URBAN LEGENDS
Jan 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Simona Rabinovitch
The year is 1996. The place, a party in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and the music, ambient trip-hop. A random guy approaches the booth. “What the fuck is this shit?” he questions the DJ. And so begins the illustrious history of the two men behind jungle outfit Ming & FS.
“We started playing together in a rock band,” recalls FS, who accosted DJ Ming that fateful night. Today, although both musicians maintain separate projects in addition to their joint endeavor, the two musicians live together, work together, and co-run Madhattan Studios. Their second full-length, The Human Condition (Om, 2001), is being heralded as one of the year's most innovative releases, showcasing a funky, melodic sound that resonates to the rhythm of the streets with unprecedented sophistication. Hard, funky beats are complemented by an underlying sense of soul, live instrumentation, and dreamy vocals that include Naked Music's Ada Dyer on “Some Die.” More song-oriented than its predecessor, The Human Condition combines the best of multiple urban genres: drum 'n' bass, two-step, breakbeat, and hip-hop.
“On the first album, the focus was more on being experimental, coming up with new sounds, a new genre,” recalls FS of 1999's Hell's Kitchen. Ming concurs: “This time, we had a more conscious, melodic motif.”
Their respective backgrounds helped Ming & FS rise above musical conformity. Ming is a college-trained audio engineer who played in hardcore punk bands before discovering industrial and breakbeat. He became immersed in the early — '90s U.S. jungle scene while studying in Miami, after British DJ Freestyle introduced him to the new sound. FS has been a DJ since he was 10 years old and turned a vintage Otari board into a DJ mixer. He scored a major record deal as a rap artist at the age of 16, and upon moving to Brooklyn, went on to study classical and jazz music and to produce for such artists as Coolio, Brandy, and Carl Thomas.
“Hip-hop remains the backbone of everything I do without exception, and that will never change,” says FS. “My other influences allow me to make our production more intricate, because I know traditional music structures from my training in jazz, and I can decide which rules to follow and which to break.”
Ming admits he sometimes misses playing in bands, so he incorporates certain elements into Ming & FS's acclaimed live show, which features four decks, live bass, and guitar. “It's the live remix thing,” he explains. “We'll drop a hip-hop break and a drum 'n' bass track going double-time over the hip-hop and add an a cappella on the third turntable. Or we'll have a break going and Fred will be playing bass, and I'll maybe drop an a cappella over that. We call it as it goes along.”
As for gear, they “don't use a ton.” Rather, Ming says, “We sample a lot of our own stuff, making our sound sources come through fewer boxes.” Samplers include an E-mu E64 and an Akai MPC2000 used for drum programming. “We run two consoles together,” he adds. “A 24-channel Soundcraft Ghost and a Tascam 16-channel.” Although their debut was recorded without hard-drive editing, the duo now relies on Mark of the Unicorn Digital Performer.
Ultimately, Ming maintains it's about doing what it takes to create something new: “We try to come up with a lot of original sounds. It's becoming important to add something new to the pool. You hear the same breaks all the time. We're really conscious of staying away from that.”
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