Diary of musical melting pot

One Self with DJ Vadim (right) easily blend their individual styles together.

I live in the middle of a musical explosion," says DJ Vadim. He's talking about his home and recording studio in the noisy heart of East London.

In 2003 he moved from the quiet, leafy suburbia of Kingston in south-west London ("Very white, very nice, very much where your grandmother might want to live.") to his current spot and set about building a recording studio. Once complete, Vadim and "his band" One Self, made up of vocalists Yarah Bravo and Blu Rum 13, recorded their debut album, Children Of Possibility. One Self play tonight at Galatos in Auckland.

"I live basically next to West Ham football club and this area, to call it cosmopolitan is an understatement," he laughs. "There's loads and loads of Asians, Arabic people, Africans, Eastern Europeans, Colombians, just that kind of mix and all those cultures bring their own music here.

" So every day you're hearing mad Indian music, Eastern European music, Colombian music, so it's a mad mix of all kinds of stuff. Plus East London has the pirate stations so there's all of them banging out their drum'n'bass, and grime, and house, and what have you, it's like a total opposite of where I used to live."

These worldly musical influences come through on Children of Possibility. Opening track, Fear The Labour, starts with an exotic Middle Eastern lute sample and, like the rest of the album, it is topped off with Vadim's trademark bass heavy - and deliciously fuzzy - beats. Throw the smooth yet commanding vocal styles of Bravo and Rum and you have one impressive album.

"I guess the best way for me to describe this album is like a diary of where I was, or where we were when we made it. The sounds that were around us in a sense of what we were seeing everyday."

Being part of a band is a new thing for Vadim who has worked in a mostly solo or collaborative realm until now. He has released five albums as DJ Vadim since 1996, including the excellent USSR: Life From the Otherside in 1999, and his collaborators include acts as diverse as up-and-coming British hip-hop group Taskforce, Polish jazz guy Urzula Dudziak and dub-noise pioneer Kevin Martin (aka the Bug).

He first met Blu Rum in Canada in 1997 after being introduced through friend, and fellow music producer, Kid Koala. And he met Bravo in Brixton in 1999. He had worked with the pair separately on and off and then in 2003, on The Russian Percussion Tour, the trio started working together more as a group.

"I didn't go out and find two strangers to start a group with," he laughs. "I've been working so closely with Yarrah and James for the last six or seven years that in a sense nothing has changed. The name has changed and we are a group but each of us individually are doing our own things. But One Self is just something that we've all grown into.

"I felt their vibe and we got on together as people. The thing was, before we were a band, we had toured together so much, that we were touring like a band. The reactions we were getting were amazing but the live show was just a concept - me on the decks and Yarrah and James on stage - but there was no album, nothing fixed for people to focus on in a sense where you go to see your favourite group in a concert, whether it's Coldplay or Wu Tang Clan.

"We just went the extra step and thought, 'Well, we're getting excellent reactions, we're working together, but we've never put an album out together so, lets do it'."

Vadim says he didn't do anything differently on the One Self album to what he would normally do on a Vadim solo project. "It's still me behind the boards producing the music. But what has changed, is simply there's two people - and I make a whole lot of different music every day - that have chosen the music that fits their style, and we've blended something together. So there's more of one sound as opposed to previous DJ Vadim albums that might have many different things pulling at you.

"But even in saying that, when you listen to this album there's inklings of reggae, soul, world music, folk, Indian music, and all sorts of electronic sounds, so there's still lots of different influences happening, but in a very special organic blend."

His latest musical fetish is flamenco, but he listens to everything from the bass heavy beats of Caribbean music to melodic Indian music "to draw inspiration from it to create my own pieces of music".

Vadim has always made music the way he wants and is renowned for the trippy, ominous and sometimes paranoid edge that he puts on his music. He says the ethic of doing things his own way comes from being Russian. "When I came to England [in 1979] I was an immigrant, and, even though I was very young, ever since I moved here I never felt the need to conform, and that is something I took through into the music.

"I don't feel the need to conform. Other people want to totally assimilate, I've never wanted to assimilate."

*Who: One Self, made up of DJ Vadim, and vocalists Yarah Bravo and Blu Rum 13.
*What: Innovative and conscious hip-hop.
*When & where: Tonight, Galatos, Auckland.
*Album: Children of Possibility, out now.