Rhythmism.comQ&A With Above & Beyond : Anjunabeats Volume 8 @ Electric Zoo 2010
by rhythmism
Thursday, Aug 5th 2010, 09:43 PM
The story goes that Above & Beyond took its name from the poster of a motivational trainer by the same name as founding member Jono Grant. Ten years later, the moniker has proven to be prophetic: Above & Beyond is one of biggest names in trance, having received early support from Pete Tong, going on to play for 1 million people on a beach in Rio de Janeiro, and rising to the #4 spot in DJ Magazine’s Top 100 DJ Poll within four years. They recently released Anjunabeats Volume 8, the latest in their series of celebrated mix compilations on their own Anjunabeats label, which also houses producers like Super8 & Tab and Menno de Jong. We talked to Jono about the new album, what exactly makes trance music so popular, and their upcoming Electric Zoo gig on September 5. Also, why they’re giving fans a chance to win a piece of the moon.
Your new mix Anjunabeats Volume 8 came out on July 20th. How does this edition differ from the previous volumes?
I think each volume series we do is a step forward from the last, musically. Obviously dance music is quite a fast-moving form of music, so I don’t know if there’s a particular thing I could pick up on, really. It’s just kind of a further evolution of our sound.
You are currently ranked as the #4 DJ(s) the world in DJ Mag’s Top 100. How do you manage to keep your sound fresh and interesting while maintaining a prolific presence with trance fans around the world?
Well, I think that helps with your position in DJ Mag polls, to try and keep things interesting. If you go a bit stale, I think fans will move onto something else. But I think the key is to keep your fans happy, really, to keep things interesting. Sometimes, obviously, if you change your style a bit, some fans kind of get upset and they want more of the old stuff. There’s always a bit of that that goes on. But in the end, if you stay static, you’ll actually lose more fans rather than gain more fans.
Above & Beyond’s sound is pretty diverse – you’re able to incorporate a lot of different types of sounds. Where do your influences come from? Do you listen to a lot of different types of music?
I think that’s probably why. We’ve got quite a wide range of influences. Paavo is very much into film music. Tony comes from a band background. I was into a lot of Depeche Mode and ‘80s music. I think it’s a diverse range of influences that really keep the sound interesting. That’s the key, really. If you just listen to dance music, then all of your music will probably sound boring, to be honest! Because if that’s all you listen to, then you’re just going to regurgitate that. I sort of believe there’s no output without input. And whatever you listen to kind of comes back out, whether it’s jazz music or rock music or whatever. So everything has its say in what you do, I think.
What do you think it is about trance that makes it so popular around the world?
I think it’s a very melodic form of music, so it’s kind of quite an acceptable form of music. So I think that’s kind of global. People like melodies all around the world, whereas stuff that’s not melodic, stuff that’s more rhythmical, say, tends to be more prevalent in other cultures. So I think it’s the melodic factor, really.
Do you have a definition of trance music? Do you think it can be defined?
Well, it’s funny, because we don’t think of what we do in terms of, in relation to, trance music. It’s difficult to define what trance music is, really. I can tell you what we do – I think what we do as kind of uplifting electronic dance music. Trance music in particular…it has to have some form of melody in it and some kind of hypnotic vibe to it as well. It’s quite a basic definition, but I suppose it would have to be two things: hypnotic and melodic.
You’re coming to play the Electric Zoo festival in New York this September. What is it that you most enjoy about playing in New York City?
To be honest, the U.S. is one of the best places to play because I feel like we’re very much appreciated over there and we always feel welcome to play there. The people are very educated about music, I think, because of satellite radio and stuff like that. They tend to know all of the records, so when you do play a big vocal track, everyone sings along to the words. To be honest, North America is one our best territories to play and I think that’s true for a lot of DJs. It’s a very well-organized market, so things don’t tend to go wrong as much as they might in some other areas. A lot of that success can be attributed to the organization.
How do you approach a festival performance as opposed to a club performance?
When we’re playing a festival, we’ll tend to play a shorter set from the start, because often there will be other DJs playing. And our set will be kind of more focused and we’ll play slightly more obvious material. Stuff that people really, really want to hear, rather than take people on a really long journey for three hours. People want to hear upbeat records, I think, so it’s kind of more condensed, if you will. At a club, we’ll play a three-hour set, which starts out progressive, and build it up to the bigger tracks. But at a festival, you haven’t got time to do that so much. It’s a bit more hits-led I guess.
Who are some of current musical influences?
I still listen to a lot of old ‘80s music like the Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode and all that stuff. That’s still a very big influence for me. One of Paavo’s favorite film composers, and I think we all like his music, is Thomas Newman, who did American Beauty and Road to Perdition and all that kind of stuff, so that’s a big influence for the three of us as well. Tony was very much into New Wave music and he still listens to some of that, but he’s more into bands than I think me and Paavo are. So it’s quite diverse, really.
Who are some up and coming DJs/producers we should know about?
There’s a guy called Arty, from Russia. I think a lot of people already know about him because he’s put out a lot of stuff, but he’s been really excellent. There’s also another guy called Andrew Bayer, who has been around for a while under the name the Signalrunners, but he’s now gone solo. He’s producing some amazing stuff right now. I also really like Boom Jinx from Norway. He’s a big character when he DJs as well. So he’s one to look out for.
What sort of gear makes up your studio?
Largely, it’s software-based these days. We do have quite of a lot of hardware. We’ve got a Moog Voyager, Roland SH-101, and some sort of plastic synths like that. But we’re working mainly in Logic, mainly with plugins these days. Most people are, it’s so much easier, and you can record mixes.
Back in the day--I was just talking to Paavo about this the other day, it was quite funny-- we’d actually finish a track quite quickly because we couldn’t load it up again. Now, you can record all the settings, whereas before, you’d have to remember the position of knobs on your mixing desk. We’d resort to lots of methods like taking pictures of the mixing desk and stuff like that so we could remember where everything was if we needed to come back to it.
But now, it’s actually a different discipline working in the studio--the fact that you can come back to something a lot easier means that you tend to do that, rather than putting something to bed and finishing it and moving on to the next track. You’ll often think, well, if that bass was a little bit louder or the hi hats were a bit crisper, and then you load it up again and have a tweak, and the weekend comes and you try out a new version of the track, and go, oh, I think that sounds better, but now I think the vocal’s not loud enough, and then you start changing all these things. So there was something magical, actually, about the old way of working, where you had a couple of days to do it before you’d move on to something else because you had a remix that you had to do for someone else, or something like that. You’d actually finish the track, and that would be it. These days we’re all digital, but we used to be analog.
What’s your typical setup for a DJ set?
We just use a Pioneer DJ mixer with two CDJs MK-3s. We’re pretty simple in that respect. We like to prepare stuff beforehand, so we’ll make a lot of bootleg special edits of tracks, work in the studio, and then present what we’ve done on stage instead of remixing tracks on the fly. Sometimes that can be effective, but we prefer to concentrate on entertaining the crowd and that sort of thing, and use the studio for geeking out more.
Your track “Buzz” was used to unveil Virgin Galatic’s SpaceShipTwo. Can you tell me about that experience?
It was really good actually, because basically we found out that Virgin had been sort of sniffing around our music and had heard this track. They actually did some research into Above & Beyond and Anjunabeats, which was pretty cool. And they decided that it was a good fit with Virgin, which is really nice to hear.
At the actual launch, that was quite a dramatic event. The actual tent blew away at the end of the event, which was pretty crazy. It’s actually been uploaded on Youtube, you can find it somewhere. It was great, we met Richard Branson and all his family and stuff. And obviously Schwarzenegger was there doing his speech. It was just great to be part of that event and to hear the music when the spaceship was being unveiled. It’s great to be part of a historic moment like that.
I see that you are also giving fans the opportunity to win a piece of the moon on your website. What is it about outer space that interests you and Above & Beyond?
I think it’s forward thinking, to think about how space could affect our lives. There might be some solutions to problems we have right now that may be up there. It’s human nature to want to explore undiscovered areas, really. Well, it’s not undiscovered yet, is it? But we need to discover more. So I think that’s the fascination, really. Tony’s particularly into physics and stuff like that as well, so he’s got a particular interest in the science behind it. Personally, for me, I’d just like to go up in that spaceship because it sounds really cool.
North American Dates
September 1 Newport Beach, CA @ Sutra www.sutraoc.com
September 2 San Diego, CA @ Fluxx www.fluxxsd.com
September 3 Seattle, WA @ Showbox Theatre www.showboxonline.com
September 4 Austin TX @ Nocturnal Festival at Apache Pass Event Center
September 5 New York, NY @ Electric Zoo: New York's Electronic Music Festival www.electriczoofestival.com
September 5 Toronto, Canada @ Guvernment www.theguvernment.com
Anjunabeats Volume 8 Tracklist
Disc 1
1. Parker & Hanson "Alquimia"
2. Duderstadt "Stranded in NYC"
3. Aruna & Mark Eteson "Let Go"
4. Oliver Smith "Chordplay"
5. Boom Jinx & Andrew Bayer "Keyboard Cowboys"
6. Above & Beyond vs. Kyau & Albert "Anphonic"
7. Arty "Rush"
8. Maor Levi feat. Ashley Tomberlin "Chasing Love"
9. Super8 & Tab feat. Anton Sonin "Black Is The New Yellow"
10. Andrew Bayer "From The Earth (Breakfast Remix)"
11. Bart Claessen "90 Nights Of Summer"
12. Above & Beyond & Gareth Emery pres. OceanLab "On A Good Day [Metropolis]"
13. Thomas Datt pres. Asedo "Seven Years"
14. Daniel Kandi "Piece Of Me"
Disc 2
1. Andrew Bayer "A Farewell (Intro Edit)"
2. Andrew Bayer "The Taxi Driver"
3. Arty "The Wonder"
4. 7 Skies "Sushi"
5. Lange "Live Forever [Feat. Emma Hewitt] (Mat Zo Dub)"
6. Who.Is "We.Are"
7. Above & Beyond feat. Richard Bedford "Thing Called Love (Club Mix)"
8. David West feat. Andreas Hermansson "Larry Mountains 54 (Juventa Remix)"
9. Adam Nickey "Altara"
10. Daniel Kandi "Forgive Me"
11. Super8 & Tab feat. Jan Burton "Mercy (Extended Mix)"
12. Alt+F4 "Alt+F4 (Dan Stone Remix)"
13. Nitrous Oxide "Dreamcatcher (Club Mix)"
14. Oceanlab vs. Passive Progressive "Sky Falls Away"
Saturday & Sunday, September 4-5, 2010
Made Event presents
ELECTRIC ZOO
New York Electronic Music Festival
Randall’s Island Park
Open Air Festival
11am-11pm Each Day, All Ages
Two Day Passes & Single Day Tickets Available
www.aboveandbeyond.nu
www.anjunabeats.com
www.MadeEvent.com
www.ElectricZooFestival.com
Your new mix Anjunabeats Volume 8 came out on July 20th. How does this edition differ from the previous volumes?
I think each volume series we do is a step forward from the last, musically. Obviously dance music is quite a fast-moving form of music, so I don’t know if there’s a particular thing I could pick up on, really. It’s just kind of a further evolution of our sound.
You are currently ranked as the #4 DJ(s) the world in DJ Mag’s Top 100. How do you manage to keep your sound fresh and interesting while maintaining a prolific presence with trance fans around the world?
Well, I think that helps with your position in DJ Mag polls, to try and keep things interesting. If you go a bit stale, I think fans will move onto something else. But I think the key is to keep your fans happy, really, to keep things interesting. Sometimes, obviously, if you change your style a bit, some fans kind of get upset and they want more of the old stuff. There’s always a bit of that that goes on. But in the end, if you stay static, you’ll actually lose more fans rather than gain more fans.
Above & Beyond’s sound is pretty diverse – you’re able to incorporate a lot of different types of sounds. Where do your influences come from? Do you listen to a lot of different types of music?
I think that’s probably why. We’ve got quite a wide range of influences. Paavo is very much into film music. Tony comes from a band background. I was into a lot of Depeche Mode and ‘80s music. I think it’s a diverse range of influences that really keep the sound interesting. That’s the key, really. If you just listen to dance music, then all of your music will probably sound boring, to be honest! Because if that’s all you listen to, then you’re just going to regurgitate that. I sort of believe there’s no output without input. And whatever you listen to kind of comes back out, whether it’s jazz music or rock music or whatever. So everything has its say in what you do, I think.
What do you think it is about trance that makes it so popular around the world?
I think it’s a very melodic form of music, so it’s kind of quite an acceptable form of music. So I think that’s kind of global. People like melodies all around the world, whereas stuff that’s not melodic, stuff that’s more rhythmical, say, tends to be more prevalent in other cultures. So I think it’s the melodic factor, really.
Do you have a definition of trance music? Do you think it can be defined?
Well, it’s funny, because we don’t think of what we do in terms of, in relation to, trance music. It’s difficult to define what trance music is, really. I can tell you what we do – I think what we do as kind of uplifting electronic dance music. Trance music in particular…it has to have some form of melody in it and some kind of hypnotic vibe to it as well. It’s quite a basic definition, but I suppose it would have to be two things: hypnotic and melodic.
You’re coming to play the Electric Zoo festival in New York this September. What is it that you most enjoy about playing in New York City?
To be honest, the U.S. is one of the best places to play because I feel like we’re very much appreciated over there and we always feel welcome to play there. The people are very educated about music, I think, because of satellite radio and stuff like that. They tend to know all of the records, so when you do play a big vocal track, everyone sings along to the words. To be honest, North America is one our best territories to play and I think that’s true for a lot of DJs. It’s a very well-organized market, so things don’t tend to go wrong as much as they might in some other areas. A lot of that success can be attributed to the organization.
How do you approach a festival performance as opposed to a club performance?
When we’re playing a festival, we’ll tend to play a shorter set from the start, because often there will be other DJs playing. And our set will be kind of more focused and we’ll play slightly more obvious material. Stuff that people really, really want to hear, rather than take people on a really long journey for three hours. People want to hear upbeat records, I think, so it’s kind of more condensed, if you will. At a club, we’ll play a three-hour set, which starts out progressive, and build it up to the bigger tracks. But at a festival, you haven’t got time to do that so much. It’s a bit more hits-led I guess.
Who are some of current musical influences?
I still listen to a lot of old ‘80s music like the Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode and all that stuff. That’s still a very big influence for me. One of Paavo’s favorite film composers, and I think we all like his music, is Thomas Newman, who did American Beauty and Road to Perdition and all that kind of stuff, so that’s a big influence for the three of us as well. Tony was very much into New Wave music and he still listens to some of that, but he’s more into bands than I think me and Paavo are. So it’s quite diverse, really.
Who are some up and coming DJs/producers we should know about?
There’s a guy called Arty, from Russia. I think a lot of people already know about him because he’s put out a lot of stuff, but he’s been really excellent. There’s also another guy called Andrew Bayer, who has been around for a while under the name the Signalrunners, but he’s now gone solo. He’s producing some amazing stuff right now. I also really like Boom Jinx from Norway. He’s a big character when he DJs as well. So he’s one to look out for.
What sort of gear makes up your studio?
Largely, it’s software-based these days. We do have quite of a lot of hardware. We’ve got a Moog Voyager, Roland SH-101, and some sort of plastic synths like that. But we’re working mainly in Logic, mainly with plugins these days. Most people are, it’s so much easier, and you can record mixes.
Back in the day--I was just talking to Paavo about this the other day, it was quite funny-- we’d actually finish a track quite quickly because we couldn’t load it up again. Now, you can record all the settings, whereas before, you’d have to remember the position of knobs on your mixing desk. We’d resort to lots of methods like taking pictures of the mixing desk and stuff like that so we could remember where everything was if we needed to come back to it.
But now, it’s actually a different discipline working in the studio--the fact that you can come back to something a lot easier means that you tend to do that, rather than putting something to bed and finishing it and moving on to the next track. You’ll often think, well, if that bass was a little bit louder or the hi hats were a bit crisper, and then you load it up again and have a tweak, and the weekend comes and you try out a new version of the track, and go, oh, I think that sounds better, but now I think the vocal’s not loud enough, and then you start changing all these things. So there was something magical, actually, about the old way of working, where you had a couple of days to do it before you’d move on to something else because you had a remix that you had to do for someone else, or something like that. You’d actually finish the track, and that would be it. These days we’re all digital, but we used to be analog.
What’s your typical setup for a DJ set?
We just use a Pioneer DJ mixer with two CDJs MK-3s. We’re pretty simple in that respect. We like to prepare stuff beforehand, so we’ll make a lot of bootleg special edits of tracks, work in the studio, and then present what we’ve done on stage instead of remixing tracks on the fly. Sometimes that can be effective, but we prefer to concentrate on entertaining the crowd and that sort of thing, and use the studio for geeking out more.
Your track “Buzz” was used to unveil Virgin Galatic’s SpaceShipTwo. Can you tell me about that experience?
It was really good actually, because basically we found out that Virgin had been sort of sniffing around our music and had heard this track. They actually did some research into Above & Beyond and Anjunabeats, which was pretty cool. And they decided that it was a good fit with Virgin, which is really nice to hear.
At the actual launch, that was quite a dramatic event. The actual tent blew away at the end of the event, which was pretty crazy. It’s actually been uploaded on Youtube, you can find it somewhere. It was great, we met Richard Branson and all his family and stuff. And obviously Schwarzenegger was there doing his speech. It was just great to be part of that event and to hear the music when the spaceship was being unveiled. It’s great to be part of a historic moment like that.
I see that you are also giving fans the opportunity to win a piece of the moon on your website. What is it about outer space that interests you and Above & Beyond?
I think it’s forward thinking, to think about how space could affect our lives. There might be some solutions to problems we have right now that may be up there. It’s human nature to want to explore undiscovered areas, really. Well, it’s not undiscovered yet, is it? But we need to discover more. So I think that’s the fascination, really. Tony’s particularly into physics and stuff like that as well, so he’s got a particular interest in the science behind it. Personally, for me, I’d just like to go up in that spaceship because it sounds really cool.
North American Dates
September 1 Newport Beach, CA @ Sutra www.sutraoc.com
September 2 San Diego, CA @ Fluxx www.fluxxsd.com
September 3 Seattle, WA @ Showbox Theatre www.showboxonline.com
September 4 Austin TX @ Nocturnal Festival at Apache Pass Event Center
September 5 New York, NY @ Electric Zoo: New York's Electronic Music Festival www.electriczoofestival.com
September 5 Toronto, Canada @ Guvernment www.theguvernment.com
Anjunabeats Volume 8 Tracklist
Disc 1
1. Parker & Hanson "Alquimia"
2. Duderstadt "Stranded in NYC"
3. Aruna & Mark Eteson "Let Go"
4. Oliver Smith "Chordplay"
5. Boom Jinx & Andrew Bayer "Keyboard Cowboys"
6. Above & Beyond vs. Kyau & Albert "Anphonic"
7. Arty "Rush"
8. Maor Levi feat. Ashley Tomberlin "Chasing Love"
9. Super8 & Tab feat. Anton Sonin "Black Is The New Yellow"
10. Andrew Bayer "From The Earth (Breakfast Remix)"
11. Bart Claessen "90 Nights Of Summer"
12. Above & Beyond & Gareth Emery pres. OceanLab "On A Good Day [Metropolis]"
13. Thomas Datt pres. Asedo "Seven Years"
14. Daniel Kandi "Piece Of Me"
Disc 2
1. Andrew Bayer "A Farewell (Intro Edit)"
2. Andrew Bayer "The Taxi Driver"
3. Arty "The Wonder"
4. 7 Skies "Sushi"
5. Lange "Live Forever [Feat. Emma Hewitt] (Mat Zo Dub)"
6. Who.Is "We.Are"
7. Above & Beyond feat. Richard Bedford "Thing Called Love (Club Mix)"
8. David West feat. Andreas Hermansson "Larry Mountains 54 (Juventa Remix)"
9. Adam Nickey "Altara"
10. Daniel Kandi "Forgive Me"
11. Super8 & Tab feat. Jan Burton "Mercy (Extended Mix)"
12. Alt+F4 "Alt+F4 (Dan Stone Remix)"
13. Nitrous Oxide "Dreamcatcher (Club Mix)"
14. Oceanlab vs. Passive Progressive "Sky Falls Away"
Saturday & Sunday, September 4-5, 2010
Made Event presents
ELECTRIC ZOO
New York Electronic Music Festival
Randall’s Island Park
Open Air Festival
11am-11pm Each Day, All Ages
Two Day Passes & Single Day Tickets Available
www.aboveandbeyond.nu
www.anjunabeats.com
www.MadeEvent.com
www.ElectricZooFestival.com
