How did the name Audiojack come about? It was as simple as two guys sitting in a park reeling ideas off and Audiojack was the first one we both totally agreed on! That's something we still use to gauge the potential of our new music today actually, if we both totally agree on something it almost always ends up being something special. When you first started listening to electronic music, which parties and DJ where you going to see? Rich: I got into hardcore and techno when I was about 13 although I didn't go to many clubs back then, I was mostly listening to mix tapes, the likes of Sven Vath, Stu Allen, Slipmatt, Carl Cox. My first real DJ love though, and the inspiration behind a lot of my musical development has to be Sasha, a love affair which started around '96 and continues to this day. We signed to his now defunct agency Excession a few years ago and I had the privilege of meeting him in Miami. His Essential Mix from 2001 is still to me the greatest mix I've ever heard. Jamie: When I was at school my mate used to make me tapes with early 90s house on there and I used to listen to it on my Walkman when I was training for sport and what not. There was a rave held in the small town I lived in so I went to that for a couple of years before going to uni, which was where I really got into the clubbing scene. It's only been in the last 10 years that my taste has zeroed in on the specific types of electronic music I'm into now. I've certainly become more of a music snob over the years ha ha. How do you think your sound has evolved since your first track 'Robot' back in 2005? Well we've matured a lot since then, our tastes have become more refined and we're definitely much less noisy! Robot was a twanging techno monster, made around 128bpm whereas the stuff we're making now would almost all be categorised as house, and much slower too, around 120-124bpm. Which artists have been your biggest influence more recently? In the last year or so Maceo Plex, Huxley, Waifs & Strays, FCL, Eats Everything and Julio Bashmore have been really standout artists or us. We're really excited about quite a few newer artists such as Balcazar & Sordo, Ardalan, Ksky and Dusky. How would you describe your creative process whilst working together in the studio? Pretty straight forward really, getting a good groove or bass line that's going to work on the dance floor is paramount. If the foot isn't tapping to a simple loop then it's back to the drawing board. Then its building a track around that using the percussion to get the type of rhythm you're aiming for. Which artist would you love to collaborate with? It might sound bizarre but none really! The phrase 'too many cooks' springs to mind; we've already got enough ideas going on in the studio. How do you compare studio time to playing out at gigs? You can't really they're totally different, it's like comparing writing an essay in your own time to doing a presentation in front of a crowd of people. Your new label Gruuv has gone from strength to strength over the last year or so, why did you want to become label owners?
Primarily we started Gruuv out of a passion to support some of the fantastic music we were being sent by upcoming producers. Also as a platform to occasionally release our own music. We just love putting EPs together, from helping artists with getting their sound right to signing music, choosing remixers and promo'ing to other DJs and releasing. Does the dance music industry these days dictate that artists need to be both creative artists and businessmen in equal measure? In short, and by and large, yes. In years gone by there was a tiny fraction of the producers, DJs, live acts and labels there are nowadays. This meant there was nowhere near as much choice for those music buyers, making it much easier for tracks to stand out. Try doing that these days and even if you’re successful musically there, so artists have to quickly learn how to do a lot of these jobs and the PR for themselves. Who’s currently rocking your world as a producer and why? Maceo Plex has a really nice sound at the moment blending the funky disco vibes with raw techno sounds which keeps both girls and boys interested on the dance floor. If you could give one piece of advice to yourself when you started out in music, what would it be? Don’t snap up every remix that comes along; think carefully whether it’s right for you musically If you could pass on just one production tip, what would it be? Originality is everything in music, being just like everybody else will get you nowhere so try and think outside the box. If you make house music, try and get some sounds that are usually used in other genres like Hip Hop or Dub Step and try to incorporate them into your productions to create a more unique sound. It might work, it might not but when it does you’ll stand out from the crowd. What was the inspiration sound wise behind your debut album, Radio and how has your sound developed since then? I guess our music has always had to have energy and worked on the dance floor but we’ve made everything from Deep house to peak time techno depending on what we’ve felt like at the time. The inspiration for our album was to create an electronic music journey that incorporated all of the styles we’d used in the past. Finally, no doubt the opportunity has arisen for you to produce on the more commercial spectrum of dance music, what is it that keeps you true to the Underground? Basically because we hate commercial music, underground music is for people who love music and it’s created by people with truly great minds and talent not by people who understand what flicks the switches of ignorant people and know they can make money with it by selling out and making cheesy mainstream atrocities.