Boy 8-Bit
Volar, April 30, 11pm
Producer/DJ Boy 8-Bit has been making a lot of noise in the past year with his low-tech dance tunes influenced by vintage video-game soundtracks - as his name suggests - but his career might have turned out differently if it wasn't for the chance loan of a cassette from a friend in the early 1990s.
'I grew up listening to Guns N' Roses, Metallica and a lot of heavy metal, and my first steps into dance music came when I discovered that there was a copy of the Prodigy's first album The Experience on the other side of a Slayer cassette I was given,' says the native of Cornwall, England, who was born David Morris.
'Oddly, I found myself listening more to the Prodigy album and feeling somewhat guilty about it. But then I got into house and wanted to see how electronic music was made.'
He started playing on his old Amiga computer with an eight-bit sampling cartridge - which provided the inspiration for his moniker - and after early experiments with drum 'n' bass he started to develop his own stripped-back sound at the turn of the century, influenced by electroclash artists such as Miss Kittin and the Hacker.
The turning point in the Boy 8-Bit story came when Theo Keating - best known as DJ Touche and, more recently, Fake Blood - played a show in Morris' hometown of Penzance in 2002. Morris managed to pass Keating a CD and to his surprise 'he got back to me saying he was into the stuff on it'.
One of the tracks on the disc was a re-edit of Colonel Abrams' Trapped, which Touche incorporated in his 2004 Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1, giving Morris (above) his first big break - and he hasn't looked back since.
In the intervening years, Morris has found himself much in demand for his remixing skills, and the Boy 8-Bit sound has been stamped on tracks by a wide array of artists, including La Roux, Armand van Helden and Dave Clarke, and his tracks have been championed by influential DJs Pete Tong and Annie Mac.
'I have a set of influences and I try to encompass everything I like into dance music,' he says. 'But ultimately, I just make music I like. I listen to soundtracks, Tangerine Dream, eighties electronic scores, heavy metal, video-game music, sadly - but to put it broadly - everything.'
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