RS: What artists out there would you like to work with that you
haven't worked with yet?
James Wiltshire (of Freemasons): Oh plenty, absolutely plenty. Obviously there's the
standard, the Madonnas of this world and Kylies. Russell definitely
wants to work with George Michael and I really want to work with Annie
Lennox. We're both very much into vocalists, anyone with a strong
voice who is open to electronic music. We're always listening to
different styles as well.
RS: Well you guys are prodigious. So when the two of you have DJ
dates like the big date in Australia, is that just Russell or do you
go with him?
James Wiltshire: No, no, we both DJ together. I work off a laptop, he
works off of CDs and vinyl. It actually works really well between the
two of us and it's good fun. I think neither of us would want to do
just the DJing side, you might as well experience both sides of the
coin together.
RS: When you're on the laptop spinning live are you using
Ableton or Tractor?
James Wiltshire: Ableton and various controllers and quite a few effects.
RS: So he plays a record or a CD and then you play on top of him?
James Wiltshire: No, that can be really difficult for DJs and generally
back to back can sometimes be annoying because there's always
something you want to follow the thing that you're playing up with.
It depends on how we feel but it's very natural moving between each
other, we'll either do half an hour each or an hour each, etc.
RS: Where do you see the sound of the UK going next like for
your fourth single, since music's so trendy and quick over there?
James Wiltshire: That's going to be an interesting one and it's something
we're going to have to delve into. People's musical tastes are very
seasonal here. For example, every time the winter comes because it
can be so dramatic and quite dreary here everything tends to be a
little bit moody and one-note oriented. We've noticed that
particularly with the electro scene here, there is an underground
movement for it but there's also a backlash against it at the moment.
So most importantly what we will always do is make sure that those
chord sequences within our music, we have no interest in making things
with just one note in it.
RS: Already a backlash against electro?
James Wiltshire: There's an awful lot of electro out right now. It's
become incredibly easy to make an electro record because an electro
record is based completely on a riff and it's very easy to write one
riff. It's very difficult to write a series of rifts and put them
together as a cohesive record. What we've got over here is an
absolute explosion of high quality, well produced, but very similar
sounding records with exactly the same noise and they all do dan-dan
da-da-da-da-da-dan dan-dan. Oh, it drives me up the wall sometimes.
RS: It's sort of like the whole VST trance mess that was two years ago?
James Wiltshire: Yes. When it becomes simple to make a record it's
dangerous because there's too many records out there. It's become
simple now to make a good dance record. It's still difficult to make
a great dance record and that's something that gets a little bit lost.
RS: Any plans for you guys to come over here to the States?
James Wiltshire: We are planning it. America's such a big country and
we've had a lot of invitations to a lot of places so we're going to
try and do it all cohesively in lump. We certainly don't have time,
with studio commitments and remix commitments, to sort of try and flip
backwards and forward an awful lot. We spend a lot of time in Europe
as well and the actual amount of jet lag going between three or four
different time zones within a few months would be enormous. So we're
going to try and do it all in one big cohesive bundle possibly at the
end of this year or the beginning of the next.
RS: Is there anything that you'd like to say to all your fans out there?
James Wiltshire: Well first of all thank you very much. We recently put
a MySpace page up as we were rubbish at maintaining a normal website
and MySpace has just been fantastic for us. We've had so many
beautiful comments, especially from America. Because the album's not
officially available, it's available through certain websites but it's
not really available, we didn't realize quite how far we'd broken or
how far we'd reached in to America. We have MySpace up on a little
work computer next to the studio as well so we're often nipping
backwards and forwards, and we try to reply to as many as possible but
sometimes we just get swamped. So to see that being embraced over
there has been beautiful and some of the comments left have been
incredibly inspiring.
