First off, a massive congratulation on your recent success in the electronic music scene. I'd also like to thank you for this interview with liquidsilvermusic.com. It's a pleasure to have you with us.
Bonjour ! And thanks, it’s also a pleasure for us !
Most of your songs are a cross of hip-hop and dubstep. When did you first begin experimenting with these genres and how has your music evolved since then?
We started doing hip-hop almost 10 years ago. We had turntables, a lot of vinyl’s and a computer with cubase... We started making beats and were looking for an MC but at the time we didn’t know anybody in that scene so we finally ended up with a lot of instrumentals that didn’t even need an MC anymore. At the time, we were already experiencing a lot of different styles and tempos. We had a lot of influences whether it was bass music or movie soundtracks.
When we produced “Robbery’s song”, in 2005, we did kind of a dub step intro and at the time didn’t know what it was! We just thought we made a kind of 2-step beat with hip-hop sample and a “DnB” bass. We started realizing soon that it was called dubstep. From that we followed the movement and it’s has been a major influence in our new tunes, but we still keep our hip-hop basis! The Cassius Remix, for example, comes back to a hip-hop tempo at the end because we just thought something different had to happen at the end of this track, which begins with dubstep.
Was there ever a breakthrough moment when you realized you had created something special?
Not really. From day one we never applied any rules to our music; we just try to have a lot of fun while doing it. We just came naturally to what we do today, and a lot of fun means new sounds and new textures for us. We just like to take a lot of time to create!
Well, we couldn’t work without our computer because it’s the center of our studio. We still use Cubase as our main Sequencer. We produce a lot on the road too with laptops. So the one thing would be the computer but there are a lot of other tools we couldn’t do without:
We use a lot of hardware. We recently bought a Virus TI and it’s a killer for basses and unseen synth sounds! We can’t really imagine just using VST synths now that we have this one !!
We can’t go live without our MPC’s, turntables or Kaoss pad because in most of the songs we play manually on theses machines.
There’s not really a regular time, we already spent more than 6 months on one track, while some others can be composed in one night ! We are pretty long in general because we like to work on details !
The most thrilling aspect is to travel. We’ve been doing dates in Vietnam recently and since we both have Vietnamese origins it was a pleasure being there. Someone even told us that we had the first crowd dancing to dubstep there!
Playing live is always a big pleasure whether its clubs or big festivals.
That’s a really hard question! Probably the hardest one we’ve ever been asked!
DJ iRaize : Dr Dre
Pho: Prefuse 73
Can we expect to see you in the Unites States anytime soon?
Right now we’re working on bringing the live in USA and Canada so it might be pretty quick!
Your new single "Megaphone" is now in stores. Where did the inspiration for this song come from? And I know it’s early to ask, but can we expect any singles from you soon?
It’s a vinyl and Mp3 release that came out last week, and its also part of the forthcoming album: “Cloud Adventures”(out on Disquette records in February 2011). We’ve been on this album for 5 years now! There are many things we received inspiration from: Asian samples, Dubstep Basses, Hip Hop beats, Soundtracks and old movies …
We have a lot of artists featured on this album: Shabazz the Disciple (NYC), Shogun Assassin (NYC) from Killarmy, Non Genetic (LA) and ALI from France. There are also tracks with Luce (Australian cellist), Hansen (a French Saxophonist) and La Fine Equipe (French Hip-hop producers). All these people inspired us too for the realization of “Cloud Adventures”.
And finally, I have to ask this. What’s with the cat costume?
These are Shinobi special task force masks from a very popular manga.
We watch a lot of anime and read a lot of manga, one of our inspiration sources.
All ninja, skateboarders, break dancers, turntablists, and graffiti artist do tricks.
So Tha Trickaz just do tricks with music & sounds.
Thanks so much for your time. All of your fans including ourselves wish you luck in the coming years. We look forward to hearing more of you down the road.
We can’t wait to go to America !!!
