Roni Size

Roni Size, born Ryan Owen Granville Williams on October 29, 1969, is a British drum and bass DJ and producer from Bristol. He grew up in a Jamaican immigrant family and drew his early bearings from reggae and Bristol's sound-system culture before moving into breakbeat and jungle production. In 1996 he formed the collective Roni Size / Reprazent around artists from his Bristol label Full Cycle — Krust, DJ Die and Suv — adding vocalist Onallee, rapper Dynamite MC and double bassist Si John. Their debut album New Forms, released on Talkin' Loud in 1997, won that year's Mercury Music Prize and went multi-platinum in the United Kingdom. Built on tracks including "Brown Paper Bag," "Share the Fall," "Heroes" and the title piece, and featuring the Philadelphia rapper Bahamadia, it is credited with establishing a jazz-inflected, live-instrument strain of drum and bass: Si John's upright bass and drummer Clive Deamer's kit playing set against programmed breaks, at a moment when the genre was short of convincing full-length albums. Deamer later joined Portishead and toured with Radiohead. Reprazent's second album, In the Mode (2000), brought in guests from well outside the genre, including Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine and Method Man of the Wu-Tang Clan. Size also formed Breakbeat Era with DJ Die and vocalist Leonie Laws, and released solo work including Touching Down in 2002. The group announced a break in 2008 but has performed regularly since, including a 2009 orchestral rendering of New Forms with composer William Goodchild at Bristol's Colston Hall and festival sets at Glastonbury and Coachella. Size continues to tour internationally as a DJ, and remains one of the defining figures of the Bristol lineage that runs alongside the city's trip-hop output.

Official site

Subscribe to this calendar

Upcoming shows