RS: So speaking about Lustral, I notice that the European
producers change names every three months, why so many different names
for you altogether?
Ricky Simmonds: There really is a very simple reason for that. When
we first started probably about '95 with Chakra, we were putting "I
Am" out through Jackpot which then got licensed to Warner Brothers, we
had five or six other tracks that were singles and were ready to put
forward as singles as opposed to album tracks. The deal we had with
Chakra would have meant taking at least another six months or maybe
even longer until we got to the second single. So it was really just
a way of getting all those songs out, we decided to have different
projects so we could get all those songs out within the same period of
a year/fourteen months without the records or the productions becoming
stale. Like so many things in our lives, it was a fluke thing which
came about by necessity but which became really good for us because it
created a load of projects which is good. Lustral isn't a trance
project whereas Space Brothers is, and so if we write a trance record
we wouldn't put it out as Lustral.
RS: So basically every project has a different sound to it.
Ricky Simmonds: There's some that are similar, like Ascension is a
trance project as well as the Space Brothers. But certainly, there's
a certain Chakra sound which is maybe a little bit more progressive
and deep. We've got a Lustral album coming out fairly soon and of the
twelve tracks on the album, there's only one which you'd really call a
club record. It's kind of very downtempo and very song-driven. So
different projects definitely have different sounds attached to them.
Stephen Jones: We always think they have different colors. For me,
Chakra is green, Space Brothers is red, and Lustral is yellow, if that
makes any sense. The sound is always all in our own head, that's how
it visually looks. So if a certain sound, we always easily fall in to
the same project, something like "Forgiven" sounded like a Space
Brothers record when we made it so that's what it became. "Home"
sounded like the follow-up to "I Am" so it became a Chakra record, and
so on and so on.
RS: Kamillian's "Guidance" is probably my all-time favorite
you've ever done. When you wrote that song where did the vocals come
from, what was the idea behind that?
Ricky Simmonds: Do you know what, we haven't been reminded of that
for so long, I'm actually having to remember in my head how it goes.
We wanted to do a gospel-oriented thing but it obviously had to fit a
certain sound we were making and remixes we were working on at the
time. So if it wouldn't have been so club-oriented, we would have
done that as a full-on gospel choir type song.
Stephen Jones: We actually recorded that with the Freestylers. It's
not just us which is why it's called Kamillian - it's us, Andrew
Giller (half of the Sol Brothers) and Aston Harvey (half of the
Freestylers). That is why there's a kind of weird breaks mix on there
which is basically a Freestylers mix.
Ricky Simmonds: That was the only project that we've done with
someone else. We got Kay Cameron, who sang "I Am," and she's very
much from a soul background so we got her to do that kind of thing.
We even put live claps in it going on which is the real thing, so we
wanted to make it feel like it was in a church, that was the idea.
RS: Y'all came over to Vegas for the Dance Music Summit, what's
your take on the US dance scene?
Stephen Jones: Well I love Vegas to start with, I like the Grand
Canyon <laughing>. The US dance scene is a tough one. We've been
very aware of the dance scene for years and know it's quite different
from the UK and Europe in that although the singles go out there, you
haven't got a single-based kind of approach in the charts. You don't
get singles going in the top ten or the top twenty like you do in the
UK or in Germany or in other territories. There are very few records
just put out as standalone singles. So it's a really different
territory and it really is hard to kind of get to grips with it unless
you're in America a lot, and we haven't had to spend that much time in
America. So we're kind of aware of it from a business level like,
from reading the Billboard charts and seeing what's happening, but it
seems to be pretty much an album and a compilation-driven scene from
our point of view.
