{"id":20053,"date":"2015-06-19T12:31:39","date_gmt":"2015-06-19T10:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/?p=20053"},"modified":"2015-06-19T12:31:39","modified_gmt":"2015-06-19T10:31:39","slug":"interview-xyconstant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/interview-xyconstant\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: XYconstant"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cornwall’s 18 year old Alfie Coleman aka XYConstant has quickly established himself as one of the most rated newcomers in electronic music.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bursting onto the scene at the back end of 2013 with his incredible remix of Disclosure<\/b>‘s ‘White Noise’<\/b> (MNEK REFIX<\/b>) , XYConstant<\/b> quickly gained instant online love from some of the major Hype Machine<\/b> blogs and the popular\u00a0Youtube Channel<\/b>; ‘The Sound You Need’<\/b>.<\/p>\n

With over 2 million Soundcloud<\/b> and YouTube<\/b> combined plays , XY<\/b> entered 2015 with great expectation. After releasing a free download (‘Her Eyes’<\/b>) and another great remix for one of Island Record<\/b>‘s hot new prospects (Lola<\/b>) online figures continued to rapidly grow,\u00a0eventually breaking out with his own original production \u2018Silverlined\u2019<\/strong>, which led to him being signed to Pete Tong\u2019s mighty FFRR label.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a story which shows that it can be possible to stand out from the over-saturated online marketplace. We spoke to XYconstant recently and began with his plans to move to London\u2026<\/p>\n

“I did a bit of music production at college and learned about the industry, four months later I was getting signed by the label I was assigned, I was like, \u2018What!!\u2019.”<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\n

Have you got a rough idea of when you might move to London?<\/strong>
\nIt depends how everything pans out but we\u2019re thinking September or October. End of the summer probably.<\/p>\n

Won\u2019t it be a bit of tug because Cornwall is such a beautiful part of the country?<\/strong>
\nI guess so but I\u2019ve been here all my life and I\u2019m 20 now so I\u2019ve \u2018been there, done that\u2019 and I can always come back, all my family are still here. I\u2019m quite looking forward to the buzz of London because you don\u2019t get that down here.<\/p>\n

For a young person, what is there to do, musically-speaking, down there in Cornwall? And how did you get into electronic music in the first place?<\/strong>
\nThere\u2019s never been much of a scene, well, there is but it\u2019s quite small. There are collectives of people representing different genres, like drum\u2019n\u2019bass but nothing that large. So people are surprised to hear that I got into it, being from Cornwall! My older brother played me a lot of electronic music when I was younger and I got into and starting making it on Fruity Loops. Obviously the internet helps massively, 20 years ago I would have had a bit of a problem getting out of Cornwall but now you can just put something up online and leave it\u2026 what happened with me was I uploaded a bootleg of White Noise by Disclosure. I\u2019d already put stuff up but this one got a lot of blog attention, which was a stroke of luck for me really. Especially as it happened straight away, I went from only having contacts mainly down here to breaking out of Cornwall.<\/p>\n

Great, and we hear that there was quite a funny story about your track blowing up online when you were away at a festival?
\n<\/strong>Yeah, that was with \u2018Siverlined\u2019 my new single. I uploaded it at the airport when I was on the way to Croatia for Outlook and I got on the plane, landed in Croatia and my phone ran out of battery within a day. I thought, \u2018Let it do it\u2019s thing, that\u2019s always worked for me in the past\u2019. On the way back I found I had missed calls and messages from my manager saying to call him asap as it had gone to No.1 on Hype Machine and we had a lot of labels interested, which was mad! It had been a steady, nice reaction with my stuff up til then and that was my first original track with a vocalist. It alleviated those post-holiday blues straight away [laughs].<\/p>\n

Would you say that there\u2019s anything particularly \u2018Cornwall\u2019 about your sound? I guess even just being from there will have a subtle influence somehow\u2026
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s interesting because I\u2019d say not at all, but as you say, it probably has because my parents have always played folk music down here, they\u2019re in a band together. So, since I was young, I\u2019ve always gone to their gigs \u2013 it\u2019s Cornish folk, which is lesser known than Irish folk and has a slightly different sound. It must have influenced my musicality because I was listening to it before I was even playing instruments. You can never tell but I’m sure that I have some influences creeping into my music. There\u2019s nothing I can pick out and say, \u2018Yeah, that\u2019s come from there\u2019.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s it, it\u2019s one of those things that\u2019s quite abstract but maybe somewhere in your melodies or rhythms it\u2019s affected your output. How did it feel when you got signed?
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s very exciting. I did a bit of music production at college and learned about the industry, four months later I was getting signed by the label I was assigned, I was like, \u2018What!!\u2019. It was quite a strange transition and it happened so fast. It\u2019s a super exciting time, I\u2019m still learning things and I don\u2019t know what\u2019s to come. That\u2019s what I love about this music is there\u2019s not really any set of doing things. I mean, you might think you can make tweaks to a song to make it do better, but at the end of the day it\u2019s a loose cannon, which I really like.<\/p>\n

For sure, you can never truly predict how people are going to react to things \u2013 you can definitely feel when you\u2019re on to something good, there\u2019s a lot to be said for intuition, but you can\u2019t write a book on \u2018How to make a hit\u2019.
\n<\/strong>If you could, it would have been written wouldn\u2019t it?!<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next after \u2018Silverlined\u2019?
\n<\/strong>As I said, music changes so we\u2019ve got the next singles in the pipeline with some cool singers and songwriters and getting material together so it\u2019s ready to roll. I think once one of those singles it out there then we can see which direction it\u2019s going to go. One thing that isn\u2019t going to change is that I\u2019m always going to want to make stuff that I like. Since being signed I\u2019ve had a lot more free-reign to work with vocalists and work in studios with different producers. Before that, it was a lot more of being on my laptop on my own with headphones on! So I\u2019m exploring stuff with other musicians, which is great and I think we\u2019ll look at getting an album together at some point.<\/p>\n

With festival season kicking off, are you planning to hit any this summer?
\n<\/strong>As a punter, there\u2019s a festival called Boardmasters down here which I\u2019m going to go to. I\u2019m not really a fan of traveling too far to get to a festival, I know that sounds really boring but I got put off when I went to Outlook because it took us 24-hours to get there. We did it the cheap way, which I won\u2019t do again \u2013 I ended sleeping on an airport floor for 12 hours! Next time I\u2019ll splash out!<\/p>\n

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Soundcloud <\/a><\/span> Artist Page <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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