Bass veteran and Exit Records boss dBridge shows the breadth and resilience of the hardcore continuum.
The word “legend” gets thrown around too frequently, but Darren White, better known to most FACT readers as dBridge, certainly deserves the label. It’s almost too much to even list all his achievements.
The producer, label boss and DJ kicked off his musical career in the early 1990s, while he was living with his brother Steve White, aka Spacek. He’d studied computing at college and knew how to code, so when he came across DAW software like Cubase, it made sense, and soon he was writing tracks, initially collaborating with his brother under the moniker The Sewer Monsters.
Later on, as the jungle scene started to splinter into various subgenres, White started producing with Jason Maldini under the name Future Forces. They straddled the scene’s two poles, fitting somewhere in-between LTJ Bukem’s heady explorations and the jump-up crowd’s rave destroyers, and convinced their friend Clayton Hines to start a label, Renegade Hardware, to support the new sound.
In 1998, White and Maldini joined forces with Michael Wojcicki (Vegas) and Daniel Stein (Fresh) to form Bad Company, a divisive drum & bass supergroup that helped popularize White’s defiant, underground sound as Renegade Hardware faded from view. Countless collaborations followed, before White kicked off Exit Records in 2003, providing a new focus for his sonic interests.
The label has been a reliable source of progressive, underground bass music for years now, having released projects from artists like Sinistarr, Fracture, Marcus Intalex, Zed Bias and dBridge himself. And last year, White released his first solo album in a decade, A Love I Can’t Explain, to global acclaim, re-asserting his status as one of electronic music’s most versatile, genre-bending pioneers.
White’s FACT mix – entitled “The Sonder mix” – is typically deep, but shows a different side to his sound. “My mind often wonders when I’m out and about, someone may cross my path and for a brief instant I’m transported into their life, playing out the rest of their day,” he tells FACT. “I then get to thinking about my own life and what would it be like if I’d made different decisions and followed a different path, what are the alternate versions of me doing. This mix is me choosing to live one of those lives.”
Tracklist:
Paula Temple – ‘Joshua & Goliath (Slow Version)’
dBridge – ‘Nachtlus’ (The Fear Ratio Remix)
Oscar Mulero – ‘Perfect Peace’
Joy O – ‘COYP’
Sin Falta – ‘Diamonds’
E-Unity – ‘3.6’
Sieren – ‘Move On’
dBridge – ‘Austin ARB-6 122BPM’
Trux – ‘Pulse’
Joe Seven – ‘F Weird’
Scissor – ‘Reflections’
Interplanetary Criminal – ‘Tension’
Karima F – ‘Bacon Shoulders’
Nick Leon – ‘Pelican Dub’
Overmono – ‘Daisy Chain’
Trevino – ‘Shank’
DieMantle – ‘One Day’
Boderland State & The Best Kisser in LA – ‘The Happy Goose and Friends’
dBridge – ‘L Ware’
Gary Gritness – ‘Bent Cop Hustle’
London Modular Alliance – ‘Same Repeated Cycles’
Ronan – ‘Never Truly Alone’
Read next: Drum & bass pioneer dBridge traces his musical evolution
