You guys will be helping celebrate the launch of The Annual 2013 at Fusion. How are you feeling about the show?
Looking forward to it as always! We’ve done a few shows in at Fusion in the past, so knowing the venue and its vibe helps us map out what we are going to with the night.. MOS Parties are always good value!
Is it cool to play shows back home, where have you played recently?
Yeah for sure, it’s nice to not have to get on a plane as it means you turn up a bit more refreshed, rather than jumping off your flight, grabbing a quick dinner and then usually straight off to a gig. Plus hometown hangovers are a bit more manageable! We haven’t done a lot of Melbourne shows recently, so this oughta’ be a lot of fun, it’s great playing on your home turf.
Do you have any big touring or overseas plans for the New Year?
Its looking like a good start to next year – We are off to Asia for a couple of gigs straight after New Years and then, kicking off mid January, we are doing a 3 month national tour for the Ministry Clubbers Guide 2013 CD which we just finished mixing.
You’ve been able to balance between the club and mainstream sounds. Is it important for you to create tracks which appeal to different audiences, or is it something that just happens naturally when you’re recording?
We like to work on lots of different things, some more underground, some more mainstream or vocal – it just depends what’s vibing for us at the time. We don’t really set out from the start of a project to land it with a particular audience so maybe that’s why we managed to get plenty of diversity in our releases. We basically just try to do tracks that make us feel good when we are developing them and then can be incorporated into what we do when we are DJing.
Dance music has become a much larger part of the Australian music landscape over the past 5-10 years, how do you think the scene over here measures up against the scenes in other countries you’ve been exposed to in your travels?
It’s crazy how much the scene has grow, especially in the last 5-10 years, as you point out, the technology has enabled more and more people to do it. Seems to us that Dance music has become so global in its appeal that the difference between countries is not as noticeable as it used to be… whether that’s a good bad thing its hard to know sometimes. We think Australia has a very healthy scene generally and some of the hottest dj -producers in the world right now, eg Dirty South, Tommy Trash, Ivan Gough are Aussies – so the bar has really been raised for dance music in Oz.
Your tracks are full of energy, do you need to get in a certain headspace in the studio to get things going or is it enough to be in the studio feeding off each other’s energy?
Yeah, we certainly get better results on those days when we are feeling enthusiastic and full of energy. We all have those times where it feels like a bit of a choir, and the work done during those times usually doesn’t get the results you would like. However, we just really love hacking around with music and rarely grow tired of it. We are usually in a good headspace when we are working on music and we think this helps deliver good energy into our production.
How does the process work in the studio, does one of you come up with an idea for a track and then you both build on it?
We don’t have a set way or routine for doing things other than making sure what we are working on is buzzing for both of us. Between us we usually have lots of ideas floating around and then together we sort out what is worth developing into a full finished project. There is a lot of back-and-forthing in developing projects and it’s a system that seems to work for us.
How did you first meet up and when did you discover you were on the same wavelength musically?
We first met 4-5 years ago. Paul bought me a CD of some of his ideas to me at a gig. We discovered pretty quickly we had a similar tastes and aspirations musically. Once we got into studio there seemed to be really good working chemistry and things have flowed nicely since then.
What projects are you working on at the moment, possibly a studio album sometime soon, feeling any pressure on that end?
At the moment we are finishing a few remixes and co writes for some other artists and we are finalising on a lot of other things too. We have 2 new singles Yarl and Scorpio coming out over the next few weeks on a few different labels both here and overseas.
We have been talking a lot about an album and we have around 20 tracks we are sifting through with an album structure in mind. Unfortunately dance music and full length albums are not something that always go hand in hand. However, we find the challenge of that is very appealing. It would also give us an opportunity to get some of our more eclectic, less dance-floor based stuff out there. In an album format it seems more acceptable to break a few conventions and let the more experimental stuff come to light. So yeah, hopefully that’s something on the table for 2013.
