Crucial Stylz.
Bass on their own terms.
Clemi P on UK bass culture in Innsbruck.
Clemi P
Dub, UK garage, 140, jungle and drum & bass: Crucial Stylz don’t want Innsbruck to be limited to one sound. Ahead of their second birthday, Clemi P talks about the crew, Molecular and the Airportreef moment that confirmed their own direction.
Crucial Stylz are an Innsbruck crew rooted in UK bass culture. Clemi P organises their events and also plays behind the decks.
More room for bass
What was missing in Innsbruck that you wanted to create yourselves with Crucial Stylz?
Above all, we felt bass music was missing a little variety. Innsbruck already had a drum & bass scene, but we wanted to bring in more of the other sides of UK bass culture: jungle, dub, UK garage, 140 and everything in between.
From the beginning, it wasn’t just about the music. We also wanted to create a place where people could come together, discover new sounds and feel comfortable. Simply doing our own thing, without adapting too much to trends or particular expectations.
Molecular for the birthday
Why Molecular for your second birthday?
Musically, Molecular is an extremely good fit for what Crucial Stylz stands for. His sound is deep, groovy and sometimes quite dark, but always has plenty of feeling and a certain lightness.
We like artists who have their own sound and don’t simply play the biggest tunes. Molecular brings exactly that combination of musical ambition and dancefloor energy.
For our second birthday, we wanted to bring someone we were really excited about ourselves, who represents our sound well and who has also influenced us over the past few years.
People are open to different styles if you take them on the right musical journey.
Before the club night
What should happen musically during the pre-session?
The pre-session at Bierfabrik is deliberately meant to be different from the actual club night. We want to start the evening in a relaxed way, with dub, reggae, perhaps a little downtempo and other sounds you rarely hear at a typical DnB party.
It’s about settling in together, having a beer, talking and getting into the mood for the night through music.
Afterwards, we all head to Funkraum, where things naturally get a little more intense.
A shared thread
How do you find a shared musical direction as a crew?
I think it’s precisely those different tastes that make Crucial Stylz what it is. Everyone brings their own influences, and that keeps things musically interesting.
We don’t try to pin ourselves down to one particular sound. What matters more to us is that the music has a certain depth, groove and character.
The evening should still have a thread running through it. So we do pay attention to how the energy develops over the night and how the different styles flow into one another.
For us, those contrasts between soulful, deep, heavy and different tempos are exactly what makes a good rave.
Through the influence of these different genres and styles, we also try to shape our own sound and identity over time, creating something new that perhaps doesn’t exist in quite that form yet.
A day at Airportreef
Was there a moment when the dancefloor showed you something that has changed the way you plan events?
Definitely our event at Airportreef this summer. We spent an entire day playing exactly the sound Crucial Stylz stands for: from dub through jungle and soulful drum & bass to the harder sounds in the evening.
By the end, more than 500 people were there, and the feedback was incredibly positive.
It showed us once again that you don’t always need the best-known artists or the biggest drops. When the location, soundsystem, atmosphere and, above all, the music come together, something entirely its own emerges.
For me, it also confirmed that we can confidently follow our own path with our sound. People are open to different styles if you take them on the right musical journey.
That’s exactly the feeling we want to create again at our next events.
Crucial Stylz
Interview by email · Editorial and image art direction: SCENE:ID. Michael Winkler · Courtesy Crucial Stylz