How did you came from guitars to sampling madness ? were you tired of the rock scene ?
how did you start making bootlegs ?
We've never belonged to the rock scene or any scene because it's hard for people to categorise our music, just like the dance scene will not embrace us either for the same reason. The people who do categorise us , call us bootleggers or bastard pop artists but we feel there is so much more to us than that. We have always been interested in many things such as production, filmmaking , dj'ing , artwork alongside making and performing music as a band. There are many other artists or dj's out there whose life to us seems plain and boring, always doing the same thing day in and out. We started making these so-called mash-ups early '99 whilst putting together a one-hour radio show for Studio Brussels (belgian national radio) in which we mixed many of our favourite tracks , like on a mixtape. We had been dj'ing at parties and befriended clubs for a while then. It made us realise that by using the software we could actually make new melodical structures out of existing ones. The challenge was to take interesting combinations, such as skee-lo's i wish with survivor's eye of the tiger and then going into cannonball by the breeders. The less obvious the better.

The bootleg thing is getting bigger and bigger in France... how do you feel about this 'hype' thing ?
As we don't live in france and rarely come there you will understand that we're unaware of this. We only know that the kind people at Colette in paris have been supportive from early on, but we haven't even dj'ed once in france since we made the album. about the hype thing we only think it's funny because this is a compilation only officially out in Benelux and everywhere else on import. presswise a lot of magazines that would never give soulwax the light of day are now calling us up asking us to do an interview. because we made a mix of other people's records. this to us is funny.

Richard x vision of bootlegin' is quite political, do you share his point of view ?
Don't know his point of view , what is it? We share his fondness for electronic music combined with soulful vocals though. We rate him and Kurtis Rush very highly as they have been almost the only ones to make mash-ups that were technically and conceptually superior to the rest. We're looking forward to his album on Virgin as we feel it might mean historicallly more than people give him credit for.

We've heard some mp3 mixes around the web... do you present live acts live or do you play your productions as a dj ? the '2 many dj's' project seems right in between djing and music production...
Doing this record live would be physically impossible and pointless to try. We do dj and try to be as entertaining as the record sometimes using dubplates of re-edited tracks or remixes by us. So i guess you are right in saying it's somewhere between dj'ing at production.

The bio talks about 'a grand master flash thing'... your cd brings us back to the golden era of 'megamixes'... were you searching that type of vibe ? are you influenced by old school hip hop (grand wizard theodore / 45 king) as well ?
Grandmaster Flash took bits out of records that he liked because they had a good groove, regardless of their style or origin. This could have been a funk track but also a few seconds out of a country instrumental. Using two copies of the record he would re-edit these tracks and make something new out of it. We are nowhere near the genius of his turntable technique but using a Mac G3 we basically did the same thing and kind of updated it through today's software. A lot of people are saying that what we're doing is true hip hop, but it's not like we consciously tried to. It just seemed normal to us to do it this way, not knowing why other dj's wouldn't. A lot of times we'll like a track but feel that it's two verses too long or the intro needs to be looped a couple of times.

Your music is also very 'punk' in the way she treats modern pop music... do you feel close to this approach ?
maybe it's punk in the way that it this is something anyone without any real musical knowledge owning a pc and a turntable can do in their bedroom, and as you can see by the media attention it can upset a lot of people in the music industry and the way they think about copyright. Using legal loopholes to get this album made and not caring about the coolness factor in our selection of tracks is about as close to punk as we come, though.

Nowadays, mainstream music and undeground music are very close, and your compilation is a good exemple of this phenomenon... how do you explain that ? were you always so eclectic in your taste ? do you respect / like all the tracks you have sampled ?
Yes we like all the tracks we have used or at least all the bits that ended up on the record. As i said earlier we have always been this eclectic in our taste, not only musical but in everything. We feel there is good and bad made in every style and in the end it doesn't matter if it's mainstream or underground. 'Fuck the pain away' by peaches is just as much pop music as destiny's child's 'independent women' to us, and vitalic's 'la rock 01' rocks as hard as the stooges. Using Dolly Parton was in no way an act of irony, we really like that song. As much as we like cylob or queens of the stoneage.

Speaking about sampling, is it just a way to change the context of a song or do you use it as a
real composition tool ?
We do use sampling as a composition tool when writing and recording songs for soulwax but in the context of this album we mainly used other people's songs to make a collage of sounds we like, referencing thirty years of pop culture. The juxtaposing of songs mainly is there to show that many new songs are actually inspired by older ones.

It must have been really hard to deal with all these sampling clearance... who were the most hard people you had to deal with ?
every case was different and on www.2manydjs.org you will find a list with all refused, used and unused tracks. Major labels were the hardest because they have policies such as no ac/dc no daft punk etc... and in many cases these requests don't even reach the artist. Smaller independent labels are easier and mainly want money upfront . We deeply regret not being allowed to use 'La Horse' by serge gainsbourg because in this song he basically does in 5 minutes what we try to do in one hour : he hops from rock to disco to country to sixties pop but it always sounds like gainsbourg. Maybe next time...

What would be your 'dream bootleg' ?
As this bootleg thing has basically grown out of proportion lately and you hear them popping up everywhere, your ears become accustomed to it and you tend to not notice anymore if it's the original or 'mashed-up' version . This is due to the saturation of the tools: everyone uses the same accapellas and instrumentals. So basically i don't think there would be a dream bootleg for us since we have become quite tired with them. It's just one of the many things we do and the point we tried to make with this album was to show that tracks like , say 'joe le taxi' by hanayo or 'danger!high voltage!' by the wildbunch have the same aesthetic and style as our mix of for example basement jaxx with emerson lake and palmer. To someone who doesn't know the originals it would mainly be a compilation of songs with a similar edgy vibe to them.

Speaking about the tracklisting : there is this version of billie jean with the residents... how important is this band for you ? i've heard a version of billie jean with a beach boys acapella on it, was it unclearable ?
the residents are the true originators of messing with pop culture in a subversive way combined with dark humour. Both in artwork as in mixing they have been quite influential on this album. The billie jean vs beach boys bit was not done by us but by our good firend Kurtis Rush. And even if we wanted to use it, yes it was unclearable.

Will you come back to guitar music one day ?
We don't really feel this is a departure from guitar music, you will find that many of the tracks used on the compilation , even though they will be categorised as dance music all have a rock attitude to them. But to answer your question , yes we are working very hard on the new Soulwax album in our studio here in Gent, Belgium.

Your cd means also the death of dj culture... people who buy this won't need dj's anymore... don't you feel sad for all those disc jockeys without work by now ?
The cd was made to be played in the car or in your own home. We never really imagined people actually putting it on and dancing to it. If so we would have made it a bit different.

Guillermo Villas