Elliot Turnley and Ronny Wing, directors of the forward-thinking visual arts company, Deximl, are connecting the electronic music community with their new project, Beats and Bytes.

Undercurrent: You’ve clearly been busy in lockdown, what are you doing with Deximl?

Elliot Turnley: We’ve been busy working on creating a centralised platform for the Brighton electronic scene on our website. We’ve been involved for years in creating immersive visual experiences for club nights and now we are launching a content platform that is centered around an integrated radio station called Beats and Bytes. We are going to see how this goes at first and see how people get involved and then past that we’ve been laying groundwork and a network for a podcast. We want to give the people behind the electronic music scene a voice and podcasts seem to be resonating with a lot of people at this moment. A lot of people are turning to them almost as a way of social interaction, and it is something positive that we think we can bring.

Obviously the lockdown has had an unimaginable impact on the electronic music scene, so we’ve come up with new creative ways to help support it and help promote the people within it. It’s dire times for many so we want to be able to help support the people in our favourite venues, our favourite artists, engineers, all aspects of the community.

What was behind this move?

Myself and Ronny were looking at how we could work around the current lockdown. Our primary business product is producing interactive visuals for club nights, which obviously there aren’t any, and most likely won’t be for a long time, so we were talking about how we can reach out to people and what we can produce in the meantime.

I do a lot of radio shows and streaming so we landed on this idea of integrating a radio station into our website and creating our own content that way.

At present we’ve got a number of mixed up from myself, but we are going to use the platform to really shine a light on the electronic community and help highlight the artists, engineers, venue owners, promoters and all the people behind it.

When is the launch?

The launch is Saturday 23 May at 8pm on our website deximl.co.uk and we’re obviously really excited about that, excited to show people what we’ve been working on. We are going to be kicking things off with a live broadcast in the evening and by that point all the channels will be live on and people can start to really see what we’ve got going on.

We are going to use this as an opportunity to lay out what we are planning to do in the long term and let people know what to expect. We’ve been working on it for some time now, and it’s really come together both as a concept and a practical product, so we’re obviously really excited to launch and help keep the conversation, the community going.

It’s dire times for many so we want to be able to help support the people in our favourite venues, our favourite artists, engineers, all aspects of the communit

Elliot Turnley, director, Deximl

Do you feel that giving back to the community in this way is important, especially right now?

Yeah for sure. We’ve both been involved in it for years, we’ve both got so much from it, and so at this point it is nice to give back in a way, to bring these people together. 

So much of the work we have done with the company is centered around these community events. If you look at The Mine nights that we have supplied visuals for, there is a real close knit group of dedicated music fans in and around these nights. We operate very closely with these communities and have done for years, so with Beats and Bytes and future podcasts, there’s an opportunity to create a centralised community resource that allows us to give back to a scene that we thrive from, that we love being a part of.

That said, with things like the radio station, the podcats and that, it is not just about talking to engineers about what desks they are using for hours, we want it to be accessible for a range of people.

Whether it’s people that are already deep in the scene and maybe want to get more into the nitty gritty and hear stories from veterans of different areas, or people that have a passing interest in electronic music in general, we wanted it to appeal to anyone really.”

How are you accommodating for community input?

We are in crazy times at the moment, so just being able to produce something that reaches out to people and engages them is important but then allowing people to respond back is crucial. You can see so many creatives at the moment embarking on new projects and finding new ways to connect with each other, so being able to be part of that is really positive for us.

What we’re making, at its heart, is a real community resource. There will be all these people contributing to the podcast in the interviews, we’re looking at guest sets on the DJ, artists spotlights, and also in terms of the radio platform, having interaction with listeners. Whether this is through a live text feature, or phone in’s for live broadcasts in the future, it’s always crucial to let people have input and engage with the things we are putting out there.

We as creatives are all scrambling for the answers to the new normal; how are we still going to reach out to people, how are we going to keep this community alive and we are all coming up with our own ideas to do that. We think that Beats and Bytes, and the evolution of Deximl is a great way to connect with people in the current climate and keep the conversation alive, the community alive.

There are people that have spent years of their life out and about going to shows, creating events themselves and being part of this huge collaborative scene; and they are now finding themselves completely isolated.

We want to find ways to bridge this and to reconnect this community, to reconnect people.