The Re-Groove: Villa
The Re-Groove returns to speak with Belgium production trio, Villa. Hailing from Ghent the group are purveyors of high quality dance music and have mixed one of the year’s best compilation: Cosmic Balearic Beats Volume 2 out on Eskimo Recordings The group have also remixed for the likes of The C90s, The Golden Filter and Moby aswell as dabbling with disco edits with a release on seminal edit label Mindless Boogie‘s 20th release.
Winston: Where did you grow and where do you live now?
Villa: We all come from a different place, but Villa as a music project is originated from Ghent. That’s a little town in Belgium with a vivid music scene. The studio is based at Seba’s place. He lives in a little village in the countryside.
Winston: How did you guys meet?
Villa: That depends on who is telling the story. Seba met Fredo on a party in Make Up Club, but Fredo was so drunk that night he thinks he met Seba on a music fair.
Anyway, from the moment we got in the studio together it went all very nice & easy.
Winston: How did you first get into electronic music?
Villa: The eighties were a great time for electronic music. Lots of bands were experimenting with these new instruments called synths, effects and drum machines. One could hear electronic sounds in the hit parade in a very acceptable and fresh manner. That is how it happened to us. Separate from our personal preferences, it sure has something to do with the era we grew up in and the novelty of electronic musical gear at that time… First there were Quincy Jones/Michael Jackson, Prince, Moroder and Vangelis. Later, as for many people, Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Daft Punk, Leftfield, Orbital opened our ears for electronic music.
Winston: What is about a song that compels you to edit it?
Villa: The feeling we have something to add to the piece, a fresh angle or the feeling to get more capacity out of the parts provided. A nice front lady always helps of course. It is a bigger challenge for us to edit a known track than an obscure hard to find one where no one actually knows what you did to the track. Take a guilty pleasure and make it credible again, combined with our approach and sound.
Winston: What sort of gear do you use to produce?
Villa: Seba has been collecting numerous classics from the memorymoog, cs60, rhodes 73, linndrum LM2, full system 100, sherman qmf, prophet 5, OBXA, EII, omega 8, banana synth, SY1, Expander, prophet VS, DX7, Andromeda…we could go on for another while here… to a Tascam M600 mixer and some vintage channelstrips…Oh yeah and a Pentium 3 oldschool PC
Winston: What’s your favourite edit you have done?
Villa: The first edits were very easy cut/copy paste edits of disco and house tracks, for example DMX Crew with Cold Heart part 2 on Gigolo Records. Emphasis the good groove and take out the bad parts. After those kitchen edits we evolded to a more active form of editing and started adding new elements to the tracks. A nice example is the Agneta edit we’ve done… So we are very delighted with our diva edits of last summer on Mindless Boogie…
Winston: Is there any song think should never be re-edited?
Villa: Too many to mention… Every artist will think different about re-editing, do’s and don’ts. So it’s hard to say.
Winston: How did you end up getting together with Mindless Boogie?
Villa: We’ve known the guy from Mindless Boogie for a long time. He was there from the start of Villa and years before that he booked the first big Fredo & Thang gigs in Ghent. He is also the man who brought the three of us together (after that music fair experience). The mood was right, the setting was perfect, and the start of the summer and Mindless Boogie was celebrating their 20th release.
Winston: What do you have planned for 2010?
Villa: Have a chill, relax a lot… No no, we ‘re gonna work even harder than we did in 2009, making good remixes, edits, mixes, sets, doing some co-productions and last but not least, come out with our own material. We are really excited to finally release them because we’ve just been working on remixes for the past six months.
Villa - Agneta
Villa - Anita
Villa - Tina
Courtesy of Mindless Boogie
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