We really dig the dancers too, they did such a great job bringing the story to life. “Broken” is about a girl who meets a guy in a bar, and when she sees him, time freezes. They’ve never even exchanged a word, but she fantasizes about what their lives would be like together, and like the song, it goes to a pretty dark place. The dancers are acting out the interactions between the guy and the girl through interpretative dance, it’s a little sexy, a little dark, and ultimately doesn’t end well for the guy. Broken is actually the first video in a two-part series and ends in a bit of a cliff hanger that is resolved in the second video, so I guess you’ll just have to wait and see for that 😉
What has been the most exciting part about having your debut album CRAVE out?
Honestly it was such a release to finally have it out! CRAVE took a long time to make and it’s been so great to be out performing the album live all the time. Now that we have the videos about to come out, and we’re getting radio play in the states, people are finally getting to hear it, and we just want to keep things rolling.
Why did you pick this song to make a video for?
The whole concept behind FEATURETTE is just that – we’re story tellers, and we want to create a mini-feature for each album. So we thought, what better way to keep that motif going than to make a featurette for the videos as well? “Broken” is the first song on the album, and the beginning of the story, so it was our natural first pick for the video series, where the next video we’ll be pushing out is the finale, and the last track on the album. We tried to encompass the whole story of CRAVE over these two videos, where “Broken” really sets the scene well for ‘boy meets girl’, but much darker. It pulls you down and makes you feel and see all the visceral, ugly, lusty passion that comes out of a new love, but in a twisted way where everything that happens in the video is maybe just the girl’s projection of her reality.
How did you guys meet and start making music together?
Hilariously enough, we met working at a band camp – so it’s always been music for us. We jammed together at the camp and then clicked and started writing songs, albeit in totally the wrong style, but some of those songs actually made it onto the album which is kind of cool. It was a huge transformation – for example, one song off CRAVE vol. II, “Memorize” started as a folk song… which, looking back, is pretty hilarious! We definitely prefer the sound we ended up with, seeing as both of us were upsettingly poor guitar players…
How do you guys build a song? Do you meet to jam or put pieces together individually?
I feel like jamming for most electronic musicians is a different sort of animal. Since a lot of the music has to be pre-programmed, we don’t have the freedom to just throw something together on the spot. For us specifically, Jon’s a drummer, and I’m a signer, so if we jammed on our natural instruments, there would for sure be a lot of holes. It’s less jamming and more nerding-out I would say. We hover over a computer for several hours playing with synths and usually the songs evolve from the sounds of the synths that we make, and those take us somewhere. The melody and lyrics usually come last, and only after we’ve got the right sound going, then it all flows from there.
You have a lot of people excited about your music, did you feel something special when you first started playing together?
For me, coming from a classical background with no transition from one genre to the other, I had all the feels. LOL I felt as though I didn’t know what I was doing, or who I was trying to be, which is a really difficult thing to admit and come to terms with. It was such a drastic departure from the world I’d been living in that it really shocked me at first. What I did find is that I got completely addicted to the rush and wanted to perfect my game and work my craft so hard ever since. I think the live show is just as important as the product you’re putting out there online – it’s the whole package that needs to draw people in and be irresistible to get people to hear you.
Who are your dream collaborators?
Phantogram. They’re so rad.
What’s next for you guys?
I feel like there’s a new adventure everywhere we look. We’ve barely made a dent in what we ultimately want to do with this project so we’ve got a long way to go. We’re going to play as much as we can, and start playing outside our comfort zone – hopefully some tours outside of Ontario/Quebec soon, more radio play, and always, always writing. We’re not stopping at CRAVE, we’ve got a lot more planned.
Listen for us.
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story / Koko Ntuen