Parklife kicked off in Adelaide on the weekend, with Soulwax playing one of the standout sets. Check out the photos here!
If you think about the current state of modern pop music, you should know that the Belgians are to blame. Without Soulwax – and in particular, their DJ offshoot 2manydjs – the likes of Australian heroes like Cut Copy, The Presets, and Midnight Juggernauts would, in all likelihood, not have broken into international markets in the way that they have. Klaxons would be considered a lesser Primal Scream, not at the vanguard of new-rave (or fluoro-rock). Girl Talk probably wouldn’t exist at all. Soulwax have revolutionised pop music…and they almost did it by accident.
It was in the mid-1990s that the brother-born duo of David and Stephen Dewaele first began performing together as Soulwax, creating Leave the Story Untold, before following it up in 1999 with their international breakthrough, Much Against Everyone’s Advice. While a foot-stompingly catchy indie rock record that may have been, it was their landmark 2003 release As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 – an officially released compendium of the mix-tapes they made to entertain themselves, mashing together everyone from Dolly Parton to Peaches to the Velvet Undeground to Salt n Pepa to New Order.
With a slew of successful remixes behind them, the duo are two of the most influential figures in music today, and their many fingers in many pies seems set to endure – they’ve just released their first DVD, Part of the Weekend Never Dies, chronicling a club tour performed in 2006.
“We were involved in every aspect of it,” says David of the finished product. “We released a compilation of all of our remixes [in September, 2006], and we’ve been touring with that until March, and in between we were working on the film – editing, the music, mixing, a lot of different things. We were involved in almost everything up to the packaging.”
But beyond that, the brothers have kept busy in the studio too, remixing a plethora of artists, making an album with a Belgian group called Das Pop, and working on the second Tiga album. How on earth do they deal with all their activity – when does one aspect of what they do stop and when does the next begin?
“We’re in quite a fortunate position,” he admits, “because there’s quite a bit of demand we can be quite loose and we don’t have to plan everything six months ahead. So if, for example, we say in two months we want to go and record something with ‘that person’ then we can. We’re quite fortunate that we can change depending on how we feel. I see maybe a lot of people around us who maybe tend to do only one thing – they tend to be more structured, but also more bound to certain rules. We’re quite flexible.
“Also,” he continues, “because we do so many things and we do them in a way where it’s quite random, we stay fresh. We don’t get bored.”
It’s certainly the way the music industry seems to be going these days – Soulwax are masters of their own domain, running their own studio, and essentially able to be self-sufficient in terms of how they produce both their own and other people’s music. Having the ability to delineate their various guises seems like they have a greater scope of musical exploration than most musical acts – other bands tend to stick to the one thing; a case of ‘better the devil you know’. It seems like a very European take on music – a little of this, a dash of that, a splash of something else.
“Maybe you’re right,” he shrugs. “I never thought it as a ‘European thing’, but just as a logical thing. Just as I could never understand why anyone would want to be a deep house DJ or a drum ‘n bass DJ where you only play one kind of music – I never understood why if you’re a chef why would you limit yourself to only Brazilian food. It’s the same in all sorts of life – life is too great to stick to just one thing.”
For the future, it means that Soulwax can continue ad infinitum – as long as the brothers aren’t bored, they can keep creating under their many and different guises. David can’t see it changing for the moment; he doesn’t want to limit himself to one aspect of musical creation.
“The way it’s going now is increasingly becoming more and more projects,” he says. “Some of them we want to keep secret and instead of it being about one Soulwax album it’s just going to continue to be many, many different projects. We have a lot of things going on, and any artist – and I tend not to use that word, but anyone creatively busy – thrives on accomplishment. I think the advantage we have is that there’s so many little different particles in this entity that it’s easy to get a quick feeling accomplishment, even if it’s just an edit or a remix. There’s all these little things and we just build many little things.”
Soulwax’s documentary DVD Part of the Weekend Never Dies is out now, with the band continuing its Parklife tour this weekend.
