Tectonic - Hidden Lab and Materia Mix - 2004

Biography of Tectonic

Tectonic aka Hidden Lab aka Jan Warnstam started his music career on an Amiga 500 in 1988. Since then he has produced many styles of electronic music and seen the birth of genres such breakbeat, jungle and drum'n'bass in the early 90s. He started acquiring more dedicated hardware and soon decided to take his music production to a new level, and to a wider audience. In August 2000 he participated in a remix competition on the Swedish Radio P3 show Morgonpasset, followed by sending of demos to P3 Dans and P3 Demo in September under the name of Soil of Sound. In spring 2001 a 15 minute special show dedicated to his previous and present music was featured in P3 show Syntax Error.

In April 2001 Back to Plastic founder Thomas Bergsten approached wanting to start a new drum'n'bass label to release tracks on vinyl. Pressure Cut Recordings was a fact and has so far released one 12 inch vinyl with tracks by Jan under the production alias Hidden Lab. Parallell to this Jan also got a breakbeat remix signed to a compilation album on Invisible Records in Chicago, using the monicker Soil of Sound. This compilation album was released in September 2001. During 2002 Jan was also signed to the Swedish breakbeat label Sound of Habib based in Gothenburg, and the first release on this label consists of two tracks on a compilation album coming autumn 2002.

All this about production, but what about spinning records? In autumn 2001 Jan was asked to join the radio show Vinyl on the local student radio station Radio Stil 95,5 MHz. Happy to get a chance to learn mixing he accepted the offer and started learning to mix on both vinyl and CD players. When the new year 2002 came the radio station decided to close down until the economy had been reinforced. Being without a chance to spin the only solution was to look for decks of his own, and in April a pair of 1210s and a Vestax mixer were finally bought. Practising now continued with renewed force and in May the first recorded mix set was released to the public.

In July Tectonic had his first club gig at Pace in South London, getting good reviews afterwards from both the promotors and the visitors. The Swedish invasion continued later on in July on Oxford when he played back-to-back together with Physics (MSR/Good Looking/Phuturistic Bluez) at HQ in Oxford. During the summer of 2002 the discussion of a new club in Link?g, Sweden had also started, resulting in the Conscious club nights during autumn 2002 where Tectonic held a residency as well as being one of the promotors. The Conscious club nights featured guests such as Streetbeats, MC Stirlin, Physics, Genki, Psilodump, Seba and more. During this autumn Jan was also booked to play alongside Streetbeats, Fracture & Neptune and Optical at Beat Jam in Reading, UK.

During the following year, 2003, Tectonic had the fortune of playing several times at Svaj in Stockholm, Impedans in Oslo and at the huge electronic music festival Sun Dance in Tallinn, Estonia. Jan also had the opportunity to go to Helsingborg and play at Leet Night run by Leet Recordings crew Phono and Voss, and at Rangus Tangus in Stockholm alongside Flipper playing a deep six hour set in a comfy lounge setting.

In 2004, Tectonic has so far played in Ųhus, Denmark alongside with resident drum'n'bass and noise DJs as well as a return to HQ in Oxford for the BASIC003 release party in May alongside Mattrick, Chemical and Loxy from Metalheadz.

During spring contact was also established with Norrk?g based collective Nemcom, resulting in several outdoor gigs in Norrk?g during the summer and a gig at sushi bar XO in September. Furthermore, since late 2003, the Conscious collective also has a weekly radio show on Stockholm based radio station clubDECKS every Tuesday hosted by Tectonic and Miklo representing the drum'n'bass spectrum, while hg, Lantto and Max L play electronica, hiphop, jazz and deep house. Guest DJs appear to blend the selection even more, thus far including more10 and Jimi Salomaa.

In spring 2005 Tectonic was booked to play a mini-tour in Poland - Synthetic City in Gliwice and Absurd in Krakow. After this, the Nemcom and Conscious crews decided to return to the organizing scene together with the Intercity event, where Tectonic played drum'n'bass back-to-back with Miklo, Kay and Franke as well as a jazz/electronica set in the lounge area.

The future looks bright with forthcoming releases in different formats, more international gigs in the pipeline and the weekly radio show running as strong as ever. If you want to book Tectonic for a varied set of deep, technical and musical drum'n'bass, breaks or jazz, don't hesitate to get in contact right now.