we were thinking up ideas. If we'd been in the studio day in, day out it wouldn't have been like that, because we wouldn't have been feeling fresh. These bands that are given two or three weeks in the studio by their record company to record an album, I feel sorry for them.

"That's the good thing about WARP: there's no pressure. I reckon, if we were signed to anybody else, Nightmares On Wax wouldn't be at the stage it's at now. For a start, another label probably wouldn't have put out 'Aftermath', it would have been too hard for them.

"Put it this way, I don't even know what it's like to be signed to a label. It's just us and a few friends putting music out and having some fun. It's not like we're in it for a quick buck - we're not expecting to make loads of money off this album. We all know that we've got to build."

Conventional wisdom has it that the modern technology of sequencers, drum machines and multitimbral synths and samplers tore apart the social fabric of the band and gave rise to the phenomenon of the "bedroom musician", working away in splendid isolation. In truth, technology hasn't quelled the social instinct in human beings, and if anything, because its use doesn't have to revolve around clearly defined instrumental roles, it can offer a less formal relationship. At the same time, it's natural that different musicians will gravitate toward different elements of the music. Harper explains how he and Evelyn work together in the studio: "The majority of the time, George is the percussion and hip hop side, I'm doing the basslines, and then the melodies are us combined. And that's Nightmares On Wax; that's how it works so well."

What, no arguments?

"No, we've never come across it", replies Harper. "Everything flows all the time."

"With every track we put out, we want to change something even if it means people are going to be copying us. We want to inspire a lot of people and be remembered."

"Once we get in the studio, the vibe's there", Evelyn elaborates, "and once we're on that vibe nothing goes wrong between us. Sometimes we'll just sit there looking at one another saying 'I can't believe it!'. If I was to go solo or if Kevin was to go solo, we wouldn't sound anything like Nightmares On Wax. We could each have the same idea, but when we come together it becomes something totally different, it's not what we were both on about anyway. That's what's good about it - every track is a surprise. We try to make tracks so that you've just got to be ready for whatever's going to come next - we'll get the track to build into whatever isn't expected."

The single most important piece of sound-generating gear for Nightmares On Wax is their Akai S950 sampler. Synths, on the other hand, don't get much of a look-in, and when the duo visit FON it's not so they can take advantage of the studio's collection of synths. The only use they'll put a synth to is as a MIDI controller for the sampler.

"We don't take any notice of the synths they've got", says Evelyn. "We're just not interested in using those sounds, because we know somebody else's hands have been on them. It's not that they haven't got good sounds, or that we couldn't get something good out of them, but somewhere along the line everybody'll end up using them."

Instead it's sampled sounds and, to a lesser extent, sampled breaks which come to the fore in the Nightmares' music. Evelyn and Harper take very seriously the creative potential of sampling.

"Sampling gets a lot of slagging now, but to us sampling is an art form, no matter what anybody says", insists Evelyn. "If you listen to hip hop today, their way of sampling is amazing, the way they disguise samples. That's what it's all about, being able to sample something, change it up, put it in your track and then play the original to somebody and have them not even be able to notice it. Sampling a break straight off is nothing, nowadays. Now that anybody can sample, it's all down to how you do it."

The pair are less than forthcoming about the "how" of their sample manipulations, but Evelyn does reveal that instead of using the Akai's utilitarian time-stretching routines to bring their sampled breaks into line, they prefer a more creative approach which involves "chopping up" samples into small segments which can then be manipulated independently before being "glued" back together again.

The same spirit of sonic adventurousness informs the duo's approach to sampling and manipulating individual sounds.

Evelyn: "We'll hear a sound and we'll sample it, but we won't just use it straight, we'll play about with it. We're creating our own sounds out of existing sounds, that's the easiest way I can say it. It's just that we've got this... I suppose it's pride. We make our own sounds for everything, even down to the hi-hats. People might call us fussy, but it matters to us, right down to the smallest detail. That's how original we want to be."

"Every little sound we both have to agree on, that's how it works", adds Harper.

Ironically, the very technology which allows Evelyn and Harper to be so meticulous about crafting their own sounds also makes it easy for other people to appropriate those sounds. The Nightmares are well aware that the capabilities of the digital sampler can, like the proverbial double-edged sword, cut both ways. Harper gets in a pre-emptive strike: "All those people who are stuck for ideas, they're always waiting for something new to come along. Well, I'd like to say to all the fakers and imitators out there that the metallic sound on 'Biofeedback' is going to get sampled."

Evelyn, however, is far more sanguine about the prospect of their sounds being ripped off.

"To me it's a compliment if we make a track and somebody samples a sound off it and uses it, so it doesn't really bother me", he maintains.

LISTENING TO THE MUSIC ON A WORD OF SCIENCE, YOU soon become aware that the Nightmares' music has little to do with the current easy-money commercial dance music that, unfortunately, too many people get to hear. As experienced DJs, Evelyn and Harper are in a good position to see what's wrong not only with the music but with the dance scene as a whole. It's not a pretty picture.

"The major problem is the people in the dance movement", Evelyn explains. "They won't accept anything until it's big, and that's the saddest thing about it. It was the same situation when I took a white label of our next single to a club, and the DJ played it for a minute and then went onto the next track. That's the typical shit you have to go through, because these people won't play anything until it's big. These are the people that make out they're down with it, but really they're just playing safe."

"I think the problem now is that we're losing club culture", opines Harper. "It's happening all over the country."

"Everybody wants to be a DJ and get themselves in the limelight", Evelyn adds, "but all they want to play is house music, and they don't realise that they can't play anything else. Too many people are getting brainwashed, they're not getting the chance to hear other music. There is good music out there, but people aren't getting the chance to hear it because all these YTS DJs are just pushing it aside for all this piano stuff. Unless there's a big scream in it, or a big piano intro, they're not interested."

That other music of the moment, Belgian techno, doesn't come too high in the Nightmares' estimation, either.

"I used to rate it about a year and a half ago, but it hasn't progressed", says Evelyn.

"All they're going for is mental sounds, a mental effect", adds Harper. "All those stabs... it's just annoying now."

"That's what all the rave stuff's doing", Evelyn continues. "It's just heavy-metal house. All the people who were into the music in the first place are getting pushed out because they don't feel that they're part of that scene any more. It's not that they don't understand it, it's because the music's shit."

Harper: "When we're DJing, George does the hip hop side and I do the house side. I refuse to play any of that rave shit, all that piano stuff, because then I'll just sound like everybody else, so what's the point?"

"There's too many promoters around, as well, and they're just killing the scene", adds Evelyn. "We're waiting for everything to go back to basics. I reckon the tables will turn, it has to happen. We're just going to carry on doing our own thing. Even if it came to the stage where nobody liked our stuff and our records stopped coming out, I know we'd still make music, because we'd still get a buzz from doing it."

The versatility, originality and vitality contained within the grooves of A Word of Science should ensure that, for Nightmares on Wax, obscurity remains nothing more than a bad dream.