This weeks interview & mix comes from Cotton Wolf
Selector Afterdark – Cotton Wolf by The Selector on Mixcloud
Introduce yourself and tell us about the part of the UK you’re from?
We’re Cotton Wolf, an Electronica duo from Cardiff, and we are Llion Robertson and Seb Goldfinch. We have experience of playing, writing and producing for various artists (which is how we met), and share a particular love of great electronic music, as well as enjoying many of the other amazing musical genres out there.
Can you tell us a bit about what you’ve been working on recently?
We have just finished our third release with Strangetown Records, the ‘Moxa’ EP. We have completed a commissioned remix of ‘Several Wolves’ (by Trwbador) and started work on our debut album. We’ve also been busy rehearsing and playing live shows, the most recent being 4th April where we headlined at Octa at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff.
And can you talk us through the mix?
Our mix selection was about celebrating artists whose music excites us and fits our particular interest of soulfully melodic woozy music, music that take you on an interesting head journey without resorting to over-the-top production, but relying on the quality of the written music to do the work. There’s an incredible amount of electronic music being produced these days but finding the good stuff that you’re genuinely into can take some time so we conducted a vast amount of research for the Selector mix!
Nice, give us a taste of some of your favourite British artists at the moment?
The mix contains tracks from all over the world but it’s always exciting to hear great electronic music that’s being produced here in the UK. We always go for music that feels honest, has soul and has integrity and I think people like Jon Hopkins, Nathan Fake and Daniel Avery do that very well which is why we’ve included them in our mix!
Cool, tell us about some of your British musical Heroes and influences in general?
Great DJ’s don’t necessarily make great producers and vice versa but if we’re talking specifically about DJing here then I don’t think we can look much further than Andy C! We used to go to a lot of the One Nation raves and to the big DnB nights in Fabric and Andy would just steal the show every time. His ability to control the room is incredible and he’s technically very good indeed. We also saw Derrick May at the Weekender Club in Berlin a few years back and hearing a bit of old school Detroit smashing out of the speakers was great!
Great and what is on the cards in the immediate future?
The majority of our time will be spent on writing our debut album which we’re incredibly excited about. We’re both ludicrously fastidious, which is good in terms of not driving each other crazy when we’re agonizing over the smallest minutiae of decision-making, but which means we take a tad more time than most other people!
And finally, where is the best place in the world you have peformed and why?
We’ve played in lots of venues all over the world including Webster Hall in New York City and Colston Hall in Bristol but if we had to choose then it would be the O2 arena in London. We supported a very famous band (who will remain anonymous!) on their 10-date UK arena tour a few years back and Jon Hopkins was also supporting. We played in venues such as the Birmingham NIA, Liverpool Echo Arena and the O2 in London, which is going to be pretty tricky to top!