Fade Up :: Cosmo’s Midnight

April 18th 2013

New music is everywhere. Whether you’re listening to the radio or clicking through blogs and ‘related artists’, finding your new favourite act seems easier than ever. Yet this constant cacophony of sounds means that even if you find something special, it’s far too easy to skip through a track in chunks without appreciating it as a whole.

Fade Up is here to scoop the urgency out of music discovery: giving you the chance to hang out with an emerging homegrown talent that we think will go on to do big things. We find artists that are worth taking some time to get to know and set you up with a first date, soundtracked by tunes they’ve curated for the occasion.

Screw short attention spans, we’re bringing intimacy back to the internet.

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Disclosure‘s Guy and Howard Lawrence haven’t got the brotherly production duo game pinned down. Cosmo and Patrick Liney are exploiting their extra sensory twin powers in order to create some rad electronic music straight outta Sydney.

 

Let’s spend a little time with Cosmo’s Midnight.

Sandro (Flog) :: You guys draw a lot of comparisons to Flume. Has his sound influenced you?

Cosmo (Cosmo’s Midnight) :: I think that right now it’s impossible to not be compared to Flume, and one of our fears is being considered Flume copycats. Flume uses a lot of techniques that have been around for a while. But since he’s brought them to light, other people that use them could be considered as trying to sound like Flume. It’s a bit like Disclosure. People have been making garage and house for ages, but anyone that chops vocals or pitches chords just sounds like Disclosure now. Anyway he is making huge waves in the Australian electronic music scene so of course his music is going to be used as a point of comparison for music along the same vein. But really we didn’t ever make a conscious effort for our music to sound like his. Our influences come from a variety of artists and genres. So yeah, Flume is definitely a producer we look up to and he is definitely going to help more underground acts get a foot in the door, but we don’t really intend to sound like him.

S :: Do you tend to sample a lot?

C :: We definitely use samples in our music, but not to the extent that you would in producing hip-hop or sample-based house. It’s almost always a small vocal hook that we can re-pitch or tweak in some way to work with an idea we have already made. Everything else we tend to synthesise, as you have a lot more control over stuff you have written yourself. Most of the time it takes quite a bit of effort to make samples work in your tracks.

S :: In your recent debut set, you triggered a lot of samples live, but left sizeable gaps between each track much like a band would do. Is this a performance style that will be maintained in the future?

C :: Right now we are still working on building our live set and our gig at The Standard was definitely a great way to test the water. We feel that separating the tracks creates a bit more of an experience for each track which can often be overlooked when they are blended seamlessly in a set. As we build our live set more and make it more of a performance by taking away some of the button pushing, it will probably become a bit more spectacular. Right now we are still experimenting with ways to perform live that will be heaps involved so we can have more stage presence and don’t have to rely on just hyping up the crowd with gestures while the computer does all the work.

 

Cosmo’s Midnight have curated a mixtape of their influences for you. It is the very definition of glorious.

Cosmo’s Midnight have just signed to Yes Please Records

Cosmo’s Midnight | Fade Up

 

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