A painter, fine artist, multi-instrumentalist, writer and producer—Belfast-born Dominick Martin has spent the last 19 years simply creating. He's done so with remarkable prolificacy and with a signature style, a sort of restrained melancholy that's broad enough to encompass myriad tempos and genres. It's a sound that, over 14 albums, including his more song-based experimental LPs as Dominick Martin, bubbles over from drum & bass into dub, techno, house, ambient, jazz, soul, blues and folk. It wouldn't be exaggerating to say that Martin has given us some of drum & bass's biggest underground tunes this century. The swooning singalong "Even If," the bouncy "Ugly Duckling" and the dreamy rolls of "Mr. Maverick" are just three of many examples.Yet for all his influence, Martin has never played the drum & bass game. Working from the geographic, musical and social peripheries, there's a sense of mystique surrounding him that can be attributed to a few factors. He's media shy. He's selective about DJ bookings. He's never been remixed, and has no online profile whatsoever. Martin lives in the small German town of Mönchengladbach and regularly retreats to the Irish island of Valentia, the westernmost point of Europe, a place where he writes a lot of his material and finds a great deal of creative and spiritual fulfilment. He is also a recovered alcoholic.Martin recently released a pivotal album and has another one coming up. Grow , released on Craig Richard's The Nothing Special, is one of Martin's most explorative and personal bodies of work, comprising tracks dating back over 15 years., meanwhile, is his 14th album, released later this month on his own Signature label. It's a broad sonic investigation that throws dubby textures, deep synths, electro influences and jazzy house into the mix. He also sings on it, something Martin has been incorporating into his music since 2001.Martin's recent mix for Beats One, one of a small handful of studio mixes he's ever recorded, further illustrates the range of his work and interests these days.It hints at a future beyond the genre he's been associated with for the past 19 years. I caught some rare interview time with Martin, attempting to understand his current state of flux.I'm just not motivated by my geographic position when it comes to music scenes. I'm not bothered by being isolated, and I don't need to run parallels between my success and my exposure to the network that provides said success. There's enough room to do what you want to do and not be worried about protocol. Plus, I'm quite happy to fall into the anarchic unknown, be it through pragmatism or laziness.I think so. But sometimes it's the way life is. Life does what it wants anyway, regardless of whether you want it to. So as long as I have a space to write, I'm happy. I am trying to change that though, and give myself a bit more of a professional setup. We're actually moving to Cologne. Being closer to a city allows me to be closer to important things like record stores, for example.Sure. I think over-exposure to cities is a stressful experience. It's difficult to ascertain what's actually happening when lots of people are together, and I think the combination of modern life is a prelude to madness. When you go outside in an environment like Valentia there's an energy that's much stronger. I don't know what the hell it is but it fulfils me. I'm not a religious man.I'm not a fan of any particular big ideology. There might be elements or ideas that resonate with me, but it all feels so anti-anthropomorphic. I love what Terence McKenna thought about culture: it's not your friend, it's like furniture, you can sit in it, enjoy it and walk away from it. People get involved in it in far too much of a serious manner, insofar as it's critically important to them. Your life isn't bound to these things. It's the power of your mind. I had these epiphanies about how people function when I was very young. Maybe four, five years old.I had a pretty comprehensive deconstructionist view on religious beliefs by that age. It was a sense of something much stronger. And that made much more sense to me. Like some type of-type of sensation but years before the film.All the time. It's a wide-open world. Like what Musk and other people are saying, this is quite probably a ridiculously fantastic game being played from beyond somewhere. These are fundamental positions that people will take in the future. They will ask, "What is actually there?" Scientifically we're getting closer to putting our finger on what it might be, but you know it will be weirder than anything you can imagine.I'll always remember one of the earliest trips I took down there. Randall came up to me, kissed me and told me I was blessed. He's one of my favourites. He's seen it all and he still has that buzz about him. He's been constant. He's very funny and has lots of energy—every scene needs characters like him. I miss the Music House days, actually. The smell of ganja coming down the road, always loads of people there talking about things and ideas. It was a real community.Not at all. I used to run club nights there but there was no interest in us. I barely play in my home city, which is a shame. Soundtracks change from city to city, and I think drum & bass has a stigma attached to it in Northern Ireland.Drum & bass was that music everyone hated in Belfast. It wasn't welcome. I remember seeing Bukem play in this fancy house club. It was really busy and I thought, ah ha, we've cracked it! Then the next drum & bass night was empty. That's the way it is. There's a stigma that's never gone away.Yeah it is, but it would be nice if other people got the joke. That's why working with Craig [Richards] has been really interesting. He's been an ambassador for my music. He's respected in other genres, so when he shows my music to people who might not know about me it's authenticated in different way. It's not that I want to sneak in there with a drum & bass outfit hidden under a coat, I'm just looking for an angle to say, "Look, there's some drum & bass that's got some poetic vitality and beauty and you're missing out on it because of a type of sectarian attitude."There's a lot of exchange between the styles and genres I'm working in. I've always had that, but it's more prevalent in my music now.was me trying to show the fringes and areas where I can explore and develop. It's the type of music that I fear for, as it doesn't instantly have the same type of purpose as my drum & bass songs.It was. Or rather the build up to it. I got attacked, my face was busted up, my jaw was broken, I felt down. I wanted to write music and do something. I wanted to get that feeling out and make sense of how someone can do that to me. So, I tried to do that but my hard drive went. It just blew up. Then I painted the self-portrait that's on the cover . It became this manifestation that built up to that first Dominick Martin album. By the time I made it I didn't give a shit what it was, I just wanted to put it out there. I did an I Ching reading and it gave me a reading about a fox trying to cross a frozen pond without getting its tail wet. And that's what happened. It's strange—the universe rewards bravery. I think there's still some interesting material on that album. It's closer to the air of rawness that I want to capture.was more focused on how I try and encapsulate the vocals of what I do. Particularly in the falsetto range, where I think I'm more at home in my voice. I've discovered I have an ability to hold notes. I sometimes worry people might think it's too Bee Gees-y, but I love The Bee Gees anyway. In fact,was actually going to be an all-vocal album. It didn't quite end up like that, but it's more on the edge than any of the other Calibre albums. Experimentation needs to have sugar, if that makes sense?Yeah, it becomes mechanical and all about the technical side. That bores me. The thing has to have this free-flowing sense of poetry. I worry I sound pretentious now.You have to face the fact that there's a multitude of ways to finish a track, try not to think about them and just let it set its own course. It's about getting into a mindless state where the creativity is happening naturally and you're not thinking at all. Like meditation. I'm sure you get it with writing. When you have that sensation where you're merely holding the reigns of a horse.