From rocking to raving: we chat to Foals about their !K7 mixtape

Hi Edwin! Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Where do we find you today?
In bed. Mug of tea in hand. Actually there's no tea. I'm just in bed. It's been a long day. 

Your !K7 mixtape is out next month. Previous !K7 mixtapes have been released by The Rapture and The Big Pink… how did yours come about? Did they approach you or vice versa?
We'd been speaking quite casually about doing something together, and then they came forward with the tapes idea. What can I say? It made a lot of sense.

What are your memories of making mix tapes as a kid? Did you ever make one for a girl and what was on it?
I borrowed/stole a few of my older sister's tapes when I was an impressionable young thing, and I think from there I got into the concept of stitching things together from your own or other peoples' records mostly just for its own sake. I spent way too much time as a teenager by myself, collecting records and ordering them alphabetically, or according to genre, or date, or… you know. It sounds kind of cool in retrospect but actually it was rubbish. Yes, I made one for a girl. Probably quite a few. The last one I remember was actually a mix CD at university. It was all Low, Bonnie Prince Billy, Movietone, Dirty Three, Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin… that kind of thing. Fuck knows what I was trying to prove. I remember being very proud of the "flow".

How did you go about compiling the tracklisting for this one? It must have been quite a task.
I trawled through my own itunes library for days, compiling and sorting. And then through my records. And then I went to each band member and asked them to put forward tunes. And then I went through their records. And then their itunes libraries. And then I spent days, weeks, and months arranging things on my computer. It went through a few different versions. It might sound a bit daunting but it's a process that I'm always engaged in. I won't say obsessively, but it has entirely altered the way I listen to music. I'm always thinking "where would this go, how could this be played?" etc.

Is there anything in there that you think might surprise people?
I guess people might be surprised that most of the music doesn't sound like Foals. But I don't really know what does sound like Foals. we listen to a whole heap of random shit, and this mix is just me trying to make a smaller, more coherent heap of a certain type of shit. And when I say shit I mean not-shit. Hopefully it will surprise people by its not-shitness. Please don't put that in big letters.

Were some tracks on there 100% definites in your mind?
There were! And most of them didn't get licensed. Turns out that licensing music for compilations is brutal work. Anyway, the Blood Orange tune, Oni Ayhun, the Bibio remix of Clark... they were all in it to win it from the start.

You're pretty well established as a DJ in your own right. Do you find that DJing offers you musical freedom outside of your work with the band, or do your DJ sets have an affinity with the Foals sound?
Can I say both? I try my hardest to keep that affinity alive. But I'm not remotely interested in DJing "indie" music. It's just… pointless. Rock music is a beautiful thing when performed live and loud, but when played off a CDR by some bearded guy in the corner of a damp pub it's far from inspiring. itunes shuffle does the job quite nicely. Whereas house music is entirely about DJing. That's its form and its function. OK, what's my point. I don't know. I hope to reflect aspects of the Foals sound through tune selection but also through the dynamic of the set.

You have quite a hectic DJ schedule coming up this summer, with dates all over Europe. How does a DJ tour compare to a band tour?  Do you miss having the other guys around?
Well, if you can call it a tour. It's certainly much shorter. Three consecutive days at the most, off and on through the summer, so I get to come home and have some kind of life. Whereas band tours are month-long epics, sometimes joined up across half a year. The latter is way more demanding and immersive. That's definitely not a bad thing.

I miss having Yannis around to provide the charisma. The last show he came to he drank most of the rider and stage-dived midway through the set. Leaving me standing there just doing my thing. I like it that way. Otherwise I find people watching me expecting something to happen. Nope, i'm just playing tunes one after the other.

What can we expect from your set at 2022NQ?
It feels like quite a personal booking so I'm hoping I can be a bit indulgent and play some deeper stuff. But we'll see. I usually play tunes by John Talabot, Tensnake, Todd Terje… DFA, Futureboogie, one or two Foals remixes, definitely something off the new TEED record.

Thanks Edwin, and see you on Saturday!

Interview: JR

Find out more about Foals !K7 mixtape

Catch Edwin from Foals DJing at 2022NQ this Saturday night. Tickets are £9, available through Skiddle below.

Tickets are no longer available for this event