Much respect to Mike aka Gigantor for taking the time to answer these questions

Thanks for this chance to interview you guys, first question that I feel I must ask is who are your inspirations?

Inspiration comes from all over. Musically, I have always been a fan of rock music, especially indie and punk, as well as hiphop/triphop and electronic music with a focus on IDM. In the drum and bass realm, folks like Tech Itch, Kemal, Dom and Roland, early Dillinja, and so on have been influential to our sound.

How did you all meet?

Knick and I met while we were at University of Alabama. I met Knick through DJing at various events and we both wanted to start making tunes. Knick and I started making some tunes, and did one called "Take That" which would get released as EI001, and then we heard about Enemy after he won a web DJ battle against some friends of ours from Birmingham. I know it sounds like a bad match.com commercial, but we met Enemy in the tubes of the internet. We were really impressed by his sound so we invited him to join up and Evol Intent was born.

Why drum & bass?

Why not? It was the most captivating sound to us at the time, though since we've been expanding our sound as Evol Intent. The LP we're releasing this fall will have some different styles on it, with many on more of a glitchy/IDM tip.

What's your views on drum & bass today and where it's going? Many people seem to be up in arms for one reason or another from such things as cookie cutter beats, lack of progression, drum & bass turning into a synth heavy rock act, dubstep ruining or not being part of drum & bass, the lack of jungle being listed as part of what's going on today, and so on.

I think a lot of the hate has to do with webforums and the online culture of drum and bass. People will always find something to hate on. At the same time, most renown producers are searching for a new sound or experimenting into something different. So what if some producers decided to bring in more rock elements or change their sound up? Maybe they did this because they got bored or even to maybe bring in more fans, it's not necessarily a bad thing because in the end it brings more people to drum and bass.

With Asia, Australia, and Europe having major parts in the drum & bass scene both production and fan wise, what are your views on North America? Canada, especially Toronto is picking up on it quickly. Other parts of the states, D.C, New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other places seem to take to it in some respect but the country can't seem to be bothered with what's not rocking the charts. Do you see any chances for drum & bass being respected and appreciated on a wider level throughout the country rather than select areas?

The USA has always had a waxing/waning scene in certain cities. For instance, when I started DJing New York City had a huge scene for dnb, but since then it has declined. These days smaller NY towns such as Rochester, have large turnouts. Certain towns seem to be up and down with drum and bass turnout (our base Atlanta and my hometown Birmingham are no exception). The west coast seems to be consistent, Los Angeles is definitely the dnb hotspot in the states at the moment. At any rate I think a lot of the decrease in dance music in many cities has more to do with fallout from the RAVE act as the big parties ended, and so did many people's zeal for dance music in general in the US.I must add overall though, it seems like interest overall is increasing for drum and bass, and while it may never own the mainstream charts, it will maintain a healthy underground status.

Moving away from personal opinions on the drum & bass scene, let me ask about your studio. What are you guys using?

Of course we're big fans of Reason. We also use Logic Pro, Cubase SX and Ableton Live.

Being Reason users surely you've been given word or seen yourselves Reason 4 is on the way. Are you pleased with what they are doing with it?What additions would you like to see or would liked to have seen added to the software?

We're pretty excited about it! Things I'm looking forward to the sequencer upgrades (tempo map) and that big ol' beast of a synth THOR. Some things I'd love to see eventually: the ability to track/record (though I know this will probably never happen as it's against the program philosophy), multi-core CPU support (this might be added in 4, not sure?), upgraded effects such as a multiband compressor/limiter, an analog-style EQ, maybe even pitch/formant shifting effects.

Touring live for producers in your genre has primarily comprised of decks and a mixer, sometimes a laptop running Ableton Live or someother software and some midi devices as well. Such acts as Prodigy still today turn up at gigs with hardware and even software combined to do gigs. Has there been any talks of taking your sets to a more personal level such as hardware? These days with technology growing at an ever increasing rate it seems almost capable to take even a computer based producer live using computers and midi based controllers. Any thoughts on making your sets a little more live in an on the fly sense or are you all comfortable with your setup now?

Actually we've been talking about doing a live show, and eventually we'll probably incorporate Ableton Live into this, as well as Reason.

Recently you all started moving away from each other. How will this affect your music? It was said before you all used to just pass files back and forth, will that still happen?

First off, moving apart from each other won't really affect our music at all. Even when we all lived in Atlanta it was rare for us to work on tracks in the same room, and we would pass files back and forth. Now nothing has really changed, and thanks to Reason it's easy as cake to collaborate on tunes. Since Reason is so self-contained, you never have to make sure everyone has the same plugins or so on, and not to mention it performs beautifully cross-platform. This is one of the biggest selling points of us, as all you have to do to collaborate in Reason is make sure you have the same refills, self contain, and send the file.

You guys being on Lifted has been quite an inspiring buzz for me, working along the likes of Spor, Ewun, and Apex. Is there a goal in mind for Lifted? Perhaps this is also asking the same question in another way but what is the drive behind Lifted's label?

The goal of Lifted is to focus on releasing high quality drum and bass music and create a community among the artists. There's lots of great music to come from the label soon, including Spor's Supernova EP, an EP from Apex (the production half formerly of Unknown Error), and a collaboration EP with some killer tunes on it as well.

I should also mention Evol Intent Recordings. What was the purpose behind starting the label, does it still run, and do you still look for producers out there looking for a label such as your?

Yes the label is still active. We're about to put out our 12th release, which includes a collaboration with Arsenic we did and a tune from newcomer Spektrum. Following that is our LP "Era of Diversion" which will be a 4 plate vinyl, shortly followed by a CD release. The CD will have a bunch of extra music on it including some interesting collaborations and IDM tunes. After our LP we're going to release an EP from Ewun, which so far has some really sick tunes on it!

Thank you for your time! I greatly appreciate this as well as many fans do!

No prob man! -Gigantor

cheers oracle. interesting to read about the scene in the states. totally agree with the "People will always find something to hate on" bit. why is it we always turn in on ourselves i'll never know...