Gravious.com

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(Photo by Megan Cullen)

I’m Ali a.k.a. Gravious, and I am a Dubstep producer based in Glasgow, Scotland.

I started producing music in 2001 after being shown the basics of DIY production by a friend. I played around with a lot of different styles, including electronica, ambient and drum and bass. However, I was increasingly drawn to the fresh sounds of Dubstep, Dark Garage and Broken Beat after hearing the selections of DJs such as J Da Flex and Femme Fatale in 2004. Through J Da Flex in particulary, I quickly discovered the bass-heavy sounds of Kode9, Digital Mystikz, Horsepower, Skream, Groove Chronicles and Ghost – and was hooked! At the same time, I discovered the old Dubplate.net forum (now deceased), where I could get my hands on mixes and RinseFM sets well beyond their broadcasting range.

Although I took inspiration from these sounds, I was also heavily influenced by my wider tastes in both electronic and instrumental music, in particular, Future Sound of London, Boards of Canada, Radiohead, LTJ Bukem, Aphex Twin, and a raft of more leftfield DnB artists. I’m still heavily influenced by such artists today, whether I like it or not! I made my first few identifiably Dubstep pieces in late 2004 and early 2005, including my tracks DoubleThink and Temple Ball (which later came out on the HotFlush label). ‘Wormsign’, another track made towards the end of 2005, became my first release alongside ‘Monolith’ on the Scuba sub-label of HotFlush, which up until then had been an outlet exclusively reserved for label owner Paul Rose’s own productions. This release hit the racks as a 12″ in Autumn 2006, and was followed up by 3 further releases on Hotflush or it’s sub-labels.

Having DJ-ed regularly around Scotland after my first releases, 2007 saw my first ‘live’ laptop set of strictly Gravious material, when I played at the Triptych music festival in Edinburgh alongside Pinch and Distance. The live set was actually the suggestion of a certain promoter and founder of the Electric Eliminators crew, who were putting on the night. If only he’d known what he had unleashed onto the world…

2008 saw me hit venues across the UK, as well as a handful of European cities. The live show rolled out further afield in 2009, with a short tour of Australia and a smattering of European festival appearances in the first half of the year. Venues I played in included the deep end of a swimming pool, a huge home-made “treehouse” in the Australian bush and a Soviet era TV tower! The start of 2009 also saw the release of my Futurist EP on Highpoint Lowlife records, and I have a bunch of releases and remixes in the pipeline – watch this space (or more accurately, the frontpage blog…).

Ali Grav