Pirapus

Pirapus are a Christchurch-born drum & bass duo: George Murray (keys / production) and Ben “Tex” Hollamby (beats / guitar). They operate across drum and bass and jungle styles while drawing on adjacent sounds listed under their work — liquid funk, drumstep, dubstep and melodic bass — and describe their own output as "F U T U R E" drum & bass. The pair are based in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The two met during an impromptu jam session at the University of Canterbury. George Murray is a classically trained pianist from age four and carries that background into the duo’s keyboard and arrangement work. Ben "Tex" Hollamby handles beat programming and live guitar, which feeds into Pirapus’s use of live instrumentation inside electronic productions.

Musically they blend dancefloor drum & bass energy with direct influences from trap, dubstep, bigroom and hard techno — the wording they use for their sound. Concretely, that shows up as piano- and key-driven motifs (drawing on Murray’s classical training) layered over programmed break patterns and heavier, dubstep-style bass passages. Ben’s guitar parts frequently act as textural or melodic counterpoint to the synth leads, and the productions move between full-time DnB breaks and halftime/stutter sections that reference trap/dubstep phrasing. Across releases you can hear both liquid-leaning melodic passages and harder, aggressive moments associated with deathstep/drumstep and heavier dubstep-adjacent bass design.

On the career side, Pirapus have released music on Monstercat, NIGHTMODE, Bassrush, Lost In Dreams and DnB Allstars. Their recorded output centers on the interplay between Murray’s keys/production work and Hollamby’s beat programming plus live guitar, which is a consistent production choice in their releases. They explicitly frame their project as bridging club-focused DnB with cross-genre production elements from trap, dubstep, bigroom and hard techno.

The duo’s catalogue and label credits — Monstercat, NIGHTMODE, Bassrush, Lost In Dreams and DnB Allstars — are the clearest public record of their work to date.