Italoboyz: Artist of the Week

Italoboyz: Artist of the Week

9 October, 2007 | 8.31AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News:

Since their sexy opera-led minimal track ‘Viktor Casanova’ [check it out in the player below] dropped in August, Italoboyz Marco Donato and Federico Marton have become hot new property on the underground club circuit. Ricardo Villalobos, Sven Väth and Luciano have all be caning their track which brings together minimal techno beats and FX with beautiful poignant female opera vocals.

Because Italoboyz are working hard to push the envelope of electronic music, they’re our Artist of the Week.

Beatportal caught up with the boys in London.

Your tracks always features loads of quirky weird noises - what’s your theory about good minimal?

Marco: Well first of all we don’t really see ourselves as ‘minimal’.

That is for sure a big influence, as well as many other genres. We like to think that our music is the result of our personal music exploration that started in the late 1980s and embraced pretty much all the possible evolutions that house and techno music went through.

The theory we have is that the thing that counts the most in making music is having an idea behind it.

So instead of starting by creating a drum kit, and then putting a snare, and then finding the hi-hat, we first develop what we consider is the soul of the track, and then add in all those nice little details.

How do you develop the ‘soul’ of the track?

Federico: The way we work at the moment is this: we work initially on the idea of the track that we want to develop, we do the arrangement and the general structure, until let’s say 80% of it is done, and then we take it to the studio, where we make the final mix and that’s where we process the main sounds with analog machines.

So the biggest part of the work is made by using software, mainly Reason and Ableton Live which we use to create lots of sounds.

The final part of the process is hardware, and our favourite machine is the TL Audio C 5021 valve compressor. We also like the Lexicon MPX-500 and the Aural Exciter.

Your recent ‘Viktor Casanova’ track has loads of soul, thanks to a distinctive female opera vocal. Where on earth did you get that sample from?

Marco: He he, it came from heaven, not from earth.

Ok. But it did come from an old record, didn’t it? Is the sampling of old records and combining it with modern minimal something you’ll be exploring more in the future?

Federico: Definitely there’s the need for something different and more emotional, and for something that people recognize.

We always hear more and more re-edits, some of them are great, because they take an old amazing idea and they make it sound modern and phat.

What’s your favourite plug in effect/audio effect at the moment?

We constantly experiment with many different plug ins and we are very much into combining them, which sometimes leads to really nice sounds!

The Ohmboyz (arctic) is an interesting delay, the Doubleglitch it’s very useful for micro-breaks. The Nepheton is a very nice emulator of the classic 808 drum machine and the Akai DC Vocoder is really nice too.

So do you get all your drum noises from the Nepheton 808 emulator?

Marco: We really like using our own sounds that we generate out of anything we have. We find sounds and we record them.

Recently we did a whole track by using sounds that we recorded out from a wooden xylophone, a flute, castagnettes (we love them so much) and lots of other real things. They sound so real, because they are real.

You’ve used some crazy instruments to make minimal.

Marco: The most amazing aspect of minimal is that you can do the most weird things and easily get away with them. Obviously, it has to sound nice and original, and if it does, it makes total sense.

For any budding producers out there trying to make minimal, could you share a few tips?

Federico: Start with an idea and make the track as it makes sense to you. Don’t bother too much with details, work towards the concept of the track and the rest will follow.

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