Solar Power

Upping sticks to Belfast may not be the kind of advice you'd find in the How To Make It In Drum And Bass manual, but it seems to have done the trick for sparkling electronic beats duo Solarise. Since hooking up just over two years ago, Simon Sheldon and Colin Cathcart have gathered together a classy body of work that sounds every bit as impressive on a hi-fi as it does through a club's PA.

They've also managed to catch the eye of Davina McCall.

"We're on the soundtrack for the new series of Streetmates," says scouser Simon. "Apparently, when they were filming in Belfast, they picked up a copy of the Apache CD (last year's showcase compilation of Northern Irish dance acts) and really liked our song on it and asked if they could use it. We're made up."

The duo both have musical form stretching from well before they met.

Simon worked in a recording studio in his native Liverpool, a place that gave him an up-close view of some of the famous talent that spun in the town's orbit ("McCulloch and Cope used to pop in. But, unfortunately, I never met Bill Drummond. Which is a shame because I think some of the stuff he's been involved in has been brilliant.").

He also played keyboards in a "kinda psychedelic funk rock type band called The Void". His involvement with the group strained when, motivated by his burgeoning obsession with dance music, he bought himself a sequencer and began writing his own electronic material, and it broke entirely after Simon moved to Belfast with his girlfriend in 1995.

Colin, meanwhile, was living in Dundalk, working his way through lots of primitive equipment and a variety of musical styles. He arrived in Belfast in 1998, primarily to enrol in college, but after meeting Simon through an ad in a record shop window the books were soon abandoned and the pair began writing together.

"It clicked very quickly," says Colin. "I think we really just complemented one-another. We both come at it from different angles. I would concentrate a lot on the rhythmic side - Simon would be well into the stuff in the foreground. We work independently as well. I'd finish a track and hand it over to Simon and let him do his stuff, and vice-versa. It always seems to work out sounding better. In our case having two people's influence on the material is really beneficial."

But what about their chosen location? With the sole shining example of the criminally gifted (and Fabio-endorsed) Dominick 'Calibre' Martin, as the Solarise boys attempted to discover their sound there didn't appear to be much life in the local Drum and Bass dog. However, once they began gigging around town, it wasn't long before they began to notice some kindred spirits.

"At first it did definitely look as if being in Belfast would be a hindrance," Simon admits. "But the more we went out playing live and speaking to people we just found out that there's a really good drum and bass scene here. There's ourselves, Capo Regime, Roo Nation and Calibre all doing really interesting, exciting live stuff. Then you've Kato and Judge Dread. We're all actually part of the Flava collective that puts on the Solid nights at The Front Page. It's a great thing to be a part of. Sometimes it seems that all of our mates are making music."

This cooperative energy bears its first recorded fruit in March when Hot Black Records (run by the Bangor-born but Glasgow-based Desiato) release an EP showcasing tunes from Solarise, Audiosyncracy, Capo Regime and Desiato themselves. Colin and Simon have also contributed the track 'Fresh' to the recently released Coffee Shop: Chilling Records compilation. Like most of the talented fanatics they've aligned themselves with, the pair haven't bellyached on the lack of a supportive infrastructure capable of encouraging the kind of music they want to put out. They've got on with it themselves.

"We send CDs away everywhere. We've actually got a guy in America sorting five dates out for us on the West Coat at the minute. You can't afford to sit on your arse doing nothing, you have to constantly let people know what you're up to."

That's the attitude.