HLZ, Das Spezial – Kill The Pilot, Metalheadz
Since 2009 HLZ has been blazing a trail through drum & bass, matching soulful spirit with razor-sharp production. Coming swiftly after his long-awaited debut album All My Life, the Italian artist's remix of Das Spezial's 'Kill The Pilot' takes a sensitive approach without sacrificing the bold angles of his Metalheadz-approved studio sorcery. In this exclusive interview, he breaks down every step of the journey towards the show-stopping version that close out the Hope Against Hope EP.
Das Spezial has constantly embraced the fresh perspectives that remixes cast on a piece of music. With a focus on producers who share the project's appetite for experimentation, the label has welcomed a heavyweight cast including Roman Flügel, Henrik Schwarz, Matthew Herbert, Dave Clarke, Daniel Avery, Bruce and more to reimagine the Spezial sound. On the most recent release, Hope Against Hope, it's Italian D&B legend HLZ who delivers a version of 'Kill The Pilot' that perfectly balances a sensitivity for the original production with the crushing production chops he's built his reputation on.
HLZ, aka Emilio Dimitri, was based in London through the late 00s and 2010s while forging a presence within drum & bass that eventually led to a close relationship with one of the undisputed pinnacles of the scene — Goldie's enduring Metalheadz label. Along the way he's been part of the Need For Mirrors duo and collaborated with the likes of DJ Trace. He moved back to Southern Italy five years ago and put the finishing touches to his 2026 album All My Life, a standout moment in his decades-deep back catalogue that marks one of the strongest releases on Metalheadz in recent memory.
On the album, and his 'Kill The Pilot' remix alike, Dimitri demonstrates a keen instinct for balance in his sound — emotional depth matched with dancefloor presence, artful distortion carefully wielded in a crisply rendered mixdown, futuristic sonics wrapped around a very human heart. Talking to us from his synth-stacked studio, Dimitri offered up some fascinating insights into his thoughts, intentions and processes working on the remix.
"The connection, of course, was through Goldie," Dimitri laughs, explaining how he came to connect with Das Spezial. "He said a friend of James Davidson [from Ulterior Motive] was gonna send me some stems for a remix, and so I looked up Das Spezial and I thought the studio work looked absolutely amazing, but it's not just about the music environment. You can see there's a whole art concept behind it. I thought, 'this is something very cool,' and when it comes to me, it really doesn't matter how big or small the project it is. If it's something really interesting, why not?"
As soon as Dimitri received the stems for 'Kill The Pilot', he could hear the strong trip-hop influence coursing through the music and was immediately excited about working on the project.
"I'm a huge trip-hop fan," he enthuses. "I even think myself I'd like to switch into making something like this, even if it's not easy. I think trip-hop is something that really needs to be played live. You can get something good with machines and the studio, but you really need that human elements for the music to make sense."
When it came to starting to work on a remix of the track, before even touching the material Dimitri was faced with one relatively simple decision — to either work with and respond to the mood and sound of the original song, or to completely "destroy" the source and twist a few elements into something entirely new. Because he already felt an affinity for the track, it was a logical choice to work the music into a 170 BPM D&B framework without departing from the essence of the songwriting. One of the critical elements at the start of that process is getting the tempo of the original music in line with the pace you want the remix to work at.
"Sometimes the magic happens, you know?' reveals Dimitri with a grin. "The original track, if I remember, was around 90, 92 BPM. The moment I changed the tempo to 87 BPM, which would be 174 in double-time, it shifted the pitch of all the elements down one semitone. The risk you can get into when you take this approach is that the voice will start to sound completely different. Luckily, just shifting it one semitone meant they still sounded natural, but with a darker environment around it. I thought, 'Okay, this is something pretty cool.'"
With a moodier starting point, Dimitri was free to work one of his signature incisive beats into the mix, drawing on his own custom samples recorded from his Dave Smith Tempest drum machine to quickly lay down a framework on which to develop the remix. With his mind made up to retain the essence of the Spezial production, he focused on resampling from the original material rather than adding too many new sounds in. Obviously, being a D&B production, there was still space to work up a fresh, sub-heavy Reese-style bassline from his Moog Sub 37 to run underneath everything. He also reached for his Prophet 6 synth to create some additional pad tones, but otherwise he focused on the sounds he had been sent.
"I really wanted to take advantage of the beautiful stems already in front of me instead of trying to add more pads and chords," he explains. "The soul was already there–that's the main thing. The synth sounds that came from Spezial were made with things like the Prophet 5 and a Buchla modular. They were already very abstract and distorted. I just wanted to enlarge that sense of depth and space through the different samples I grabbed, adding delay, reverb, and so on," he continues. "Relatively simple stuff, but obviously the hardest part is to cut the right sample for the job."
Even with his vast collection of synths around him, for Dimitri it was clear 'Kill The Pilot' didn't require a great deal of additional ingredients adding into the mix. As he explains, it's more important with a remix to react quickly to the sounds when an idea sparks, and the instrumental and synth material was inspiring enough to work with. The remix peaks after the second drop with a wall of guitar tones, reaching an energetic intensity that moves beyond the original. Given the natural ramp up that comes with the rhythmic pressure of drum & bass, the challenge then comes to balance the track out with its place on the whole EP.
"My remix is much louder compared to the original track, and that makes sense," Dimitri explains, "but I also thought to myself, 'don't push this too hard. Keep it rounded, because the EP is going to have a rounded sound.'"
Mixing a track down is an under-appreciated part of the production process — Dimitri repeatedly calls it the hardest step towards a final master — and there were many harmonically rich elements to balance. The critical first step, he stresses, is to not try to have everything fighting for attention.
"Some stuff needs to be up front for a reason, some stuff should be at the back for a reason," he points out. "For this remix, there was one thing we both agreed on after the first master. Shahab said, 'I think the strings could be louder, and he anticipated what I was already thinking because they were a bit lost, and they are one of the nicest musical elements in the track."
Mastering Engineer, Matt Colton
The final step in the process was the mastering — a fine tuning of all the frequencies to ensure the music sounds the best it possibly can across every possible format from earbud headphones to arena-sized speaker stacks. Dimitri created his own reference master, taking the audio out of his preferred DAW (Bitwig) and processing it in WaveLab simply to have a different working environment and hence a different focus for the patient, subtle approach required. This reference master came in useful to give the Hope Against Hope EP's mastering engineer, Matt Colton, a guide to aim for when bringing the tracks together ready for release.
HLZ's overall production style lends itself to the broader outlook offered by this spot on a Das Spezial EP, but the end result is still a distinct, punchy strain of drum & bass that comfortably walks the line between home listening and club-ready weight.
"When it comes to underground drum & bass, we should try to be more open to projects like this one," Dimitri ponders. "With the stuff I do, if they give me a three-minute trip-hop track I can do something decent with it. But unfortunately you have to differentiate what is drum & bass now, between the underground and the commercial scenes. They're two completely different things, but because of that split many underground artists don't open themselves up to try new things. But when the music is good, why not try something different?"