Thursday 3 November 2011

Naysayer and Gilsun -- Exclusive Interview


I love mashups! I know, people tell me that they're a bit old now. That as soon as we started hearing 2ManyDJs in Kmart as muzak, then it was all over. But yeah, that was 7 or 8 years ago now and I still love it. Other people do, too! There's a reason Girltalk comes out here every summer.

Naysayer and Gilsun are great fun and are everything a couple of young punk DJs should be. They play anything and everything, usually all at once. Download their album "Naysayer and Gilsun are in space" and you'll hear everything from Daft Punk, to Salt n Pepa, to the Grease Megamix. Nothing wrong with that, I say. Sounds like a usual Saturday night DJing to me. But whereas I'll do it over 3 hours, these guys smoosh it all together in a 4 minute song.

We were stoked to see them appear on the Golden Plains line-up for 2012 and sought them out to ask them a few questions.



-- How long have the two of you being playing together? How did you start out?
We've been doing this together for 3 years.  We started playing house parties as all our friends turned 18. It was always a shitty sound system and one laptop.  Eventually, by chance, Streetparty saw one of our gigs and started booking us.  The video stuff is a more recent endeavour of ours. We started that about a year ago and have been doing it live for only three months.

-- Whereabouts can we catch your sets at the moment?
At the moment, most cities around Australia! We are kicking off a tour and now you can get the details at our website http://www.naysayerandgilsun.com/

-- What equipment do you use when you play? CDJs? Ableton?
We use CDJS (or 1200s if we want to get girls) and Serato.  Plus a MixErmegency as a serato video plugin.  All our video is done with an external midi-controller.  So we telepathically communicate to mix in time with each other.

-- Comparisons between yourself and other mashup acts are inevitable. The first that springs to mind is Girltalk. His sets are a lot different to yours. You guys seems to play parts of the songs for a lot longer, whereas he might only grab a few bars and then straight into something else. Is this a fair comparison?
We started out as the ultimate fanboys.  Essentially that comparison was totally correct.  But since then, especially with the arrival of our Audiovisual set, we've developed our sound into something more drawn-out and crossover.  With a similar mix of genres but more focus on dance music and building a sustained vibe, something more like 2manyDJS or an Optimo party set - at least that's what we aspire to.

-- Who would win in a fight between yourselves and the Yacht Club DJs?
We don't know, but we can only imagine any such fight would take the same form as those in Real Steel, the film where Hugh Jackman controls giant robotic mech-boxers in a futuristic sports fighting ring.  This is a real film, out this year. I also imagine it would end with (robot) tears and hugs. 

-- "Naysayer and Gilsun are in space" is a great album. It's been a while, though. Can we expect another album soon?
At the moment we are very focussed on the audio visual show, so it remains to be seen when we next put out a purely audio mix tape.

-- You seem pretty relaxed about people 'sharing' your tracks. What's your opinion on the current state of file sharing of music on the internet?
We're definitely in no position to criticise people for using, sharing and listening to music freely. It feels like at the moment there are a lot of different business models being thrown at the wall. Not all are sticking but a lot of them are. We think the internet is going to lead to a renaissance for artist profits and a focus on quality physical releases and live performances.

-- What can you tell us about your video compilations? Can we expect to see some of these at Golden Plains?
What can't we tell you? We're really excited about them. This is our new thing.  We take scenes from movies, television and anywhere else and remix them in conjunction with music from all over the genre spectrum.  The vibe we are going for is a totally cohesive, drawn out, mind bending dance experience.  We try and keep a visceral, visual, colourful edge to the movies we sample.  It goes from dark to happy, light hearted to intense and everywhere in between.  It's almost like going to see a movie but you can dance and flirt with the person next to you.

-- You played a few festivals last summer, what can we expect from you guys at Golden Plains next year?
It's such an honour.  We will be doing our audiovisual set and our focus will be on finding a mood that is perfect for Golden Plains.  We are going to be playing a drawn out set of our more filmic, intense video remixes and electronic music.  For us, Golden Plains has been a fun and very intense experience in the Supernatural Amphitheatre.  We hope to deliver the same thing.


Take a look at their latest video mashup and, like me, start to get excited about catching them at Golden Plains



And here's an old mixtape of theirs from about a year ago.


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