FOREIGN BEGGARS have blown up. Whether it was their North American appearance on the Skrillex Mothership Tour, their spotlight on British teen television show Skins, or their colossal 2009 hit with Noisia Contact that vaulted them, these three have landed in the spotlight of bass music worldwide. The last few years have been a flurry of activity for these three with a constant onslaught of touring and releases, even signing to the prestigious EDM label Mau5trap for their latest full length effort The Uprising. They have become an elite task force of merging hip hop and bass together, and are currently touring to promote what has become known as the Foreign Beggars signature sound. DJ No Names, Orifice Vulgatron and Metropolis hooked up for a substantial Q&A regarding touring North America for the first time, their new album and their upcoming tour. One of the topics was their hot new release, The Uprising.
The Uprising is your first full-length release since United Colours of Beggattron in 2009. That was obviously a really huge album for you guys. Due to the success of that album, did you guys feel a push for more releases right away? Did you wait three years for a full length to accommodate touring and EPs/ singles? Is there any collaboration on The Uprising that you think rivals your collab with Noisia? Which track is your favorite?
DJ Nonames: There’s been a lot of recorded material released since 2009: two EPs on Never Say Die, singles and Orifice and I held a weekly radio show on the BBC every week for 18 months. There’s always been recording going on between touring. It just took a while to have a collection of tracks that worked
together as an album. There’s actually another album with Noisia that’s near completion too.
Metropolis: Our recording process has never really been to sit down together and write an album. Since the beginning, we would always be generally recording tracks all the time while busy touring and handling everything else. When the number of tracks would begin to stack up, we’d start thinking whether we felt it was for an album or not, or for EPs or whatever. So we never really looked at it as a three year gap. We put out The Harder They Fall EP on Never Say Die last year because as our sound had began to evolve we felt we were in a strong enough position to put out a full dance music record, a direction we kind of hinted at on Beggattron. For the past five years, we’ve been back and forth in the studio with Noisia working on that collaborative project, as well as working on a collaborative project with Alix Perez. So it’s not like we’ve just been twiddling thumbs, we’ve been working!
I think on The Uprising, the joints with Alix Perez are comparable to that of Noisia because we’re close friends and they were in fact part of a slow-grown project we’d been putting together. That chemistry is definitely there and it’s something we aim to work on at some point when both our schedules will allow
Favorite track for me is undoubtedly Flying To Mars. I was with Alix when he wrote the beat; this was a while back. I have a video of my kid dancing for the first time ever to that particular instrumental the day after he made it. We had already tried some verses on it. I really wanted to get Ahu to sing a hook. For some reason, I always heard something ethereal and trippy on it, but
didn’t quite put it down enough at the time. Then a good few months later, Donaeo comes in the studio. We recorded several demos, then on the off chance I played him the beat and he was crazy about it. He had the hook within seconds and bam! His hook and my original verse were also recorded at the Strongroom studio one, which has an amazing history, and the whole session was engineered by one of our good, good friends Will Davies, who Vulgatron has known since school. I don’t know. It’s a special, special track for me, and I think it may have surprised quite a few people that the first real dubstep joint off our album wasn’t as loud and aggressive as a lot of people may have thought it’d be.
We had lots more questions in our session with the guys, read the full interview HERE.