Q&A: Kode9

How come you remade your seminal 2006 record '9 Samurai' this year?

There's no reason why I did anything in January apart from having so much energy to make music and not really caring about anything. I'd had the idea to do it for ages but it just happened. I felt it needed an upgrade, which is why it's called '9 Drones'.

And why did you want to make music at 150bpm?

I've been trying for a couple of years to make tracks at this speed that fill the hole between grime and dubstep and footwork. It's like a little rope ladder to enable my sets to get faster, without there being this sudden shift [in speed].

Why has footwork struck such a chord with you?

Because all of dance music is so fucking slow! I feel like it's been getting slower in the last few years and I don't approve of it. I've had a thirst for speed since the early days of jungle, and things have been gradually slowing down – dubstep is super-slow. You've got people slowing grime down to 130bpm and slowing jungle down to 125bpm and I just don't get it. What was lacking for me in non-house music was a bit of energy. Over the last couple of years I've spent time getting to the footwork part of my sets because there's loads of different music that I want to play, but there's no doubt that the bit I enjoy the most is the footwork part. When people go off to it, they go off in a way that I don't see with other types of music. There's a frantic deliriousness that's quite special.