The Reason (Parasite) - The Making Of

For me, The Reason (Parasite) is a key track in the upcoming album, 'Tales From The Doombox' - it's certainly one of the strongest and it's the only representation of drum'n'bass that will be featured on the album. But it also has a lot of memories for us, as the seeds for this tune were originally sown way back, way before Subsource became the entity that it is today.

History - From Parasite to The Reason

It was sometime in 2004 during our first sessions before Kimba came onto the scene - Paul, Nelly, Stu and myself had the beginnings of the track laid down and had provisionally called it 'Parasite'. At the time, we were working with Stix, (Jerome Kalinani), who was also part of the Real Elements (Malawian hip-hop that Kimba was also with). I remember him turning up to lay some vocals down on the instrumental we already had. We had attempted to get the track to him a few times previously but with he was adamant that 'something will come' in the actual session. Usually, a disregard for pre-planning something like this equates to a wasted precious studio session but the way he was saying it that day just seemed to dispel our fears. He turned up with a blank notepad and a pencil and within 90 minutes he was leaving, having written and recorded two verses, the chorus, breakdown and multiple vocal takes on all the sections. Fast work indeed.

The original 'Parasite' ended up being a feature of our experimental live set-ups for a while, it stayed and outlasted all the other songs that were incorporated into our first sets, well beyond the time that Stix left to return to Malawi after having a religious call to be back there spreading the word of Christianity through hip-hop. The track scored our first synchronisation deal - with Big Up Productions, a rock climbing video production company. We featured on Dosage Volume 3 alongside Roots Manuva, but they chose to use Parasite as the lead track which then featured in the trailers. To this date, more than five years on, we still get e-fanmails from rock-climbers all over the world. I've been told by rock-climbing friends that half of their passion is about physical strength and the other half lies in mental grit and sheer belief. 'This is the reason why I live' resonates deeply with the feats that these athletes pull off.




Another 4 years later in 2008, American TV network CBS got in touch offering us our biggest synchronisation deal to date. The premiere of season 5 of crime-solving-with-maths-series, "Numbers", has a rock-climbing murder sequence and it's Parasite they want to use. Whilst it's an entertaining show, that particular section didn't work nearly as well as in the Dosage video. I conclude that it's music that's good for doing extreme sports to and not so good for murdering people to.

The funds we received from CBS through this deal paved the way for us to make a good push for producing a quality album. But by the time we were finishing the album earlier this year, the sound of 'Parasite' was something we'd moved away from in favour of chunkier, dirtier bass and crisper drum sounds. Around eight of the tracks were confirmed and we realised that there was no drum'n'bass set to be on the album. Since the DnB section of our live sets are the parts we like the most, we needed some representation of it on the album, so under a tight album deadline, we locked ourselves in the studio for a couple of days and the new 'Parasite' was born. The original version was more laid-back and drew comparisons to 'Red Snapper' and the resurrected track gives a nod to its origins with it's vocal chorus hook and a hint of rhodes. All other instrumentation was written from scratch to bring it into 2009 and Kimba 'unleashed a masterpiece' with new lyrics for the verses. It was complete.

Some might be wondering about the story of how we ended up with parentheses in the name - in true Subsource style it wasn't quite intentional. To avoid confusion with the original, we'd decided to rename this new version, 'The Reason'. We'd been bouncing the artwork cover for the album between the designer and ourselves more times than was necessary in order to iron out the kinks in layout, format and spelling. In the end, it all looked great, except somehow we all managed to overlook the fact that we'd still called it Parasite on the back cover. Oops. So to attempt to avoid confusion, we've now got both titles in the title. So if you get an album when it's released in March next year and it says 'Parasite' on the back cover as track 8, you know you've got a copy from the first printed batch :)

The Video

A budget of 200 pounds doesn't get you anything remotely close to being a good video. But we had a cracking director/producer on-board (Colin Arnold at Surgery Productions) and Ollie Simmonds did some brilliant post-effects too to help produce something that is. We managed to attract the attention of NME TV who wanted to playlist it on their Sky 3 channel - for a video on this kind of budget that would usually be unheard of. A spanner in the works got thrown when we discovered there is something called a 'Harding Test' for possibly epileptic seizure inducing material. Our video had just failed it.. no national broadcasting for us this time. Doh.

So the single is out there on iTunes, 7digital and most other online retailers - get it (and the brilliant Jocks' Chapter 2 Remix by JP from the now-disbanded Goodbooks) and play it loud and proud. It's possible we've got an iTunes app coming this way to go with it but unfortunately Apple seem to be delaying this process way more than they ought to. Until then... This is the reason why I... I... I...