Line_out has been collecting Drum & Bass records for 26 years, ever since he fell in love with the genre through the “Jungle Tekno 4” compilation in 1994. His collection includes 2,000 references from almost every mutation D&B has undergone since the early 1990s. From Jungle, Darkside, Neurofunk, Techstep, and Drumfunk, there isn’t a single flavor of Drum & Bass he hasn’t already explored, which is a testament to his boundless knowledge of this particular field of electronic music.
Alongside his DJing, Line_out also used to run three vinyl labels exclusively dedicated to Drum & Bass, on which he released many records, old and new, mainly from obscure Russian and Ukrainian producers. Since settling in Serbia in 2022, his focus has been on making a name for himself as a DJ in the local scene, while waiting for an opportunity to release more music on vinyl in the future.
Line_out’s mix is a masterful showcase of his skills behind the decks, the kind of flawless precision that only years of experience and an unwavering dedication to the craft can bring. If you’ve always thought Drum & Bass wasn’t for you, give this set a listen, and you’ll be surprised by all the richness and subtlety that this genre and its many variations have to offer.
Can you tell us about your personal journey with electronic music and DJing?
I was born in Leningrad, lived in this city for 39 years and decided, together with my wife, to leave Russia at the end of 2020 to find a better life, as we understand it.
I began to show a conscious interest in searching for music in 1991-1992. It was a time of change. My cousin brought me a piece of the Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the end of a century of ideological confrontations and global wars.” Leningrad was renamed St. Petersburg. А variety of foreign dance music appeared for sale on pirate cassette tapes.
At first it was Eurodance, of course. But in 1994 my older cousin, who had already visited the first techno club in Russia called “Tunnel”, brought me cassettes of Belgian techno and Dutch Hardcore. I was 12 years old and this music blew me away with its otherness. About 9 months later I got my first cassette of Jungle music. It was a compilation called “Jungle Tekno 4.” Since then I have mainly listened to Jungle, Drum and Bass and Downtempo music.
In Russia in the mid-90s, practically no one knew or listened to this kind of music. I only found one other person at school with similar musical tastes. He was older than me. We swapped tapes once a week at a set time in the school toilet during lessons. He was afraid that his friends would see that he was communicating with the younger one. At that time, I plunged into the wave of Happy Hardcore and early German Hard Trance.
In January 1998, I turned 16 years old and I was able to attend a Drum and Bass party for the first time. That’s when I bought my first vinyl record “The Chameleon – Links.” At that time, all the DJs were playing vinyl records and I just wanted to have a piece of “that club music” in my room and listen to it from time to time (my parents had a record player these days). It seems to me that this is still the main motive for me. I don’t buy LPs, just DJ singles, which you don’t have to listen to, but you can play. I can just listen to music from the “cloud”, and the quality of a single and an LP cannot be compared. They are literally two different types of vinyl records.
What were your main resources to discover and buy electronic music during that period?
In the late 90s, the state stopped controlling the lives of its citizens. It didn’t care what was played on the radio or what was said on the air. A broadcasting license could be bought very cheaply, so two radio stations appeared in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, playing club music from dawn till dusk. Day after day, most of the first wave of Russian DJs played their sets on air according to schedule. Record shops opened in both cities. These were mostly second-hand records brought in by DJs. They started releasing their vinyl sets on cassettes and CDs. These were the labels “Citadel Records” (Moscow) and “Golos Solntsa” (St Petersburg).
In 1998, a used vinyl record cost $8-10. My father earned about $130-150 a month. After the millennium, the price of oil went up sharply, salaries of residents of large cities began to double almost every year, and prices for records from the 90s began to fall even in Russia. In the new millennium, Jungle music from the 90s was perceived as music from the distant past. Like Disco music in the 90s. I didn’t consider myself a DJ, but as a collector. The DJ plays what the people on the dancefloor like, and I’ve always played what I like. So I kept collecting old releases.
I discovered Discogs in 2006. Since then, it has been my main channel for buying music, as well as buying records while traveling. Since 2012, I regularly travel to Tokyo to buy records in bulk for myself and friends. In a month in Japan, I can buy 300-400 records, of which about 70% are resold, allowing me to recoup my hotel costs.
Who/What have been some of your main influences over the years, and what draws you particularly to jungle and drum & bass music?
If we talk about my favorite artists from the 90s, first it was DJ Hype and DJ Zinc and their mid-90s sound, but as I got older they were surpassed by DJ Die and T-Power. Techstep is also important to me. I seem to have almost every Optical and Decoder release that came out before 2001. Over the last decade I have been impressed with everything ASC has done.
I respect this genre of music for its vitality and diversity. It is constantly changing radically. I can’t listen to most of today’s Drum and Bass music, but the genre continues to attract the attention of new generations. This is a sign that this is not a temporary phenomenon.
I had my crisis of faith in 2001, when Drum and Bass suddenly turned towards minimalism, and I would even say primitivism. Now I can call some of the releases from those years classics and I actually own those records. Then I basically stopped going to clubs and continued collecting old recordings for myself, digitizing old recordings of radio broadcasts. Gradually I decided that the genre was dead for me.
My first job in an advertising agency and IDM music changed the space around me. I met several fans of Goa and psychedelic trance music and attended their festivals.
Suddenly, in the spring of 2007, my new friends dragged me to a Drumfunk party and I was surprised to find that the club was still playing tracks with amen breaks. It turned out that I had missed the beginning of the Drumfunk movement in Russia in the 00s. There was a commercial sound on the radio and at festivals, Russian DJs from the 90s were playing what the UK majors of the 90s were doing. I didn’t expect anything good from Drum and Bass music.
I went to the store to buy some Drumfunk records. This, of course, was not available. But among the new releases I found the music of Verse & SP:MC, which sounded like a rebirth of Techstep sound but in the 21st century. It was as if I had restarted again and began to find out what I had missed during these 7 years.
Can you briefly describe your record collection? Do you mostly collect jungle and drum & bass records, or other musical styles as well?
A significant part of my collection is music from 1994-1999. This is my base, which I collected from 1998 to 2007. I have several dozen releases from 92-93, but that is a bit outside my era. I don’t have a strong emotional connection to it. In 2007 I started looking for something interesting from the 2000-2007 period. So far this is the weakest part of my collection. I also started collecting releases that mixed the Techstep sound of the 90s and Neurofunk. A classic example is “Jubei – Alignment” (2010). Unfortunately, most of these records were released between 2007 and 2012. After that I practically stopped buying new drum and bass records, but in 2013 a Jungle music revival began.
In 2007, the experimental label “Darkestral Recordings” was founded in England. At the same time, a team of young drumfunk musicians from St. Petersburg, led by Bop, crossed IDM and Drum and Bass music and called it “Microfunk”. Just three years later, thanks to D-Bridge and his thematic label “Autonomic”, this sub-genre emerged from the shadows and was given the same name. Now I call it Post-Drum and Bass, and these records make up the second major part of my collection. I also slowly collect different music from Downtempo and Goa trance to music of 88-94 (Early Techno, Breakbeat, Dutch Hardcore, Hard trance).
Was there already a big scene for drum & bass in Russia in the 90s and 00s? How did it develop over the years?
It seems to me that by the end of the 00s, the popularity of drum and bass music in Russia had surpassed all other countries and since then has been second only to England. The first DJs started playing Jungle around… 94/95. In Moscow it was “Storm Crew” (DJ Dan and DJ Groove). I released their two best Jungle tracks on my label BURELOM. In St Petersburg it was DJ Boomer and DJ Took, who formed the promotional group “Da Bass” in 1996. Other big cities had their own DJs.
In 2000, a second generation of DJs appeared, often playing from CDs. In the mid-00s, Drum and Bass became a very popular youth music, with a lot of parties and festivals attracting 6,000-10,000 people.
The war changed everything and since 2020 I haven’t been following the scene in detail, but it seems to me that in the big cities there are still several parties every weekend. It’s just that now only local stars play there. “The World of Drum & Bass” festival visited Russia in September 2023. DJ SS decided to ignore the sanctions against Russia and came to Moscow himself. I don’t think that clubs or parties should be banned in Russia, but I’m against big brands publicly supporting the current situation with their presence in Russia.
You used to run 3 vinyl labels focused on jungle and drum & bass music, mostly made by Russian producers. Can you tell the story of those labels and the music released on them, as I believe quite a few releases contain obscure tracks from the past previously unreleased?
In 2012 I tried to make an impact on the world’s music scene. I decided to follow the most progressive (for me at that time) Post-Drum and Bass labels: “Autonomic” and “Auxiliary.” I quickly realized that there were literally a dozen people in the world making this kind of music. I spent some time and found several unknown authors, released several vinyl and digital releases as “Audio Plants Recordings.” TOP-3 of my favorite tracks were written in Ukraine: “Queensway – Atmos”, “Hidden Element – How Can I Trust You” and “Thankee & Urban Trip – The Abyss”. I simply could not find this music in Russia, and I signed these tracks in 2013.
In 2015, I decided that my own community on social networks could give birth to a crowdfunding project in order to finance the re-release of several compositions that had not been released on vinyl records. I launched a separate label “Vinyl Backers” for this.
For the first release (VBACK01), I managed to raise funds via “Indiegogo” platform to release a collection of the best tracks by the St Petersburg musician Nuage. He had many digital releases on various labels and I got permission from them to re-release his beautiful music on 3×12”.
VBACK02 came after I contacted the German label “Camino Blue Recordings.” I asked for permission to re-release Seba’s wonderful remix of the track “Living On A Membrane” from the “Camino Blue” owners that had previously only been released digitally. By the way, in both cases the labels didn’t ask for money, but praised my work.
VBACK03 was fully financed by St. Petersburg commercial label ZBS where I was working at the time. I persuaded them to release the first Russian Jungle album of the project “Gosti Iz Buduschego” (“The Guests from the Future”). My condition was to keep the DJ-friendly format: 2 tracks per side, not f***ing LP. Now this 2×12” record is very rare.
The fourth release caused a bit of a scandal and spoilt my desire to reissue old music. I agreed with popular producer Dev “Paradox” to reissue a rare record from a label that had been dead for 21 years. For the first time, I paid a lot of money just to get the author’s approval. He sent me the signed contract and said it was all settled. After the record came out, the owner of the first label appeared and declared that my release was pirated. I understand that I made a mistake when I didn’t get the agreement from the label, but I was really sure that I was doing everything legally.
In 2014 I launched the “BURELOM Music” vinyl label, which was designed as a Drumfunk sub-label, but gradually became my main label for Jungle music releases. It existed until 2019.
The fourth release (BURELOM04) was supposed to be the second side of the first release, but I spent a lot of time finding and restoring the source. Two people wrote this composition for several years. It seems to me that this would have continued endlessly if at some point the author had not been placed in a psychiatric hospital.
The second release was funded by 40 persons whose names are listed on the label. BURELOM03 was deliberately sold at a prime cost of 5 euros per record for a few days.
The fifth and ninth releases are incredible and unique compositions in the Drum and Brass style, as I call it. The sixth and seventh were sold as a pair. I already talked about the sixth – these are Moscow Jungle hits, and the seventh includes the track “Storm Crew – Password”, which actually should have been on the sixth release, but everyone wanted “Step Off” to be cut on the whole side. BURELOM08 was my first attempt at releasing a fresh name from England. The release of Dug was very popular in England because of its dark atmosphere and failed in Russia. I then celebrated the label’s fifth anniversary with a two-record compilation (10.1 & 10.2) and ended label activity with Wacky Gee’s release, a musician who was completely unknown even in Russia at the time and who still makes beautiful Jungle music.
What are your next projects, and what are you looking forward to in the near future?
I still love releasing music on vinyl. I hope my experience and knowledge will be used in my future projects. I can help artists and labels to release their music on vinyl as a vinyl broker.
The problem of long waiting times for a record to be produced has been virtually solved with the opening of many new vinyl factories. The combination of crowdfunding and crowd investing mechanisms will make the process of releasing records even easier and faster. I spent 2022 and 2023 finally settling down in Belgrade. I hope to find a place in Serbia where I can perform as a vinyl DJ. I’m unknown here and vinyl is an additional problem for the club these days.
Finally, what can you tell us about the mix you recorded for us?
This mix began with the simple idea of compiling a list of interesting and little-known compositions that are unfairly ignored by buyers. The list I compiled did not contain any big hits. So I diversified it by including some compositions from other styles.
Since I started going to clubs in the 90s, my own habits and conservatism did not allow me to mix several genres in one mix. Few people did it back then, and I like it when the mix in the club is perceived as a single canvas, not a mosaic. But now we have a different case. Also, I recently turned 42 and it seems I decided to sound a bit younger. This decision gave the mix a slightly more jagged shape and introduced some unexpected shifts in mood.