Words by Alejandro Nieto
Photos by Juan Carlos Clavijo

Right before their first appearance in New York as a main act, the Canadian born duo Chromeo, sit together for some Italian food and talk about their career and their upcoming album Fancy Footwork, due in stores March 2007. “If you can hear me and you don’t mind, I’m going to be eating”, says guitarrist/frontman Dave1. He and Pee Thug are both main architects of the electro funk band Chromeo and they’re about to order some fancy spaghetti with sun dried tomatoes at a hassle-free Italian place. It’s a breezy night at New York’s East Village, and the Montreal/New York City-based duo-namic music partners seem calm and collected.

The guys are just a couple of hours away from their show and they have had a long absence from the local scene. Anyways, I hope to be able to grab their enthusiasm more than the spaghetti. I remember a couple of days ago, a friend was telling me about the qualities of the strip clubs in Canada and of course that’s it, ’cause who better to answer my question than these two musicians from Montreal whose songs only talk about girls.

I’ve heard strip clubs in Montreal are the craziest ones…
Dave: Are we starting the interview now?

I guess…
D: P knows about it… he used to go out with a stripper!
P-Thugg: Oh yeah, you can touch…
D: About seven years ago we had a little phase where we used to go for touching and feeling, but we got over it.

All of your songs are related to girls. Any relationship with that “Strip Club” phase?
D: Ohh no. For the kind of music we do you can’t really talk about anything else. Most Prince songs are about girls too. It’s determined by the kind of music we do, but we’re trying to give it another twist you know?

So what’s the twist?
P: Really sincere, but really funny at the same time. Maybe a little unpredictable. A lot of people, when our first album came out, they couldn’t tell if we were serious or not, ironic or not, and I try to cultivate that ambiguity.

What’s cool about you guys is that, unlike a lot of other artists, you seem to have no problem sort of laughing, even at your own expense. You do a lot of humorous stuff and don’t seem to care about your “image” so much. I think that is why a lot of people are drawn to your music as well, because it seems so sincere. What’s your take on bringing humor to the music?
D: A lot of people do fun music, The Darkness… they are fun. I see what you mean, a lot of groups are fun, but sometimes I find that the audience is too serious and I don’t know why! They just stare, and I also think it is because our live material doesn’t sound the way I want it to sound. It’s hard to have someone following us everywhere. We have a low budget, the record label (Vice) doesn’t give us all this money. We’re working to get to a level where we can do that.

Was touring with Bloc Party better in that sense?
D: Yeah, but at the same time, there was a big difference. Here, a Bloc Party fan is gonna be also maybe like a Rick James fan, and there [Europe] it’s really different, the Bloc Party fans are really purist, rock purist, and our music is really 80’s funk, that’s what it is, and you gotta be open to that kind of stuff.
P: Sometimes nobody has ever heard that kind of music, and I like making people discover what it is, they’re like, ‘What is this called?’ A lot of people ask us that.

Your sound with the vocoders, synths etc., has a very retro 80’s vibe to it. Was it a conscious choice to take that route or was it more a natural process?
D: Oh yeah, totally conscious, it’s the kind of music we wanna do. P does all the synths, he is really the synth guy.
P: All the synths and sounds that we create are with old drum machines, vintage gear, vintage synthesizers, analog synthesizers…
D: We listen to the music from that era, that’s what we listen to, a lot.

P, where did you get this idea of using the talk box almost all the time in your sound, live especially?
P: Well, that’s my thing, I can’t sing and I’d love to be a singer and that’s the only way I can sing.

Tell us what is the life like coming up in Canada. Especially being into hip-hop?
D: We’re a little bit older, I’m 28, so when I started listening to hip-hop there weren’t many white people doing this music. Eminem didn’t exist and even the Internet didn’t exist, so you couldn’t really communicate with other people who liked the same thing and it was really like “You’re alone with your group of friends”, and I think we had to work a little bit harder to get respect, to get taken seriously.
That’s kind of how we came out. It was kind of hard to get a big community of people who shared the same interests. The best example is when P started playing the talk box, he had to figure out everything by himself and that was ten years ago, you couldn’t even go to a record store or a music store and ask someone, so I think we’re from that older generation of people who really had to be “students of the game” and learn these things by themselves, on their own. For about six years we thought some bass lines were bass and not a moog, and we didn’t even know what a moog was, but we were young and nobody was there to tell us, because we couldn’t communicate with anybody, we grew up in Canada, you couldn’t go down the street and ask somebody. There wasn’t a myspace page, you couldn’t google it, none of that existed and I think that definitely fuel our passion and desire to be something authentic, and when you hear Chromeo you can think it’s funny or you can think it’s serious, but one thing that’s clear is that it sounds like dudes who’ve been listening to this forever and dudes who’ve been doing this kind of music forever, and that’s what we sound like, and that’s because there were years and years of us doing our homework, really.

What was it like coming up in the music scene in Montreal? Do you think you had advantages there that you wouldn’t have had in the States or vice versa?
D: No, only disadvantages, but actually one advantage, there were a lot of cheap vintage records, and we used to go and buy records for like two dollars, and then I come to New York and why is this two fourteen bucks? So that was a big advantage, but other than that we were so isolated…
P: There were no other musicians around like us, sharing, I mean, some of them, but not really. We had a hard time finding musicians, keyboard players, drummers or other musicians that shared our interests.

I read you were discovered by Tiga in Montreal, what’s the story? Were you friends?
D: I worked in a record store with him and he liked all my hip-hop stuff. We went through all my hip-hop records and he liked them a lot, so he asked me to do something for his record label and wanted me to do something like “not hip-hop”, just kind of instrumental, maybe down-tempo, he didn’t really know, he didn’t specify, and I was like all right. So we weren’t “discovered” by him, but he initiated the idea of us doing something else, and then I got together with P and we decided to write songs and work on a project with some kind of vintage 80’s thing. Me and Tiga talking and he signing us proceed Chromeo. We thought it was gonna be a side project…

Lots of people are “DJ-ing” these days just because of their band status or status in the scene in general. What are your thoughts on this?
(Laughs) Well, we’re part of it because we DJ and they ask us to DJ!

But I have been in some really bad DJ sets myself.
Think about Lindsay Lohan, do you think she’s a good DJ? But at the same time it’s another art form, because it’s not really a DJ set, it’s not the guy playing something like Africa Bambaata or something, it’s more about what you want to see, what they listen to, it’s more like a selection and for that it’s interesting. I like Hall & Oates a lot and I would like to see Dary Hall DJ’n. If I was a millionaire, I would have Dary DJ’n at my birthday party, knowing that he sucks, right? But I would like to know what he plays ’cause it’s Dary Hall, so it’s another art form, so it shouldn’t be called DJ’n it should be called “selected”.

You guys are getting pretty big. Are there a lot of girls throwing themselves at you on the road?
D: People still don’t get down to our shows the way I want to. I think part of the reason is because we can’t afford a sound guy who can tour with us and make us sound the way I want to sound. Hopefully with this next album I will, and also it’s because people just look at us and we are more like characters, we are like cartoons or something.

How do you feel about that?
D: When our first record came out I really wanted people to see us in a certain way, you know, and that’s because when we came out it was this kind of music like electro clash, like MSTRKRFT and all that, and that was very ironic and also very fashioned and because we had all these vocal effects, we really didn’t want to get confused with that, so every interview we did I had to be really defensive, like “we’re not like that, that’s not what we are, we’re very serious, we play instruments”, and now four years later, I don’t give a shit, that music doesn’t really exist anymore and if people just want to laugh at us, that’s fine, and if people just want to be serious and email P synthesizer questions for six hours and talk about moogs that’s fine too.

It’s been two years since the original release of your first album, She’s in Control. What’s happening now? Are you guys working on new material?
Oh yeah, we’re in the studio right now, we already got eight new songs, and the new album is coming out in March. During the making of the first album, we discovered this music that inspired us. In a way it’s harder with this new record. It’s been like how are we gonna write and take it to another level, and find new sounds.

What’s the new album gonna be like?
Similar to She’s in Control, but more evolved, more songs, more vocals, more songwriting, more structures.

Do you guys have a name for it?
It’s gonna be called Fancy Footwork.

Where did the name come from?
When somebody dances well, it’s an expression you use like wow! Fancy footwork! You got fancy moves! We’re petrified that it sucks, we’re really scared that it’s bad, because there’s more pressure on the second album. With the first one, we really didn’t care, because nothing had happened, it was our standard. Now, people are gonna think we’re retarded, I can’t wait.