INFORMATION (
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Materia aka Jan Warnstam (also aka Tectonic,
although this name is rarely used these days in favor of Materia)
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 Materia 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 Linköping,
Sweden had also started, resulting in the Conscious club nights
during autumn 2002 where Materia 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, Materia 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, Materia played in Århus, 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/Renegade
Hardware.
During spring contact was also established with
Norrköping based collective Nemcom, resulting in several
outdoor gigs in Norrköping 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 Materia 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 Materia 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 Materia played drum'n'bass back-to-back with Miklo, Kay and
Franke as well as a jazz/electronica set in the lounge area.
This was followed up by a return to Poland in 2006
with gigs in Szczecin and Zielona Gora, the Bakfickan sessions in
the Nationernas Hus basement and yet another gig at Pompom i Parken
in Norrköping alongside Swedish house legends Spånka and
several others playing a wide range of electronic music.
December saw the return to the UK with a gig in
Nottingham and in February Gothenburg go their dosage of hook-riden
future funk. As of late February, Materia moved to Denver, Colorado
to work for three months and had several stateside appearances in
both Denver and Minneapolis.
This was also the time when the live set was
starting to become a viable alternative to the DJ set, and the
first live set was played at the IMAX Theater at the Denver Museum
of Nature & Science, starting off a discussion event around
human space exploration with invited guests such as the astronaut
Russell "Rusty " Schweikart.
Coming back from the US, the time had come to branching out into more genres such as house, electro, minimal and the like. In the summer of 2009, a remix of Houseclap - deBaser on PR Records will mark the first official release in the house spectrum, with more soon to follow.
Now sharing his time between Stockholm, Sweden and Bristol, UK the DJ sets as well as production aspects focus more on house and techno but the love for drum'n'bass still remains.