Fouk on working together, sampling and more

With the majority of electronic music producers being solo acts, we’re always intrigued as to how the collaborative process works for those operating in groups of two or more. Daniël and Hans each have their own studio, but getting together regularly is key to their sound.

“When we work alone, I sometimes have a different workflow, or he has some ideas that I couldn’t find myself,” explains Daniël. “I’m the keyboard player, I can play parts really quickly, so when we work together, it’s a combination of all the ideas.

“Sometimes working separately also works really well,” he continues. “We might have a small snippet that we work on during the day, then I come home and have a crazy idea and lay down some keys, and then the next day, I go to his studio again and we finish the track… There’s no one set way that we work on a track.”

: So how do you get tracks finished between you? Hans: “Usually we get together and finish the track when we’re both there.” Daniël: “Mostly, I do the final mixes.” Hans: “We usually do the mix while we’re arranging as well, but for the final touches, some mixes need more work than others, and he has the best ear for that. He used to master our label’s digital releases as well.” Daniël: “These tracks all go to a proper mastering engineer, though. I’m not able to master for vinyl… well, I’ve never done it. I just make a premaster that we can send out, or a master that we can play in the clubs.”

: How much does DJing influence what you do in the studio, and vice versa? Hans: “A lot. Because we’ve been increasingly playing on prime time, that

COMPUTER MUSIC

influences what you make. The BPM is a lot higher than when we started; we used to do a lot of the slower jams as well, around 115bpm. But now, this track is 124, which is about the BPM that we’re playing out. I think the whole scene has changed, too – it’s become a little bit faster.”

: How much influence do you take from the scene and other artists? Hans: “I’d like to think that we’re always in a cocoon and original, but you always get influenced by other artists. You hear new stuff that you really like… it doesn’t have to be in the same genre. Like, Alfa Mist is a really good UK jazz musician… anything.”

: Describe what relationship you have with technology… Hans: “We’ve always been quite technically minded. If you have a home studio, you like to mess around with all the gear and stuff, so there’s a good relationship with technology – older technology as well. We started out playing on vinyl, so there’s always a lot of love there. As DJs, we’re not against the whole CDJ thing, as we use them a lot ourselves – you have to.” Daniël: “We’re more like classic DJs; we don’t really incorporate a lot of new technologies – we just mix from track to track. Mostly vinyl, but also digital, because we have a lot of tracks that aren’t released.” Hans: “With vinyl, you have something you can hold in your hands and build a relationship with.”

: MatingCall started with a single sample recorded from vinyl. Is that kind of sampling a big part of your music? Hans: “We used to say that we made collages of samples, finding a lot of musical samples that you could layer on top of to make really nice harmonies and so on. As we’ve evolved as artists, we do a lot more ourselves – it’s a different way of going about it, but we still use some samples.”’ Daniël: “For this particular track, for instance, we used just two samples.”

: So sampling is actually something you’ve moved away from? Daniël: “Yeah, and in the beginning we didn’t have all these [hardware] synths, so we did use a lot more software synthesisers. But also, we relied on all the great samples we found on records, and that defined our sound. People really liked it. We always liked to combine it with our own playing, though – not like making an edit, or something. You can take a disco sample and just slap a beat on it, which can be nice, but for us, it was more interesting to find those particular samples that worked together, and sometimes you couldn’t even hear the actual sample anymore. We’d layer, say, our own Moog bassline on top of the bass sample, and some chords.” Hans: “We’d love to think we do some creative things with samples. As long as it’s a part of a whole, not the main thing at the front, it can be really good, it can work really well. But where we’re at now, we’d like to do a little bit more than that.”

“As we’ve evolved, we do a lot more ourselves… but we still use samples”