It's A Trap!

"I've been meaning to put the vocals of Assquake together; I've been meaning to bounce a stem of that shit and...”

As the conference call begins, Josh Young and Curt Cameruci are already deep in the throes of some conversation regarding collaboration before I rudely interrupt. Despite the fact these two aren't even living in the same city these days, their productivity shows no signs of diminishing.

“Inbetween interviews we're having band meetings,” Young laughs. Despite the distance, Cameruci says they still see too much of each other. “Because we're touring, and we're always out on the road or in the studio somewhere we're still with each other more than we're with our girlfriends and our wives.”

“We used to live together and we almost killed each other,” Young jokes.

It seems the distance actually helps the creative process. Everything they make now happens via filesharing services such as Dropbox, except for the occasional track like the Do Or Die remix for Flux Pavilion they recorded on tour.

“We were kinda doing that before,” says Cameruci. “I've been living in New York for three years so we've been doing it for a minute. We both work differently in general. We both have different mindsets about making music and we both like to be alone when we work too, so it's good to do that.”

“When we were living together we even had a studio separate to our house, and just because of our styles and the way we work together it was counterproductive,” Young adds. “I don't know as much about engineering and production sort of stuff so I'll make something really quick and get my idea out as fast as possible, and all the fine tuning is what Curt brings to the table. So living apart, it actually made stuff a lot easier because I could do my own thing and get my ideas out, send them to Curt and if he likes it he takes the whole project and finishes it, or brings it to a point where it's ready to go.”

The system is clearly working. Ever since they first bugged Diplo for stems to do a remix (which they turned around in a day), Flosstradamus remixes have become a 'must have' for lovers of big trap beats and dirty hip hop fans. Their own style is simple and minimally layered, with bass impact and partying being high on the list of priorities. They've mastered social media with hashtags like #PLURNT(Peace Love Unity Respect Now Twerk) shadowing their multi-platformed posts. They don't take themselves too seriously, but are very interested in making something different and presenting their tunes in novel ways.

“We're always up with technology and we're always on the next shit,” Cameruci says. “Like, we've just always been those people anyway. We saw this one website where you can see when you joined Twitter or whatever and we were like the 800th person to join Twitter or something, so we're always trying to do something next level with technology and the internet.”

This translates into how they get their music out. “When we released the X EP we did this thing where kids had to tweet at us with this hashtag, and then we spit it back to them with a unique link which included one extra download for a friend, and then it was done. We released one of our mixtapes as a torrent-only download, and the next mixtape we're about to release we have vape pens, for smoking weed and shit, that are custom made with a USB drive built into them.”

Young pipes in (pun intended).

“I guess it was a bit of a stoner idea,” he laughs. “I feel like we are both most creative after a set. A lot of times we'll come offstage and we have this massive adrenaline rush, and we smoke when we play so we'll be a bit stoned and the juices are flowing so we start riffing, and that was one of those ideas!”

“You see the reach that you can have [with social media],” Young continues. “We've already exploited Twitter and SoundCloud to their fullest potential so we're always looking for new ways we can utilise the internet, because when you upload a song to Hulkshare or SoundCloud, or you put it on The Pirate Bay like our last mixtape, you're really giving it to everyone. You're not focusing on a demographic, you're putting it out there for everyone and anyone who has an internet connection. At the end of the day we want to get our music to every person, so when you have certain streams available, we're gonna use those and exploit them to the fullest.”