“Vector Burn, hiatused Drum & Bass moniker of US based producer Oliver Scott, entered the books in the years after the Millenium. His music was acclaimed and celebrated among DJs and fans of technoid DnB for his unique sound, heavily Techno-influenced percussive textures and radical abstinence from traditional Jungle/Drum & Bass clichés.
When growing up he played bass in indie/hardcore bands, and started producing Drum & Bass in 1999. Two years later he broke into the scene and quickly gained followers worldwide through his releases on labels like Cyanide, Technorganic, Scientia, Replicant Audio and Critical. On the ‘Replicant Audio vs Critical’ Knowledge Mix-CD he had three of his tunes featured. Around that time he started his own label named Alloy Recordings together with Castor (with whom he also released a number of studio collaborations as THE RIOT some years later) that never got off the ground and ceased to exist after putting out testpress of their first planned release.
In time Vector Burn branched out to harder tunes and overall covered a wide spectrum of influences and nuances within his unique trademark sound, somewhere between cinematic and technoid. After a couple of years of exposure to a broader audience through labels such as Beta, Habit, Human Imprint, Barcode and Metalheadz, his Drum & Bass release career gradually phased out. His last known releases were a digital tune on the US based label Force Recordings in 2008 and a remix on Fanu’s second Album on his own label Lightless in 2009. Today, most of the old interviews, mixes, articles and such (including Vectur Burn’s own old websites) are offline; the digital past slowly degrades and the knowledge of things past blurs in detail as we progress. But the releases remain and give reference in the rubble of time.
Oliver Scott still makes music today under a number of pseudonymes (Lightning Tree for slow trip hop, Forward Remnants for experimental electronic, Grandfather Moth for experimental ambient, Baphometrics for extreme electronics), but has basically left the mainstream dance music scene. He is still involved in the music industry as he has been working in various capacities on music videos, design and animation. However, quite a few of his older Drum & Bass tunes were never released at the time. Some had been signed for releases that didn’t happen for one reason or another (on Replicant Audio, Rumble, Hiatus, Logistic, Square One, Defcom, Renegade Hardware and Vector Burn and Castor’s own Alloy Recordings), a handful of leaks have circulated on Soulseek and the likes for a decade, and one of his remixes (incidentally a bootleg in itself) was actually bootlegged to a whitelabel vinyl (DNB001) from such a leaked mp3 in 2003. But more than half of Vector Burn’s tunes were never available to the public, aside from some appearing in DJ sets many years ago.
For this release, the artist spent months combing through his archive and network of old contacts from back in the days to gather tunes, including many from his early years, some of which only existed on other people’s hard drives anymore. He reconstructed and salvaged some material, collaborated with designer Chadwick Halbritter on the artwork, compiled the album and had it mastered by Eric Racy (who also mixed the latest Photek album)… And now he hands it to the public as a massive free download album in two volumes, asking for nothing in return (not even a mandatory ‘like’ on his Facehook page).
This might well be one of the most gracious gifts a Drum & Bass producer has ever made to their scene. There are predecessors on the label front – Kniteforce, Nerve and Tilt have put their release catalogs online as free mp3 some years ago (although Kniteforce eventually took the links offline and went back to commercial), and a number of artists have released tunes on existing Drum & Bass netlabels and/or made tunes available as free downloads on their websites or ‘social’ profiles. But so far, few (if any) producers in Vector Burn’s league have put almost their entire catalog of unreleased tunes out for free, with such effort to put it in a decent form, let alone years after (more or less) leaving the scene. This is a massive heads up to all those who still appreciate the early millenium tech funk, Vector Burn’s works in particular, and to all who are in it for the love of music:
‘Thank you for downloading / sharing / stealing this album.'”
Release page
Direct download Vol I (MP3)
Direct download Vol II (MP3)
Direct download Vol I (WAV)
Direct download Vol II (WAV)
Format: 46 x File, Album, MP3/320 kbps, WAV
Released: 9 May 2014
Style: Drum and Bass
Bass and Space 