About a week ago Simian Mobile Disco stood on the Apollo stage at Arvika pleasing the audience with some of the best electronic dance music on the border between electro and techno. The duo hadn’t time to sit down with us for an interview so we did it digitally instead. We’re focusing on live shows, new projects and food obessions.

Simian Mobile Disco was formed in 2005 by 2/4 of Simian – What happened? And why mobile?

Well, Simian, the original band broke up doing our US tour. We all wanted to move in different musical directions I guess, but we’re still good friends with Alex and Simon. Simian Mobile Disco was originally just a jokey name we had when all the members of Simian were Djing. We did a couple of mixtapes and a couple of remixes under the name Simian Mobile Disco while Simian was still active, and then when the band broke up, we just carried on using the name. We never really thought it through, as it was never supposed to be anything but a joke…and now we’re stuck with it!

You have a new project called Delicatessen – Tell us more about it!

There’s actually two joined up projects – “Delicatessen” is the name of a series of club nights we’re curating. We started off running them at Matter in London, but as it rather suddenly closed at the beginning of the summer, we’re looking at other venues at the moment. “Delicacies” is the name of our new record label, that we’re releasing a series of 12” on.

Why the food obsession?

The label idea came first – delicacies are often weird and unpleasant sounding items, weird bits of meat etc. They’re the kind of thing that only a select number of people, connoisseurs, would enjoy. The same is true for our new releases – their quite hard, off-kilter bits of techno, eight minute club tracks. We’re not expecting everyone to love them, but hope that a select few will appreciate what we’re trying to do.

About the special dishes the tracks are named after, have you tried any of them?

Actually when Jas was DJing in Indonesia recently and made the mistake of telling his hosts about the new label… they took him for breakfast and he ate skin crackers (which will be the title of a forthcoming track) and brains. He quite enjoyed it!

With Delicatessen you make some moves towards techno? What has changed in your lifes, or the world, since your debut album Attack Decay Sustain Release.

We’ve always been techno fans, since going to Bugged Out in our Manchester student years, and there have been more techno sounding tracks that we’ve made in the past, that have ended up as B-sides – the Clock EP, or the bonus EP that came with Temporary Pleasure for example. The main influence to our change of musical output though is Djing.

We’ve DJ’d a lot in the last few years, all over the world, and gradually our sets have become a lot more harder and techno orientated, seeing what works best on dancefloors. The DJ set and the live set are very different musically, and sometimes people can be a bit disappointed when we don’t play Hustler or We Are Your Friends when we DJ, but everyone has to move on and develop their sound.

You’re playing live at Arvika. Describe Simian Mobile Disco live.

SMD live is musically us with a load of our studio gear – analogue synths, drum machines, a bunch of effects on pedals and rackmounted. We play a mixture of album tracks, and other bits and pieces including some of the Delicacies stuff, but it all tends to flow a segue into each other, so it often won’t sound a lot like the versions on the album.

The visual show is new. We’ve added video projections this summer, we used to have a huge amount of pixel line strip lights, and we still have some of those, but the video is more important in this set up. The visuals are all abstract geometrical shapes, but the “falling down a tunnel” effect we have for Hustler is especially good!

Your huge hit Hustler is sometimes mentioned as an underground hit. When does things stop being underground?

Good question… in the UK, something stops being underground when it gets to mainstream daytime radio, I think. So I would say “Cruel Intentions”, which is our biggest single, certainly wasn’t an underground hit.

Speaking of Hustler and underground music becoming famous, what’s your opinion on all the music blogs out there promoting music?

Well, some of them are good and some of them are shit, like most things! What’s your opinion of all these newspapers out there giving you the news..?

If you mean in respect to the effect they have on the music industry, it’s really tricky to say. Being on blogs can really help raise your profile and bring attention to your music, but at the same time it encourages people to think that music is free. It’s a really double edged sword. They certainly helped us a lot in the early stages of our career.

TAjT likes music that makes us dance therefore our last question is, what makes you dance?

Jas – 20 minute synth solos.
James – I tend to lie down instead.

Aspic (clip) by SMD Delicacies

Coming up: Interviews with Danger, Skatebård, Louis La Roche and Boy 8-bit

Etiketter: Simian Mobile Disco, united kingdom

Detta inlägg postades den söndag, 25 juli, 2010 kl 06:57 i kategorin Arvika2010, Interview. Du kan följa svar på detta inlägg via RSS 2.0-flödet. Du kan lämna en kommentar eller en trackback från din egen sida.