Roni Size & Reprazent

Roni Size is the stage name of Ryan Owen Granville Williams, a producer and DJ born in Bristol in 1969, who grew up in the St Andrews area of the city steeped in sound system culture and hip hop. He's the founder and frontman of Roni Size & Reprazent, the drum and bass collective he put together in Bristol in the mid-1990s with fellow producers DJ Die, Krust and Suv, plus vocalists Dynamite MC and Onallee and drummer Clive Deamer. He set out to find whether drum & bass could work as a live musical experience, building a project that incorporated live drums, bass and vocals into the rhythmic framework of drum & bass.

That project's debut album, New Forms, was released to critical and commercial success, winning the 1997 Mercury Prize, certifying platinum in the UK, and is often cited as their magnum opus, with singles including "Brown Paper Bag", "Heroes", "Share the Fall" and "Watching Windows" all featuring Onallee's vocals and charting in the UK. Size and his collective helped establish Full Cycle Records, becoming central figures in Bristol's developing drum & bass movement, a sound that brought together drum & bass, jazz, soul, hip hop, funk and live instrumentation distinct from the harder London jungle sound of the time. A follow-up album, In the Mode, arrived in 2000 with guest spots from Method Man, Rahzel and Rage Against the Machine's Zack de la Rocha, and the group later reworked their debut as New Forms².

For this run of UK shows marking the album's 30th anniversary, Roni Size & Reprazent return as a full live band, with Size leading from the keys alongside Dynamite MC and the rest of the outfit, bringing the double bass, drums and vocals that made the original record stand apart from studio-bound drum and bass. Expect a set built around the New Forms material and the Bristol sound that grew out of it: jazzy breaks, heavyweight bass and a band dynamic rather than a straight DJ show, playing rooms from Bournemouth and Newcastle to Brixton and a Bristol homecoming at Canon's Marsh.