In preparation of the second wind of their incredibly successful Wake Your Mind North American Tour and on the eve of their their return to Los Angeles for a very unique “Wake Your Mind In Concert” show at Avalon over Memorial Day Weekend, the two talents took some moments out of their crammed schedule to speak with us.
GDE: How do you see your current studio album, Wake Your Mind (Black Hole), as different from your previous releases?
COSMIC GATE: The biggest difference from Wake Your Mind to the albums before sure is that besides singers and songwriters, for the first time we have been working together with other DJs/producers. This, in our eyes, gave the album an even wider range than, for example, our Sign Of The Times album or Earth Mover. Those had quite some vocal tracks already, but they were missing out on the amount of collaborations we have on Wake Your Mind.
When you guys say that with your new album you want to "shake up conceptions of our music" and "blow any lingering, outdated misconceptions to pieces," what is meant by those statements?
There are still a lot of people who see our music like it maybe was in the late-90’s, not really knowing how our sound, or a lot of trance in general, has changed during the last years. These people unfortunately have a wrong idea of today’s trance, and we hope that the album helped a bit to show that trance sounds modern and has nothing to do with this simply cheap dancefloor vocal music that especially in Germany was branded as trance. That actually gave trance a bad name and the misperception has lasted until now.
A very easy example on Wake Your Mind are the two tracks we did with Alana [Aldea], “Perfect Stranger” and “Never Apart.” We really liked both tracks. They are simply different to all the singles we have ever done before. This shows that if we were just to produce singles and not work towards a full album, such music like the tracks with Alana would never have happened. To produce an album gives us the chance to express ourselves better, to show a wider range of our skills and musical ideas. To produce an album is really a lot of work, but we think it is important to make people understand what we are, that we not only produce club tracks, and that our limits are a bit beyond that.
With audiences' tastes constantly changing and music always evolving, what do you think it is that is going to entice people to listen to your music?
People always will listen to good music, and we hope that this is what we do, produce music that people simply like listening, dancing or singing to! Music that touches the soul, makes people happy or maybe even cry. We think it is important to feel music, and this is our goal: to write music that gets to people somehow, not only for a few weeks on the dancefloor following a certain short-term zeitgeist, but music they hopefully still listen to with pleasure in a few years.
When both of you are in the studio making an album, what's the interaction like between you? Do you guys work together or come up with separate ideas and try to merge them together?
Working on Cosmic Gate, we actually spent all our time together in the studio, so we follow ideas together right from the beginning. When we both like them, we try to push them on to see where this first idea brings us, and this is for us the best way to work.
Where do you see trance's position in the wider electronic music market ten, fifteen years down the line?
We think that trance for the last nearly 20 years has had a very important role in electronic music, and we are sure it will stay like this in the future. There are a lot of young talented producers that push trance to its next level, and others will follow, so it will be interesting to see how trance sounds in 10 years. No matter how, we are sure it will still have an important part in the electronic music scene.
We have a wide range of music that we grew up listening to starting in the 1980’s, so we are influenced not only by electronic music. Still today, we are pretty open to different styles, from opera to pop to lounge and back. We try to keep our horizons open and think it is important to not get blind for only electronic styles, as much as we love it.
For both of you, what's the experience of playing packed clubs and festivals like? How does it feel to be in control of crowds of that magnitude
If you are playing a packed club and the energy is flowing back and forth between the DJ and the crowd, this feeling is really amazing. It really gives you a kind of natural high, letting you as a DJ, and maybe also the dancer on the floor, give all the energy you have! This vibe can really lead to some fantastic parties. I guess we all know this. It’s simply a great feeling!
This is hard to say. All the tracks that we have produced are special to us. Most people maybe would say it’s “Exploration Of Space” or “Fire Wire” that makes them think about us first, but we as producers think that tracks like “Be Your Sound” featuring Emma Hewitt, for example, maybe are something to be more fond of. This is really hard to say. Maybe let’s agree on that the discography will not be wiped away for now too quickly and we all have time for a few more listens. [laughs]
For more information, visit www.cosmic-gate.de and www.blackholerecordings.com.
- Patrick (Words) & George (Media Editing) of Global Dance Electronic (keepitelectronic@gmail.com)
UPCOMING TOUR DATES:
Cosmic Gate back at Sutra in Newport Beach, CA w/ Emma Hewitt Thursday, June 28th 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment