RS: What is the music genre you're playing now, or what kind of
style is this tour going to be?
Sasha: I don't know. Some of the sounds have definitely changed since
the last time we were touring together. I think the electronic music
scene in general has changed a hell of a lot in the last six years,
since we toured together. Definitely even in the last couple of years,
with the Berlin movement on everyone's sound, I think it's become more
minimal. Though I still like to play records with melody and with warm
sounds, and John still likes to play dark and dirty. I think that's
why our music always compliments each other.
RS: When you two play out who goes on first, who goes on second?
Sasha: We take turns.
RS: Cool. Are you doing the laptop thing still? How's that working for you?
Sasha: Yes, I like it, I enjoy it. It feels like DJing to me now. It
took me a while, but it definitely feels like DJing to me now. You
have people argue until they're blue in the face, 'I used to be much
better when I played vinyl,' and whatever. But music changes, people
move on, you know? Things change, and right now I'm enjoying the music
that I'm playing, and I'm using my laptop, and to me it feels like
DJing.
RS: What is your setup? Are you using a Mac; what kind of controller?
Sasha: Yes, I use a Mac, and I built my own controller, to control Ableton.
RS: Very cool. So, tell us about Emfire.
Sasha: That's my new imprint. It's not really a full-blown label – it
doesn't have an office or anything. It's just an imprint through which
I'm putting out tracks of my own. We've got four releases out already,
and we're actually releasing our first proper kind of physical CD for
this tour. It's basically a remix package of the first four singles.
We've got some amazing artists remixing my tracks – Radioslave,
Matthew Dear's Audion and Slam have done mixes of all my tracks which
are amazing. I'm really happy with all the results.
RS: The tracks are available exclusively through Beatport?
Sasha: Just the original tracks, yes. We'll be selling the CD on the
tour. It's getting a proper release at some point during the tour, and
then digital – it's going to be released around about that time, too.
RS: Is that the CD that's going to be coming out through Ultra?
Sasha: That's the one, yes, the physical release of Emfire.
RS: And that's going to be the tracks and the remixes? Is that
like a mix CD or an artist album?
Sasha: No, it's just a remix EP of my first four singles that we've
put out on Emfire. It's basically the four singles, edits of the
original mixes of the four singles. There are eight remixes on there.
Each artist we've chosen for remixes sent us two completely different
mixes, so that's great. Everyone's done a club mix, and then a deeper
mix. So that's eight mixes, and then we've also included a soundtrack
I did for a Surf DVD. It won the best soundtrack at the X Dance
Festival, so they wanted to put it on there. We got the license to put
it on there. So even though it's ten pieces of music from the film,
it's basically the score to the film, and it's one continuous piece of
music, that's like forty-five minutes long. So there's quite a lot of
music on there for a physical release. But it's not an album, just a
an EP.