elektro exclusive interview with Felguk

They’ve worked with the likes of Zedd and Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike and they’re Brazil’s favourite duo, combining blasting electro production with a canny eye for remixes and a dynamic approach to DJing that has its origins in their original day jobs as ad-music producers. With collaborations with Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike in the works and a string of US tour dates planned, Elektro Daily felt it was essential to sit down with Felipe and Gustavo, aka Felguk just before their set at Belgium’s TomorrowLand 2013.

Check out Felguk's Soundcloud page here.

You started out making audio for commercials. Do you think that’s had an effect on how you subsequently approached production?

That’s interesting - we’ve never thought about that! In a small way yes, in our new EP for example, there’s one track called "LoudBlue" -

-and this track was originally made for our publicity campaign: we exactly knew what we wanted and that was partially knowledge from our background - making tunes for commercials, so it had a little bit of an influence yes.

So when you make tracks now, do you go through a process similar to how you did when you’d receive commercial briefs?

It varied then, as it does now. Sometimes we now get an outline decided beforehand and that’s more similar to how it would go with commercials, but usually we sit down and experiment with crazy ideas - that’s what happens whenever we have some time. We’ll make one sound - from a sample or such, and we’ll tweak it here, tweak it there, throw in another sample, spark an idea and then we’re going. The most original compositions come from just experimenting freely. But sometimes, for example in a collaboration, we’ll have a DJ in our studio and he’s going to be in Rio for 3 days only. Then we have to be ready. We’ll have a few reference tracks that we want, where we’ll say “we like the drums on this one, we like x aspect of this one” and so on. That’s a quick way to come up with a good product. Often we’re really surprised by the outcome! But the most original stuff still comes when you have some time to really mess about in the studio.

You shot up pretty quickly off the back of some serious remixes -

Remixes are that bit easier because you have a starting point. You have a vocal that suggests a harmony - that are not too many ways you can move away from the key of the vocal - and sometimes there’s a melodic starting point too - it’s similar to having a commercial briefing once again. We’re not sure it raised the level of our production though. It’s a good strategy when you first start out - you draw attention to your name, people are looking at you, so you can persuade them to come see you playing out, but from then on, we haven’t been making a lot of remixes as we’re focussing now on original stuff, that’s the real challenge for us.

You guys produce and DJ as a duo - how does that relationship work?

We’ve been working together 6 or 7 years. And we’re still talking! In the beginning Gus was the DJ, I (Felipe) was the producer, I didn’t DJ, he didn’t produce. Now we do everything together. I taught him production, he taught me mixing. It’s very boring producing alone, it’s just you and the machine, you know? You listen to the same loop a thousand times, you feel, crazy, you don’t know if it’s good or bad anymore? I just, give an idea, he adds to the idea, I add to the new idea, we exchange and it flows much better, we’re brother on the studio and on stage!

How has that transition into working into both spheres had an affect on both of your outlooks?

Felipe: For sure. When you produce and don’t DJ, you’re more free, when you start DJing, you go back to the studio to produce and you’re thinking of the crowd and how they will react, you become a slave of the crowd. But then, before, I used to produce tracks that were considered too complicated for the crowd, lots of different parts and so on. After I started DJing I started making tracks that were more straightforward, more effective.

Gus: Yeah, it’s the other way around! I injected my knowledge of crowds into production, and I saw DJing a bit differently too I guess.

TomorrowLand’s one of the biggest festivals on earth. How do you prepare for a set like this? Is it different to preparing for a club set?

It varies venue to venue, festival to festival. In a festival you can experiment more, you can play some commercial stuff, you can play underground tracks, you can mash in rock or classic vocal samples, I think in clubs there is a stricter language to follow. At a festival, they are less heterogeneous, there are people from all over. When you play in a club your play to that town, those regulars, who came here expecting something specific.

Is there a Brazilian sound?

There is a Brazilian electro thing for sure but that’s not what really rocks the crowd there. It’s more the overall international sounds you hear at all big festivals and events. We think the Brazil vibe is growing, but it’s not exporting its trends, it’s still importing these. 98% of the Brazilian clubs are still populated by Brazilians. We hope one day it’ll start exporting itself more. That’s why we’re here!

You play an electro house sound. We have the EDM thing, we have the Deep House blow up, do you think we’ll rotate back to electro?

Hmm. Hubs like the UK are bit different to the rest of Europe, you still have lots of tribes listening to drum & bass and the like. Big room electro already dominates international EDM we think. Electro has its root in house, and whilst trends move in and out: like dubstep’s downward and trap’s upward cycles in the US, house and housey, four-to-the-floor based stuff has always remained consistent. Who knows why? perhaps because it’s the most straightforward.

What are Felguk’s plans for 2013?

We’re off to the US at the end of September, We’re in Australia at the end of this year and India early next year - we’re really excited about these places! We just released a new EP, Slice & Dice, and we’re now getting the feedback on that - all the love from the hard work we’ve put in! We’ve got a collaboration coming up with Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike soon, and we’ve got plans to sit down and make more music. Singles though- we’ll hold for a little bit before our next EP, in order to consolidate and just focus on some more collaborations.

What advice would you give aspiring producers?
Be a nerd! Everything you need can be got for free on the internet: you don’t need analogue equipment or the like. Go to forums, you don’t even need paid lessons, get free tutorials, get free samples, free VSTs. The other tip is get a few reference tracks, and try and rebuild them. After that you can develop your vocabulary for your own sound.

What would you be if you weren’t DJs?

Gus: I would own a restaurant

Felipe: I’d be his biggest client! I guess I’d work in music, managing someone. Or interviewing DJs, like this!