1. Growing Up
I have pretty strong musical memories going all the way back, really. My parents are not especially musical and they had pretty average music taste overall, but fortunately they were into a few cool artists so I managed to be surrounded by some good music from a young age – Paul Simon, Fleetwood Mac and Neil Diamond were some of their favourites. I also started playing piano when I was three or four so I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t all about music.
2. Inspirations
These days inspiration comes from a lot of places; when you make music for a living it’s easy to be inspired by lots of different kinds of musicians – singers, producers, DJs, songwriters…so the list of what’s inspiring us lately is pretty long! Disclosure, Daft Punk, Styalz Fuego, Tame Impala, Clouds, Adapt Or Die, Julio Bashmore, Duke Dumont, Cashmere Cat, Hit Boy, 2 Chainz, Gucci Mane, Jeremih, and the drummer from Def Leppard!
3. Your Group
Mikah and I were already DJing and producing tracks before we got together as Aston Shuffle. Mikah was working in a record store in Canberra when I met him, so we connected over music talk right from the start. These days we’re fortunate enough to make a living from our Aston Shuffle stuff, we’re pretty much about music 24/7, which can be a double-edged sword at times but we wouldn’t persevere if we didn’t love it.
4. The Music You Make
As DJs we play a lot of different venues, so you have to be versatile, I guess, and that speaks to where we come from. But the aim is always to smash the room apart, whatever that room might be – we’re always aiming for a pretty high bar.
5. Music, Right Here, Right Now
There’s a lot of focus on dance music at the moment, the EDM scene in America is huge and getting a lot of attention, and the Daft Punk album is the first record in a long time to garner that level of attention and critical dissection. It’s super exciting that it’s a dance act that has managed to achieve that. I think it’s great that they’ve consciously made a very different record to what’s happening with dance music on the whole (especially on a commercial level) and have still managed to absolutely kill it. That kind of risk taking is very inspirational, it’s easy to fall into a mindset of just adhering to whatever else is happening in music, so to see a purposefully different record do so well is hugely inspirational.
The Aston Shuffle play Chinese Laundry with Light Year on Saturday July 6.