THE TWELVES

Fresh from three gigs in Germany, esper magazine met up for a coffee and a chat with João Miguel and Luciano Oliveira, otherwise known as Brazilian Electro duo The Twelves. This year has seen a phenomenal rise for the guys who’ve been dominating the blog scene, most notably with their remix of Daft Punk’s “Night Vision” which toped the Hype Machine on four separate occasions. They have in fact been number one on the Hype Machine 30+ times this year, a pretty unbelievable feat for couple of unknowns at the start of this year.

ESPER: Hey guys, can you tell our readers how you two started making music together?

L: We met seven years ago and started a rock band together, playing guitar and bass, the band wasn’t going anywhere though, it was kind of Indie Rock but the vocals had a Brazilian style, I guess that was part of the problem.

Is there a decent Indie Rock scene in Brazil?

J: It’s not really strong, there’s a lot of teenage stuff you know. We play a lot in San Paulo, there are a few guys doing stuff like us, but there’s not a big scene going on in terms of what we are doing. It’s really hard in order to be successful in Brazil you have to be successful outside first it’s so stupid, that’s why we’re here.

Have you been to England before?

J: Yeah I actually spent my honeymoon here in London last year. We went all over Europe, my wife loves London she wants to live over here.

I think I’d rather have my honeymoon in Brazil to be honest.

L: Well no one is satisfied with what they have, right? In Brazil we want safety and in London you want sun…

How do you guys write together?

L: Well, our method is we throw away 98% of what we do and then the other 2% we listen to for about two weeks and realise it is also crap. We listen back to stuff we did like 3 months ago and I think it’s horrible.

J – It’s not that good because in a way you don’t move forward, we’re always rethinking. We’ll listen to something really close and realise we want to do it more like that and work from there.

So how do you get your own tracks done?

J. We don’t. ha. Remixes are easier. It’s better to work with a deadline then you have a clear time when it’s over, then once it’s sent off you can’t change it you have to live with it.

Yeah, if it’s not your music your not that affected by it.

L: Yeah exactly, its less personal and your not that attached to it, you can experiment with it how you want, in a way there’s more freedom to it then if you were starting something from scratch

Do you have a studio in Brazil?

J: It’s a home studio called our room.

L: We use Abelton, but recently we’ve started going back to playing bass and programming drums to sound like the real thing. There are so many guys who use the same samples from these programs. If you’re doing the electro bass drum and snare thing, its all going to end up sounding like 150 other bands. We’re going for a more organic sound, although that sounds really pretentious.

It’s good that you guys think are trying to think more organically, have you ever thought about playing with a band?

L: We want to approach more of a live band when we play in the future, we don’t want to play with computers anymore they’re not reliable! We want to go back to something you just plug in like a keyboard, I wanted to start using a drum pad, but I played with it for two hours and broke it, I don’t think I play that hard man I just have a habit of breaking things.

So you want to start using a band after this ep comes out maybe?

J: It’s hard finding people who think alike musically, that would be a dream but it’s hard to find the guys over in Brazil who will be suitable. In London it should be easy, you put an advert on the Internet here and you’ll probably get 5 people reply within the day, it’s a lot harder in Brazil. People like James Murphy who have a whole band around them, man LCD soundsystem is my dream band.

Finally guys are there any other artists you want to work with over here or in fact anywhere?

L: I love the new Beach House album, I know its not officially out, I don’t want to get arrested or anything, but it’s great. My ipod doesn’t have a lot of electro on it to be honest. I’ve been listening to a lot of 70’s prog, Genesis “Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” is being played a lot.

J: I listen to a lot of Radiohead, Air… a lot of chill out stuff. I rarely do listen to electro on my days off, we just want to chill out and get away from it sometimes.

The Twelve’s are doing a Radio 1 essential mix on the 19^th December at 03:00 you can download it from their website here