Azari & III
Reckless with your Love
Championed by their heroes Erol Alkan and Tim Goldsworthy, teaming up with Fischerspooner, releasing indigo coloured 12”, this Canadian band is undoubtedly wacky. It’s the kind of off the wall but fun approach that has the support of director David Cronenberg famed for films Dead Ringers and Scanners. With an album out in winter the Canadian duo take a moment to sit back and relax from their world domination tour.
For those that don’t know what’s your sound?
DINAMO AZARI: I’ve been talking about this, figuring how to answer that question. We’re trying to make modern music without all the stereotypes. It’s what’s coming out of us in the studio. There are pieces of our childhood, of our teenage years and there are pieces of...
ALIXANDER III: of our wants and desires for the future .
Are we talking more clubs or records?
A: A combination of all that. Growing up there was a lot going on. You were at a crazy concert one day, a big club show the next or maybe a real underground warehouse party.
D: Maybe some gangster hip-hop like Public Enemy just watching the power and movement of this group of guys from LA.
A: Yeah there was a lot of that. The way they rocked their samplers in inner cities of the states, they were the first people to really figure out how to chop those fat, fat beats.
Hungry for the Power reminded me of Tim Sweeney’s radio show Beat’s in Space.
A: It’s that kind of Disco-House cross over. It’s like amazing eighties pop music, they have the same backing track we would. But it’s a different approach. We like to have a bit more soul especially our singers have very soulful voices
D: Yeah defiantly we could get put into that category. We reference people like New Order and Depeche Mode; we love our Philadelphia soul. Then we’ve got our Detroit influences and then we’ve got our New York club scene house influences and then you’ve got your Chicago warehouse scene
A: then there’s a lot of the Manchester stuff, the Happy Mondays and the Charlatans.
Were you a Hacienda fan?
A: When I was younger I won all the tickets from radio shows to go see all those guys. That was early rave type stuff. Early eighties, early nineties.
D: I remember listening to Hard Times. This early nineties mix of Todd Terry and it was just relentless powerful house beats. That DJ set for me felt the energy and that groove of the rave scene.
A: Yeah, the most important thing was a lot of energy. There had to be a big vibe. Of course there are segregated scenes but for us we juts float through. We saw NWA the first time they came to Toronto and that was crazy but at the same time Robert Owens and all night warehouse parties.
D: We love that dark warehouse energy. Everyone’s vulnerable, open to what they’re going to do and what the artist is going to do. So it’s just black with a little red light maybe a strobe and it’s just big, big speakers and dancing all night long.
A: The songs back then, there was very little song orientated stuff going on. So it was just those blazing tracks. There was nothing to distract you.
Were those the two vocalists in your band?
D: We were the cannibals, and that’s actually our full band.
A: When the album launches we’re going to have the whole live show.
How does the live band work?
A: It’s a hybrid of different stuff. We could do a show with Marshall’s stacked and drum-kit or just with a little Casio and some microphones. Maybe we want to do a three or four hour long set and intermix our vocals amongst the DJ set, if it’s that kind of party. We don’t want to stop people dancing so that just staring at the show going on
I’m feeling a lot of tension from tracks like Manhooker.
A: That’s interesting because that’s actually one of the first tracks we made. There’s a certain kind of mind state where you’re asleep all day and awake all night where you start to loose track of the world as 99% of the rest of us know it. Both of us shared this idea that we were stuck in a dream from which you can’t wake up and you’re moving from one flirtation to the next. But there’s also a sense of emptiness when you can’t connect to anything. You’re in the night and maybe one day you will wake up or maybe you’ll just get lost in there.
What about with the reckless with your love aspects?
A: Hungry for the Power and reckless, your love is your passion...
D: Making decisions. We’re not doing it like Alicia Keys where every song it’s like every song is about love.
How did you meet at the start?
D: Boys from the hood doing similar stuff. A couple of local people saying you guys need to hook up.
A: Fritz Helder was doing his own thing, he had a band called The Phantoms.
D: SYF came in a bit later he doesn’t know who Robert Owens is he’s from Africa. We love that kind of virgin aspect to him. It’s really amazing how we’ve come together it’s just a match made in heaven. Maybe it wasn’t as good as meeting each other on E-harmony but it was defiantly meant to be.
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