Jimbo James
Interview with Tomas Barford of WhoMadeWho
Biggest challenge of creating Watergate 26 mix?
The biggest challenge was definitely to make a ‘club mix’, while still being true to what WhoMadeWho is about and our history as a band playing a live and releasing indie-electronic records. We wanted to bring as much ‘us’ into the compilation without compromising the format. There are loads of good club tracks out there, and a lot of amazing producers sent us great tracks, but many of them didn’t fit in with the kind universe we wanted, even though there were clear ‘hits’ among them. Another obstacle was also that we wanted to make the compilation 100% unreleased and exclusive material, which also narrowed down our choices a lot. In the end we really feel we succeeded in creating a personal compilation.
Biggest joy of creating Watergate 26 mix?
The biggest joy was working together and being able display all these nice people we have met around the world the past years. Oona Dahl, Clarian and Concret we met at Burning Man, Magit Cacoon played with us at a beach in Tel Aviv, Ruede Hagestein through a release on cult label Freundinnen in 2004, Otto B we heard by coincidence walking past their studio, Jenia Tarsol we met at a traditional Ukrainian lunch in snowey Kiev. There are a lot of personal stories involved in the project.
Tell us how the musical collaboration with Artbat and how it came together? Why do you think your respective sounds work so well together?
We also met Artbat in Kiev while we played there. We have always been big fans of their productions so it made sense to start working with them now that we got to knew them. Even though a lot of people might not agree, I feel they have a little of both disco and trance in their sound, two genres that we really like and that fit perfect for WhoMadeWho’s sound. They have great understanding for both a good dirty beat and great harmonics – and know how to cut a simple production, qualities that mixes great with WhomadeWho. We did two tracks together ‘Montserrat’ where they re-edited one of our songs and ‘Closer’ where Jeppe from WhoMadeWho did a vocal for one their tracks.
Catch ARTBAT and WhoMadeWho at Watergate on Friday, April 5th, for the official release party.
– jams
Jimbo James
Editor-in-Chief
jams@musicis4lovers.com
