There are no heroes in electronic music - and in drum'n'bass even less so. Dance music DJs and producers attract the sort of fans who would recognise their idol's second choice of mixer before their face. So it's not surprising that when it comes to probing two chaps behind one of the genre's pioneering acts, they're less than willing to go personal. Broach the question of the future of drum'n'bass, however, and they're a bit more talkative.
After all, back around the turn of millennium there was talk that drum'n'bass was past its sell-by date. Producers, DJs and fans were grumbling that the music as they knew it had been eclipsed by garage, that there was nothing fresh and nobody innovative on the scene any more.
'Music is always evolving and growing, and it always will,' says Ben Settle, who goes by the recording name of Ed Rush. 'There are loads of great new tunes out right now that we are playing.'
Settle and Matt Quinn make up the drum'n'bass DJ-producer duo Ed Rush and Optical, known for making genre-expanding drum'n'bass that took on many of the cleaner, more precise influences of techno. They're particularly associated with pushing the evolution of the sub-genre techstep as it coalesced out of jungle in the mid-90s and they earned a formidable reputation behind the decks - which is where they'll be next week, live in Hong Kong.
It's hard to know which side of the drum'n'bass argument - is it dead or alive? - to take: there hasn't been a rush to a new genre, as happened in 1998 with techstep, yet drum'n'bass is becoming mainstream enough to get airplay through such unlikely outlets as the National Geographic channel.
'All we can say is that there must be some cool people working at National Geographic producing the trailers,' Settle says. 'You're starting to see artists like [Australian live drum'n'bass act] Pendulum get signed by major labels, so some things are possible, but they're going in a little bit of a different direction. I think a lot of drum'n'bass heads are into something that most people can't get their heads around, so I don't see it going too mainstream any time soon.'