[divider]INTRODUCTION[/divider]
After Thomas Newson finished his set at the Playhouse Festival, Canadian DJ/production duo Dzeko & Torres took the mainstage for their first performance in South Korea. However, before they went on, we managed to sit down for a few minutes to ask them some questions. These guys have been putting out some of the biggest tracks in EDM over the past couple of years, so we were anxious to hear their answers. Read our brief interview below:
[divider]DZEKO AND TORRES INTERVIEW[/divider]
2014 is coming to a close what are some of the highlights from the past year?
I think just the whole year in general has been really good for us. We started off the year with a collab with Tiesto on his album and a remix/collab that we did with him for John Martin. And then after that, just a bunch of…touring all summer. And then the Carnage tour was great too. We did the Carnage bus tour which was massive. Really we just had a really good year and now, I mean, all the music that we worked on all of this year is all coming out end of this year. Like we have the collab with Moti coming out at the end of this month (December 2014), and then into January, February and March we have all the rest of our music coming out.
With so much music coming out how do you guys decide on which labels to release on?
We have releases on Spinnin’, Musical Freedom, and Doorn…
…You just kinda look for what’s the right fit and you send it out to those labels. Because we release on Musical Freedom so often, it’s pretty cool because we get to kinda put whatever we feel like putting on Musical Freedom. Like, anything that we feel that we’d like to put on there, they usually like it, so, I mean, it’s a good home base for us.
Tell us about the 10 minute mix you just put out for 2014.
We’ve done it since 2012, and no, you don’t really keep track all year. Just at the end of the year, you just look back and you see. You go through Rekordbox and stuff and see what was your most played tracks. We don’t necessarily do the most popular tracks. I mean, it always ends up being the most popular tracks, but it’s always the tracks we play the most throughout the year. And this year there was about 70 of them and we couldn’t fit them all, so we just picked 63…
Do you find the amount of tracks you play different in festivals and clubs?
Yeah, festivals you have to play more songs.
Clubs you can kinda drag out the whole song. You can even do intro/outro mixing. And festivals…it’s almost like the crowd has ADD. You have to just cut the whole time.
Are you more comfortable in the studio or on the road playing in front of fans?
…We started at different places. I started in the studio and he started DJing. So I think…over time we both got used to both places. I don’t think there’s any particular place where we’re better than the other. I mean, I think we’re pretty good DJs and I think we’re pretty good producers…
Is there anything in the studio that you must have to focus?
Tea and coffee, that’s it.
What are you guys using for equipment/software these days?
Ableton…we switched to 9 about a year ago when it came out, but we just switched to 64 bit two weeks ago. It’s still not complete because there’s some plugins that aren’t 64 bit yet…
What are the benefits to switching to 64 bit?
…You can run more channels. The 2014 mix had 298 channels, so we had to switch to 64 bit. Because at 32 bit we couldn’t even open up the project anymore. If you have a computer that can do it, its worth doing it just because you can run a lot more stuff. And if you find that your projects are crashing on 32 bit, 64 bit can handle it.
What’s the plan for 2015?
I think we’re gonna be finishing up a lot of new music and just keep adding music. A lot of new music.
Any tours coming up?
Yeah, we’re doing Europe for the first time. We’re doing India for the first time. We’re doing a whole South America tour for the first time…it’s not gonna be as intense as touring as we did last year. We did over 120 shows last year — 130 or something like that…It will be less this year, I think, but it will be records we’ve never played before.
What do you guys like to listen to in your free time? Any albums of this year that were your go-to albums?
Dzeko – Hip-hop. Almost anything. I listen to anything…I was listening to the new J. Cole album. It’s pretty good. I think it just came out.
Torres – I don’t really like anything but dance music. It’s pretty bad. Probably my favorite album of the year was the Guy Gerber and P. Diddy, which is really Puff Daddy, which is 11 11. It’s pretty cool.
Any brief advice for producers?
I don’t know if there’s any good production advice really. It’s kinda just ‘figure out the way you want to do something’. We don’t know what the hell we’re doing in reality…no one really does. But, if it ends up sounding good, it ends up sounding good. And I think that’s the best advice you probably give someone — if it sounds good, it sounds good. Oh, and I guess the only thing we could really say is: just cut the bass out of anything that doesn’t need it because, you know, when you’re trying to compress and there is too much bass going on, it makes everything really, really, really quiet.
[divider]CONCLUSION[/divider]
We want to thank Dzeko & Torres and their team for allowing us to grab this interview and some pictures. We enjoyed their set, and definitely hope to see them back in South Korea in the very near future. Be sure to check out the rest of our articles related to Playhouse Festival including the coverage, photo gallery, and interviews with Vicetone, Borgore, and Thomas Newson. Stay tuned for the final interview of Playhouse Festival with Tritonal!