by RAF KATIGBAK

Twelve years ago, at the tender age of 17, Shy FX (aka Andre Williams) unleashed a four-minute blast of bad-bwoy braggadocio that crashed into the U.K. pop charts like a 10-ton truck filled with Amen-break shards and barrels of sub-bass. The track, “Original Nuttah,” featured the hyped-up ragga toasting of vocalist UK Apache, and helped define the then-burgeoning sound of London’s drum & bass scene.

His follow-up single “Simple Tings,” with its frantic Gene-Krupa-on-Ritalin sound, was a mind-melting exercise in programming and groove, further cementing his position as a serious player on the make. “At that time,” recalls Williams, “I was running with people like Potential Badboy and T Power, and they were program junkies as well. What we would always do was basically show off to each other and see who could try to twist up the beats the most.”

When the scene began to morph from chopped-up jungle breaks to a more tech, loop-based sound, Williams took a short hiatus, and took stock. “Too many guys got caught up in their beats and weren’t listening to what was going on, and not listening to other forms of music, and it showed in their production. I needed to take a step back to figure out what I wanted to say, to see where the music was going.”

Last year, Williams returned fiercely, with a new-school take on old-school sounds. Diary of a Digital Soundboy was an R&B-meets-D&B album that once again stormed the charts and injected some fresh blood into the scene. “In the old days, we had a lot of reggae soundsystems in the jungle scene. Then the whole culture of blues parties and soundclashes went out of drum & bass, and for a while, you’d play a deep, sub-bassline tune, and you just wouldn’t hear it. But with people like Dillinja, with his Valve Sound, and with soundsystems like the one at Fabric, where you can actually hear sub-bass, I thought that it was definitely time to bring that style back.”

With Bonjay, Skratch Bastid, Hussler and Corey K at Station C on Friday, March 10, 10 p.m., $15

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