The Sound Of: Exit Records

Flashback just over two decades ago and Darren White, otherwise known as the DJ and producer dBridge, was in something of a rut musically. As one of the founding members of influential drum & bass group Bad Company, he had been putting out records of brooding techstep since the late 1990s, alongside fellow collective members Dan Stein (aka DJ Fresh), Jason Maldini and Michael Wojcicki. 

Moving into the early 2000s, though, White found himself wanting to break out alone to probe a different sound.  “We were drifting apart and I wasn’t in the same headspace as the rest of Bad Company,” he says now of that period. “Initially, I planned to put some solo tracks out on Bad Company Recordings, but the other guys weren’t into the idea. I was struggling a little, because I wasn’t massively into where the sound was going. My head was more with the music people like Calibre and Marcus Intalex were making at that time, and I wanted to explore that myself.” 

Opting to leave Bad Company in 2003, White set up Exit Records as an outlet for some of his early experiments with that alternative sound. The first releases, 2003’s ‘Libra / The Bride’ and 2004’s ‘Original World / Tradition’, introduced a more soulful, melodic approach to drum & bass into White’s discography. Collaborative records, with the likes of Commix and Calibre, followed, before he decided to open the label up fully to outsiders. “I started off with the idea that it was just going to be for my own work, but that changed quickly,” White explains. “I was getting sent some great music, so it felt silly not to use the platform to release other people’s tunes too.” 

Though he’d established himself as a key figure in the drum & bass scene, White was determined from early on not to allow Exit to become a label that could be easily pigeonholed. This ethos first came to the fore via a series of 2007 releases from White’s brother, the producer Steve Spacek, operating under the alias Black Pocket. Centred on jazz-inflected broken beat cuts, the records retained the soulful elements of White’s own early releases on the label while moving away from the rolling drum & bass breaks that had defined each Exit 12-inch up to that point. 

White looked up to the way independent imprints such as XL, Warp and Talkin’ Loud built their discographies around a wide cast of artists and sub-genres.  “Once I got into the habit of releasing other people’s music, that became my template,” he says. “I wanted to explore other worlds, and that still drives me now. I’ve still got aspirations — I want to put out band music, for example. Putting the Blackpocket records out felt like a personal statement, and it was an honour at the same time. It set the mood going forwards.” 

Seeking out music that was “left of centre” became a mission statement for White and Exit. It was also a guiding principle behind the ‘autonomic’ sound that he pioneered alongside the duo Instra:mental, which helped shape the next chapter in the label’s development. Centred on halftime 85 BPM rhythms that sought to emphasise the space in the music, while also largely forgoing the breakdowns and drops that had come to define a lot of drum & bass, the autonomic sound grew into a significant movement at the start of the 2010s via the short-lived Autonomic label run by White and Instra:mental, as well as the club night and podcast series of the same name. 

“It was quite a small moment in time,” White says, “but it had quite a profound effect on me as a musician, and seems to have stood the test of time musically too. We gave people the belief that drum & bass can be many other things, and it set off a whole load of new experimentation. As with a lot of genres, things had become a little standardised, and we felt that there were other avenues to explore.” 

Soon other producers were taking influence from the movement, and passing on their tracks to be played on the Autonomic podcast, putting White in touch with a whole new group of artists whose work ultimately found its way to Exit and broadened the label’s sound even further. “If you look at the Synkro, Indigo, Om Unit & Sam Binga and Alix Perez records from around that time, there was this crossover too with the footwork scene,” White reflects. “There was lots of cross-pollination of sounds, which I really liked. It opened my eyes up to new possibilities, and I really enjoyed piecing it all together in DJ sets.” 

Highlights from this period include the jittery rhythms of Dub Phizix & Skeptical’s ‘Rags’; Indigo’s dank, sub-bass-driven ‘Ayahuasca’; Om Unit & Sam Binga’s gunfinger-fuelling ‘Gamma’; Chicago juke explorations by Stray and Fracture on ‘Bounce That’, and Sinistarr on ‘I Pop, I Jit’; and Alix Perez combining the bass stabs of classic grime with stuttering footwork-esque percussion on ‘U’. 2016’s Richie Brains project also saw a number of these producers — Om Unit, Fixate, Alix Perez, Fracture, Stray, Chimpo and Sam Binga — come together for the album ‘Who Is Richie Brains’, which came about after White and label manager Will Courtice suggested they all go into the studio and explore “the links between their sounds”.

More recent years have seen Exit release EPs from the Osaka-based footwork producer DJ Fulltono, downtempo hip-hop experimentalist Dolenz, Istanbul-based purveyor of off-beat dubstep Gantz, techno and breaks veteran Neil Landstrumm, and Indian trap producer Malfnktion, among others, as the label’s roster and ‘sound’ has expanded ever further. White is, therefore, understandably inhibited when I ask what he looks for in an Exit record today. 

“It’s inexplicable in the sense that I connect with what I’m hearing and that’s when I know,” he says. “A lot of the time, it will be feeling like a producer is putting forward an interesting take on things. I came from an era where labels like Renegade Hardware, Metalheadz and No U Turn had a sound and an identity. I feel like that applies to a lot of the producers I work with for Exit: people like Skeptical, Fixate and Itoa. I don’t want to release music that is derivative; I want to hear the individual.” 

It’s this focus on the individual that has also seen White take a fairly hands-off approach to the shaping of each release on Exit. Preferring to approach producers to ask if they would be interested in putting out a record, rather than signing music he’s been sent, he simply leaves them to put together a collection of tracks that they think works for the label.  

“Being a producer myself, I often have a vision of how I want a release to be and so, as a label owner, I want to afford other people that same courtesy,” White says. “I seem to get the best out of people as a result of that.” Similarly, he gives them full rein over the visual side of each record. “I ask them how they envision the full package looking — because they have their own visual tastes, as well as their own sounds — and then we’ll get in touch with their preferred artist.” 

With Exit now totalling more than two decades of operations in 2024, it’s evidently a process that has yielded significant results for White. The label has also just hit the milestone of putting out its 100th release in the form of the four-part ‘EXIT100’ series. Fittingly, it saw White shun the nostalgia trips that usually go hand-in-hand with such landmarks to celebrate the innovation that Exit and its stable of artists have continually championed. 

An album from London-based modern classical composer Madison Willing, with whom White has collaborated in the past, is also in the offing. “It’s a complete departure for the label,” White says. “Why shouldn’t I be able to release this record? I don’t want to conform to solely putting out music that people think the label should be releasing, and I never will.” 

dBridge's The Sound Of: Exit Records mix retraces over 20 tracks from its first decade. Listen, and check the tracklist, below. 

Tracklist:

dBridge & Resolution No1 ‘Libra’
dBridge & Fierce ‘Daylight’
dBridge vs Calibre ‘Providence’
Calibre ‘Overation 
Break & Survival ‘Cronk’
Black Pocket ‘For You Alone (Calibre Remix)’
Rufige Kru ‘Is This Real (Original)’
dBridge ‘Creatures Of Habit’ 
Instra:mental ‘Intervention’
Calibre ‘New Cons’
Spectrasoul ft Mike Knight ‘Melodies’
Instra:mental ‘Thugtronik’ 
Consequence ‘Give It’
dBridge ‘Inner Disbelief’ 
Survival ‘Walk On By ‘
Abstract Elements ‘Wrong Way’ 
Genotype ‘Justice Over Law’ 
Digital ‘Shanty’ 
System ‘Voices’ 
Code 3 ‘Living Proof’
dBridge ‘Love Hotel’ 
Scuba ‘In 2’ 
Instra:mental ‘Scene 3’
Croms ‘Invisible Cities’
Synkro ‘Open Arms’ 
ASC ‘Leviathan’
They Lived ‘The Alive’
Synkro & Indigo ‘Guidance’ 
Synkro ‘Progression’
Joe Seven ‘All Prologue’ 
Consequence ‘Oden’ 
Skeptical ‘Another World’ 
Loxy & Resound ‘Black Hole’
Dub Phizix & Skeptical ft Strategy ‘Marka’ 
Amit ‘Manic Mirror’ 
Fracture ft Dawn Day Night ‘Get Busy’ 
Clarity ‘Off The Cuff’
Indigo ‘The Root’ 
Dan Habarnam ‘The Known’ 
Fis ‘Club Track’