Octave One - Here, There, and Beyond

With 20 years of production experience behind them and list of gigs spanning ten years, Octave One are veterans on the electronic scene. Despite an old school attitude towards analog gear, this family affair made up of brothers Lenny and Lawrence Burden are far from out of date. About to release a new album early next year, Revisited (Here, There and Beyond), they are headed down under to join Carl Craig and John Roberts at the second birthday of the Golden Cage in Sydney next month.

Pulse: Your new album Revisited (Here, There, and Beyond) is intriguing. What inspired the title and track choices? Octave One: The title of the project was inspired by the title of a track that we had on our first release on our then newly formed label 430 West Records. The track's title was There and Beyond and it was one of six tracks from the Octave One Octivation EP. So we really wanted a tie into our first 430 West release and the "here" is where we're at at this moment. The track choices were really left up to the artists we chose to remix the project.

We let them have the choice to choose from whatever tracks that they wanted from our catalogue of songs. We really wanted them to have the freedom of choice with no barriers as to what their particular favourites were and with what they could do to a particular track as an artist themselves.

As a group and individually, you're noted for your experience and you stand out for still using live gear instead of doing everything on a laptop. Why did you make this choice? Well that's the kind of question that is almost completely correct in the assumption that we only use hardware. Like we said, almost. We do use ProTools in our recording process but we are completely hardware on stage. We think it really boils down to what makes us feel the most creative. For us in particular, the creative process seemed stifled when we attempted to chain ourselves to laptop soft synth recording.

We had friends that were, and are, into the whole computer producing experience that would tell us 'just go buy this piece and that piece and add it to your computer and it'll almost give you the same experience as using hardware.' And we would just laugh to ourselves and sometimes even out loud, because that just didn't quite make sense to us. It was like going to a restaurant and the waiter suggesting meals to us that taste just like, or almost like chicken. Well, why in the world would we order a flavor substitute when we could just order the item that they're trying desperately to imitate? Just makes no sense [laughs].

How does the sound differ with analog equipment? Well it's like the characteristics of a light bulb compared to that of the sun with soft synths being the lightbulb. They both provide you with light, but how much brighter is the light of the sun? How much warmer is the heat of the sun compared to that of a lightbulb? And even more so, how much more attractive is the sun to us as humans than a lightbulb? This attraction to hardware analog gear is what we pay careful attention to during our performances. We get the first hand experience of seeing how the sound of gear just moves and motivates the crowd.

What's in your live kit? To give you a rundown in sum form: 2 Samplers, 2-3 Drum machines, 2 Compressors (because live gear is mad uncontrollable), 5-6 synths, and a 24 channel mixer.

You've been producing for 20 years and touring live for 10. For you, what are some of the stand out moments and achievements that have made it all worth it? Wow, loaded question because we have so many stand out moments for us performing live over the past 10 years. We seem to take each and every show and review it for what we've learned or earned from it after the gig, regardless of whether it's a large festival or a small show in a closet.

But we feel our biggest achievement that we learned the most from might have to be playing the Love Parade a few years back. It had to be the most nervous that we had ever been in performing and we were almost frozen stiff. But we did learn from it how to just relax and have fun like it was any other gig we had played. But again, the size of the crowd was just so phenomenal to us.

In Sydney you'll be playing alongside Carl Craig and John Roberts. Have you done shows with them before? It's a first for us playing with John Roberts we think, but we've had the pleasure of sharing the bill with Mr. Craig on various occasions and we look forward to gigging with them soon.

Could you give us five tracks that have really influenced your music throughout your career and grabbed your attention? We don't have five individual tracks so much but there are quite a few artists that we really lean towards. Anything Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, Stevie Wonder and Prince.

Octave One are playing with Carl Craig and John Roberts at the second birthday of the Golden Cage on December 17. Find out details on Pulse Radio here.

Listen to Octave One on Pulse Radio