Live sets vs. DJ sets? How would you describe them? Bloody Beetroots once told me it's like being in completely different worlds. With the live show it's a different stage set up with drums mixing desks and everything. Then the production is much bigger, sometimes we have our own lights that we bring a long and of course we play our own music. With the DJ sets, the fun part is that we can play other peoples music as well. This is very inspiring. I believe were not really seen as DJ's but as a band that coincidentally does DJ sets. If that's what people have in mind I'm totally fine with that because in the end, they want to hear our songs. I love the fact that we can combine our songs with all of the interesting stuff that is out there. This can be new stuff or very old. That would be the main difference from the DJ sets and the live show. Also it's very easy for us to check out our own new material. Back in the day it was very difficult for us to try out a new song, because the way we have our live shows it's a very big production and a lot of stereo files we bring and there's a lot of different outputs that we use for the bass drum, bass, keyboards and everything. So if you want to try out something new it's really a lot of work. With the DJ sets we can just take something from the studio or hotel room and just roll with it all the time. With the DJ sets you can just try it out and see how it works and that's really a great opportunity to see the reactions and it makes it a lot easier. Have you thought about doing any live set compilations with other artists that also do live sets? Not really, could be a good idea for the future. We want to have more freedom during the live show
and we know when something is coming, for example in the 16th bar the drum is gonna come. It would be very interesting to do for some parts of the show with another band. We did quite a couple of shows with the Disco Biscuits. We've played with them many times, and to see how they jam I would love to have some of that. Not musically, but the technicality. Walter plays good keyboards and I do the drums, and we could expand but technically. Seeing how they jam I'd love to use that. Yeah there would need to be rehearsing. The thing is with Walter and I, we have worked together for so long that we don't have to talk much and we kind of know what the other one thinks. It'd be interesting to feel the music and see how one person takes it then the next. A lot of artists try to play everything to please everyone. What's your opinion on artists changing their style as music changes through time? There are a couple of angles to see it from. It's always fun to surprise and it just hits people and they say ooh where did this come from. In entertainment, you can do anything just as long as you never bore. Then you have to look at their whole career, unless if you're AC/DC and you have the great luck that you can basically play the same songs for 30 years and keep your fan base and they just want this, then it's great. As an artist, you should always try to develop your new ideas. As I said before, that's why the production of the album took so long. We needed to find ways to do things differently but in the same language, so to speak. I like to believe that it's always good to look forward and also see what's here at the moment and should I follow that and produce for the
market. But that's what we don't do; we never produce for the market. We think of, where do we want to be in one year? I think it's great to experiment a little bit and of course the worst you can do is follow the market and say oh this is what everyone else is doing so I might as well do it too. That's just a sure way to kill yourself career wise. When you look at EDC, when we heard we would play on the same stage together with Bloody Beetroots, Boys Noize, Proxy, Major Lazer we thought oh my god this is going to be very difficult, are people going to expect us to play very hard or should we even try to do this? But we decided to do what Booka Shade does and it worked out very nicely. I was very happy with the show. You have to find, who you are and what you really like and go for it and not look left and right. It can be very difficult; I'll tell you it took us a very long time in our career. We've been doing this for a long time now. What do you think of a situation where another artist uses your song as a sample? Like when Will I Am used body language? It's a great honor. Funny thing, the way we heard it in the beginning, he didn't really want to clear the sample, he wanted to just use it because he thought it was just an underground thing, that he could just grab it and not do anything. Then he found out that it was rather well known in the club scene. But I was very happy that he used the song, and in our DJ sets we like to use a mash up of it. If it musically makes sense, not only harmonically but from the general attitude of the song, it really works together. I think it's a great way of working and combining these bits and pieces. I'm always happy to have our songs sampled, unless if it's something completely stupid.