We are in very good relationship with GrandMarnier, Yelle’songmaker in studio and drummer on stage, and exchange ideas through iChat almost everyday. Reason why with Yelle, there’s been something going on since a while now, she sent us acappelas and we sent them some beats, but until now we did not get to the end of anything.

Her track comes from very far. We were at a beat-listenin session at Switch’s place in LA.

By the way, if you live under a rock and don’t know who Switch is, he’s a friend, one of our biggest source of inspiration and honoured us mixing the album.

So back in LA… we were listening to some of our new beats and some of his, when we heard this one that we liked a lot. We thought we could edit the drums and add our touch and would have been perfect, Switch agreed…

e worked on it sent it to Yelle to sing on it and when we got it back , Switch only added a longer outro.

You can now listen to Cooler Couleur as well as every other track of the album on our Myspace!

Continues…

(Video by Ricardo Galbis and John Alberico of Subdrive)

We were in New York at the Downtown studios with Dave (Switch), finishing and listening to the album. Trying to give sense to it and understand if something was actually missing.

A guy knocks at the door asking if he could interview us for a magazine. We accept and, in the middle of the interview, we realize that the interviewer is Spank Rock!

At the same time, when he started to understand from the questions he was asking, that the album was not conceived to be a collection of dance tracks and how many other artists were involved… he smiled and almost wispered, would be cool to be part of it…

We didn’t let him repeat it twice and immediatly told him we were going to be in the studio for other 4 or 5 days and that he’d be great if he’d joined us. We would have make a beat for him…  if he liked it and wanted to work it out, would have been just great!

We produced this fresh beat, which we really like a lot. The day after he wrote the lyrics and rapped on it.

This is Park the Truck and you’ll have a taste of it very soon!

When we were told there was a remote chance to work with Roisin Murphy for a track of the album, we couldn’t believe it and almost fell from the chairs! Memories went back to our 20s, spending entire afternoons watchin MTV, waiting for the fantastic video made for Moloko’s Pure Pleasure Seeker! Love at first sight…

Fantasy became reality and we realized it only arriving at the studio, where she was already working on the beat we had sent to her.

We were extremely tense and excited and to get over excitment we started drinking, but instead of just relaxing , we found ourself completely drunk looking like 2 morons.

What impressed us the most about Roisin is that other than beautifully talented she is extremely professional! We finished up “Hold up your hands” before forcasted time and we still had the studio for a  couple of hours…

We had another beat ready so we tried… Why not doing another track?

She immediately agreed!

In two hours we produced this second track that of course was immediately included in the album, which is Royal T.

We really enjoyed working with Ms Murphy and hope to collaborate with her again in the future. According to this interview, looks like our (professional) love is mutual! What’s going to come up from this we don’t know… but could really be a lot of fun!!!

By the way we’re going to perform together in London this coming sunday…

We have always been Kelis fans! And it’s been a bomb to have her for a track in our album…

At the beggining, we wanted to do a Techno/Kuduro track and thought about the instrumental of a rmx, which we had done for Subsonica, a major Italian group, which unfortunately was never published.

This is a snippet of it:

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Unfortunately, because we really liked it a lot, but turned out to be a good thing, because we had the beat almost ready for Kelis.

It’s been released under the name No Security 134.

Here’s a first demo of it

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And here is No Security 134 which we haven’t posted on the blog yet!

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At the same time, we also produced a beat with dubstep influences and we had sent it to Diplo so that he could listen to it. While in New York with Dave (Switch) to mix the album, he suggested to continue working on that “dubstepish” beat sent to Diplo and to put that version on the LP.

We tend to listen to what friends have to say and decided to go for it. There was only a little problem. We had lost the Logic session of that and only had an mp3 file.

After some back engineering, we had the final version ready to publish and you all know that by now!

Crookers featuring Kelis – No Security

If you wish you can buy No Security and all remixes here:

Collaborations with Steed Lord have occurred on many occasions in the past. We made a remix for them and always shared each other’s tracks and ideas over the internet.

We met for the first time after a while, in Switzerland, in a club where both had to perform and we ended up dancing like nuts to a fantastic Hip Hop set by A-Trak. Since then, every time we see each other, it’s party time!!!

Beat for Transilvania was made about 2 years ago and it features many characteristic of rhythms we were producing back then. On the other hand the melody is something completely different from what we always did… sounds like music from a horror movie!

When we sent them the production to sing on it, that is exactly the direction we asked to follow. We wanted them to think about it, as the soundtrack for a film set in Transilvania… That is of course how the name came up and now we can say: They totally understood what we wanted!

Listen and download Transilvania

We went to downtown records in New York to visit them and were told about a cool Swedish band called Miike Snow they were working with. We listened to some of their works and were asked to do a remix. We accepted, but at one condition, that we would have done what we wanted and decided to do something different, not an ordinary dance track and so the Animal rmx came out.

We were convinced it would be turned down. Everyone in that period wanted us to produce Day ‘N’ Nite type of rmx, but surprisingly they didn’t! Actually they liked it and we were so excited about it that immediately thought we should have done something together for our album. That’s how Remedy was conceived.

We have no demos to show the evolution of this song, because it came out like that after the first attempt… What’s cool is that the group liked it so much that they decided to do a version for their album calling it “in search of”. Given that Tons of Friends was supposed to be out before  “Miike Snow“, we did not have anything against it. In fact we thought: “that’s about showing some mutual love too.”

You are probably wondering why we did not want to do something like Day ‘N’ Nite with them, even though it was our biggest success. Well, simply because you can do an infinite number of remixes with that style, but only one out them will fly that high… and once you did one… it’s better to change! Otherwise you may look like someone in the desperate tentive of replicating yourself…

We try to keep pushing things forward!

Remedy – Crookers Featuring Miike Snow – Radio Edit

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We have known Soulwax’s music for quite a long time, but only met them for the first time in Milan a couple of years ago. They were there for a gig and asked the promoters if they could meet us, since they had been interested in us after hearing our remixes. The promoters contacted us, and a few hours later we were all backstage together fooling around like good friends! Since then, we’ve seen each other more and more and eventually they invited us to perform at Soulwax Radio and Soulwaxmas in Ghent.

After our history together, asking them to collaborate on a track for our first album was the most natural thing for us to do.

We wanted to only use analog instruments, which is the opposite of what we usually do, so we went to their studio in Ghent and started playing synths all together. Of course we wanted it to sound as Soulwaxish as possbile! The result of our collaboration was the first demo and another track that they are going to use for the upcoming 2 Many djs album, in that one I (Phra) sing and we arranged Italo Synth using only digital plugins. In the end it was basically an exchange!

Here is Demo1

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On the 2nd demo I started singing the “Love, Love, Love” vocals and Igor Cavallera (MIXHELL) offered to play live drums on it after he heard the demo… how could we refuse?

Demo2

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After that we decided to have live bass on the track as well and our man Matteo took care of that! We sent it back to Soulwax who did their last edit, making a more mellow version. More Italo, less dancefloor banger.

Demo3

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After this we headed back toward the first demo, and came out with the final version of “We Love Animals“.

Stay tuned for Epidose #2… No Security ft Kelis