November

Artist of the Month: Zuri

01) When did you two meet up for the first time and how?

We started producing music as solo projects first ... When Maxsie was a DJ in his city, he wrote tracks for his sets, and i wrote tracks for his friends at the time when he was just a clubber!
You know, it was just a hobby for us at that time!

Many of our solo-tracks were aired in the city, they were distributed on the Internet, forums, everywhere! Then Maxsie decided to form a duo to write club music, and a mutual friend thought: "Hey Guys, You need each other! You would make a great team!"

He decided to introduce us, and getting us acquainted, it was wonderful. He led us to a local club, where we drank, danced and talked. Clubbing with pretty girls surrounded by great music created a warm aura for us in 2007, as you’d understand after the beers, the music and the club, common interests and common tastes came afloat and we decided to get together to produce music. It was destiny I suppose. And after expending days and nights in the studio, writing, writing and doing yet more writing... we decided to move a step forward and formed a serious duo.

 

02) Has Electro House always been your passion, or did you produce something else before it?

Actually, we’ve always listened to and loved Electro House but we loved progressive too, as a matter of fact, we tend to fuse both styles (leaning more towards the electro side) ... You know, as in progressive electro. At first our productions were hard, we loved to do crazy ideas, but after three or four releases at Beatport, we started doing things that weren’t as aggressive, or as rigid and more popular in the world of Dance music, and now you all can hear it in our tracks.

For example, our experiment Bootleg Mix "Funky Town 2010", which was very successful and very popular ... It turned out to be something like Disco House, haha ...We have no boundaries in styles really because we always want variety and innovation, we could write now something in the style of Vocal House, Disco House or something like Funky House, but always adding our own trademark sound to them.

 

03) All producers have something characteristic in their productions, what element would best describe the style of Dj Maxsie & Alex Speaker?

Yes indeed, in our tracks the most characteristic feature are our Breakdowns, and we try to make them the most fantastic, beautiful and memorable possible but the most important thing for us is to create a cool, interesting, and general idea. We always write the tracks in a great and positive mood , because we want our music to reflect this part of us, and of course, we try to make the sound clean, I mean the mastering ... we always give to our tunes maximum power... yeah!

 

04) You've worked with some of the best Electro House labels out there, including Big Fish, Noobish, Plasmapool, Destination?, Dynamic Musik and lately Big Alliance Records, how have been your experience with this last one so far? 

We began noticing that some of our favorite Artists were signing their tracks or remixing for Big Alliance Records, so we decided to see what kind of label Big Alliance was.

We went to the page and we saw residents of this label, and it was all our favorite artists. We were just delighted with such a composition and top quality producers! We fell in love of Big Alliance right away. We really liked the ideas, the hard work and their attitude towards us and therefore we continued to collaborate actively with them. You know, Big Alliance for us is like a big family now... hehe

05) Lets talk about Pumping Jumps, an EP you've just put out with Big Alliance Records , which comes with three spectacular original productions, "Pumping Jumps", "Pull On", "Take Me Higher", tell us the story behind them and most importantly , a brief description with your own words of each one of them. 

Ok, so of course our own release, which was released on Big Alliance Records (October 4th), it has gotten a lot of support and comments from our fans , which is what we really wanted!. Hmm...The history of this release and tracks separately of course was peculiar and interesting.

Initially, before we met with Big Alliance Records, we planned to sign the track "Pull On" with our friends "Burn The Fire" label (owned by Cold Blank), but unfortunately our discussion with these guys about it was never finished. And after we delivered our first demo to Big Alliance, we decided to make an EP and so, we started to produce a new tune, which we named after "Take Me Higher".

Then we worked on the third track which was very easy and quick to produce as a matter of fact, as we had a break of two weeks where we gathered ideas, inspiration , all was very positive! good mood, cool weather outside the window and we just sat down and created a fantastic thing which we decided to call "Pumping Jumps ".

This release we had originally planned by cutting the male and female vocals, and we got this... as like our other tracks, we just always want to bring a sea of smiles and positivism

 

06) When you are about to perform at a gig, what do you do 10 minutes before playing? Some Djs smoke, others pray, and some even seek moral support via twitter, what do you guys do?

Funny question hehe…10 minutes before playing, we of course get a little worried, but we don't bite our nails and we don't do any smoking either, we sit in the dressing room with our friends and colleagues and we just have some fun fooling around, joking, anticipating a big party. As we said before, we are 2 positive guys and we try to make of our gigs as crazy as we are lol

 

07) Some Djs play pretty much the style of what they produce while others like to cross boundaries, what is your case?

In fact, we really like to play our music, we just play only groovy, fun Electro House and of course mixing our tracks in sets, which will make you dive into the sea of euphoria in the club!

 

08) What artists or Djs do you currently look up to and if you could pick only one of them to collaborate with right now, who would that be?

Oh yeah, we have a lots of ambitious plans for the future with our favorite artists with whom we would like to collaborate or do remix a remix with. It would be great to work now with Felguk, Wolfgang Gartner and Deadmau5. These producers have a big influence on us, so we would love to look forward to work with them soon but if we have to choose someone now, it probably would be Felguk, because their style is somewhat similar to ours, and vice versa. We really like the ideas of these 2 guys from Brasilia, they sound incredible!

 

09) Besides making music and playing choons live, what do Dj Maxsie and Alex Speaker do with their time? any hobbies or activities?

Maxsie likes to make designs, love making artworks for us, design for pages, ever since childhood Maxsie loved to draw and in that time he already had a background in art.

When he has free time, Maxsie opens his photoshop, and a miracle begins!

I (Alex) love to cook, if he had not engaged in music production, I probably would have become a chef. Cooking unusual tasty food and visiting restaurants is some of what we like to do.

We love to get together with the company of our friends with whom we can chat, drink beer, laugh, discuss the news in the world, fashion, watch movies, discuss and listen to music.

Of course we don't forget about our girlfriends. Hehe. We must to go with them to shop, stroll and relax...And bla bla bla lol....Actually, our lives are very busy and we have a limited amount of free time and sometimes not even enough time to sleep. We never stop doing our business.

 

10) Last chance to promote, advertise, or announce to your fans that are reading this interview!

Ok. At last we want to say to everybody:

Add us to your favorites at Beatport, listen to our music and of course visit our pages networking pages; MySpace.com/djmaxsiealexspeaker, Twitter.com/djmaxsiespeaker or join us on facebook, and you will always know all the latest developments from Dj Maxsie & Alex Speaker.

Thank you all for your time.
All The Best from Dj Maxsie & Alex Speaker