So you guys met last year? At Fresh? And what were you both doing there?
Caroline – So I do Fresh Air on Monday nights from 8:00pm – 10:00pm and that’s all Adelaide local music, like electronic style and that’s how I met Tom.
Tom – I was going in for an interview about another release ‘Icy Love’ and had no idea CARZi was a massive fan! We got to talking about collaborating and it all went from there.
Can you tell me a bit about your musical journeys up until you guys met?
Tom – I’ve been producing for 10 years or more, 12 years maybe now. I was always just a bedroom producer, I always do a lot of sound design… Tevlo was my first kind of, me trying to release my music and brand myself properly. And then Caroline was much more the opposite.
Caroline – Yeah I spent the last 10 years on stage. So we have a really good balance of him in the studio and me on stage and now we’re swapping.
I really love your collaborative track Armour, so I’m happy to hear you guys decided to create more songs together and form V O E! So are the tracks just flowing now?
Caroline – It was yeah, so we’ve put a focus on getting the singles we’ve got out, cause there were so many. We got to a point where it was like 18 tracks or something and Luke and Nick from Global League were like woah woah now we have to pick what’s going to move forward!
Tom’s sound and what we’ve been developing together has evolved. So now we have to be like alright what’s gonna really fit our sound without scaring off the demographic that love ‘Asking For It’ and ‘Armour’, like so more radio vibe. But then looking at doing another EP with all of the heavier, bassier stuff in it.
So when it came to deciding on a “sound” was it just a natural thing that evolved as you guys were working on the tracks or did you both go into this project knowing what you wanted to produce?
Tom – A lot more per song, Armour – was just an instrumental I’d done as a Tevlo track that Caroline really liked out of the ones I showed her when we met at Fresh.
Caroline – Yeah that was the one, I was like, yep done.
Tom – It all kinda starts, I just produce whatever I feel like producing so we don’t really decide until more recently where we’ve got a bit of a direction.
Caroline – I think what we’ve done has definitely progressed from Armour.
I’m excited to listen to your upcoming EP, you mentioned that it’ll be released by the end of this year? Is that correct? Should we expect a similar sound to what we’ve been hearing, I do love the raw vocals mixed in with the drum and bass.
Caroline – So we’ve got obviously the first 2 and then ‘Spotlight’ going to be our third release, we’re putting that up for distribution soon and that’ll be 6 – 8 weeks, but potentially that’ll be more of a January thing.
Tom – And then the EP we’ve got too many tracks, we’re just picking which will be best released first, so they’re all finished and they’re all full songs it’ll just be final tweaks which we’ll work with M4SONIC on. He just help us do the final touches… Because he’s worked with Sony and he’s a lot higher in the industry… like at the top already, he has all the good pointers on like just the final things. Just little things to do to make it stand out more on radio.
Caroline – He changed around ‘Asking For It’, originally Toms rap was at the end, and Nick was like, change that, make it second verse and then make yours the third verse and then have like a festival moment. And I was like, alright, we’ll try it, but if we don’t like it we’re changing it back. So we changed it around and I couldn’t argue, it was better that way!
So with the EP, does that mean you’ll have the ammunition to start touring around?
Tom – Yeah, so the big plan is to start touring, we’ve got some people in more rural South Australia who already want us to come out there, so we’ll start off with more local, you know, more Australian tour and then hopefully just move up the coast and head towards Melbourne and stuff and keep going. That’s the start, but the aim is international because we’re a lot more drum and bass, it’s more Europe and UK.
Caroline – We just need to get contacts, we’re so ready to go, we can just literally pack up right now and go.
So how was it having M4SONIC and Uberjak’d remix “Asking For It”?
Tom – Yeah that was pretty sick.
Caroline – We were both just happy that they liked it!
Tom – Both of us knew those names cause both of us are fans. These are artists that we already admire and now they’re straight away like yeah we’ll remix it.
Caroline – Especially when we were first showing Nick and he was just like, guys please can I remix it and we were like, um we were going to ask you that haha
Uber came to watch one of our sets and I could see him talking to Nick and I could tell it was a really intense conversation using his hands a lot to talk. Nick came back and said “So basically Uber wants the stems tomorrow!” It’s a captivating song because there’s a lot of emotion behind it, I’m really glad that’s translating to our audience.
