Jamie xx

But I never did that because I always just wanted to use it as a live tool, playing it live, tapping the buttons.

The first time I really remember was us trying to figure out what the song was and how to play it live, probably for that weekend's show.

I was also trying to figure out my new toy, which was an MPC.

And we plugged a microphone into it and got Oliver to sing like an ooh, just a note, just to see how it worked.

And then recorded it into the machine and started messing with the pitch live.

And that became the intro of Crystallized.

So that sound is still that same sound from that first day of just trying to work out Crystallized.

Especially because we were all so young, we didn't really know what we were doing, but it felt like we were just handed over to these different people.

It was really useful to have gone through all that and hear all the different ways that things could be filled out.

And I was learning a lot at the same time, but definitely the back of my head, I was like, I could do this.

And then Excel employed Rodney McDonald to be the engineer at their new studio, which was just in the garage of the headquarters of Excel.

And that sort of opened the door to the possibility of maybe me being able to do it because he had all of the engineering skills.

It kind of gave me the opportunity to try and prove myself.

Everything was so exciting.

We had this space for free.

We'd worked out how to do all these songs structurally because we played them live so much.

It was the MPC stuff first so that the groove was right to record the guitars over.

And I just literally played it in like I would in the band.

So I was playing it live, just do the whole thing in one go.

We were all talking about rumble drums, which is a term I think we just made up.