These days dance act Above & Beyond don't believe they fit into the "pigeon holes" of trance or progressive house music anymore saying it's now "totally different".
Speaking to MTV Newsat the foot of a mountain in Mayrhofen, Austria where they had opened Snowbombing Festival 2013 wecaught up with two thirds of the prolific trio - Jono Grant and Tony McGuinness - for an exclusive chat about global gigging, genre-obsession and a decade in the biz..
MTV: "Tell us about the new release ‘Anjunabeats Volume 10‘?"
Tony: "We’ve put a lot of effort into this compilation and I think it’s one of the best that we’ve done. It’s got some releases from artists that aren’t usually on Anjunabeats and quite a few from us so we’re happy with how it’s gone. 10 years in, go figure. It’s fantastic."
Jono: "It’s one of those things like driving on a road and you just keep going and that’s what we’ve done with our music. We’re not really aware of how many miles we’ve done or how many releases we’ve had."
MTV: "Do you guys still see yourself as a Trance act?"
Tony: "I think those terms were invented when music magazines were really important and people read how journalists described the music. People still use that word to describe our music but the music itself is totally different. You’d hope it would be 10 years on you know. I mean what they call ‘progressive house’ now, sounds like hard house to me."
Jono: "If you look at the Beatport progressive house chart it’s very noisy, commercial house music, it’s not progressive house, it’s not the sort of music you’d hear Sasha and Digweed play which is what I thought progressive house was, but it puts the whole genre thing into question. From my point of view as a music listener and music lover I just like music that I like and I don’t really care what the genre is. I really don’t."
Tony: "It’s getting harder and harder to put things in pigeon holes and that’s good, things should keep moving."
MTV: "You've gigged across the globe. Is there anywhere left in the world that you’d like to play?"
Tony: "North Pole, South Pole and Sub-Saharan Africa seem to be the only places we haven’t been for some reason so yeah I’d love to do a gig at the top of Victoria Falls."
MTV: "Tell us about your new North American residency."
Jono: "We’re about to start a residency in Las Vegas at the Wynn – both
XS and
Encore Beach so we’re really excited about that. We just filmed a big promo video out there and had a lot of fun driving silly cars and jumping out of planes and all sorts of stuff.
"Playing in Vegas is great because you get to play to a new audience as well as your fans so a lot of people come in from California to see you play but also you get a lot of people travelling a long way to come to Vegas for their holidays so you’ve got a fresh audience as well, it’s that melting pot of people who know what you’re doing and people who don’t and that’s an exciting audience for us to play to."
By James Barnes @mtvuknews
Watch our Snowbombing Festival programmes including live shows from Kasabian, Example, Rudimental and Disclosure from 9pm on Saturday 11th May on MTV Music.
This article ©2013 MTV Networks Europe. All rights reserved. Any reporting on this interview (including quoting therefrom) must credit MTV News UK as the source.
