“Josh hypes and MCs during the set, we deconstruct our songs and other people’s songs. We have stems from Major Lazer and we have stems from A-Trak and we’ll layer those on top of other songs that are big,” he says. “We go in between straight-up hard style music and underground hip hop stuff. It’s all over the map, but at the end of the day we’re there to make everyone go crazy and turn the fuck up.”
Getting audiences to ‘turn up’ is no great difficulty for the high-octane duo, whose growing reputation in the US has taken them from small clubs into packed dancehalls. Young advises their shows aren’t for the faint hearted. “It’s definitely not something to sit there and analyse and play in a café. It’s deconstructed to a certain extent but we’re really trying to bring the most energy humanly possible.”
Keeping up these ambitious energy levels presumably involves a ghastly amount of guarana consumption. However, Cameruci reveals the simple source of their hyper-animation.
“We’re just into the music for real. We’re into real hood trap music and when we play it we fucking turn up. Same with our songs, we’re all about our songs and to see kids go crazy to our songs – we feed off of them and they feed off of us. It’s recursive.”
Yes, in addition to taking their livewire stage show around the world, the group have released a constant stream of original music over the last couple of years. A few months back they dropped the single Pillz, featuring Yellow Claw and Green Velvet, and this month another single, Mosh Pit, was unveiled. Cameruci reveals these songs will find a home together on a forthcoming EP. “We’re going to do four songs total. We have one with Waka Flaka called TTU – it stands for ‘Too turned up’, and there’s another one with Travis Porter called Drop Top. That’s coming out in the next few months.”
Since the group’s 2011 debut Jubilation, a half dozen EPs have followed but there hasn’t been a full length Flosstradamus release yet. Cameruci says they prefer to regularly release singles, rather than get bogged down by album production. “We just put stuff out to give the kids something to listen to, so they’re not waiting for the next little bit. We keep putting them out throughout the months to give them to our fans so they can turn up to them.”
As already mentioned, Flosstradamus will appear at the 2014 Big Day Out. The pair aren’t strangers to the festival environment, having previously performed at the likes of Coachella and Lollapalooza. Young explains the characteristic differences between festivals and club shows.
“A lot of times in clubs the fans are right up in your face, they’re really close to you and you get to see people and make eye contact. You drive that energy from specific individuals in the crowd, whereas at a festival the energy is driven from a mass of people. You’re really just looking out over a sea of people. When you tell everybody to put their hands up and you see five thousand hands go up, then you’re doing your job.”
Flosstradamus’ upcoming support slots with Major Lazer didn’t come about by accident. Young and Cameruci have a close relationship with Major Lazer mastermind Diplo. The second Flosstradamus EP, 2012’s Total Recall, came out on Diplo’s Mad Decent label and Young says they’ll probably join forces during the tour. “We did the Mad Decent block parties this summer in America and did the same thing where we were supporting them, but a lot of times we found ourselves being pulled out onto stage stage and performing with them as well. So I’m sure you’ll see a little bit of that as well as the night goes on, depending on how much weed goes around.”
Electronic music is becoming an increasingly crowded field at present, particularly since claiming mainstream dominance a few years back. Cameruci details how Flosstradamus live shows diverge from the norm. “It’s getting pretty diluted with so many people DJing and stuff like that now, so everything that we do we try to tweak it a little. Our live show right now here in the States, there’s no giant LCD screens like a lot of the other people who are touring now have. We have fake weed plants on stage, it looks like a grow room. We’re just trying to do something a little different with everything we do.”
Although Flosstradamus take note of the common activities in contemporary electronic music, they’re not distracted by prevalent trends. Rather, their determined intention to get audiences to ‘turn up’ propels them forward. “I don’t feel very much competition for us in the EDM world, just because we’ve sort of made our own lane,” says Young. “We’ve carved our own field. Every night Curt and I will talk about our set and we’ll sort of figure out what we want to do better, but we’re really competing with ourselves.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
