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Swayzak- The New Kings Of Synth Pop-

Author: Jonty Adderley
Sunday, September 8, 2002
Deliberately eclectic and impressively original, Brit duo Swayzak (aka David Brown and James Taylor) occupy their own little niche of today's fast growing electro revival. Musically experimental, though equally at ease with the 80s synth pop of Danse Society and Human League, the pair shortly release Dirty Dancing,
a highly interesting and listenable album that sits alongside the likes of Teknova and even Gigolo stuff.

That the pair decided to name it in homage to the dreadful Patrick Swayze film of the same name is just one indicator of their refusal to play the game, as is their choice of interview location; the cafeteria at London's Science Museum.

"The title works on different levels too, it's a bit of a joke and a piss-take and at the same time an apt description of the music," explains David.

"We preferred to name it after a really crap film because if we'd called it after a cool 80s film like Cat People that would have been much more obvious."


Skrufff (Jonty Adderley): Your new album has this very contemporary electro sound, what inspired it-

Swayzak (James): "We decided we wanted to make it more song based and not too long and we wanted to make a 'proper' album with ten tracks that was under an hour."

Swayzak (David): " We also wanted to make it more upbeat, with vocals taking it to a certain level then adding certain types of sounds to make it more poppy. We've grown up from a time when synth pop was around. We'd forgotten about it then we started playing live in Germany a lot, we started hearing DJs playing Gigolo stuff and mixing it up with stuff like Human League, Throbbing Gristle and minimal house and we got inspired."

Swayzak (James): "That's where dance music came from, when the first acid house producers came out they all liked Prince, Giorgio Moroder and these kind of artists and it's nice to revisit those infuences. I suddenly realized half way through recording that this is a pop record, though we hadn't intended it in that way. A lot of synth pop in the 80s also had great sounds but terrible production values whereas now you can make it sound a lot tighter and better for the dance floor."

Skrufff: There's a piece of graffiti writing on your website saying 'Techno is so last century', why did you stick that on there-

Swayzak (James): "We didn't decide to, the guy who designed the site put it up. He went to some drum & bass party full of 14 year olds and someone had written it on the wall, so he took a picture. This was about six months ago."

Swayzak (David): "And it is quite cool and kinda' true. Techno feels like it's down a little and to me, it's got a little boring right now. I haven't heard much good stuff lately. The only really interesting stuff I've come across has been Richie Hawtin's music and some of the things he's doing with Vinyl Scratch (MP3 mixing). But that's more of a technological thing, the music hasn't changed much recently."

Skrufff: Did you really do all the collaborations over the net-

Swayzak (James): "We were never actually in the studio with any of the collaborators, some sent their parts in by MP3s though others sent us their parts on CD and we'd convert them into the song."

Swayzak (David): "We've since learnt that you lose 30% of the sound quality on MP3s but it doesn't matter."

Skrufff: Bands who use lots of guest singers such as Massive Attack, always seem to struggle when playing live, did you consider hiring one permanent singer-

Swayzak (James): "We never found the right person though we've never actively gone out looking for everyone, everyone we've worked with has happened as a natural progression. We also have such an established way of working together. We're talking about playing live with some of the singers next year but we'll see. We already play live all the time and not having singers isn't a problem because the way we play live is to jam and improvise each set. We have a brilliant programme called Live, where we p
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