MEET ALOIS A BAND INVENTING THEIR OWN SOUND

If you look at our track record, we are always searching for alternative, and ground breaking music to feature. We love to celebrate diversity, a melange of music, sounds, beats, tunes, tracks, genres, etc you name it we love it.

In that spirit, we are super excited to present this interview with Alois, a Swiss band inspired by 80's synth sounds and tropical disco samples. It reminds me of the amazing Drive soundtrack but less nostalgic and a bit more summery vibe. We speak to vocalist Martin Schenker in our interview below.  Thanks Martin!

We are Alois, a five piece band based in Switzerland and we’ve just released our new album Azul. It’s music that we loosely decided to call tropical synth-pop. This probably sounds weird because we live in an alpine country, but it reflects our interest in synth-driven songwriting, which also happens to blend electronic beats with tropical guitars. We are really into exploring the rhythms of various musical cultures. We all played jazz in the past, and we still improvise a lot, especially on stage. But I also love writing songs that have a deeper meaning. Our objective now, simple as it is, is to make people dance. Our new material combines sequenced grooves with the organic instrumentation. Azul's predecessor, the record Mints, was awarded  the Indie Suisse Album of the Year Award in 2017.

The band consists of myself, Martin Schenker (vocals, guitar),Pascal Eugster (bass), FlorianSchneider (drums), Luzius Schuler (synth) and Lukas Weber (percussion).

Greatest inspirations or influences?

We all come from a jazz background and some of us grew up producing computer-based music. This combination defines our sound. This record reflects our love and fascination with rhythmic and percussion-driven music from tropical regions. There are Brazilian jazz groups like Azymuth or Caribbean disco samplers from the 80s that had a huge impact on us.

We also admire our contemporaries like Mount Kimble or Caribou. We definitely trade a lot of music amongst ourselves. Our keyboarder Luzius just send me this lo-fi drum computer record from Domenique Dumont called Miniatures de Auto Rhythm, just an hour ago. We are really into musicians that combine musical ideas that weren’t meant to work together, and through this they invent their own sound. Some of us are bigger studio geeks than the rest, but we all find our energy on stage, where we reconstruct our songs and experiment with alternative arrangements. 

Tell us about your creative process? 

There is the opening track from our new album called Light the Fire. It started with an electronic drum groove. At first, it was a half tempo dubstep beat, which was programmed. It began to blossom with the addition of a fat bass line and muted guitars. After that, I tried some vocal ideas with the vocoder and added this agogo sample from a cheap casio preset. Finally, we recorded a ton of percussion over it.

It was so much fun. We often work like this, adding and deleting things, programming and recording stuff in the same session. Usually, we’re searching for a specific mood or a pallet of colors, and we experiment with sounds for a long time until we’re finally happy. The lyrics come with the music, and I like to draw inspiration from the material that is already recorded. Sometimes, I have a sentence or a word in my head, and I try to shape the music around it. 

Anything you have to say about these times we are living through. 

It’s an important time to reflect on ourselves as individuals, as a society and look at our behavior. I believe in education, so I wanted to share the IDB Berlin website. The institute for non-discriminatory education offers important resources to get a step closer to the vision of a non-discriminatory society. 

Anything else you would like to share. 

Switzerland is a small country, but we have a vibrant scene and a lot of good music. Please check out our label www.redbrickchapel.ch, it’s the home of some of our favorite bands and musicians.