Emm: I hear a lot of deep soul in Truby Trio's music, and I find that to be true about a lot of the German artists I listen to like Jazzanova and Micatone. I can just hear an American soul influence in that music.
CP: Yes, there's a huge American influence in here. There is a huge Black music culture in Germany because of the GIs. They had the clubs going and the music going, and the bands came over. Munich was the place where Maze always played on their European tour, for sure. And I think that's where most of the people here got their roots you know, if they're African-American or Black music roots. The first bands I played in was with the Black GIs. They really could sing and play, so it was really inspiring. And then they left so, now we have to do it.
Emm: Can you tell me a little bit about the German underground dance music scene? And I say dance music, encompassing the type of music you play, house music, techno, whatever. What are some of the more popular styles of music that are there?
CP: The really popular dance music is electronic trance. Electronic, synthetic trance music is really big in the huge clubs. It's totally cool, but it's not my cup of tea. But on the good side of the things, there's some really good house music. But you know, everybody likes what he likes. The house scene is really, really big and there's a lot of things going on from deep house and really tech housey stuff. It's interesting to see, it's almost techno, but not really techno, it's something in-between. It's not really tunes, it's more about tracks and sounds and stuff, but it's nothing you would listen to at home. And on the other side, there's the stuff like we do, like Compost, JCR, and Infracom and people like us, who produce more on jazzy or soulful side of things and try to do more CD projects than twelve inch projects.
Emm: Is that type of music, like what you all play, music that you would hear on the radio in Germany?
CP: No way, forget it. One reason why we called the record Elevator Music was to make a joke of it, that it's never going to be elevator music in this country, ever. I think there's one radio hour in the whole country that represents what we do, and that's not enough. Internet radio's great and stuff, but like in the public media, MTV and all these things, and TV and commercial radio, it's not going to happen, at the moment. But it's OK. There's always a back side to the commercial side. We had a really healthy time to grow because we did not receive a lot of attention in the beginning. There was no major hype and that left us enough space to grow and be authentic about what we do. But that's the main goal at the end, that before we go that we hear our tracks on the radio at least once.
Emm: Do you DJ in addition to doing your production work?
CP: Yes. We're doing a tour at the moment with Truby Trio, where all three of us play records for the invited guests. We're taking a short break, and then we'll start again at 5th of September in Eastern Germany.