Above & Beyond interview that I bumped into

[crow]

Okay, so I was checking Ferry's forum this afternoon and I noticed there was a new interview for him on About.com's Dance Music section. Very typical interview... But then when I was done with the interview, I scrolled down to find a previously done interview for Above & Beyond. This is one amazing interview! Probably one of the... no no... the BEST I've ever seen! Very well conducted and structured and the answers were simply brilliant!

The interview is done by DJ Ron Slomowicz and the interviewee here is Tony, who is one of the trio and speaks on behalf of them. Quality responses from him! This interview pretty much sums up a lot of things concerning the scene and how it goes in terms of being DJ's and producers. I urge you to read this since I know it is very essential for every listener, fan, clubber, DJ, and ESPECIALLY PRODUCERS!

I must warn you though, the interview is pretty long and bulky, but you will be surprised of what kind of answers have been given to some questions. Tony's long and desne answers are very crucial and should grab everyone's attention!

You ready?
Alright here goes:

DJ Ron Slomowicz: Where did the name Above and Beyond come from?
Tony McGuinness (Above & Beyond): The three of us got together to do a remix for Chakra's "Home," and when we finished the remix and were just about to send it off to Warner's, where I was working at the time, we thought 'damn, we've got to come up with a name for the mix.' I looked around Jono's studio and there was this piece of paper printed out from the internet stuck to the wall above his bed. He had put 'Jonathan Grant' into AltaVista which was the equivalent of Google in those days and he found this website of this motivational guru trainer, and 'above and beyond' was his slogan. So I was sitting there, looking over the room, and I see 'above and beyond' and I just thought, 'that's perfect,' so it was called the Above and Beyond mix. I don't know that we thought of ourselves being above and beyond at that point, it was that the mix was called Above and Beyond, but then we started getting more work, and consequently it became our name. I think it sort of sounds a bit like we want to sound, it's kind of onomatopoeiac in that way.

RS: What's with all the different names you all use like Oceanlab, Rollerball, and Tranquility Base?
A&B: To be honest, every time anybody comes up with a pseudonym it's purely because they're not sure that what they've just done fits in with the main name. That's where Oceanlab came from, we invented a new project because we knew that we wanted to work with Justine Suissa, but we didn't know if Above and Beyond would work with Justine. We went with Oceanlab and that's done fantastically well, and in some ways it's more popular on the record front than Above and Beyond even. Then we did a remix for another guy that he rejected but we thought was fantastic, so we wanted to put it out, but it had so many knowing references to other records, it was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek thing, so we invented the name Tranquility Base to put it out and it did quite well. We did some more stuff as Tranquility Base, but most of the other pseudonyms were around before Above and Beyond, Free State was Jono and Paavo and the Dirt Devils was Jono and Paavo before they started with me, and Nitro Methane was a thing I did with my brother before I started working with Jono and Paavo. So they're just names that have sort of come along along the way, but ninety percent of what we're doing now is Above and Beyond, with Ocean Lab coming up fast on the outside.

RS: Now this is where Anjuna Beats switches to your record label, right?
A&B: Yes, that's right, Everything's part of one kind of extended complex organism really, and Anjuna Beats and Above and Beyond just turn into each other. It was principally the business side of things that we were worrying about today, but obviously all of it has implications for the other part. That's the thing about a small label like us where we're reliant on so many different sorts of income streams to make the whole thing viable. Any one of them on their own wouldn't give us a viable business model, so we need to keep on top of everything, really.

RS: So income streams, you've got your DJing, performing, producing, remixing, digital sales...
A&B: Yes and we've got typical artists that we sign and a publishing company. We've got our own label, a web shop that sells merchandise, t-shirts and earplugs and other things, slip mats and CD wallets and what have you. Obviously we produce Above and Beyond, we remix Above and Beyond, and we DJ. We're pretty much everything that a group can be involved in. It's really the way it needs to be, because the old model of making the money from selling records doesn't really work anymore because it's all changed. It's going to change increasingly in the future by having a sort of a bit of faces in every direction, this is the best chance of keeping going and becoming more successful.

RS: Are you all touring a lot right now?
A&B: We're continually touring to be honest, the difference between DJs and a band is there's not that much in terms of production costs, so we're kind of ready to go at a moment's notice. We don't really need to schedule three months solidly on the road and then two months off. We're able to work during the week in the studio and head-off at the weekend. Then if it's really far away, like we're doing a South American tour for a couple of weeks or an Australian tour for a couple of weeks, then we're away continually but most of the time we're gigging at the weekend and working during the week.

RS: As you're touring, is that just DJing or are you performing with a band?
A&B: No, we're just DJing at the moment. We've done live stuff in the past in the UK, as Oceanlab and we did an Above and Beyond gig in the UK with vocalists and live keyboards and live guitar. But to be honest, it's so much work for us to get stuff like that together and in terms of what we feel we need to represent Above and Beyond at this point in time, we just haven't really had time to do it. We were thinking about doing some kind of unplugged gig to launch the Ocean Lab album when that eventually gets finished and I'm looking forward to doing that because that takes the live group element of Above and Beyond and puts it in a space where that can really make a difference. The problem for you doing any kind of live thing in a club where people are out to have a good night dancing and if you put any kind of production in to the middle of that which is anything less than the sort of produced sound that they're used to hearing, then it doesn't really work. Especially to do that feasibly, because most of the tracks that we're making are so layered, we would need so many players to properly do live. The other issue they have is to get a big vocal sound in any kind of space, like if you go and see Coldplay or Mariah Carey or anybody in a room, you're spending most of the day getting the sound right and sorting the problems with the PA. You don't have that luxury in a nightclub, it's not a special live PA that they'll put in for you, you're playing the club PA. So generally speaking, everything makes it very difficult to do anything good live in dance music unless you're really going to go the full hog and put a band together, but still with some samples playing. If you really want to do something that is not in a club night that requires a lot of time and effort in terms of getting the production together and getting the dates together and because we're so busy doing other things, that's one side of things that we've not had a chance to do. The nice thing about doing something unplugged is it's quite low-key, and the live element will be a hundred percent and hopefully the kind of unique nature of it will be one hundred percent. But in terms of production it's basically a bunch of us sitting around playing mainly acoustic instruments and just seeing the other people that we work with singing. So it's easily done but not when you're sandwiched in-between two DJ sets which is the reality of doing anything live at a club.

RS: Were you all DJs first or producers first?
A&B: Definitely producers first, and I think actually we were all musicians first. I was in a band, Jono was in a band and, Paavo was making music for theaters originally and then all of us, by various different means got into producing electronic music. We started as Above and Beyond doing remixes. We got together to do a remix for Chakra at the first instance, so it's been kind of remixers, producers, and DJs, in that order. Then came the label and we became label heads as well, so we do quite a lot of different things.

RS: When the three of you create music, do each of you do a different part or is it more collaborative process?
A&B: It will depend on where the initial idea for the track comes from. Sometimes somebody can come up with an idea for a backing track and that might suggest to somebody else a spark and then it becomes collaborative very quickly. For example, a few years ago Jono and I were jamming in the studio and I wrote this miserable song about my girlfriend and I having just had a big bust up argument. We recorded that vocal and it sort of sat around for a long, long time. Then one day when I was away, the vocal got turned into a track that Jono and Paavo remixed. To be honest, every imaginable way that you could combine three people into making music, we do. We don't really have a formula for doing it because ideas come when they come and you can't suddenly come up with an idea on the spot. Its something that either comes to you or it doesn't. The great thing about having three people is there's always somebody who's feeling really enthusiastic at that very minute to get on and doing it and somebody wants to got and get something to eat or get on the internet or book some flights or do some other things, the process keeps going. So it's generally collaborative and I think, probably Jono or Paavo are much better on the engineering side of things than I am, they're certainly better at playing keyboards than I am because I'm a guitar player at heart and I tend to do most of the lyric writing and melody writing - the vocal side to things. But it's not exclusive, and that's kind of the way we like it really.

RS: When you talk about vocals, when you're writing a track do you have a vocalist or singer in mind?
A&B: When we do Ocean Lab stuff we've got a singer in mind because Ocean Lab's a project that we always do with Justine Suissa. Sometimes Justine will co-write the backing track and sometimes, like Satellite, which is my favorite thing that I've written with Justine, it was a case of sixty percent of the song was written and warbled on to a demo by me. Then Justine came back with another bit, and then we wrote another bit together and the thing sort of finally got finished. When we do Above and Beyond, to be honest, I think most of the vocal demos that I write have ended up having me on at the beginning. Then we found this guy, Richard Bedford, who was a friend of one of the guys that worked in our office and I'd been looking for somebody with that kind of voice. It's a guy with a very sort of soulful white voice and he sent in his CD and we played it, and literally within fifteen seconds I was like yes, this is the guy. He ended up doing three of the tracks on TriState, principally because he sings in a way that I'd really like to sing. It's not a million miles away and he's not a girl, so the songs which are written from a man's perspective still have that kind of integrity. But to be honest, it does not always matter, if a song's written by a man it can sound OK sung by women, Satellite is an example of that. There's nothing really sort of fixed in what we do, it's an entirely movable piece.

RS: You use male vocals when most trance music seems to feature female vocals. Is it more difficult to put male vocals in to the genre?
A&B: I think it's just a case of precedent, to be honest. I can't think why female vocals should necessarily become the dominant vocal type in trance. I think if you look at the kind of people and the music that they like outside of the trance genre, there's an awful lot of stuff that they're listening to be it, Radiohead or Coldplay or whatever else which is sung by a guy. So I think it's just precedent. There's been a lot of really, really good trance records with male vocals and there's been an awful lot of female vocal trance records and I think that's why people associate it more, it's just a familiar thing. It was put to me a couple of years ago about the fact that people like having women sing because a lot of people who are into trance are guys. Just imagine it's the sort of 75/25 thing, and by four o'clock in the morning it's mostly guys in the club and they like to have songs sung by supposedly beautiful or imaginable beautiful women singing down at them. I think the opposite of that is a song written from a bloke's point of view sounds really good when you've got a bunch of clubbers in a club singing along to it. So I think there's an argument both ways and, I think it's purely just an awful lot of old vocal trance had some wafty bird singing on it but I don't think either one is more valid or less valid really.

RS: You're album TriState, did you all sit down and say we want to write an album, we want to make our first artists album and we're making these tracks for it? Or was it more like you had stuff lying around that you finished up for the album?
A&B: No, we made a conscious decision to do it. For various reasons, partly because Ocean Lab was signed to a major label quite quickly after we did the first single, there had always been a kind of outside whip cracking that made Ocean Lab material appear. Whereas Above and Beyond was one to those things that we did when we found the time to do it. Consequently, as our main artist brand if you like, after four years of being together we'd only released two singles as Above and Beyond. So we thought, this has got to change and we really need to make an artistic statement as Above and Beyond and so we decided that we were going to make an artist album and that we weren't going to do any remixes for a while. Pretty soon on from starting it we decided that it was going to be an album that would hold together as an album rather than just doing another mix compilation or something that was wall to wall club tunes for an hour. We were going to make an album in the same way a group would make an album, which is write some stuff, pick the best bits and stick it on the album in a kind of traditional way. Everything was up for grabs - the tempo, the vibe of the track, and the subject matter of the songs. I remember doing a couple of tracks on the album and one of peoples' favorite tracks on the album is called "World on Fire," and when it was originally done, which was before we'd started to work on the album really, it was like well I'm not really sure this fits into Above and Beyond. The great thing about TriState is suddenly not only did it fit in but it sounded exactly right for that point in the album. It's quite a varied thing - the out and out trance on there, the slightly more progressive stuff and then almost ambient things on there. It's kind of held together by a mood and that mood's got something to do with what we want to say and that's a better place for it to have ended up is rather than us saying we need to make a record that reflects what we play in clubs.

RS: Speaking about that, when you're putting together a compilation like and Anjuna Beats, do you think about this is the stuff I'll play in a club or how do you choose songs for those compilations?
A&B: Well the idea of the AnjunaBeats Volume series is to reflect the label and the kind of material that we put out on the label. At the time of each compilation's release, it's looking slightly backward and looking slightly forward, so we've actually moved from the first one which was almost totally retrospective because we had such a bunch of material that hadn't been released on a compilation CD, that it was kind of backward-looking. As we've grown into them and the label's grown and the list of artists that we're working with has grown, then we've been able to make it a little bit more future-looking. So it's a kind of snapshot of the recent past and the very near future and in terms of what goes on, principally it's the biggest records on the label, either because they've already been big in the recent past or you think are going to be big. Then the secondary consideration is how they all fit together and make it a kind of listenable whole. Occasionally there's two very similar tracks that we have to choose between, but for the most part it's the biggest thing on Anjuna Beats. That's the job of Anjuna Beats Volume 1, 2, 3, 4, going into the future - to kind of give you the best possible example of what Anjuna Beats as a label is all about.

RS: If we were to hear you guys spin live at the club tonight, would you play a lot of the stuff on Anjuna Beats?
A&B: Yes, I think for the most part everything that's on the Anjuna Beats CD is the stuff that we've played in the club a lot, maybe not all in one night and maybe not in the order that it is on Anjuna Beats but that's a fair kind of condensed version of the sort of stuff that we play in clubs, depending on what time of the night you're playing. If you were to come and see us in Rio where we had a three-hour set then it would progress through that, more of the sort of slightly less filled AnjunaBeats stuff to begin and then going into the more kind of typical trancey euphoric stuff at the end with a few sort of diversions in the middle for a bit of tech and a bit of other flavor. So it is not a bad representation of what our DJ sets are like really.

RS: I heard you guys got a big award from Radio One, Essential Mix of the Year. Where were you when you found out about that?
A&B: I think we were in the studio. To be honest, still to this day it's one of the nicest things that's every happed to us because living in the UK, the Essential Mix is one of those things that's been around for a long time and it's been going long enough for there to have been some really seminal mixes. The one that Paul Oakenfold did all those years ago that had bits of film music and everything else was very, very influential to us both in terms of how we play in clubs and then when we got the opportunity to do the Essential Mix, the kind of thing that we wanted to do. The thing that would kind of not just be another Essential Mix, but to try and do something that was markedly different. So we put a lot of effort into it and we were very, very happy with the records that we got. I think we hit a raw nerve with the vocal bit, the spoken vocal thing that we put on which was kind of about the futility of war and the root of that and what's wrong with the world at the moment. It just seemed to be something that people wanted to hear and people weren't already hearing it. I think when it comes to things like religion, any kind of media tends to be so safe because you've got to be politically correct and the great thing about that Essential Mix is it had loads of different views on it, including some that you don't hear on the radio. So we had great music and the timing was right, we were a little bit more adventurous with what we put on it and so I think it did stand out. There were sixty thousand playback requests from the BBC site, so we already knew that it was making a bit of a wave. Then we heard that they were doing these awards for the first time, and I don't know how long the Essential Mix has been going now, fifteen years or so, so the first ever award, to win the first ever Essential Mix of the Year Award is just, it's amazing, it's fantastic.

RS: I want to ask you about the song "Alone Tonight" which was a radio hit over here in the US. Was that about a specific situation or is that a more general song?
A&B: It was written when I was going out with a Canadian girl who I'd known for a long, long time, and she was very, very beautiful model. I was in a kind of relationship where I really wanted to be in it because I'd invested so much emotional energy in it but yet there was something at the core of it which wasn't really working and we had another big bust up. I drove all the way back from Devon and that's when the words came to me and I literally in the studio on Monday wrote it. It's a kind of stream of vitriol about the very unhappy situation and relationship that I was in at at the time. The same girl in a very similar situation that led to "Faster in Love" which is a similar sort of vibe. We had lots of discussions when we first started doing these kinds of heartbreak trance songs as to whether sad, emotional lyrics had any place in a party atmosphere. There were lots of concerns that maybe trance needs to be happy but actually what you find is there's a lot more emotional energy at the bad end of the spectrum than there is at the happy end of the spectrum. A lot more people remember those situations more intensely than the times that they're happy in their life. The one thing that's absolutely true in terms of "Alone Tonight" is that loneliness is part of the human condition and even if you're in a relationship like I was at the time when I wrote that song, you can still feel like you're not really connected with that person. The proof of the pudding really is the amazing reaction this record gets in clubs. It's rather ironic fot a bunch of people on a night out to sing along at the top of their voices to such a sad and tragic story, but believe me they do. We've got some footage that my girlfriend filmed of the crowd in that NY club that used to by Twilo and you can actually hear people singing on top of the record which is just something. As musicians what we're trying to do is to put stuff out that hits a chord and it gives people something to sing. It gives them words that maybe they want to sing but they hadn't thought of them before. That's the beauty of what we do.

RS: Where do you see electronic music going right now?
A&B: It's difficult to tell. I'm a firm believer that the future is totally unpredictable, and so I'm not really sure where trance is going in terms of its sound. I think the rejuvenation of house music with that kind of darker baseline-driven sound has eclipsed electro as being the next big thing in house music. It's starting to filter into trance and add a kind of baseline-driven almost house influenced vibe to it. I think that's a very fresh and a good thing that's coming in, because there's an awful lot of kind of copycat and what we call VST trance stuff that made on a computer that sound like old trance records we made from five years ago. This is particularly annoying as we're obviously trying to develop our sound. The VST trance we get go straight in the bin for us. Ten years ago, in order to get a record released you had to get it signed to a label that was prepared to invest enough money in you as an artist to pay your advance, to pay for a piece of vinyl to be mastered, to pay for that piece of vinyl to be pressed up and distributed and that obviously it's an expensive business. There was a degree of quality control which has almost evaporated now. It's the easiest thing in the world to make a track on your computer using Reason or Fruity Loops which are relatively inexpensive and in some respects, do a lot of the thinking for you. You can easily produce something which sounds just like all those other trance records out there and think that you've nailed it, and then mail it out or press up a few CDs and get it into the public domain. So generally speaking, I don't think there's less good music, but there's an awful lot more bad music that's coming into the scene. You'll always find somebody to play your stuff, but I think the onus is more on the DJ and certainly for us as label heads. We're doing an awful lot more top-down A&R with the artists that we sign in terms of the stuff that we're putting out and the work that we're putting in after they think it's finished to get it to a point where it's really as good as it's going to be. That applies to everybody, we do that with our own tracks and our most successful instrumental trance artist, a guy called Super Eight who absolutely nails it as far as the public's concerned every time, and in every place his records are, you know, to a greater or lesser extend A&Red by us. That's a privilege that a lot of these young kids that are making records and it's very easy to convince yourself and your mum and your girlfriend that what you've done is good. When they have people who've got some experience actually saying it's no so great and they need to change it, they'll go and sign it to somebody else. So there's an awful lot of stuff that's not really had enough care and attention and really serious objective feedback to make it as good as it used to be. So I don't know what, in terms of the sound it's just going to happen, but that's something that's happening in trance music now. There's an awful lot more not so great stuff that's available for download and what have you. I suppose it's inevitable and it's not great for the scene but in some respects I don't know what the answer is - it's one of those new horizons that we need to deal with really.

RS: I love your term 'VST trance,' that's brilliant. So are you using Cubase and Logic or what do you use in the studio these days?
A&B: We've nothing against VST as a protocol to enable plug-ins to work in a computer.. We work on Macs so we don't really used VST as a protocol anymore. We certainly use the increasingly bewildering power of the computer to make sounds through soft synths and through sampling techniques, but we have still a large amount of external stuff that we use as well. The bits of the external equipment that do so much better at a particular job are the ones that we use most, and I guess the bits that we use most are the Pro 1 which is an old set of circuits mono synth which is really great for dark base sounds and dirty noises. The JP 8080 still gets wheeled out from time to time, that's the classic sort of Ferry Corsten doorway synth. There's all sorts of other bits that we use, but obviously the computer is at the heart of it these days and the array of plug-ins and soft synths is incredible. The job I suppose and the reason why VST got the term it got from where we're sitting is that if you just use the same presets and the same program as everybody else your records are going to sound the same as everybody else, and that generally is an issue.

RS: Are you using Logic or are you using ProTools?
A&B: We use Logic and we've recently invested in some really good converters. We've got some Apple G converters which I must say of all the things that we spent a number of thousand pounds on over the last five years, these are the most marked difference. People are talking about going to 24 bit / 96 kilohertz sampling rate and everything else. If you play a 16 bit file through some old CD player and/or through your computer and then you play the same thing through some really, really good converters that have got accurate clocks, the different is astounding really. You're still playing the tune when you go to a club, but at least in terms of making music it gives back some of the air that the analogue system used to have. We also mix through an old ghost desk, an old analogue glitzy desk, even if we're just putting everything out through eight or ten channels and mixing the desk flat, something particularly bottom end sound through an analogue desk is a much richer bottom end than just adding it up digitally in a computer. So it looks like a computer set up but there's some important augmentations to the way that we work that I think, hopefully you can hear it immediately.

RS: What's in your iPod right now that you're listening to?
A&B: My iPod today is on shuffle songs because having just recently bought a CD, I always stick it on shuffle songs. I've got nearly seven thousand songs on there so it could be anything from Keane to Frank Sinatra to Trance. I listen to all sorts of things. I've been trying to listen to a lot of sort of sad songs because I'm trying to get into songwriting mode for the Ocean Lab album. So I've been listening to a lot of things like Keane, Radiohead, Crowded House, Jeff Buckley, and things like that just to get a few phrases that sometimes spark you off. Random is my favorite just because I've got such an eclectic collection on there that it throws up some amazing, from A to B situations where it might just come out of a Tiesto record and go straight in to "I've Got You Under My Skin" by Frank Sinatra. It's a wonderful thing to be exposed to that kind of wide variation of music. With all that I've bought, it's like a random radio station with all the stuff that I love already.

RS: Is there anything you'd like to say to all your fans out there?
A&B: Thanks for the support. One of the things that still astounds me is that we're out there every week and if you look on our forum you will see crowd pictures and it looks like there's a whole crowd of Anjuna Beat T-shirt wearing people in the front row. That is happening more and more with greater regularity and greater numbers all around the world. It makes me feel very, very proud and very, very happy and very privileged that we've got such a loyal fan base and we hope we keep doing what they want to hear.

WOOO!! THAT WAS A LOT EH?!

Source:

[DJ Plasm-A]

I Learned More About A&B Now...Thanks Krow... I Used To Love A&B, But I Adore Them Now!

[Swing4]

I printed the whole thing & read it at home yesterday
It was very interesting...learned much about them & general info.
I say every1 should read it
10x Crow

[mzy]

very good answered question ... i've always loved A&B .they are the best producers

[crow]

Glad you like it. I personally like the part where Tony mentions the whole VST-Trance tracks that they receive. This should be an alert to every single producer out there to start experimenting with some new sounds and not directly sending their tracks out as soon as they think they got a sound from the first couple of tries. Making music isn't about getting into the studio and getting something decent. Why do you think producers these days use the term "experiment with sounds"?