It’s not every day you find a new house track and go, “Oh! Well that’s different!” The Canadian duo, Botnek, have been getting a lot of hype recently, and for just reason. These guys have an innovative and fresh sound that’s been turning many, many heads in the industry. By the end of 2012, they showcased their talents with their “Sriracha & Beer” EP, released off of Steve Aoki’s Dim Mak Records, and since then have remixed some of electronic music’s biggest names, including DallasK, Jack Beats, Mat Zo & Porter Robinson. We had a chance to sit down and talk with one of the hottest new duos to appear on the scene, and learn a little bit more about what makes Botnek so unique.
For our readers who may not be familiar, can you introduce yourselves?
We’re Botnek from Montreal, Canada. We make dance tracks and then sometimes play them in nightclubs. We have a record deal with Dim Mak.
So what’s the story behind your group’s name, “Botnek”?
We were pretty lazy coming up with the name, we just put our first names together. Thats a joke, but it definitely doesn’t come from Dr. Robotnik, the villain in Sonic the Hedgehog games.
In your interview with the one and only Steve Aoki, you guys say you’re from a smaller town where the electronic music scene isn’t big. What influenced you to pursue the electronic dance music scene?
Yeah exactly, we grew up in a city called Halifax on the east coast of Canada. It’s nice if you wanna eat pepperoni, but doesn’t really have a music scene that fit what we were in to. If you’ve ever seen Trailer Park Boys… yeah that’s where we’re from. And it’s not that much of an exaggeration to be honest. But we’ve both been making some form of electronic music since we were teenagers, so I guess we’ve just been too stubborn to give up. It wasn’t until we both moved to Montreal that we were incredibly inspired by a scene. It was being able to see a lot of the acts we were into, we learned a lot from the scene here.
In your Aoki Files interview, you guys said that while producing “Think I Feel”, you’re feeling towards its sound was that it’s “… really weird, so people might remember that.” Has that mentality always been your inspiration behind your music?
Pretty much always. If it stands out as unique or wacky we are into it. Our big thing is we find a lot of dance music is just new for the sake of being new. Doesn’t necessarily have a long shelf life for DJs, unless it has a truly memorable hook, either being a melody or some unique sounding riff. All of the sounds we make just come from goofing around in the studio and trying to make ourselves laugh. Actually I’m pretty sure we have more fun describing what the sounds remind us of rather than actually making music with them.
You guys have received a lot of positive support from house music veterans, as well as other popular, up-and-coming artists. Which artist or DJ were you most excited about supporting your work, and why?
When I see our songs popping up in tracklists from legends like Paul Van Dyk or Paul Oakenfold I feel like a lot of people have been tricked haha. I was super happy to have Pete Tong play our stuff on BBC R1 because we got a lot of influence early on from listening to his and others’ radio shows when were living in Halifax trying to hear new music. It’s also great to be supported by newer up-and-coming acts like you said, we’re starting to have a quite tight group of peers that we can all share with and learn from.
One of my personal favorite songs by you guys is your remix of Tocadisco’s “Bat3ria”. With your extremely unique sound, I have to ask; what’s your own favorite project by YOU?
We’re super happy with how our remix of DallasK “Alienz”. We joke that it sounds like we put his song through a woodchipper. People have been responding well to it, and we thought it was something that was gonna be too weird to be called dance music. It’s cool people like the wacky stuff, just means we’re giving ourselves permission to go even more mental with the sounds for new originals.
You guys have developed a tight connection with Steve Aoki and Dim Mak Records. Were you heavily influenced by the Dim Mak sound before being picked up by Steve Aoki, or did it just work out that way? And do you guys have any plans to collaborate with the label master himself?
Definitely, dudes like MSTRKRFT, Bloody Beetroots and Felix Cartal were all influential on our sound when we started, so being a part of the Dim Mak roster is completely dope. No plans right now to work with Steve, but who knows, if he ever wants to get some Botnek weird bass in a track…
Even as an established fan, it was actually quite tough to dig up a lot of information about you guys. Is there anything that you’d like to tell PB&J and our readers to give us a bit more insight into who you are?
We are super Canadian, we both say “eh” and have funny accents (according to everyone). Our favorite hot sauce is Sriracha and our favorite beer is Tuborg. We can both grow beards in like 2 weeks. A lot of our inside jokes come from Adventure Time, or Wes Anderson movies. Our favorite website is Brown Cardigan. We have almost completely opposite sleep schedules. Only 1 of us liked the new Daft Punk album, and that same half of Botnek reads the Science section.
Do you have any new solo material that you guys are currently working on that you’d like to tell us about?
Our next single is called “Through the Night”, and should be out before July. There’s also gonna be a very PG13 rated video coming for it as well. We have one more single coming later this summer, which is all going to be a part of what eventually will become our album. It was the offer from Steve to do an album with Dim Mak and we jumped at it. Honestly, thats the format that we first experienced electronic music in, so we’re excited to be able to stretch our production muscles and not have to focus on club structures, and make some really different music that we are proud of. We’ve done so many remixes at this point, but we both agree it was really just practice to perfecting our style and mixing skills, so now when we approach new music we have so much more confidence at being able to reach our vision. So yes, new Botnek music is coming for real. Tell TMZ.
Favorites
Beverage of choice when performing a gig:
Usually beers or vodka soda.
Favorite albums of all time:
Off the top of my head… Radiohead “Kid A”, Crystal Method “Vegas”, Chemical Brothers “Dig You Own Hole”, Prodigy “Experience”, Boards of Canada “Music Has the Right to Children”, DJ Shadow “Endtroducing”
Top 3 artists you wish to collaborate with:
In no particular order: Jack Beats, Prodigy & Porter Robinson
The post Interview: The Canadian duo, Botnek, talk with us their beginnings in production, working with Steve Aoki, and more appeared first on PB&J.