Aquasky are celebrating 10 years in the biz with their new album, Team Players, a triumphant showcase of the skilful sound of this enduring trio comprising Brent Newitt, Dave Wallace and Keiron Bailey. Beginning life as a drum and bass outfit, progressing into breaks, and dabbling their feet into rock, Aquasky are always out to bend the rules and change the game as they see fit. 24Seven was lucky enough to talk to Brent Newitt about their past, present, and rosy future.

They formed around 1994, mainly through coincidence. “I used to make hiphop, or triphop, or however it was termed back then,” Brent chuckles, “for a guy called Bob Jones who ran a label called Black on Black. I was making laid back beats in a studio Dave owned. Dave used to work with Keiron on a lot of drum and bass. It was at the time the whole Ronnie Size, Krust, Peshay, Bukem, style of dnb was cutting through, like 94,” Brent explains, “and I used to listen to a lot of Kieron’s mix tapes. I noticed the progression in dnb – nice, jazzy, melodic riffs, and heard a lot of samples I used and thought ‘Wow, that’s what I’m doing but at twice the speed… we should all get together and write some music’. We did and then we got signed to Moving Shadow.”

He makes it sound easy, but they did run into a few troubles, finding the dnb scene becoming hostile and full of resentment in the late 90s. “There was a lot of darkness and bitterness in the dnb scene, and that’s not what we’re about,” Brent states. “We’re about the music, not the politics that go with it, and we had to distance ourselves from what was going down. But at the same time have that dnb work ethic, we still followed dnb, and we found we were using a lot of the same sounds and samples to make our breakbeat tracks.But it was good to get into breakbeat because we are very mellow, relaxed people, we can leave our dnb armour in the closet and get on with the breakbeat ethic, taking the piss out of each other and having a bit of fun,” he laughs. “It at where dnb was 10 years ago when we started – there’s no hassles, no egos, you don’t have to worry about upsetting the wrong people and those consequences.”

“When we got introduced to breakbeat in say, 99, it was called Nu-school breaks and we were like ‘that’s a bit of a weird name, we don’t really know what that means,'” he laughs, “and we were like ‘wow, why is this music played in the backrooms of house clubs?’ We felt this was wrong– we’d already done the whole acid house rave thing and breakbeat’s nearly the same tempo, and we’d been to events with 10,000 people, so why weren’t the people turning out to this music – it’s just as good if not better! We felt it was our role, our duty, to come into the breakbeat world and introduce the whole drum and bass way of life, to get the people dancing.” he proclaims. “It’s taken a good few years,” he adds, “it’s only been the last 18 months or so it’s become socially acceptable to be into that big bassline sound. We were pushing it hard for 3 or 4 years before people really started getting behind it.”

This mentality is what led to the lads recently try their hand at doing music live. “We like to go to extremes. We can do pretty much what everyone else does, so we like to throw ourselves in the deep end. The whole idea with Aquasky is to try other things that people won’t try or haven’t tried. We always have done, and that’s how you get places.” And Brent comments that doing breaks live, 100% live – there were no sequencers or computers used – had never been attempted before by anyone, with the sound being “all metal and quite hard sounding.”

However, despite now being 100% breakbeat, there is one dnb track on the album, ‘Time Up’. “There wasn’t going to be,” he adds, “but a lot of people decided, being that it’s our 10th year and given that it was dnb that gave birth to us, that we really should have one. It was the last track written,” he claims, “and features Spyda (from the Tarantula tune), and when we sent it, he came back laughing saying ‘I thought you guys had given up dnb!’ It’s funny; he too is trying to progress and get on with new styles of music and make a name for himself elsewhere, and dnb always draws you back, always calls you back home. You can never escape it, it’s really bizarre,” he laughs.