INTERVIEW: HWLS

HWLS, the hyphen less production project of Perth's TA-KU and KIT-POP, have had a big year in 2014. In fact, they've had their only year in 2014.

They put out a great 4 track EP with Future Classic featuring a melding of styles, bass, trap, tropical, basically anything that’s worked in a club over the last few years combined with their individual talents as hip hop beatsmiths with an rnb streak and over the past month they’ve begun touring the project nationally. I sat down with KIT-POP back stage at Beyond the Valley as he prepared to bring in the new year.

So you’re playing over midnight tonight, what're you going to play for the count down?

I still don’t know if there's a countdown thing on the screen or what the fuck I'm gonna play.

But this is a big decision, this song can either define 2014 or forecast the future...

I took a slightly different approach and I'm just gonna throw back to some Bob Marley or something (he did).

Big question, where's Ta-Ku?

Haha, that’s what I get all the time. No he’s not touring with me much.

This is your first festival and you've only just started playing shows recently.

Yeh only about a month ago.

Have you enjoyed touring the project so far?

Yeh it’s been good, there are good and bad sides to touring. We’re both pretty much homebodies, we’re pretty far away from everything so there's that, but its been nice getting out and about and everything. There’s some plans to go overseas next year but we're  just waiting on some emails through this debaucherous Christmas season.

Is it weird that you've started this new project with Ta-Ku, but you haven’t performed together at all?

It is kinda weird but its mainly to be a production project, doing shows was more of an afterthought, he doesn't like to perform much as it is, he’s really selective. Whereas I really enjoy djing. The main thing I want to get across to punters was that the show doesn't change if he's there or not, that’s the main thing. I've made a good deal with him, the home town shows he’ll play because he doesn't have to travel far.

How is performing as a duo different to performing solo?

I think its just the variations as music now, I used to play similar stuff on my own to this several years ago and I think we've sort of evolved into this sound, we really like to play bass driven music. My own shows now are a lot different, I use different gear.

You've only got 5 tracks out so far, do you think you know what your sound is yet?

Nah I don’t think so even with the EP, same vein but a little different in a way, it’s a bit whatever we’re feeling at the time but yeah I think its always gonna be a little bit heavy.

Are you going to stop being lazy and come up with track names?

Yeah I think the next EP will be a little bit different, we might use some different names for the numbers but at the moment we’re keeping all that stuff very minimal.

Kinda like white label stuff, it's all about the music.

Yeah we didn't want to give names to things so that people can't make an idea about it before listening to it, just keeping it numbered made it easy to catalogue whilst also being slack on our part, keeping things simple is always good.

When's your next release coming out, have you got a date?

We've got a couple remixes coming out hopefully in January, one that was supposed to come out a couple weeks ago, but we've been flat out with a other things so we didn't have time to put it out, but pretty much the next EP is done. Just do a little bit more to it then we’ll be right to put it out.

As a collaborative project, where individually you both make stylistically similar music, what do you guys bring individually to the tracks? Is one of you more percussive or melodic?

That’s a good question to be honest, we’re both very drums based from our previous projects. It’s always just been about ideas, that are outside of what we normally do. We still make beats the same but we rarely make stuff together in the studio, we send it all to each other over the internet. That way everything sounds fresh to our ears, and the main thing we’ve found is we can work a lot quicker sending stems back and forth and manipulating it and adding more to it.

Are you doing any solo stuff next year?

Nah I'm not, I'm gonna focus on this HWLS shit, if there's anything I do on my own it’d be doing production for other people.

Are you looking to bring in any other people to the project?

We’ve got some stuff in the works, we had 002 feature a couple of people but we had to drop that, there's some we've gotten back with people sending us their stuff over 001 and some well known people but it’s just a matter of jumping through the hoops to make sure people can hear it. We’ve got a few collaborations lined up for later in the year. I cannot drop any names.

No names were dropped, look out for new releases and more tours from HWLS in 2015...

Words by Alex Whitney

SEE ALSO

LISTEN: SEEKAE 'TEST & RECOGNISE' (HWLS REMIX)

INTERVIEW: TA-KU

SOUNDCLOUD WRAP: KIT POP