Music > Interviews

Noisia

The Nick Rayns LCR, UEA

27/01/17

 

Back in 2003, Noisia, a Dutch electronic trio were releasing drum n bass tunes on an underground level. Within two years they became the go to producers on the scene. Since then they’ve set up three record labels, a radio station, remixed the likes of Moby and Amon Tobin, written music for loads of videogames including Devil May Cry 5 plus three tracks for metallers Korn. Their brand new album has just dropped, and the three time winners of the Best Drum N Bass Act at the Beatport Music Awards are heading to Norwich to treat us to headlining DJ set at UEA. I spoke to Thijs about the new album, their innovative audio visual show and that infamous hairy doughnut video. Not a euphemism.

 

Your new album Outer Edges came out last September – it feels like there were no boundaries within this work. How did you find working together again after time apart?

The album is pretty much about the boundaries that are there, they’re very real, but we wanted to explore the extremes of what we could comfortably see as fitting to Noisia, or fitting to what we think Noisia is, or fitting to what Noisia should be. We’ve always made quite abstract music, music that isn’t about something else but itself, the topic of the music is the expression of energy in sound. I think. So this album was about us looking for a new level of expression, and looking into how much further we could take this thing that we do that people seem to like. During the years leading up to the album we certainly hadn’t been apart physically, we have three studios right next to each other so we see each other pretty much daily. We did a lot together actually, we did the soundtrack for a videogame, did the I Am Legion album (a collaborative album with Foreign Beggars), released an 8-track EP called Purpose, and a lot of singles and some smaller EP’s. So yeah, we’d been busy. But it’s true, there’s been a six year gap since our last album in 2010.

 

You’ve developed an innovative show to go along with it, which won an award for best live show before the show had even begun! What is involved with the show?

Ha ha yeah, that was jokes! In all honesty at the point we won the award we really hadn’t made the decision to push for this audiovisual show idea we’d had for a while to become reality. That came after. There were a couple of important things leading up to it though, the first of course that we’d always had some sort of a vision of a show where we have much more control over the non-musical elements to a concert - video and lights. But it never felt like it was possible to do it all, let alone do it well. But when we toured the I Am Legion live show in 2014, two of us were occupied with music elements while the third did live VJing onstage right besides us while Pavan and Ebow were doing the lyrics live. We also toured with our own lights guy, who knew the show inside out. So we gained a lot of experience on that tour, of what’s possible and what’s not. After all of that experience, we felt more confident that we could do the same thing for Noisia. Another aspect was that we met our current lights guy, Manuel Rodrigues of deepred.tv, who’s personally developed a system to control lights from within music computers, so during the Outer Edges shows the light is always dead-on sync to the musical elements.

 

 

The video for Collider is mesmorisingly gross. How did you come up with the idea for the hairy doughnuts?

This is 100% credit to Henk Superelectric, a friend of ours from Amsterdam who’s previously made the equally bizarre video for Machine Gun. We asked a couple of people to send us ideas for a music video for Collider, but when he told us about his ideas including that big flying pink doughnut that comes back in a hairy incarnation too we were sold!

 

How can you tell when a song is complete?

Metaphysically speaking, the song tells you, you only follow what it tells you to do until it stops speaking, or you can’t be arsed to listen to it anymore because it’s too demanding ha ha. Only a track with a great amount of “lifeforce” will be able to force you to keep working on it. A lot of ideas just die down because they can’t motivate you to keep breathing life into them. Less metaphysically speaking, a good track has a strong internal logic that should direct you in one way to work on it and exclude all other possibilities, or at least most of them. You know you are done when you have brought the song to an acceptable length without breaking any of its inherent aesthetic rules. If we feel a tune can go anywhere that usually means the basic idea isn’t special enough. The great thing is that every great and special idea kind of commands you to approach it in a different way, which keeps finishing tracks interesting.

 

I love Surfaceless off the new album and also Get Deaded. There is such a mix of influences in there. What sort of music do you listen to other than dance music that’s found its way into your music?

Well this is very cliche, but between the three of us we listen to pretty much everything.

 

What’s the most important piece of equipment that Noisia uses?

Obviously our brain and ears, but I think another very important thing we really can’t miss is our studio rooms and our speakers. I could put another computer with another music application on there, make all sounds from scratch and still achieve an OK result. It would be frustrating, but I’d know what I hear. Using all the software we’re used to and all of our own samples but in a bad room on bad speakers would be really hard for us. But then again, our rooms and our speakers aren’t the only good ones in the world, they are ultimately replaceable. The only thing that genuinely makes us us is our brains I’d say.

 

 

You’ve started a radio station – Noisia Radio. Do you use it as a way to introduce your listeners to new music you like, and where can we listen to it?

The radio show is available on iTunes and RSS podcast services, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, internet radio stations, and even actual FM stations from Kazachstan to South Africa and US to Australia. And that is not a joke! Noisia Radio is a way for us to support everything we think fits into the Noisia world. So we play any genre we all can agree makes sense for Noisia Radio - we’ve got some old classics now and then, but mostly new music that we receive and find ourselves on the Internet.

 

What can we expect when you play at UEA here in Norwich?

I don’t know! Tell ME what to expect! I like to play some weird stuff, but I sometimes decide not to because I have a feeling I wouldn’t make anyone happy with it. So it totally depends!

 

Bassjam present Noisia playing a DJ set at the LCR on 3rd March. Also playing – Bad Company UK, Ivylab, Annix, T>I – Oblivion. Tickets available from ueatickets.ticketabc.com