As one of the dubstep scene’s most dominant forces, Infekt is now sharing his wisdom on everything from technique to maintaining a positive mindset as a musician in the modern age with a new course. We spoke to the bass music behemoth to find out more about this and the building of his dubstep bangers

Photo: Dieter Wiselogel

Hailing from Bayreuth, Germany and now based in Montreal, Canada, Christian Fial (aka, Infekt) has won millions of fans globally for his energetic and breathtaking tracks. The coruscating Orgalorg, the electrifyingly eccentric Sectumsempra and this year’s pulsating hulk Feedback to name but three.

In the course of his career, Infekt has also been a pioneering figure in the shaping of several subgenres of dubstep – and the linchpin behind redefining the problematically-dubbed ‘riddim’ subgenre to the more apt ‘trench’. With a series of monthly single releases and his new blog encouraging more fans to start producing themselves we were very eager to speak to this wildly accomplished 26-year-old…

1 Can you give us a bit of background on your music production journey?

Christian: “It’s kind of a funny story; basically my dad reads a lot of computer magazines. He read one where they were talking about FL Studio, and he showed me the article. He said, “you can make your own music with this”. I tried the trial version and was like, “yeah that’s cool, I’m interested but I don’t really know what to do with it”. Then I discovered dubstep around 2012, and since that’s all computer music it was like a door opened; it was like,‘here’s something you can make’. I tried making that and that’s how I got into it. From there I dove in so deep and wanted to learn everything about it. I switched to Reason, then Ableton Live and now I’m in Bitwig. It’s been quite a journey on the production side.”

2 What was it about Bitwig that made you make the switch?

CF: “I was really interested in it; I’d heard a lot of enthusiasts were using it. Then I tried it out for a while before I made the leap. I saw a video of Nik from Noisia using it and that encouraged me to give it a go. I challenged myself to make a full tune in it. There were just so many little things that I really appreciated about it. Now, there’s so many things about it that I’d miss if I switched back to another DAW.