As drum‘n’bass clings to Asian soil like a spiny invasive species, master hand LTJ Bukem continues to sow seeds. Ahead of his set at Hyde, he talks to Patrick Brzeski

At 43-years-old, and 20 years deep in the drum’n’bass game, LTJ Bukem remains a man on the move. After a few frantic days of trying to ascertain his whereabouts – with his own people telling us he had gone MIA in Thailand – we eventually caught Bukem by phone in Koh Samui, where he was luxuriating in a bungalow between open-air island gigs. “I’m still here, mate!” he says, laughing. “Don’t call the rescue helicopters.”

LTJ Bukem (real name: Daniel Williamson) requires little introduction. As a DJ, producer and label owner (Good Looking Records), he has been a leading figure of the drum’n’bass movement since its inception; his jungle and “intelligent drum’n’bass” innovations run deep through the genre’s DNA. While his production activities have tapered off in recent years (his last official release was the Fabriclive 46 mix in 2009, and before that, Some Blue Notes of Drum ‘N Bass in 2004), he continues to tour and play out relentlessly, both in London and abroad, tirelessly championing the sound he helped conceive.

To the delight of local drum’n’bass devotees, Bukem has been hopping around our hemisphere a lot lately. His current tour alone takes him to multiple cities in Thailand, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, China, and back to Thailand. But Bukem insists this isn’t any milking-the-glory-days retirement tour; booking requests from Asia have simply ballooned in the last few years. “We keep getting calls from Asia. They say, ‘we know the music, we know the record label, and we want you to come over.’ I’m always open to exploring new territories.”

Bukem says the extent to which his music has taken root globally has come as a revelation to him. “We hit India earlier in the year, which was quite a shock – I had no idea they were into drum’n’bass there. People across Asia come up to me with their cassettes from the early 1990s and ask me to sign them, and I’m like, how on earth did you get a hold of this? As far as I know, this tape was only sold in a marketplace in Camden in 1992 or something.”

The future of these nascent drum’n’bass outcroppings, along with the ongoing vitality of the genre as a whole, is hard to parse. “They’re very much in their infancy,” Bukem says. “It seems that half the people who turn up at these shows have somehow been following me for 19 years, and then the other half are coming to drum’n’bass anew. Compared to commercial house it’s still a lot harder to promote, so moving forward it will be interesting to see where these little scenes go.”

Of the future of Good Looking Records, Bukem says he has some interesting new strategies in the works, but he’s mum for the moment. “There’s a new website to be launched, some new music and, in time, I’ll get back in the studio; but for now I spend about three days of every week just listening to new music. And that’s continual, we can never go lax on that, because ultimately that’s the source of everything that we do: what we’ll put on the label, what I’ll go out and DJ and just altogether what we want to represent musically. It’s a major part of what I do. You have to keep up.”

Near the end of our interview, we mention what is probably a perennial sore spot for Bukem. Reportedly, back in the drum’n’ bass heyday – crazy as it may seem to today’s tight-fisted music industry – Bukem and his partner were offered upwards of £10 million (HK$125 million) for Good Looking Records. They turned it down. Any regrets? “A lot of people have said, ‘well you could have taken the money and done nothing for the rest of your lives.’ But that’s obviously not where our heads were at back at the time. We were still in our learning phase. Look, I’m out travelling the world, doing what I love – focus forward, all the way.”