The digital German duo on a sound journey through a psychedelic tsunami
Interview: Dan Prince
Florian, Michael welcome to DMCWORLD – and what an entrance with a stunning debut album ‘Raum und Zeit’ which we will come to later. The world knows and loves you for your driving drum & bass productions – was setting up NEOSIGNAL a realization that there was more for you two to do out there?
“Hello and thank you for the kind words! We are delighted to hear you like our forthcoming album. You’re right, we’ve both been producing and playing out Drum & Bass for more than a decade. We love it to bits, it is such a great scene, lovely people and the music has so much energy and vibe. After such a long time we just feel the personal need to create something different. With all the years we have been producing our musical taste and preferences, same as our views on things in general, have naturally changed too. Especially working with different tempos enabled us to transfer our personal creative ideas which weren’t really related to D&B. That was something we wanted to do for a long time. We wanted to create something fresh that fully represents us to date, from our soul but also from our mind. Something that excites us and that also gives us the chance to explore areas we haven’t explored before and to tell things a different way. Imagine you have pretty much the same meal every day for years. Surely you can vary it a little once in a while, but if the basis always stays the same it gets quite boring and it feels like constantly feeding a machine with the same stuff. As an artist we think one should always aim for progression; in our view this means you simply need to break stuck habits and try something new. ‘Never change a running system’ is a well-known German saying, but that does not really work for us. One should not be afraid of a change and one should avoid defining oneself by the expectations of others. We simply decided to break out of our Drum & Bass comfort zone to try something new. It is a new challenge and musically it does feel like liberation to us. Nevertheless we surely will continue writing D&B under our Phace and Misanthrop aliases.”
The new single ‘Planet Online’ comes complete with remixes from Culprate, Rockwell and Rawtekk – why did you choose these guys?
“We rate all three of them as highly talented producers out there who have their own trademark sound and style in what they do. All three are super cool cats and we never doubted a second that their remixes will be bangers. And for us they proved that perfectly with their remixes!”
You spent the majority of 2012 locked away in writing mode in Hamburg… please give us a few words on each of these special tracks…
SEQUENZ – the very first track we wrote for the LP
ANGST – frantic
1000 VOLT – a psychedelic whirlwind
TEMPTATION – tempted by a harmonica
PLANET ONLINE – night and day
RAUM UND ZEIT – a free fall through a clockwork
KOSMOS – gimme some Bach
DERNIER CRI – I obey
HITMASCHINE – play and dance
PARALLELWELT – got two faces
SATURN CITY – need to get there
JETSET – no stopping anytime
0-NEGATIV – vibes
KEIN SIGNAL – lost the signal
DAS DIKTAT – you want to break free
You debuted your Neosignal live show at Fabric recently. You cite your influences as Joy Division, Kraftwerk and Led Zeppelin – for our readers who weren’t at London’s finest nightclub – talk us through your live show…
“In general, we are no friends of calling a pure electronic music performance live. In the end you always just trigger something. We are electronic music freaks, no musical trained instrumentalists and hence prefer to leave the live word to real instrumentalists being able to improvise whenever and whatever they want. When we thought about taking the Neosignal project on stage we just wanted to perform it in a different form than just DJing. The music on our LP is all various tempos and styles, anything from 86 up to 120 BPM. While writing we didn’t specifically aim for the music to work in a DJ set only. Music for us should be something you enjoy listening to in the first place, and it shouldn’t be only treated as something that just ‘works’. Music isn’t a product, but more a feeling and emotion. As we produced the whole LP in Ableton Live anyways, the performance is all Ableton based, plus a couple of controllers for us to interact live. This gives us most freedom and possibilities, and in our view presents the music and its concept the best way. Because the music and the BPM’s on the LP are so diverse, we reprogrammed many tracks just for the performance, so it truly is something special and exclusive. It now is like one sound journey through the LP and also through some of our past productions. We also would love to get a real visual stage show going at some point, with visual animation that fits each track. There actually is a story we could tell for each piece of the LP. We feel this would present the whole concept of the LP and our ideas even better, but as such a production is quite costly and time intensive, and as we are at the very beginning we’re taking one thing at a time.”
How did the whole Division Recordings deal come about? You must have been overjoyed to sign with your Noisia friends – you must rate their opinion highly?
“We are extremely happy to work with our Groningen family. They have been our friends for years and are very supportive. When we finished writing the LP end of last year in December we honestly had no clear idea or plan what we were going to do with the music and didn’t show it to anyone that time. Walter [Noisia’s Manager] invited us to come over to Groningen to play an after-party set in their hometown for the Eurosonic Festival. We decided to play our new music only on that night and didn’t really expect anything to happen because of that, we just felt it would be nice to play something a little different on that occasion. Everyone really seemed to like it and Noisia instantly asked us if we would like to put the LP out on their label, which for us indeed is a true honor! We felt their honest joy and passion for our new music project and that convinced us immediately to go with them, rather than looking for a major label.”
A great quote from you…”One should not be scared of risk and one should avoid defining oneself by the expectations of others – that leads to boredom and repetition.” With that in mind, what are your thoughts on the EDM hierarchy producers churning out similar records one after another and earning six figure sums for their pre-recorded sets…?
“Is it really like that? We do not know, and we do not really care. Our job is to make music and not to judge what others do. There´s always hard work involved when you´re famous for something. Everyone should be free to do whatever makes them happy. That is what it’s all about to us.”
And finally, who are some of the producers from around the world you are giving high fives to right now?
“There are so many great producers out there, but to mention a few: Amon Tobin, Noisia, Pharrell Williams, Gesaffelstein, Rockwell, Culprate, Koan Sound, Justice, Eskmo and so on…”
If you’re after a pre release taster of the album then the guys have just released a mini mix album preview :
NEOSIGNAL ‘RAUM UND ZEIT’ (ALBUM)
DIVISION RECORDINGS – RELEASED 24 JUNE
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Space: http://neosignal.de
