Doing it with Stylus

By STEPHEN JEWELL

Playing live is a moot concept in electronic dance music, where most tunes are delivered not with traditional guitar and drums but with computers and turntables.

Consequently many dance acts choose to spice up their sampler-driven sets with trumpet players and other live musicians while others, like Vibes on a Summer's Day co-headliners X-Press 2, stick to what they know best: playing records.

"We're not exactly live but we do a lot of manipulation of records," says X-Press 2's Ashley Beedle, on the line from Australia where he and colleagues Darren "Rocky" Rock and Darren "Diesel" House played at Sydney's Vibes the night before.

"We've got six decks and three mixers. I use a microphone going through an effects unit and we have on board samplers like Cycloops so we can actually edit tracks there and then. But it would be pulling the wool over people's eyes to go completely live because we're a DJ crew so that's got to be the basis of our live set.

"Take a band like Groove Armada, who use samplers on stage. People might have hang-ups about it from a rock perspective but from a dance perspective, it's cool. Over the years, dance music has always been attributed to faceless DJs and now they're all starting to come out of the woodwork and make themselves a bit more presentable."

X-Press 2 themselves came out of the woodwork last year, releasing their debut album Muzikizum a decade after their inaugural single, Musik X-Press, first appeared.

In that time, House and Rock made plenty of music together and individually under various guises including the Ballistic Brothers, Rocky & Diesel and Problem Kids.

However, all three have now chosen to concentrate solely on X-Press 2 after the success of Muzikizum and its main David Byrne-sung single, Lazy, which reached No 2 in the British charts.

"At the end of the day, we didn't have a lot of illusions but we are really pleased with how the album's done because it was just straight up and down dance music," says Beedle. "But we were really surprised by how well Lazy did. And working with David Byrne was funny. We had to get our heads together and think, 'Right, we're working with David Byrne. Let's do it.' He'd actually wanted to work with us ages ago when we were the Ballistic Brothers but he thought we were a live band, which we weren't. With Lazy, we'd already done the backing track before David Byrne was involved. We sent him the track and he really liked it so he did the vocal and sent it back to us. It was all very organic."

Buoyed with their success with the erstwhile Talking Head, X-Press 2 then sought out Dieter Meier, the former vocalist of Swiss electronic duo Yello to sing I Want You Back.

"We wanted him to do a Yello record for us but with a contemporary feel," says Beedle. "We sent a track to his management and got this twisted phone call back. He works as an art dealer now and, as far as I know, doesn't do much music."

Despite Muzikum' s encouraging sales, X-Press are not resting on their laurels and have already started work on their sophomore album, which Beedle hopes will be out before the end of the year.

"Just before we came over here to do the Australia-New Zealand tour, we laid down all the rough demos so when we get back, we've got all the hard work to do," says Beedle.

"There's going to be a lot more vocals and song structures on this album, which people can get into. We're going to spend a bit more time fine tuning this one. One thing we didn't want to do was leave it too long because we would have been the forgotten men of dance music."

* X-Press 2 play Vibes on a Summer's Day, 6pm to 8pm, in the Hangar Room, Western Springs, Waitangi Day, Thursday, February 6.