"IT KEEPS ME FROM GETTING STUCK IN A RUT" - Student DJ and music producer ATDHE tells all
Adam Wright is a 20 year old Internatonal Relations student at Nottingham Trent University by day, and a music producer and DJ by night.
Adam makes music under the stage name ATDHE, and has been drip-feeding tracks online to his followers for the past year which he describes as "underground house and UK garage", although he stresses that he never sets out to create a set sound or genre, saying, "I tend to just play around with different ideas until I find a sound I enjoy. All my tunes tend to be grounded in a House beat but musically I draw influences from everything I listen to, for example the Emo-Hardcore vocals on 'Lost in You'"
The track he mentions, which features vocals from Jack Spivey, the singer of Sheffield hardcore band Blind Eye, is perhaps the most obvious example of ATDHE's genre-bending style of music and can be listened to below. Otherwise, he names his influences as ranging from Artful Dodger to Arctic Monkeys to Dario Marianelli, while tracks like Make My Day recall early Disclosure.
You might think that spending time making music like this might get in the way of Adam's uni work, but he stresses that the opposite is the case: "Personally I feel like uni has been the perfect time to be doing this, even when i'm not producing it keeps me in a mindset to keep learning more and not get stuck in a rut. They also really complement each other in terms of being able to switch off. If I'm feeling overly stressed on a piece of work then I'll spend a couple of hours on a track, or likewise if I'm having a writers block I can go and concentrate on some uni work."
On top of this, Adam has been helping to organise a club night at Sheffield's DQ night club, called Cllctv (pronounced 'collective') Presents, where he aims to give up and coming DJs a place to play in the same way that up and coming bands do.
He told The 9am Lecture, "Cllctv Presents came about as a way to give great emerging and underground artists a platform to perform to a solid crowd at one of the city's best nightclubs. When you're coming from a Producer background rather than a DJ background it can be really difficult to get a foot in the door, and if you can't get gigs then it really limits your reach - and there's some amazing talents out there who are ready to put on a really good night!"
"There's some amazing talents out there who are ready to put on a really good night"
It didn't start out from a love of house music though. Adam descrobes how music has been a part of his life for much longer. He learned trombone in school and is a self-taught pianist. He describes the way this side of music left him unfulfilled, "I've always preferred writing my own things to playing sheet music though, and it was during GCSE and A Level music classes where I really started getting to grips with making tunes." This led to him playing bass in a short-lived alt-rock band, Grand Theft Autumn. It was following the band's split that Adam took the decision to switch to house music.
'Why ATDHE, though?' you may ask. "ATDHE comes from the world's greatest striker Atdhe Nuhiu. It wasn't a name I'd ever heard before and taken out of context it looks more like an abstract collection of letters than a name."
You can catch ATDHE DJing at Cllctv Presents at DQ in Sheffield on 12th June, on a bill that also includes Latmun, Understate, Chris Michaels and DF & LDC.
You can find ATDHE on Facebook here and on Twitter as @Adzyyyyyyy