RS: You use male vocals when most trance music seems to feature
female vocals. Is it more difficult to put male vocals in to the
genre?
A&B: I think it's just a case of precedent, to be honest. I can't
think why female vocals should necessarily become the dominant vocal
type in trance. I think if you look at the kind of people and the
music that they like outside of the trance genre, there's an awful lot
of stuff that they're listening to be it, Radiohead or Coldplay or
whatever else which is sung by a guy. So I think it's just precedent.
There's been a lot of really, really good trance records with male
vocals and there's been an awful lot of female vocal trance records
and I think that's why people associate it more, it's just a familiar
thing.
It was put to me a couple of years ago about the fact that people
like having women sing because a lot of people who are into trance are
guys. Just imagine it's the sort of 75/25 thing, and by four o'clock
in the morning it's mostly guys in the club and they like to have
songs sung by supposedly beautiful or imaginable beautiful women
singing down at them. I think the opposite of that is a song written
from a bloke's point of view sounds really good when you've got a
bunch of clubbers in a club singing along to it. So I think there's
an argument both ways and, I think it's purely just an awful lot of
old vocal trance had some wafty bird singing on it but I don't think
either one is more valid or less valid really.
RS: You're album TriState, did you all sit down and say we want
to write an album, we want to make our first artists album and we're
making these tracks for it? Or was it more like you had stuff lying
around that you finished up for the album?
A&B: No, we made a conscious decision to do it. For various
reasons, partly because Ocean Lab was signed to a major label quite
quickly after we did the first single, there had always been a kind of
outside whip cracking that made Ocean Lab material appear. Whereas
Above and Beyond was one to those things that we did when we found the
time to do it. Consequently, as our main artist brand if you like,
after four years of being together we'd only released two singles as
Above and Beyond. So we thought, this has got to change and we really
need to make an artistic statement as Above and Beyond and so we
decided that we were going to make an artist album and that we weren't
going to do any remixes for a while. Pretty soon on from starting it
we decided that it was going to be an album that would hold together
as an album rather than just doing another mix compilation or
something that was wall to wall club tunes for an hour. We were going
to make an album in the same way a group would make an album, which is
write some stuff, pick the best bits and stick it on the album in a
kind of traditional way. Everything was up for grabs - the tempo, the
vibe of the track, and the subject matter of the songs. I remember
doing a couple of tracks on the album and one of peoples' favorite
tracks on the album is called "World on Fire," and when it was
originally done, which was before we'd started to work on the album
really, it was like well I'm not really sure this fits into Above and
Beyond. The great thing about TriState is suddenly not only did it
fit in but it sounded exactly right for that point in the album. It's
quite a varied thing - the out and out trance on there, the slightly
more progressive stuff and then almost ambient things on there. It's
kind of held together by a mood and that mood's got something to do
with what we want to say and that's a better place for it to have
ended up is rather than us saying we need to make a record that
reflects what we play in clubs.
RS: Speaking about that, when you're putting together a
compilation like and Anjuna Beats, do you think about this is the
stuff I'll play in a club or how do you choose songs for those
compilations?
A&B: Well the idea of the AnjunaBeats Volume series is to reflect
the label and the kind of material that we put out on the label. At
the time of each compilation's release, it's looking slightly backward
and looking slightly forward, so we've actually moved from the first
one which was almost totally retrospective because we had such a bunch
of material that hadn't been released on a compilation CD, that it was
kind of backward-looking. As we've grown into them and the label's
grown and the list of artists that we're working with has grown, then
we've been able to make it a little bit more future-looking. So it's
a kind of snapshot of the recent past and the very near future and in
terms of what goes on, principally it's the biggest records on the
label, either because they've already been big in the recent past or
you think are going to be big. Then the secondary consideration is
how they all fit together and make it a kind of listenable whole.
Occasionally there's two very similar tracks that we have to choose
between, but for the most part it's the biggest thing on Anjuna Beats.
That's the job of Anjuna Beats Volume 1, 2, 3, 4, going into the
future - to kind of give you the best possible example of what Anjuna
Beats as a label is all about.
RS: If we were to hear you guys spin live at the club tonight,
would you play a lot of the stuff on Anjuna Beats?
A&B: Yes, I think for the most part everything that's on the
Anjuna Beats CD is the stuff that we've played in the club a lot,
maybe not all in one night and maybe not in the order that it is on
Anjuna Beats but that's a fair kind of condensed version of the sort
of stuff that we play in clubs, depending on what time of the night
you're playing. If you were to come and see us in Rio where we had a
three-hour set then it would progress through that, more of the sort
of slightly less filled AnjunaBeats stuff to begin and then going into
the more kind of typical trancey euphoric stuff at the end with a few
sort of diversions in the middle for a bit of tech and a bit of other
flavor. So it is not a bad representation of what our DJ sets are
like really.
