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Back in 2003, Noisia, a Dutch electronic trio were releasing drum n bass tunes on an underground level. Within two years they became the go to producers on the scene. Since then they’ve set up three record labels, a radio station, remixed the likes of Moby and Amon Tobin, written music for loads of videogames including Devil May Cry 5 plus three tracks for metallers Korn. Teir brand new album has just dropped, and the three time winners of the Best Drum N Bass Act at the Beatport Music Awards are heading to Norwich to treat us to headlining DJ set at UEA. I spoke to Tijs about the new album, their innovative audio visual show and that infamous hairy doughnut video. Not a euphemism.


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our new album Outer Edges came out last September – it feels like there were no boundaries within


this work. How did you find working together again after time apart? Te album is pretty much about the boundaries that are there, they’re very real, but we wanted to explore the extremes of what we could comfortably see as fitting to Noisia, or fitting to what we think Noisia is, or fitting to what Noisia should be. We’ve always made quite abstract music, music that isn’t about something else but itself, the topic of the music is the expression of energy in sound. I think. So this album was about us looking for a new level of expression, and looking into how much further we could take this thing that we do that people seem to like.During the years


leading up to the album we certainly hadn’t been apart physically, we have three studios right next to each other so we see each other pretty much daily. We did a lot together actually, we did the soundtrack for a videogame, did the I Am Legion album (a collaborative album with Foreign Beggars), released an 8-track EP called Purpose, and a lot of singles and some smaller EP’s. So yeah, we’d been busy. But it’s true, there’s been a six year gap since our last album in 2010. You’ve developed an innovative show to go along with it, which won an award for best live show before the show had even begun! What is involved with the show? Ha ha yeah, that was jokes! In all honesty at the point when we won the award we really hadn’t made the decision to push for this audiovisual show idea we’d


INFORMATION Bassjam present Noisia playing a DJ set at the LCR on 3rd March. Also playing – Bad Company UK, Ivylab, Annix, T>I – Oblivion. Tickets available from ueatickets.ticketabc.com


had for a while to become reality. Tat came after. When we toured the I Am Legion live show in 2014, two of us were occupied with music elements while the third did live VJing onstage right besides us while Pavan and Ebow were doing the lyrics live. We also toured with our own lights guy, who knew the show inside out. So we gained a lot of experience on that tour, of what’s possible and what’s not. After all of that experience, we felt more confident that we could do the same thing for Noisia. Another aspect was that we met our current lights guy, Manuel Rodrigues of deepred.tv, who’s personally developed a system to control lights from within music computers, so during the Outer Edges shows the light is always dead-on sync to the musical elements. Te video for Collider is mesmorisinglygross. How did you come up with the idea for the hairy doughnuts? Tis is 100% credit to Henk Superelectric, a friend of ours from Amsterdam who’s previously made the equally bizarre video for Machine Gun. We asked a couple of people to send us ideas for a music video for Collider, but when he told us about his ideas including that big flying pink doughnut that comes back in a hairy incarnation too we were sold! How can you tell when a song is complete? Metaphysically speaking, the song tells you, you only follow what it tells you to do until it stops speaking, or you can’t be arsed to listen to it anymore because it’s too demanding ha ha. Only a track with a great amount of “lifeforce” will be able to force you to keep working on it. A lot of ideas just die down because they can’t motivate you to keep breathing life into them. Less metaphysically speaking, a good track has a strong internal logic that should direct you in one way to work on it and exclude all other possibilities, or at least most of them. What’s the most important piece of equipment that Noisia uses? Obviously our brain and ears, but I think another very important thing we really can’t miss is our studio rooms and our speakers. I could put another computer with another music application on there, make all sounds from scratch and still achieve an OK result. It would be frustrating, but I’d know what I hear. Te only thing that genuinely makes us us is our brains I’d say.


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