ON THE FLOOR - IHM USA SPOTLIGHT
Bruce: I’ve always been really into music but I never really touched producing until one of my friends said, ‘just come with me to one of these festivals, I want to show you what it’s all about’ [Referring to EDC 07]. And literally I said, ‘I want to be there. I want to do that.’ And just kept working at it and eventually got it.
How did your relationship develop with Anjunabe- ats? What effect has this had on your career?
Bruce: The first contact we ever got from them was, ‘can you guys do a remix for us?’ And him and I were like ‘Anjunabeats!’ because it’s the label that we looked up to. We loved Armada and everything but Anjunabeats to us was that special, set aside label. We did the remix and the very next email was ‘do you guys have any original stuff?’ From there, the first track we gave them was “Bloom.” Ever since then, we’ve established our relationship with them and kept bonding with everyone on the label. It just seemed like the home for us.
How do you feel about being on the compilation? How did “Aldo” come about?
Nick: We are really excited. We had one on the last compilation, which was “Bloom” obviously. I’m sure a lot of people have noticed that we do change our sound around a lot. So what we did with Aldo, is we kind of wanted to bring back that feeling of Bloom, the epic trance leads, stuff like that, so we did that and they loved it and decided to put it on Volume 10. Then, we’ve got some others that are coming out on Anjuna this year that we will be playing tonight. But they aren’t on volume 10; they are all too unique.
Are you guys working on a debut album? Anything you can tell us about?
Bruce: We’ve just started - hopefully it’s going to be really great. Not every track is going to be in the house BPM range. We’ve been experimenting and we have a couple of glitch-hop tunes by us already.
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Bruce: Him and I are obsessed with Koan Sound, Fly- ing Lotus and all of those guys. We’ve always wanted to experiment in the lower BPM range, so we’ve been taking it down to like 100 BPM. We’re working on some real different glitch-hop tunes.
Nick: We’re actually working on an EP that we are going to push to different labels. That way when the EP gets released, people will be more prepared for what our album is going to be like. It’s going to be very diverse with sounds. Influences like Flying Lotus, and Koan Sound, to influences from Above & Beyond and even influences like Bon Iyver, and M83. We’ve got a lot of ideas bouncing around.
We love your remix of Arrival, how did your ideas come about for that? Bruce: Then you are definitely going to like the glitch-hop stuff coming out! I’ve always wanted to nail a glitch-hop track. They were like ‘here’s a Halo remix,’ and I was like, ‘ok, I’m going to go balls to the wall with this and completely flip the switch.’
Nick: The whole thing with the game too, we wanted that concept of, ‘you know we could make it our normal trance sound but we kind of felt like the whole point of Halo is to kill aliens.’ So we made something a little more rock-infused and went with that glitch-hop sound.
Other than working on your album, what else have you got coming up for 2013? Plans for WMC that you can tell us about?
Nick: We have a vocal tune that we’ve worked on with Andrew Bayer and we are really trying to get a singer for it. We’ve already literally produced the track. We were going to produce it as an alias for Musical Freedom, but then we all got our heads together and decided to rewrite the track, it’s a little too pop-y. So we are sitting down now, and really hoping to get it done for WMC. We are playing at
Ultra so we really want to have something good to debut for the fans there. If anything, we will have something to debut there. We’ll be bringing a lot of new stuff from our studio.
We wrapped up our chat with Above and Beyond as they dove into their plans for the upcoming year. “The main focus of 2013 is writing our next album which is going to be out in 2014 – if we finish it in time,” says Jono. The trio has been writing songs for the last few months and already has an exciting amount of new material to work with. “But the Group Therapy thing is coming to an end. We’ve taken that name and transported it into the radio show and that’s been really, really well received. It’s quite a risk to do that, but we like taking risks, and now it’s time to move on from Group Therapy as an album brand and work on the next project,” explains Jono.
Indeed, it is sad to hear that the innovative “Group Therapy” live show concept is ending. At the same time, community, connection and the rest of the principles that define Group Therapy are also the foundation of Above & Beyond, as well as Anju- nabeats; it’s these central components that have contributed to the successes of both projects, and are not going anywhere, anytime soon.
“I think the future is impossible to predict ac- curately, all you can do is keep a strong sense of what you want to achieve and adapt to the changes around you. As long as we stay connected I think we’ll be fine,” A&B.
WORDS BY DANIELLE DESMOND PHOTOS BY DOUGLAS VAN SANT
www.djmag.ca
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