TC
Origin: United Kingdom
Take every formality, formula and framework you know about drum & bass and throw it all out of the nearest window. TC does things differently.
The clues have been there from the very beginning; the way he burst into the game under the co-sign fire of D&B godfather Dillinja, his tongue-in-cheek edge on era-defining early cuts such as ‘Where’s My Money?’ and ‘Rockstar’, the fact he’s one of the earliest drum & bass artists to sing on their own productions… Or that he supplied iconic vocals on Pendulum’s game-changing album ‘Hold Your Colour’ within years of entering the game.
Be it as a producer, songwriter, singer or DJ, DJ Tom Casswell has consistently cut his own unique path. His ambitious benchmark has remained at headliner level ever since his breakthrough. You can hear it in his music; cult evergreen reloaders such as ‘Deep’ or ‘Tap Ho’, addictive singalong hooks such as ‘Flatline’ or ‘Everything For A Reason’ or crossover, genre-melting hybrids like the OWSLA-released ‘Get Down Low’ EP. You can see it in his collaborations with fellow heavyweights such as Wilkinson, Sub Focus, DJ Fresh or Metrik. It’s sprayed all over his own label Don’t Play and you can tangibly feel it in his famously turbo-charged DJ sets where he runs the selective spectrum and is just as inspired by a fired-up underground regional crowd as he is a festival arena of thousands.
A versatile artist who’s just as adept at sculpting a bassline that can shake your bones as he is writing a topline you can whistle for days; one minute he’ll be slaying you with unapologetic low-end hooks, the next he’ll be laying down unabashed vocal harmonies. He once gave away every single musical element of his album on the day of its release because he believes in open source culture and wants to help the next generation of producers. He made 30 tunes in 30 days and slammed them together in a fire dubplate mix just because he could. Ask him politely and he’ll sell you a dubplate for the right price… Then ask you where his money is.
One of the genre’s most respected yet disruptive protagonists, TC is a drum & bass agent provocateur who blurs the lines between musicality and muscle, humour and heaviness, foundation and future in everything he does. No formalities, no formulas, no frameworks; TC does things differently… And he does so while remaining at the forefront of one of electronic music’s most accelerated movements.
