Although German producer-duo KIDSØ have been making music for many years, this project marks a change of pace for these two talented musicians. Made up of Moritz Grassinger and Martin Schneider, KIDSØ are focussed on producing a unique live-DJ performance with their shows and have honed their very own signature organic-electronic house-infused sound.
KIDSØ has just released their debut EP, ‘Apart’, to great success, via Berlin-based label Finest Ego. The EP has been a deeply immersive project for the duo, which they starting creating in 2017, and they found themselves spending a great deal of time outdoors in scenes of Bavarian nature, taking inspiration from the sounds of their home country.
We caught up with KIDSØ and chatted about creative processes, the music industry and retro music gear.
Tell us about you, how long have you been producing music? What did inspire you to start?
I’ve been in the music business for about 20 years. At that time I had quite a sparse setup, with 4 tones, 8 bit and 1 MB memory taped on an 8 channel cassette multitrack recorder. Martin joined the music business about 15 years ago, tweaking sounds on a 486 computer with as little as 16 MHz and 8 MB RAM. Together with friends, we started playing the drums and songs of our idols at that time. While most of our friends went out, having some drinks or off to party, we spent our time in our studios working on our live sets and songs.
The music industry is super competitive these days, was there a moment in your life that you wanted to give up on music? How did you manage to stay focused and achieve what you want?
When working on your own songs and playing in a band, you do not pay that much attention to other bands. You put so much effort and passion in that music, that you identify yourself 100% with your music. You do not care about “competition” or whether your music might find its audience or not. As long as you love what you are doing and have fun to play your songs, it is pretty easy to stay focused.
How would you describe your creative processes? Who writes the lyrics to the songs? Are the music and lyrics written in conjunction, or separately?
We start working on rhythms and the melodies first before thinking of lyrics and vocals. As we work with guest singers, we prefer having the foundation of a song before trying different vocal lines. The lyrics themselves sometimes come from the guest singer, sometimes we have a certain mood in our mind which we then try to apply to our lyrics.
Where the inspiration comes from?
We both have a fascination for technical stuff. Computers, analog synths, tapes recorders and all kinds of retro devices. It’s not just our studio that is overflowing with effect gears, instruments and some junk you could draw a few new sounds from, we also share this fascination in our private lives. Making sounds and music with all that equipment was just a matter of time.
What’s your favourite track from the upcoming album and what other bands/artists are you listening to right now?
It is hard to say which track is our most favorite one. Each song is produced in a different way at a different time during the last twelve months. We link each song to a certain memory we both have together. But some of the key tracks of the EP are ‘Silent’ (the very first track we finalized) and ‘Youth’ (while producing this song we developed a routine and workflow of working on new tracks).
What’s next for you?
We still play some shows this year and are preparing our tour for next year. This also means preparing different live sets, visuals and producing some additional live tracks. It feels like an adventure for us right now and we are excited to see where the next months and years will bring us.
