Crack

As times change and changes morph, pop music remains a reassuring constant in the psyche of most music fans.

Pop music is truly one of the most misunderstood genres in modern music. A modern buzzword for appalling chart tracks and heinous, mainstream, commercial radio sponsored shit, the paradigm of what constitutes pop music has morphed. Boy-bands changed everything in the early 90’s as teenage girls began to dominate the singles market and the quality was driven down.

In the 90’s, true pop music actually ended up in the some of the better R’n’B of the time, and believe it or not - underground. What had characterised the late 70’s and 80’s’ golden era of pop music with catchy choruses, infectious hooks and dance floor sensibility had been displaced with the commercial cash-in four pubescent boys could bring major labels.

Luckily, music with soul, groove and emotion is quite a hard beast to stifle and right now there are a number of artists reminding us exactly where the dance music phenomena originated.

Introducing Wolf + Lamb, and Soul Clap: two production double acts that come from different cities, but who approach music with a similar ethos. They are the anti-thesis to DJ superstars. Gadi Mizrahi and Zev Eisenberg (Wolf + Lamb’s founding twosome) found a real worldwide underground cult status with the success of their Marcy Hotel parties in New York. Offering a party experience first and a melee of wonderful underground house music as a staple for the evening, the intimacy and the quality of the party (the venue, the sounds and the closeness) made their night the hottest ticket in town and forged their reputation as first class producers, DJ’s and label owners.

Having accepted a number of others into their collective fold, the Wolf + Lamb family has grown to incorporate a number of other outstanding artists – none more so than Soul Clap. Eli Goldstein (AKA Elyte) and Charles Levin (AKA Cnyce and Chaz Shabaz) are Boston natives, but are currently residing in Miami. There is a huge crossover in the sound of Wolf + Lamb and Soul Clap; smooth underground house with a penchant for a vocal and a completely unashamed pop music sensibility. Soul Clap especially, have garnered a reputation as masters of re-editing old pop records, something that first attracted them to both Gadi and Zev.

The progression of this ethos and their relationship has seen this sound captured on the new DJ-Kicks record. Wolf + Lamb vs Soul Clap is a single CD that showcases the contemporary artists making waves in the extended families of both camps as well as perfectly capturing their own sounds (minus the odd pop gem, due to licensing issues).

Crack caught up with both parties independently and, unsurprisingly, found a common ethos and musical love.


WOLF + LAMB


Can you tell us about your musical upbringing and how it all started for you?

Gadi: I was in a few bands in my early teens, because of that I now like using the bass guitar in my tracks.

Zev: I was raised with middle-aged men crooning about how awesome God was. I sung about God in a boys’ choir when I was eight. I always wanted to explore music beyond my little world.

Your DJ-Kicks compilation with Soul Clap seems to be a collectionof artists who are connected with the Wolf + Lamb label in some way or another. Was it designed to be a contemporary pin drop of where you are as a label the moment?

Gadi: Yes. Originally it was supposed to be like most other DJ-Kicks mixes and a representation of the music we love. But licensing those tracks can be complicated, and we have a large and deep enough collective that we opted for doing it mostly in-house.

Where did you record the DJ-Kicks record?

Gadi: We decided to live in Miami for the winter. Ya’ know, get away from NYC’s terrible winters. When this opportunity came up we decided doing it together would be bigger and better than either of the two groups doing it alone.

The Wolf & Lamb staple has grown massively in the last few years into something of its own entity. Has the fast progression of the label’s popularity ever worried you? Is Wolf + Lamb still the brand you’d like it to be?

Gadi: Trying to stay underground and be more of a boutique label has always been the plan. There was a moment in the past two years where I was worried about being too popular and stuff, but I think we got over that.

Zev: Wolf + Lamb has always represented our deepest feelings about dance music and more than ever it still does. I think as long as we stay true to that, it will always be perceived the way we hope.

You both are sterling purveyors of the intimate party, as opposed to the super club. Has being selective where you play helped you retain credibility?

Gadi: We put a lot of pressure on our booking agents to make sure we are playing at the right clubs. Ideally these are small to medium size, and if we’re thrown into a bigger club situation we try to make sure the lighting is appropriate.

Zev: It’s a constant struggle, but also a learning process, sometimes we come to a bigger room and it translates a lot better than we’d hoped.

The soulful element of Wolf + Lamb records are a prominent characteristic of your releases and mixes that keep people coming back again and again. What are your inspirations for this sound?

Gadi: We think we’re black.

Zev: We’re all really emo musicians. Collectively we’ve created a culture on label where everyone’s just really comfortable showing it in their music.

Do you think the ‘sexier’ nature of this sound naturally makes for a more intimate party experience?

Gadi: Yes, absolutely, but we weren’t always this way.

Zev: There are other elements that have to be right, but if the lights and sound are good, this music can easily bring out the heat. Certainly more than a tech-house set can!

Now everyone knows about your Marcy parties, do you worry about tourists coming along and ruining the whole thing?

Gadi: Yeah, we had to shut it down to the public recently.

We’ve heard huge 80’s influences on your mixes. From pop music to samples, there is a real sun soaked flavour in there. How has this era affected you?

Zev: The right songs just float across our horizon and if it speaks to us, we’ll let our music soak up its influence. I think the 80’s dance music had a certain heightened excitement to it and a maturing of synthesis as an integral part of the music - two things we love

Do you think you’ve helped take a number of tracks from the 80’s out of the ‘guilty pleasure’ zone and back into being considered credible music?

Zev: I remember some of the first times Gadi pulled out these winners to a pretty shocked crowd who’d been listening to techno exclusively for a couple of years. There was some confusion, and then smiles as everyone just let go and danced to music they’ve known forever but had just never heard being played out.When Soul Clap joined the fray they brought us some edits which, for the first time in the scene’s recent history, allowed DJ’s to mix in and out of classics and bring more soul into their sets.

Who is the Wolf and who is the Lamb? Do they have an amicable relationship?

Zev: My name means a wolf and Gadi’s means lamb in Hebrew. The relationship is what you’d expect from a wolf and a lamb hanging out.

Who should we look out for the horizon?

Gadi: Voices of Black have a new EP on Double Standard with remixes by Tanner Ross and Worst Friends. A new artist from Israel named Double Hill has some really amazing deep house coming out soon.

How do you view your roles between label owners, producers and DJ’s. Does one end up taking precedent over the other, or do you see them all as essential to the Wolf + Lamb brand?

Zev: I don’t see us making it this far without being relatively successful at all of the roles. Being DJ’s allowed us to be better producers, and being label owners allowed us to take risks with the music we made and put out and the music of the other artists on the label. It’s the same with actually running the venue and the party. Nobody would have allowed us to clear out the room the first few times we needed to develop the new slower style of music, but we believed in it and since we we’re in control we were able to see it through.

Never before have we heard a label that takes an old established house sound and constantly manages to make it sound new and fresh? Are you ever bothered your sound might sound dated? How do constantly keep it original?

Gadi: As long as you keep on infusing fresh influences in your sets and production the sound can’t get dated. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would love to call our sound dated, but it changes every two months so that’s gonna be hard. Our music goes back and forth from the 70’s to the present to the 80’s and back again.

If you had three records in the world to save, what would they be?

Gadi: Prince - Purple Rain; Sade - Love Deluxe; Notorious B.I.G. - Life After Death.



SOUL CLAP



How Did the DJ-Kicks collaboration come about, as they’ve never done a collaborative DJ-Kicks record before?

Chaz: I’m in Berlin with my agent and a friend having a fun night and we go to get some pizza. This British guy came and tagged along. He didn’t know who we were, but when he found out he was well into us. He worked for K7 records as a scout. So we were like, how do you get a DJ-Kicks mix?” He was like, “I’ll set up a meeting tomorrow morning”.I didn’t believe it would happen, because you get a lot of people yes’ing and offering a hook up. It was a case of right time, right place.

So is it the perfect marrying of the Wolf + Lamb and Soul Clap extended families?

Chaz: As a collective we’ve been growing and growing and the body of music we’ve accumulated is amazing, so we’d be stupid not to capitalise on that. The licensing to use classic records is pretty much impossible, so unless you’re releasing it on a major label it’s just too expensive.

How do you choose which edits you are going to use

Eli: Edits usually find us. It’s not like we go out especially to make some edits and send them out to people.

Chaz: When we starting making them we were DJ’ing a lot at department stores and malls at what we call cougar gigs; playing for older people and trying to figure out a way to play our own music and our own take on creating an atmosphere and mood music. We couldn’t play the music we’d usually play in a club, so we ended up taking the pop influence and giving it our own take to make it deeper and better. Without really realising it we ended up creating this thing that ultimately got us hooked up with Wolf + Lamb and launched our career.

So how do you see your musical roles?

Chaz: We are DJ’s first, producers second. It’s really natural to do an editfor your DJ performance. Historically it’s the way it’s done. We are big history boffs and really nerdy about all the rare stuff. Real nerdy.

You guys definitely have this colossal nod to classic house music and classic pop music?

Chaz: In Boston we don’t have the scene like you guys have in the UK or in New York, so what are you going to do if you’re not going out? You go home and you get into your records.

So what about Miami?

Chaz: We mainly moved there for the weather. It’s public knowledge that Zev from Wolf + Lamb has been fighting cancer for the last 10 years, so he’s got special living conditions and diet. He meditates and he’s beating cancer on his own through power and discipline. So he favours the warm weather climate.

Eli: Gadi’s family has a condo. We go there to make really awesome music. We get inspired down there. Also, probably the best club in America is there right now; it’s alled the Electric Pickle. It’s our home away from home.

So as part of the DJ-Kicks release are you doing a big tour with Wolf + Lamb?

Eli: All four of us are doing Europe and America in April, and The US in May. It’s going to be the heaviest tour we’ve ever done. It’s the first time we’ve toured together as a four. And it’s just the four of us. No opening DJ’s, just us all night.

So what about playing bigger venues?

Eli: It’s going to be a learning experience playing bigger spaces.

Chaz: It’s something we’ve always struggled with. You walk into a club and an opening DJ is pumping it, then someone comes on and plays something else. But if you’re controlling the mood of the entire night then you are in control of how fast it’s going to get and how hard it’s going to get. You can hold the mood. You can keep it smooth, sexy and slow if you want.

Eli: It’s about building a tension. At the start we’ll play hip-hop, R’n’B –slow shit. Even if hardly anyone is there it can be one of the best times to play because you create a vibe. Building a tension so people wait and wait and wait. But even then you don’t have to open it up all the way. You can just open it up a tiny bit and you’ll still keep people with you.

So how has Soul Clap evolved? How d’ya get here?

Chaz: I think what we are doing now is a reflection of this moment Eli and I had a few years back while we were in Boston just surviving. We were doing any gig we could get. We were doing weddings, Bar Mitsvahs - anything. We were forced to do a lot of pop music gigs and were thinking there was this separation between the music we played at these gigs and the music we really wanted to play. Then at some point we realised we could use the two together brilliantly. What you hear now is an extension of that idea The whole Wolf + Lamb collective are on this wavelength

Eli: It’s underground dance music with a pop sensibility.

Chaz: It’s about these great old pop songs and the irony in those songs.They really trigger emotions with people.

Do you think you’ve been responsible for taking a lot of these tunes and making them more acceptable to a modern audience? Especially a lot of 80’s music that would have been dismissed as cheesy pop?

Chaz: Five years ago no one wanted to hear anything human. It was all about minimal techno. That just swarmed house music. There was a massive backlash against record labels, like Defected, that were pushing the vocal diva agenda. There is nothing human or sexy about minimal techno and it generated these really male dance floors.

Eli: I really like listening to a lot of dubstep and a year ago or so I tried integrating a load of that into our sets and I noticed the girls leave immediately. It doesn’t work with what we do. It has to be slower and it has to have some emotion.

The 80’s pop music slant is a prominent feature for sure.

Eli: Take it back to the late 70’s early 80’s and the birth of DJ culture and the records being played then. They were amazing and chart-topping. It was the best of both worlds at that time. It was the era when the radio phoned the DJ and asked the DJ what they were playing in the club. The club would dictate the radio airplay. Now it’s the other way round. It’s not about how it goes down with the people anymore.

Do you think that spirit of music has been lost then?

Chaz: Artists just buy into the marketing as much as they do the music. Take Lady GaGa. She is a product. Sure she can play piano. However she’s not being a musician, she’s being a product - major labels especially need these artists to survive.


Wolf + Lamb vs Soul Clap DJ-Kicks is out now on K7 records.



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http://www.soulclap.us/

http://www.wolflambmusic.com/

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