Recession? Hah! What recession?! It certainly doesn't feel like the cold financial winds currently blowing through the music industry have reached the basement of Blackmarket Records yet.

It's a warm Thursday lunchtime in late September, but even the last rays of summer can't tempt the gaggle of record buyers out of the shop's basement. There's a new crop of drum & bass releases in and, behind the counter, Nicky Blackmarket is sifting through them fielding countless questions and giving out numerous recommendations while dropping preposterously tough tune after tune into the mix on the shop's Technics.

Ray Keith, meanwhile, who runs the shop's drum & bass bassment with Nicky, is nowhere to be seen. A difficult man to keep up with is Ray. Last week, Knowledge caught a thorough soaking on the way to meet him here, but to no avail. We were advised that it might worth trying Music House, but nobody can be certain. Several days of messages left on mobiles later and our date is reset. With a Kiss FM show, three labels (Dread, Penny Black and UFO) to run, a gruelling DJ schedule to maintain and every remaining minute poured into his studio in the same Brick Lane complex of Grooverider, it's understandable. And eventually, yes, Ray Keith does arrive in the coffee shop opposite Blackmarket.

This location is particularly apt because Keith's history is irredeemably tied up with record shops. When he was just a fledgling hardcore DJ from Colchester in the early 90s, he netted a job at City Sounds in London. Among his customers at the shop were Goldie, Grooverider, Jumpin' Jack Frost, Doc Scott, Bryan Gee, DJ SS and Rap. Paul Oakenfold and Carl Cox frequented the place too. With his production work in its infant stages - he'd done a track with Prodigy favourites Genaside II already - Ray very nearly ended up teaming up with another young producer Aphrodite. A collaborative session was planned, but complications meant they never got round to it. Another City Sounds regular, Mickey Finn, got there first.

Ray reckons that this is where the nucleus of what would become the decade's most important musical movement formed. Vicious techno tunes like Joey Beltram's 'Mentasm' were the order of the day, as well as the first pioneering jungle to emerge from A Guy Called Gerald's studio. "That really made us sit up and think 'right, we can do this'," Ray says. "Suddenly, everyone was at it." Ray's first main break came when his unofficial remix of Orbital's 'Chime', something he'd just knocked up to play out, caught the attention of Grooverider. London Records signed it up for the next Orbital single, following it with the original track ''

By this stage it was 1994 and Ray had moved over to mastermind the changeover from hip hop to drum & bass in Blackmarket's basement. The whole world wanted to know about this new music and a fair proportion came looking looking for it there. You could stand in there for hours on Saturday afternoon, watching the smokey air being buffeted by previously unheard frequencies and the latest breakthroughs in breakbeat science. Watching the shoppers jostling to get served and flocking around every new box of white labels to get ripped open. If London was the capital of cool throughout the 90s, then Blackmarket felt like its very central core.

Silly money was flying about too, at least for those willing to bite at the corporate bait being dangled by A&R men everywhere. Ray says there were times when he longed for a major deal, but now realises independence was the best route for him. "I think it's great for the scene whenever someone gets signed by a major," he says, "but the majors don't really know what the public wants. They like to think they do, but the standard of pop music being sold to kids today is terrible. Real shit. Obviously it isn't working out for them. That's why things like drum & bass and garage have been able to find a niche. They're filling a gap left by the majors who just seem to want to revive old tunes and revamp them, either by putting house beats or hip hop beats behind them."

Instead, Ray spent the boom years of drum & bass building up an empire robust enough to withstand the media backlash that was always bound to follow. In 1999, he boasts the kind of release schedule that reads more like a major's than a one-man cottage industry. Just check the list of what's arriving in the shops in the coming months. A double pack of 'Something Out There' remixes by Dillinja, Bad Company, Ray and engineer Nookie. Then there's Ray's 'Classified' album of new and ruthlessly dancefloor slanted tracks, due on Dread. You've probably already heard the likes of 'Obe-1,' 'Brutal' and the mainly live session 'Bounty Roller' in the capable hands of Grooverider, DJ Hype and Bryan Gee.

And after that, 'Dread Old Skool Classics,' a retrospective of Ray's ten year stretch in the music industry. Subtitled 'A Decade Of Drum & Bass 1989 -1999', it'll include the biggest tunes to date, including 'Terrorist' and early Philly Blunt single 'London's Most Wanted,' 'Dark Soldier' and 'Chopper,' which Shy FX has also just remixed. Not to mention a triple pack from Ray's Dark Soldier project, double packs from Twisted Anger, Pedro, Nookie, Nookie vs Ray Keith and... well, the list goes on. He has the freedom to put out what he likes, when he likes. In a scene that can change almost overnight, such room to manoeuvre is vital, he says.

Knowledge asks what Ray thinks has changed in the last decade? "The pop scene has suffered a lot over that time," he reckons. "They've had to go back to the 80s to get through the 90s. If you look at the 90s, then Lauryn Hill is just about the only proper pop artist to actually come through on a huge scale, like a breath of fresh air. Obviously American hip hop is still very strong in its own right, and that's what we're trying to develop the British drum & bass scene into. We've got our own artists, we write our own music, we're not copying anyone. OK, we use samples, but we're twisting them up. A lot of pop music just samples old tunes so that people will recognise something in it."

He talks of the scene in an almost paternalistic way; about giving new producers the room to grow and beaming with pride at the unprecedented roadblock caused by the Renegade Hardware / Trouble On Vinyl stage at this year's Carnival. A defining moment in drum & bass history, a line up including Ray, Optical, Krust, Roni Size and DJ Die helped transform All Saint's Road into a seething crush of enthusiastic punters so sardine-packed they had to pogo rather than dance. As well as the vociferous reception they were awarded, forever dismissing any spurious claims that the music was in decline, Ray was also delighted at the way the scene's differing styles were all represented under the same banner. As old and new tunes, technical and musical alike, caused widespread mayhem, it felt as though that unity that so many producers have been banging on about recently might actually be beginning to materialise.

As a veteran DJ who has played everything from acid, techno and breakbeat house to hardcore, jungle and d&b in his time, Ray is distressed at the hairsplitting that can go on in the scene. "It wasn't that long since we were playing on the same bills as Paul Oakenfold and Carl Cox," he reminds us. "I can't stand this attitude of only liking this or that style of music. So when I play, I play all different styles, just to keep it fresh." Pointing in particular to the two 'V Classics' compilations, he says: "Bryan and Frost have done a lot to bring all the camps together under one umbrella with those albums. You've got to big them up for that."

And despite, or maybe even because of the hard time pop music has had in the 90s, Ray obviously counts the growth and maturity of drum & bass as one of the decade's plus points. "Nowadays a lot of us have got our own labels, our own offices," he reckons, "so the business side is all sorted out now. People did get ripped off at the very beginning; we were all young when the rave scene started and those things are bound to happen when you don't know what you're doing. But no-one's going to go out of their way to fuck people off, because we all live under one roof and there is a code of conduct. Obviously, certain things get out of hand, but that gets dealt with internally anyway. Most people just want to get on with making music. At the end of the day, you're only as good as your last tune."

For Ray, the introduction of live musicians can only mean progress. He's bought a drum kit, and is already setting about meshing traditional, well worn breaks with his own individual drums. He's introduced a singer, Leah, who walked into the wrong studio one day down at Brick Lane and ended up joining the Dread crew full time. "She was meant to be doing some garage tune," he laughs, "but she wandered into the wrong room. Or the right room, even. That's fate, that is."

The long term plan is assemble a full scale band with a view to touring to promote Ray's first solo album proper, which he'll start work on in the new year. "I've got something like four or five gigs on New Year's Eve," he boasts, "so after that I'll be fucking off for the whole of January. I'm just going to go and chill out on and island somewhere and do nothing. Then it's back and start work on the album. Because I want it to have 17 or 18 tracks tracks on it, at least on the CD, with some downbeat tunes and other stuff. I want it to be varied. It's nice to be able to cater for the different markets too. Just about everyone who buys vinyl now has a pair of decks, so we'll probably just put the ten big dancefloor tracks on the vinyl. That way we cover the underground DJ aspect but sell the CD in other countries where they don't necessarily want something to bang out in a club. I've had three practises now - the Penny Black album, then the UFO album and now the Dread 'Classified' LP - so now I feel confident about doing some live shit with my own album."

Finally, despite his complaints about the state of the industry ten years on from the birth of acid house, Ray remains positive about the music's future prospects. "Some things have got worse, but it's easy to forget," he says, "ten years ago, half the kids ago couldn't even mix, people didn't want the music in their clubs and no-one had heard of MCs. We've brought it a long way. Not every tune we make is a hit, but hopefully every tune is a stepping edge to the next level. As long as we can make our music, do our parties, play our music and other people's, then we don't need to go looking for major deals." He has a point. The entire mainstream music industry continues to spiral out of control, worried about internet sales denting its profit margins when it should really consider simply signing some decent music. Drum & bass, on the other hand, has never looked leaner and fitter. And it's people like Ray Keith that we're thank for that.

WORDS: Ben Willmott