Fyi Chris – Live In Berlin / Ransom Note & General Public Exclusive

Music

We are delighted to be able to team up with General Public once again to be able to offer you an exclusive mix from South London up and comers FYI Chris. Our man on the ground managed to catch up with the dynamic duo in Berlin as he gets deep.

Read the interview below:

Thanks for coming to grace the General Public controllers, spring seems to have sprung. feeling optimistic ?

W: Optimistic about Guardians of the Galaxy 2, not so optimistic about Vincent Kompany's legs. C: Optimistic about the flat I've just moved into!

You smashed onto the scene with your Rhythm Section release back in 2015. 'Back In The Millenium’. You have your forthcoming second release on RS this April. What can we expect?

FYI: More dystopian musings via the medium of dance music, made with both optimism and skepticism in mind.

Has much has changed in your approach to production in those two years?

FYI: Not really, just the kit we use, Chris got a few new bits and the studio at my house expanded too – but our approach is pretty much the same. Smash and grab. Never precious, all for the vibe.

You two have this ability make a track sound like it’s about to compositionally fall part, with lots of loose sounding elements, organic twists and turns, but it pulls together to keep you on your toes. Is this intentional or just a reflection of your approach to the hardware?

FYI: For sure we share a lot of the same musical influences and the common thread through a lot of these, bands like Talking Heads, Joy Division,Producers like Buckwild MF Doom, ESG, is that they all have this chaotic nervous energy in them, as if it could all just blow up any second. But it doesn't, it keeps on going, and at the end your almost exhausted. I think that feeling is something we've both felt after hearing things and definitely informs the kind of music we make.

This morning I took my bin lid of my ikea bin in my kitchen and thought “that sounds just like the symbol hit in Xenomorph” released on Lion Oil. Was it a recording of a bin lid?

W: Maybe it was from this mad irish record I found in a bin in Faliraki? – long story.

Whats the funniest thing you have sampled?

FYI: One of the first things we tried to do was sample James Franco in “Spring Breakers” – there's 100% a tune somewhere but we never caught the right angle – TBC!

You have firmly found your home in the four four kick in terms of your productions, how ever the other week you were playing some nicely selected hip hop on your balamii show. Did it start with house or were there other beginnings?

FYI: Many styles! Many styles! Hip Hop obviously, we sample from the same playbook a lot of the time, we just choose a different tempo. We make music from 90 to 160 bpm! Our influences are wide, but whatever genre they are – they're basically music to dance to, which is what we aim for most of the time.

I will never forget the day when my oldest mate came to my family home, saw a Hard Trance compilation on the living room floor, from when i was about 14 and said with a thick Stockport accent “Hard Trance Anthems?” with an utterly baffled look on his face. As if Hard Trance wasn’t bad enough, there are anthems within the genre. Do you have any equally embarrassing musical periods in your life?

W: Last time I drove back down from Macc, I listened to the Alien Ant Farm album. Still a couple tunes on there I swear! Honestly, i've never been one for calling things guilty pleasures. No one should be ashamed of liking a piece of music, sounds dumb!

What are you listening to at the moment?

FYI: that IDLES album is grrrrreat. Powder is one of the most exciting producers for sure at the moment, her stuff is so intricate and fragile but thumps harder than most, amazing restraint. A lot of good music is coming out at the moment, and it's all from the left field. Proper purple patch I reckon.

You recently played a mammoth 8 hour set in Berlin…how was that?

Watson: Was my first time in Germany. What an introduction! Chris had been before so he showed me the ropes. People just party, in the best way. 8 hours flew by really! No faff and only the good kind of nonsense. When we finished, Watson went to go catch the end of Andy Blake at Cocktail D'amour, so seeing Andy and Amy (Alsop) was weirdly comforting. We just walked around the club saying how brilliant it all was.

How does Berlin fair up to London in 2017? Can they learn anything from us?

FYI: We have house parties on lock down that's for sure – everyone lives in apartment blocks in Berlin as far as I could tell so unless you know a whole block, a good parties' not gonna last long…And house parties are by far some of the best parties i've ever been to.

So we've got that going for us. Does what you play, cater to what country you playing in?

FYI: Kind of, we definitely packed more thumping stuff for Berlin, naturally. But a lot of the time we trust our audience to be one that likes something a little west and off-kilter.