Chewing The Fat with Maribou State

Liam Ivory and Chris Davids are better known as Maribou State, the UK EDM duo who cemented their reputation as a live act alongside the likes of SBTRKT and have now ebbed into production and release territory.  Part of The Fat Club roster, they've recently worked with The 2 Bears and Crookers and their Olivia EP is due out on February 6th.  Ahead of Chew The Fat's new residency at XOYO on February 10th alongside MJ Cole, Foamo and Hot City, we caught up with the pair to chat about what's coming up for them in 2012.

Pulse:  What have you been up to the last few weeks?  Maribou State: The New Year has got off to a pretty good start. We’ve jumped straight back in the studio and finished up a number of new remixes for Alpines, Saint Saviour and a couple others, all due out over the next month or so. Also started on a few collaboration projects, which we are really exited about.

How long have you been making music for and how did the two of you end up coming together to form Maribou State?  All together we’ve been making dance music for about 5 years now. When we were young we both hated each other all through school. I built a skate ramp, which Chris stole, which I then stole back, along with getting the money for it, and burnt it. Since then though we oddly became friends. It all came around through playing in bands together at school. Maribou State is a pretty recent project.

You did a remix for Crookers fairly recently, how did that one come about?   Yeh that’s right, it managed to hit number one on the hype-machine, which was great. We’d been speaking to the guys at Southern Fried about releasing some tracks with them, then ended up doing the 2 Bears remix. The Crookers remix just followed on from that, along with a remix of the Black Ghosts, which is out in March.

How do the two of you normally go about writing a track?  We don’t really have a particular formula in the studio. Especially as there are two of us. It can start with a beat or a sample one of us has put together. We normally start ideas/loops for tracks separately then bring them to the studio to work on together. We love using more organic sounds, so the field recorder and mic get used a lot.

Do you think electronic music is in a particularly interesting place right now?   Yeah, for sure. I really like how boundaries are being constantly broken down, almost blurring genres together. It seems things are less likely to be lumped into strict genres – something that’s always pissed me off about some muso’s. It’s great as producers are able to switch up the style of their music and still be recognised for having a particular overall ‘sound’, as opposed to being boxed into a sub-genre.  

If you could go back in time to any place in the world and be making music, where would you go and why? I think its safe to say we both would have loved to be around during the Madchester scene of 88. Being a resident at the Hacienda would have been pretty special.

Have there been any memories that particularly stick out from you guys making music or DJing? Any crazy stories?  Glastonbury 2010 sticks out in my head for being one of the worst gigs ever, back when we were playing under a different alias. We were snuck into the festival in the back of some Irish mans van. Our singer got sunstroke, the owners of the tent were all fucked up on acid, the generator blew up halfway through our set and I ended up leaving to get back for a gig in London. Chris stayed however and holds it as one of his favorite festivals - I’m guessing Stevie wonder had something to do with it.

Which DJ's and producers do you think are really pushing electronic music forward right now?  Some obvious choices would be guys like SBTRKT, The Weeknd and Ghost Poet. There are a lot of newer guys pushing through like Disclosure, Pedestrian, Satellite 100 and Gang Colours – all of whom were rating at the moment.

And who's your least favourite person in music at the moment? [laughs] To be honest I can’t really think of anyone. Any bad Indy normally grinds my gears. I’m a big XFM listener but spend a lot of time in the day being pissed off with the selection. Actually, La Roux is a bit of a knob to be fair.

What have you got planned for the rest of the year? Where do you want to be this time come 2013? (provided the world doesn't end!)  So far were just filling the year with original releases and remixes. We’d like to be playing out as much as possible and are really excited to get our collaboration projects out there. There’s rumors from Eddy Temple-Morris that we're on Secret Garden Party this year so were stoked about that. We're both quite keen to think about an album for the end of the year and following that get the live show together.

Maribou State play at Chew The Fat meets Well Rounded on February 10th at XOYO
room 1
MJ COLE
FOAMO
HOT CITY
FRENCH FRIES
MARIBOU STATE

room 2
WELL ROUNDED
DONGA
JAMES FOX
GON GON
SPATIAL
LEON

For tickets and info, head here

Listen to Maribou State on Pulse Radio