Interview: 2ManyDJs

Abbas Ali chats to Belgian dance duo 2ManyDJs about alter egos, Radio Soulwax and naked ladies. 

Growing up in Belgium’s thriving dance music city Ghent during the 80s, the brothers David and Stephen Dewaele have established a reputation as musical pioneers with their DJing, Production, and remix duo, 2ManyDJs. And that's not to mention their other musical pseudonyms including Flying Dewaele Brothers, as well as finding time to be half of indie/dance rock outfit, Soulwax.

We caught up with the ambitious duo ahead of GlobalGathering to see what they’re currently up to...

What are you up to at the moment? Do you have something new to promote for your live appearance at Global Gathering?

Do we have something new to sell? Actually, no! We’ve got this crazy big project that we’re working on, trying to finish. What we’re doing is we... did a big tour, which is something we’ve been doing recently. Instead of just showing up with some CDs and DJing, we bring a whole production show. It’s basically live DVD VJing. What we do is we make animations based on record sleeves, and we play them on a gigantic LED screen. It’s stuff we’ve been preparing for months. For example, if we would play Prince, then we would have an animation of Prince’s record sleeve where he dances. It’s all to the music, so we mix it together, visually. We started doing it last summer. We’re on the second run. It’s working really well.

You’re known to people in the dance community as 2ManyDJs and Flying Dewaele Brothers, but indie fans know you better as the band, Soulwax. What’s happening with them?

I don’t know. It’s confusing with us because we tend to do so many things that I forget what they are. Then never really end up being what I think is the norm, what people normally do. Which is they work for six months writing songs, then they produce it, then they record it, then they release it, and it’s, I don’t know, a cycle of 18 months, and it just doesn’t seem to happen with us.

We always keep thinking that no one’s going to ask us to play, but people keep asking us to play, and tour, and in between we’ll little things, like we’ll do an album here and there, or a DVD, or produce someone else’s stuff. And it never really falls within the mould. It’s really odd, because there’s nothing tangible.

Like the way people might not see a remix as a proper release?

Exactly. We’re cool with it, we’re not complaining. But I can see how, theoretically, looking at it, it can be a bit confusing.

It’s not being helped by what we’re working on now, we’re doing a project. Basically, instead of making another 2ManyDJs compilation, we’re making 24 separate hours of themed music. And because it’s impossible to clear - some hours have like 500 tracks in them, and they all have the visuals as well – we’ve applied for an online radio licence, so what we’re doing it we’re doing to stream everything for free once we’re ready with it, and it’ll be in a rotating loop, so you don’t hear anything twice, with a proper schedule. And we’ll do it as Radio Soulwax. That’s a project we’ve been working on for over a year, and it’s financially very stupid.

Yes, I was just thinking how I don’t think that’s going to make you much money.

Yeah, that cool you know, we’re very fortunate that we make our money by touring. So it’s fine to invest in something.

But it sounds like quite an ambitious project. So what are the themes?

Some of them are musical. There’s one which is only early 80s hardcore punk. And then there’s one which is only 70s space disco. Like a lot of UFO disco. And then there’s one with lots of Brazilian disco. And then there’s one which is only house music, but really early house.

And then in some places the theme is not so musical. For example, since we works with sleeves, where’re making one hour which is snippets of records that have naked ladies on them. And basically we did it so that it would animate. Because we found about a thousand. But most of them have really shit music on them. That one was, like, nine months’ work.

You music tastes seem to be quite diverse, if the records and DJ sets are anything to go by. I’m just wondering how you and your brother got exposed to so many different kinds of music, as a kid growing up in Belgium?

My dad was a DJ. And he, I guess he started in the late 60s, so his record collection is quite big and eclectic. So we were never raised with the notion of genres, there was just only good music or bad music. My parents used to listen to anything from the Small Faces to Grace Jones. So when we started Soulwax and 2Many DJs, that’s something that seemed very normal to us, playing different kinds of music. And it was surprising to us that when we came out it was seen as being pioneering and inventive, to us it just seemed really normal. It seems still really normal to me. And in fact, the world has caught up. It is really normal for a 17 year old kid right now to listen to Franz Ferdinand and Dizzee Rascal. Whereas, 10 years ago you were either into indie, or hip hop, or dance music. It was very segregated.

You name is very much associated with the mashup scene of the early to mid noughties. How do you get the inspiration for putting different records together?

The thing with the mashups is, this is another confusing thing, I still get it to this day, we get seen as “these guys make mashups”,  - not that it’s a dirty word to me but, we made maybe 5 or 6 of them. Then it became this scene of people putting acapellas over instrumentals, which is purely, a lot of people took for a technical exercise. For us it was just cool.

In the beginning when we did them it was because we got asked by the Belgian national radio station to do an hour, and just to cram in as many tracks as we wanted, we sometimes had to put the acapella over the instrument, so it was more like a physical constraint. What came about acapellas over the Ramones, and that seems quite boring to me, whereas we always tried to do it in an interesting way, and in a way where it worked musically, so it became a new thing, a new chord progression, or whatever. You have to be quite lucky for that. That aesthetic of mixing things that maybe have no relation to each other is still what we do, with 2ManyDJs, but it’s not – theoretically they’re not mashups, because it’s not an acapella over, we’ll just blend thing that work together. Like when a new track comes out that clearly references something old, we’ll play the old one with it, and show people where it came from. That’s something we’ve been doing from the very beginning. Only people, definitely the press, need an angle, and when we came out, it was the mashup. It’s funny. Ever since we came out, we’ve been mashups, electroclash, nu rave, and techno. We’ve been all these things, and it always seems a bit silly to us. We’re just guys who like music.

How do you feel about playing at GlobalGathering?

Yeah, really good. UK ones, and especially more northern ones are always crazy. The higher up you go in the UK, the better the crowds.  

This year's 10th anniversary festival will be taking place in Stratford-Upon-Avon from 30th to 31st July 2010. For more information and tickets please visit: www.globalgathering.com