Futureboogie: an interview with slo-mo house stars Behling and Simpson

Futureboogie: an interview with slo-mo house stars Behling and Simpson

28 May, 2012
by: Guest Spot

Joe Brooke-Smith meets the slow house pioneers.

Behling and Simpson burst onto the scene last year with their trademark infectious, slow motion house cuts. They have quickly risen to fame as part of the Futureboogie family - the party-starters who have been slowly but surely taking over the world from their Bristol HQ. Their rise may seem to have come out of nowhere but these two artists are in fact veterans of the underground who have been releasing individually and in collaboration for many years.
 
Having now put out a string of releases with Futureboogie it's clear that these guys are doing it their own way. They have brought fresh ears to house music and tracks like 'Politics' and their mega-hot re-edit of 'Faith' by India prove that they know how to make a dancefloor work. In celebration of their gig at Trouble Vision as part of the Futureboogie takeover last weekend we managed to pin the boys down to ask them some questions.

First off congratulations on the success of the Behling and Simpson project so far. When was it that you guys decided to start a new collaboration and what brought on the desire to head into new territory?

The eternal search for fresh horizons, or something like that. After a period of focussing on one area, it's nice to experiment and try new directions, some of which turn out to be dead ends, others of which open up new areas of creativity and reinvigorate your approach to making music. I think we had a bit of a quiet patch in the studio and started messing about, trying to see if we could find our own take on house - gradually, the Behling and Simpson sound emerged.

Did your sound fall together naturally into your killer slow-mo house grooves or did you try out different possibilities before you struck on the path you're now on?

We basically worked our way downwards in tempo, and the slower it got, the more interesting we found it. I don't know whether that's a product of working in an isolated, windowless bunker, or more that it was a new groove and feel for us, but slowing it down was definitely the key. Playing the stuff out helped as well, as always, the feedback loop from crowd to studio is invaluable.

So you guys have been collaborating for a number of years now, under a variety of pseudonyms - what makes you work so well together?

I think we've got to the stage where we're pretty comfortable in our working relationship. When you start of collaborating with someone, there can be a lot of pressure to make sure that 'your' ideas make it into the tune, or that you get to have your say, but after working
together for so long, it's a lot easier to say either 'that doesn't work, let me have a crack' or 'I've run out of ideas here, do you want to try something' without any of those anxieties coming up. Being genuinely good friends helps as well for those long, deadline-
pressured sessions!

You guys have worked both together and separately on lots of different projects spanning a pretty broad range of genres - what is it that makes you keep wanting to explore new areas?

I think that it's not a case of wanting to, so much as needing to - whenever we've tried to only work on one sound or project, sooner or later we get itchy feet, or find ourselves repeating ideas, and the only way for us to keep ourselves fresh and developing new techniques and approaches seems to be to work on a range of different stuff. In many ways it would be a lot easier to just do one thing and one thing only, but we don't appear to be capable of operating like that!

There's been a lot of talk recently about artists from the dubstep and broader bass music scene starting to write house music which seems to me to be bringing a new fresh element to the music we're hearing. How important do you think this cross-polination is in driving music forward? Is it just a bandwagon thing?

Provided it's good music, and approached from a genuine place, then it's all good. Certainly the resurgence in classic house and Chicago sounds has helped with one of my pet hates, which is music without sonic character - if you're trying to recreate the vibe and feel of some of those early, dirty records, recorded with shonky equipment and run hot to tape, you can't just rely on standard Logic presets. On a broader level, house and techno are kind of the 'main branch' on the tree of dance music, and everyone needs to go back to the source from time to time.

The Bristol scene and Futureboogie in particular seems to be set for world domination at the moment. What do you think it is about this city that leads to the creation of so much good music?

1. The size: big enough to allow decent events to happen, small enough to get to know everyone easily.
2. The people - and particularly the Afro-Caribbean population. If you look at all the classic Bristol music, from Wild Bunch through Full Cycle to Tectonic and beyond, you can hear the sound system heritage lurking there to greater or lesser extent.

Futureboogie is widely known - but can you give us some names of artists to look out for and other Bristol labels that we should be checking?

Keep an eye on the whole Idle Hands family, and in particular Kowton, who is set for a storming year. Kahn is blowing up as well, and deservedly so.

Finally tell us where the Behling and Simpson project is going next. You've put out a number of albums under different names in the past - can we expect a B&S long player anytime soon?

I think the plan for the minute is to keep on releasing singles, and hopefully build more of a focus on the sound we're pushing. Possibly a couple more R&B edits, definitely a single on Applepips, and various remixes here and there as well. From experience, we know that albums are not to be approached lightly, and I think we'd like to develop what we're doing a bit more before looking at that possibility. Having said that, we definitely want to work with more vocalists...

Behling & Simpson - Politics EP by behlingsimpson

For more events at Corsica Studios click here.

Guest Spot