DJ Ron Slomowicz: The first time I heard about Soda Club was when I was in the UK and I saw a promo 12” for Jessica Simpson. Was Soda Club a way to re-brand the Love to Infinity sound, or rather, how was the Soda Club sound founded?
Pete: Yes, it kind of was like that. We figured that there was so many Love to Infinity mixes out there that it would be interesting to try and mixing under another name and seeing what the reaction would be, to see if we could basically start another sort of brand going. When it took off with the Jessica Simpson and various other things that did very well, we thought that it worked. It was quite strange because we didn’t quite expect it to work, but it did. It was one of those things where you’d be getting used to a certain reaction to Love to Infinity mixes, they were very well-received and we wanted to test whether we could still do it under another name, and it went very well. It just snowballed from there really. Now we’re on an album deal with Water Music and we've kind of shifted slightly into the trance market. We’ve been huge fans of trance, it’s obviously bigger in Europe than it is in America at the moment, although I believe it’s taking off quite nicely over there. Is that the case?
RS: Yes and no, in the dance radio markets and clubs it is. I was going to ask you about that because the Love to Infinity Classic Paradise sound is so piano, happy, and energetic. The Soda Club, at first it was like that also, but with the album and the artist project it’s much more in the banging trance direction.
Pete: Yes, we started with Love to Infinity many, many, many years ago, and we’ve worked continuously and played continuously since then. The Soda Club was designed not exactly to take over from Love to Infinity, but to be running parallel with it. Then the trance scene took off and we thought, well why don’t we just use the Soda Club name. It got to a certain stage and basically shift it into the trance arena, Trance was one area we really wanted to explore and we’d never been brave enough to get into that before, even though we’d like to. We thought that we were perceived in one particular way, which is doing the big hands-in-the-air club mixes for the big artists. Trance isn’t particularly about being a big artist, it’s about continuing the euphoria of the club. It’s not about mixing big artists for radio, club or for the video specific markets, it’s more of a dancefloor thing rather than radio-based pop-house, which is what we’d ended up kind of doing a lot of our mixes. We still kind of cater for the proper club side, but I think by the time you get a lot of A&R people saying, will you do a certain kind of mix some more, sort of like you did on Michael Jackson or whatever, then it kind of gets to a point where you think well, we’d kind of like to get back to the dancefloor please.
RS: Where did the name Soda Club come from?
Andy: For the different sound, we wanted to have a different name. We were originally going to call the band Soda because it was a poppy kind of sound, and then we found out there was a band in Europe called Soda so we tagged Club on the end of it and it became Soda Club.
RS: With Soda Club you did remixes and then you got into doing original songs and working with artists under the Soda Club name. What was sort of the transition there where you jumped from being flat-out remixers to more producers?
Pete: It came with the track “Take My Breath Away” that we did with Hannah Alethea. It got signed to the UK record label Contact Music and did really well on the charts and from there they offered us an album deal. From there it was pulling in people that we’d like to work with, singers that we'd like to work with, and songs that we’d like to work on. We've written obviously most of the album, there's a couple of covers on there, but it was a nice change from doing and transforming other people’s music. It’s something that we’ve thoroughly enjoyed doing and would like to do more.
