November 17th, 2010

Interview: Homework

Homework, unlike their lower case counterpart that serves as the agony of schoolkids everywhere, are responsible for shaking up house music in a big way this year.

Calling their “Fissa Tune” EP on Exploited Records a “breakout record” might be an exaggeration because it’s hardly the duo’s debut.  However, the title track showed a comfort and skill for transforming Greek traditional oboe songs into a full body shakedown jacking house track adorned with guttural yelps, and “I Got One (You’re It)” loops Jocelyn Brown’s funky vocal house music into the kind of siren song that could seduce any kind of dancefloor. It was one of those EPs where you couldn’t even choose a favorite because they’re all so good. Following it up with an equally heralded EP on Made to Play and a big, wild, often unexpected remix package on Exploited, Homework (comprised of Zip & Tom) succeed in something many other people haven’t lately; making dance music that’s equally satisfying for your feet and brain.

I caught up with Homework from my apartment at 5am in Osaka as the sun was starting to come up. Here’s what we talked about.

(Interview by Brendan Arnott – my text in italics)

What’s life for Homework been like lately? Recently you’ve been frequently spreading yourselves between Berlin, Amsterdam and France. Do you find touring disruptive to the lives you’re leading right now?

Homework: Touring can be heavy. Especially by train it can be quite a bore. But most of the time the hours spent in a different city, in a club you don’t or maybe do know, outside of your own country, make up for it. Traveling is great for the places you get to see… Haha, not so much for the traveling in itself. Berlin seems to really like us and it is a city we love. It’s not a great place to go and study and be serious, but it’s a great place if you want to get shitfaced everyday of the week and wake up around 1pm.

Has it become a full time job?

Homework: Yes, it is beginning to become a full time job. We both have other jobs (Zip is doing promotion for one of the biggest venues in Amsterdam; Tom works in a record store), but it is definitely a goal to make it our ‘profession’. We’ve always had many different passions on the side, from cinema to design, and we try to incorporate them in our musical profile as much as we can, so that those other ‘dreams’ don’t vanish because of our commitment to music. On the other hand, our renown, if you can call it that, opens doors for those passions to blossom as well. Tom recently made a video for the Joyce Muniz release on Exploited, for instance.

Yeah! I was hoping to talk a bit about your video work as well, I really like everything I’ve seen. While I’m not familiar with the Joyce Muniz source material, can you talk a bit about the artists whose work you’ve used for the Fissa Tune and Trumpet Express videos, Paul & Menno De Nooijer and Jeff Keen? What stands out about the material you recut into Homework videos or other projects like Joyce’s video?

Homework: The thing which intrigues me about the work of the Nooijer brothers and Jeff Keen is that not much people know about their work. When doing a ‘video collage’ for a track it makes more sense to get something that might amaze people, because they don’t know what it is. That’s why it would make no sense to do something with like Godard or Antonioni. They’re such legends that it feels too familiar to me. On the other hand it is also about sharing, just like, for instance, DJing and producing (we work sample based) is also about sharing something with your audience; maybe amazing them in the process or opening doors to new and other forms of music.

Apparently the story is that you two played together for the first time at a mutual friend’s birthday party. Was there a certain moment, or track selection, when you knew things were going to work out together?

Homework: The weird thing is that it has always felt really natural. We never have any problems or big arguments about music or other subjects. Most of the time we agree or if we don’t we can entirely understand each other’s stance. There wasn’t a particular moment that we both were like: OH MY GOD, SYMBIOSIS. It just happened and it has felt good ever since. Not brothers by blood, but by thought, something like that #nohomo.

I guess you two were in a great environment to serve as a litmus test for that kind of thing though; working in Amsterdam record store Concerto together. When I read that online I was a bit puzzled, because you guys both seem pretty young… isn’t it next to impossible to get a job at a record store these days?

Homework: Haha, it is impossible to get a job in a record store nowadays. When we started there some odd years ago it wasn’t though. And we were both a bit lucky to get a job at Concerto, certainly THE best record store in Amsterdam. We were very spoiled in our musical upbringing because of that. When our friends were listening to hip-hop, we were telling them to check out Aphex Twin and Boards Of Canada. When somebody mentioned 50 Cent, we mentioned A Tribe Called Quest. It led to some very weird situations within the confines of high school social behavior. But for our musical career it was very good to have some knowledge of what happened, how and why and what inspired other people to do new things, etc.

I imagine it also led to a lot of access to good music as well. I don’t know if it’s taboo to ask about this, but I find the vocal sample on “Fissa Tune” the most strangely addictive thing ever. It sounds so guttural and always seems to be changing throughout the song, it’s definitely one of my favorite samples of the year. Is it ruining the mystery to talk a bit about the source material for Fissa Tune?

Homework: We’re definitely not going to go into the origins of Fissa Tune, sample wise, but it does have to do a lot with the access we had to strange and obscure music. Now that the internet is taking over some of that is disappearing or has been made ‘elite’ by special torrent sites (like Oink †). But you still have to know what to look for and how to find it.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the new Homework tune “Lenny”, which samples Mr. Kravitz. I feel very vocal about loathing Lenny Kravitz, I really think he’s the worst….  However, your new tune “Lenny” somehow transforms his sample from “I belong to you” into something infectiously catchy. Are Homework closeted (or not-closeted) fans of any other kinds of embarrassing music (keeping in mind that “embarrassing” is subjective), or was the track more of a challenge to reconceptualize something more well known?

Homework: Funnily enough, that touches on the thing we discussed earlier. We might’ve missed out on a lot of commercial pop music because of our upbringing at Concerto. It’s a purist thing maybe, but people at Concerto also loathe that kind of stuff. Strangely though, when we listen to Kravitz now we think he is quite a good musician and maybe it was just our purist perception of him and the surrounding hype that killed his music… for us. The same happened to our opinion of Notorious B.I.G. for example. Lenny actually came to being through our love of the guys from Wolf + Lamb who, especially with “Extravaganza” by Soul Clap, have taken these 90’s sentiments and rearranged them to be retrofitted in our era. That was where we were going with Lenny. It’s a bit of nostalgia.

There was some contestation on Resident Advisor on whether what Soul Clap was doing should be classified as a “true revision” or just, as the reviewer put it, “the ‘stick a kick drum on it!’ philosophy.”

Homework: Yes, we loved that discussion

What’re your thoughts on it?

Homework: Well, actually we argued about that for quite some time. Is it pure genius? Or is it just something funny? The last applies, but you should also stress the power of nostalgia here. In that sense, Soul Clap made something truly amazing. They took something that was total commercial crap and turned it into something lush. It took the 90’s and transformed it into something that Larry Levan might’ve played out.

Yeah, I think Soul Clap definitely change the atmosphere and mood of the song. With regard to making music, there’s a quote by one of you that reads: “It has to have balls or a certain form of warmth” – what’s one of your tracks that you take pride in the “warmth” or “balls” that it displays?

Homework: Our tracks that go more for that kind of sensibility are for instance, “I Got One (You’re It)” and “Behind The Fence”. Also all the work for our new EP has that sort of sound. It sounds, and we don’t mean this in a racist way, black. There’s more soul in there, more warmth. House music can be very clean cut. When it has that sort of soulful feel to it, it feels good to us. That’s why we love Moodymann, though he has the advantage of actually being black, haha.

Ooh, that’s kind of getting into a bit of murky territory for me, because I’ve often had dilemmas with dance music about whether or not something was appropriation. I mean, on one hand, we’re in 2010 and sampling is so diverse that trying to define genres anymore gives me a headache. But I guess I feel weird about calling music “black” – does it imply that there’s something inherent about that label that makes it ‘better’?

Homework: Richard D James once said something, that applies in our times more than ever – with dance music shifting from one to another genre with total ease, especially within house music – and that is: “You can’t really talk about electronic music, it’s all about if you feel it or not.” It might sound kind of lame and an easy way out, but analyzing dance music is like dancing to architecture, it makes no sense. When we say those tracks feel ‘black’ to us, that is just my opinion of music (in general) talking.

I notice that Homework is very forthcoming about incorporating video, audio samples, and the culture that you find important into the music you make. At the same time, there’s been a lot of sampling of Portuguese or lots of different languages where the samplers might not actually know what’s being said. Do you think this is a problem at all? Do we need to have a connection to something to be able to reference it? I think it’s kind of an exhausting thing to try and define, but still important to think about

Homework: We’d almost want to use the word ‘groove’ here, though we hate that word. But let’s go for it: if the groove feels right, who cares if somebody is saying ‘chicken cunt’ in Portugese (there is actually a track that does that).

I partially agree, but Yolanda Be Cool recently tweeted something interesting: “travelling dj lesson….what may sound good in Spanish…may not be so cool IN Spanish…or only play it to people that don’t speak Spanish”

Homework: Or speak Americano, for that matter.

“buddup psssh”

Homework: We get what you’re saying and if you care about your music, you should know what you’re doing. Of course.

I only prepared one quote for this interview. Bukowski’s famous for a lot of quotable stuff, but one quote that always sticks with me is:

“unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.”

Where do you think the line between spontaneity and quality should be cut? Are you more likely to labor over the fine details of something, or just keep making work as quickly as possible when it feels right?

Homework: Haha, Bukowski is our God, as you may know. Our mixtape “The Laughing Heart”, begins with one of his poems read by Tom Waits and it touches, kind of, on the same thing. He says: “Your life is your life, know it while you have it.” We do think that, for us at least, it is more about instinct. If it feels right, don’t over-fuck it. You can have a feeling and don’t mess too much with that feeling. We’re not saying that we make tracks in five minutes and rush everything because we want to stick to that initial feeling, but we do operate from a sort of instinctive feeling towards producing and DJing. Sometimes that means an idea can linger in your mind for months, but when it comes out it’s almost finished in a way.

What’s on the horizon for Homework right now?

Homework: We’re working on a new EP on Exploited right now and there are some projects (read: new EPs) coming in 2011 that are still ‘works in progress’. There’s also a remix of the new Joyce Muniz track coming on November 12th. Apart from that we just want to ‘go with the flow’ (to be read as a reference to QOTSA) and see where our tastes and productions lead us. We don’t want to stick to one thing or feel.

I’m noticing a lot of labels are celebrating milestones and anniversaries with compilations: you have Exploited, Deadfish, Made To Play, Dirtybird and Man Recordings all putting out compilations within a couple of months, and it makes me think about the timeline that dance music exists on – on one hand, trends come and go really fast, and at the same time there’s a lot of longevity from different labels and musicians. Is it too early to say if you still want to be making dance music in five years?

Homework: That is true, things are going extremely rapidly within the dance music scene. I have no idea if our music will change to the extremes of becoming something else entirely… I do love dance music, but it’s hard to talk about the future, especially because things ARE moving so fast. Maybe dance music will change to a point where it becomes something more close to pop music or maybe it will become something even more experimental. For us it is about always trying something new (or old)… We’re just going to be doing our own thing, for us, for our “own heart and soul”. I don’t know where that places us within that spectrum.

Yeah, and I suppose any guess we make is pretty limited.

Homework: Absolutely. On both ends. Our future and the future of dance music as a whole is a complete mystery to any of us.

If Homework invited us to dinner, what would they make? (This can either be seen as a metaphor or a chance to talk about cooking).

Homework: We’d probably brew something up that would keep you on the edge of your seat all night. That might include heavy drinking, Gitanes, a Finders Keepers compilation and some interesting Japanese cuisine, but it might also mean just trusting us and being blindfolded, listening to that one DJ Spinna CD nobody has heard.

Hahaha, amazing. Final question – what’s one “essential” piece of house music you’d recommend to everyone interested in Homework?

Homework: The thing is that there are quite a number of things I would love to share with people. A lot of the beginnings of house are often forgotten by the kids. Larry Levan did some crazy things and we still regret never being able to have gone to the Paradise Garage. But if we could take two albums to a desert island they would be Lifestyles At The Laptop Cafe by Other People Place and Black Mahogani by Moodymann. For starters.


Thanks so much to Homework for the interview. Be sure to grab their latest Joyce Muniz remix here and check out a steadily growing, already extensive discography here.