Interview #499: Noisia

Dutch three-piece Noisia produce, DJ and currently own three record labels; Division, Vision and Invisible Recordings, all suited to different styles of their electronic work. With a huge underground following, ballsy crowd pleasers such as Gutterpump and Raar and a wealth of dangerously abused basslines under their belt, their jaw shattering drum and bass productions have earned them a strong underground following. Eight years on from their debut release on Nerve Recordings, Thijs, Martijn and Nik finally release their debut album, Split The Atom.

I Like Music spoke to Noisia about how the album came together in their beer-strewn recording studio, the pleasure of DJ-ing to broken-nosed punters, and how they got into music in the first place.

"I Like Music because… for me it’s the most emotionally direct form of art. Any other visual art or whatever, it doesn’t ever touch me as intensely as music can. That’s why I like music best.” Thijs, Noisia

"I Like Music because… it’s organized sound and I like sound.” Nik, Noisia

"I Like Music because…it occupies my mind more than half the time.” Martyn, Noisia

ILM: You’ve been making music together for quite some time. Why is now the right time to release an album?

Nik: Because it was finished! The only reason now was the right time was that, after spending a long time working on it, it was finally done and we were like, “Okay, this is gonna be it.” We decided we wanted to do a debut album about three years ago, maybe longer. It never really came together up until this point and now it’s here.

ILM: What can we expect?

Thijs: A lot of noise! Loud noises.

Martijn: There’s definitely stuff on there that they’re not gonna expect.

Nik: Expect the unexpected! Haha!

Martijn: People know us mainly for drum and bass. There’s definitely at least two thirds non drum and bass. There’s four or five drum and bass tunes on there, then there’s little skits, down-tempo stuff, electro-housey sort of stuff. Some stuff with vocals. ..

ILM: How would you describe the Noisia process of making music?

Thijs: Usually someone starts a tune and then we argue for a few weeks….then the tune’s done!

ILM: So anyone could start a tune and the rest of you jump in…

Nik: Sometimes we start stuff together, but generally it’s one person’s idea. That person gets to work on that idea until it actually represents what’s in his head. Then we comment on it and jump in if we’re into it. It’s almost like a mini demo-stage. Somebody tries to put something together that he’s got in his head, and if that doesn’t cut it then the others say so.

Martijn: But that doesn’t go for all. Diplodocus we wrote together…

Nik: But there’s always a point when it clicks and it starts to write itself. Before that it’s kind of up in the air as to whether you’re really making a tune or whether you’re just messing about. We do that a lot.

ILM: You’re a trio in essence, but you work with a lot of other artists. We spoke to Foreign Beggars recently, who spoke very highly of working with you. How do you approach collaborations?

Thijs: We have to like each others’ songs.

Nik: And we have to get along. With a lot of people you find a common ground musically, but if you don’t get along personally then it’s much harder. I’d be more inclined to work with somebody I really get along with whose musical tastes were different to mine, than somebody whose musical taste were exactly the same as mine, but I didn’t connect with. With Foreign Beggars we were just really lucky. Generally with a collaboration you can’t really anticipate what it’s gonna be like. You basically jump in and see what happens, and sometimes they’re good and sometimes they’re not as good. That was just an incredible example of when it all went really well.

Martijn: We started working with them because we wanted to focus on them for the actual song Split the Atom.

Thijs: No no, we started working with them because they came to see us play at Glastonbury and they sent us a message that day saying, “We wanna do music with you.” It just went from there…

ILM: What’s your studio like?

Thijs: There’s lots of beer cans. There’s a massive television to play X-box.

Nik: We just did an overhaul of the studio. It was okay, but now it’s quite nice and to the point. We have a cleaner!

Thijs: He wears an apron! We have really expensive speakers…

Nik: We’re basically just renting a room inside a club.

Martijn: It’s a venue rather than a club. They do stuff like salsa dancing lessons. And there are a lot of other artists in there as well. But yeah, we rent a big room, and inside the room we’ve built a studio so it’s separate from the room. People usually say that the sound in there is really good. We had it built to spec, we did all the acoustic treatment ourselves.

Nik: We had somebody come over this time, for the overhaul, and he told us that the acoustics were really shit because we completely used the wrong materials. We decided that he was a bit of a dick. He was probably right, because he was an acoustics guy. But we’re pretty happy with the sound as is.

Thijs: If he had been a nice person then I would probably have been more motivated to change it, but since he was a dick we were like, “Well fuck you!”

ILM: What tools do you use, both in the studio and live?

Thijs: We used to be more exclusively software, just stealing stuff from the web. But we just bought a lot of synths and a big electric piano. Live we’re trying to go more towards actually playing stuff as well as DJ-ing.

Martijn: We’ve bought a couple of guitars.

Nik: Now the studio is set-up, the idea is to be more immediate with the music. Before that it was mostly sat looking at a screen clicking around, fiddling with sounds and stuff. That’s still something we love to do, but we’re trying to have it so that you’ll be making something with the mouse on the computer and someone else can just jump in with a keyboard. That way you can just record it straight away. You can work more directly, with electronic music it can get really constructed and stale.

ILM: The internet has always been a big part of how you get your music out to people and initiate collaborations. It’s going through big changes at the moment in how it’s interacting with the music industry. How do you see that impacting upon the way you make and relate with music?

Thijs: We don’t really think about that too often. We just make music. I think it’s pretty weird that there’re still a lot of people buying vinyls. We used to run our own label, but we leave that up to management now. The whole internet marketing thing - all the interaction with the audience - we’re kind of removed from that. We used to do that ourselves, but now we play shows on the weekend and in the week we’re in the studio. We don’t really need to be interacting.

Nik: Our philosophy is that if you make the product right then whatever the era, whatever the technology, it’s gonna find its way to people.

ILM: So the music comes first…

Nik: Yeah, just make a product and then see from there.

ILM: Do you see it as a product?

Nik: If you release it then it’s obviously a product. You’re a producer, so what you produce is a product. I mean, yeah, it’s a song, but it’s also a product. I guess calling it a product kind of puts a price on it and stuff, but…

Thijs: But there’s lots of music that’s in our computer in our studio that’s Noisia music but that isn’t a product because it’s never going to be sold.

Thijs: I don’t think that there’s anything derogative about the word ‘product’.

ILM: What can people expect from your sets at the moment?

Thijs: Same thing that we’ve been playing for the last three years.

ILM: The exact same set?

Thijs: More or less.

ILM: Do you still get the same kick out of DJing?

Thijs: Yeah. I love it. That’s why I still do it…

Martijn: It’s really hard for us to constantly be finding new music that we’re into though. Especially the big tunes. People like Andy C play the new big tunes all the time, but we usually don’t like the new big tunes. Maybe we’ll like one out of 30 big tunes. We’ll just add that to our set, and then something else has to make way for that. But we’re not going to hunt for dubs and just play all the big new tunes.

Nik: Finding other people’s beats that we want to play is not that easy. I don’t actually DJ, it’s the other two who DJ, but when you have a certain record and in your opinion there hasn’t been another one that’s better yet, then you might as well still keep playing it.

ILM: So it’s more about people having a good time than constantly evolving and updating the music and trying to be ahead of the game?

Thijs: Exactly. A lot of them expect to hear the older stuff that we made.

Martijn: It’s not that we don’t play new music.

Thijs: We take it as a DJ set, but we also take it as a mini-concert where we just play around with music. I like to think that’s what people come for. They come to dance to the music that we make and also to check out what other tunes we play them. It’s mostly about us as producers.

ILM: Out of all the sets you’ve played, which have been the most memorable?

Martijn: I really like Shogun Audio in Digital in Brighton. The only thing that’s bad about the place is the backstage area. It’s just a little place where the heating system is kept. It’s moist and kind of dirty. But the rest of place is sick. The sound is really good and the crowd is really good. They accept everything that you play. There’s a lot of places where they pretend they’re really open minded, but they do actually want to hear what they want to hear and nothing else.

Thijs: I played in Montreal, Canada, in January at an outdoor festival while it was freezing. It was really cool! All these people in winter coats going crazy! I saw one dude in the audience whose nose was broken. His face was full of blood but he was still raving. I was just like, “Yes! I love this guy!” Later on I saw on Youtube that a guy was videoing me playing and he said to the guy, “Dude, your face is full of blood,” and he said, “Yeah, that’s because you just hit me you asshole!” So the first guy said, “Here, I have a tissue,” and the other guy replied, “No, wait I’ll clean up when this guy gets off!” It was really cool! Haha…!

ILM: It’s those little moments…

Thijs: Whenever I’m not feeling a crowd I just look for one person that’s actually listening and in my mind I exclusively play for that guy or girl. Sometimes they come up to me and I tell them that they saved my night. If you try to please a whole crowd who are obviously not liking it, you feel bad about yourself. You’re not properly performing. When you focus on someone who’s actually listening and enjoying it, it feels better. It’s like being at a party and putting on tunes and no-one likes it. You think, “Well why doesn’t someone else play tunes then?” But if you focus on that someone and he’s obviously enjoying it then it’s cool and you’re like, “Here’s the next one, here’s the next one.”

ILM: When did the passion for music first start for each of you?

Nik: My parents played music, so I listened to music. I don’t know if I was that passionate about it. I think I really got into it when I started finding my own music. I accidentally got a CD with some music software, which actually made me realize that it was really cool and I wanted to make music. But I didn’t have a musical upbringing so it was never really one of my aspirations until I actually got to see the tools, then I was really fascinated.

Thijs: I had lessons until I was 12, and then I just got lazy. Until I was 17 or 18 I did nothing productive in music, just consumed. Then I met Nik and we were bored in my house and he had this CD at home with programmes. We installed them on my little computer…

Nik: And it was a great way to pass the time.

Martijn: I had played keyboards when I was 6 and performed in my elementary school at special events. After that I played classical piano then I went to music school for three years, until this sort of went pro and I had to give up. We’re all dropouts really…!

ILM: What would you say to people who want to be in your position?

Thijs: We see a lot of people who try to become an artist. They try to get to that point rather than just enjoying the prospect.

Nik: They make goals for themselves that aren’t musical goals, but just about status or something.

Thijs: I think that method can work, but it’s a lot more frustrating if it doesn’t work. We didn’t give two shits about the industry or success. We just did tunes. It was very naïve.

Nik: We never even made music thinking about putting it out.

Thijs: We made it to listen to and for other people to listen to, not to sell.

Nik: We were just bouncing it back and forth.

ILM: And then people heard it and really liked it…

Thijs: At first people didn’t like it! At first it was shit!

Nik: Our first music was pretty shit. The first music we made was to make ourselves laugh, cos we were really bad at it.

Martijn: We still do that!

Nik: Yeah! But the first stuff was just really, really, really crap music.

Thijs: But as for advice, we don’t have much but the standard stuff. Just make sure that you enjoy what you do, and if you don’t enjoy it then just quit. Otherwise you’re gonna be frustrated. We used to listen and analyse a lot, asking ourselves how people were doing things. Then we tried to make the sound. Don’t just pick something up and try to make music. Really try to analyse it, ask yourself what techniques might have been used. Stuff like that.

ILM: What have you been listening to lately?

Thijs: I’ve been listening to old stuff. I have phases of everything. I had a long jazz phase and a long blues phase.

Nik: You sound so lame man!

Thijs: No, really! I had a classical one, and now I’m into psychedelic rock. The Doors, most obviously. Then there’s a band called the United States of America, who are really cool. The Kaleidoscope, and Fifty Foot Hose. The Rolling Stones also made a really weird album, and obviously the later Beatles, after they quit playing gigs. That’s when they got really good in my opinion.

Martijn: I don’t like any particular artist or genre. There’re a lot of artists out there who make one good tune, and I like that tune and not the rest of their repertoire.

Thijs: I also want to add that I’m listening to a lot of crappy pop music and picking out the stuff that I like. We’re going in a new direction. As well as doing Noisia, which is what we like, we’re also going to produce stuff for other artists to do their thing with. It’s not necessarily our favourite music but it’s good fun to do and we still see quality in it.

Martijn: It’s a challenge.

Thijs: Right. So I’ve been listening a lot to Beyoncé and Kelis and Lily Allen. Just anything that’s popular. If there’s some quality there then I’d like to achieve something similar.

Nik: I don’t really listen to a lot of music at the moment. I listen to some stuff in the studio, but I can like pretty much anything. I think there’s probably more moments in the day where I listen to some random sound like a door opening and that does more for me than actually listening to a song. I don’t really know why that is.

ILM: What’s the relationship between Vision, Division and Invisible Recordings; how do they fit together?

Thijs: Well, we have our album coming out now, but we also have some things that we want to release. We can’t put them out on the label cos that’s all about the album right now. That was the reason we started a third label independent of the album, Invisible. We’ve wanted to release other people’s tunes, but Vision was always our imprint for us to release our stuff on. We needed something that has a little more distance from us because we feel that Vision is very intertwined with our precious little egos! We can’t have other people’s inferior tunes on that, we’re better than them! Hahah! Also, there’s a sound that I have in my head for Invisible that you couldn’t pull off repeatedly on Vision. It’s just a bit too deep and too…subconscious or something. It’s more atmospheric. Vision is and has been, except for one release, for bigger tunes….