Our reporters Leonie and Kseniia met the Australian drum & bass dj & producer LUUDE (Christian Benson) for a nice chat after his performance at Electric Love Festival in Salzburgring about his viral hits “Down Under” and “Big City Life”, his approach with projects, guilty pleasures and more!
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Leonie: Thanks for this amazing set, it was a lot of fun!
LUUDE: Did you come?
Leonie: Yeah, of course. what do you think? I interview you without seeing you? that’s not possible!
LUUDE: Yeah, that’s true, it’s 4 years in a row, the backstage is different this year, but the stage is always – love it.
Leonie: Yeah, your drum and bass remixes have gone viral, when you choose a sample like “Down Under” or “Big City Life” what’s the moment that tells you “Yeah, this can become a Luude track”?
LUUDE: Ha Ha it’s kind of usually just, well both of the songs, one was kind of sent to me as an idea, one was a joke. Not a joke, not a joke, but it was kind of like “this would be funny to make a dance song out of” and it actually sounded alright. so yeah who knows, who knows. Just kind of listen to songs and you’re like “Well that could be cool in like drum and bass music”, but yeah you never know.
Leonie: So there’s not just like one moment?
LUUDE: No, no, no, I mean like obviously there’s like new songs that you probably can’t touch as much and then there’s some old songs where you like „that song’s so in its own genre, that I should not make it a dance song“, but then when you make it a dance song it works. I mean…I don’t really have an explanation, it’s kind of just a fluke.
Leonie: Yeah it just happens.
LUUDE: Yeah, it just happens yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m trying to come up with the some like..there is no same.
Leonie: Ha ha okay. How do you know when a song is finished or are you the type who keeps tweaking until the label forces you to stop?
LUUDE: That’s actually a great question, I’m going through it right now with my label with the song because they sent it to me and they’re like “alright do this“, so like „switch this bit up” and then I switched everything and then they’re like “no, you’ve done too much, bring it back” and then I’m like “no, but I want it to sound like this“ then they’re like “bring it” so you kind of have an argument because you wanna do some weird sounding stuff and the record label wants to do some, maybe some more that mostly you know if you haven’t listened to drum and bass you’ll hear it like “oh this sounds alright” or I wanna make it very weird, so it’s a constant argument.
Leonie: And I hope you win most of the time!
LUUDE: I never win, I’ve never won once ahaha!
Leonie: You’ve collaborated with legends like Colin Hay and Moby, if you could resurrect any artist from the past for a feature
LUUDE: Like resurrect or collab?
Leonie: Resurrect! Who would it be and why?
LUUDE: I‘m just trying to think, ha ha well, I mean if you, to be honest, if you collab with anyone, it wouldn’t be a drum and bass song, I don’t, it would be a totally different genre, but Freddie Mercury! He’s the OG, but I don’t think, I don’t know if we’d make anything good. But his voice is amazing. I don’t know if, I don’t think I would be able to do anything for him, but Freddie Mercury. I’ll choose that.
Leonie: Okay. And now a sneaky one, what’s one guilty pleasure track, you secretly love, but you would never drop in a set?
LUUDE: Oh, what the, what’s the name? Sophia’s murder on the dancefloor „it’s murder on the dance floor, you better not steal the groove“ ha ha, you know, yeah yeah that’s my guilty pleasure, I probably would play that to be honest.
Leonie: You should ha ha. Thank you very much for your time and the interview
LUUDE: Appreciate it! Did you actually see the set?
Leonie: Yeah!
LUUDE: Oh, I thought you were just signed up for the video..
Leonie: I was even once behind you, when you kind of tried to destroy your headphones
LUUDE: Oh, so you saw, oh no, no, I thought you were making it up just for the video, I’m like Oh, you actually saw it
Leonie: I saw it all!
________ Thanks to Electric Love Festival and LUUDE for the opportunity!
