I started listening to other producers, including this producer out of Norway named Finnebassen who made more like deep house with funky basslines. So when I started listening to that style of music, I started creating slower music as well. The BPMs got slower and slower, and I ended up at around 100 bpm, which felt really good to me. It felt natural, felt right for me when I made it.
I get inspired by a lot of different stuff. My father is a huge music fan. We had this player, it could take maybe 600 CDs and you could choose which one to listen to. This is ten years ago. He played me everything.
This past year [2013], I’ve really been inspired by Swedish producer Oliver Nelson and the Norwegian duo Lemâitre, so I’d love to collaborate with them one day.
Seeing as we have just come out of 2013, what would you say were your top 5 records of the year? - Stolen Dance (FlicFlac Edit) – Milky Chance
[The Marvin Gaye track] was actually one of those tracks I was too scared to touch: it’s so good, it’s one of those classic tracks you shouldn’t mess with, but then I was just sitting in my room in the evening, so I thought I’d give it a shot… I remember I was really nervous when I uploaded. I didn’t know if people were going to hate it.
Sometimes I found the a cappella online, on YouTube or something, but for most tracks it’s pretty hard to find a cappella, so I just used the whole track.
The difference between doing a remix and an original track is that when you do a remix, you obviously already have the original track as a starting point. But with the originals you start from scratch. […] However, with a lot of my remixes, I’ve actually been doing just that — making up a new chord progression and adding melody and parts that aren’t in the original track. So I feel like I’ve been using a similar approach on the originals and the remixes.
When I make music, I’m always imagining people sitting on the grass, having a beer, relaxing in the sun. Or at the beach. That was my vision. After a while, people started calling it ‘tropical house’, which I guess was a good name for it. It speaks of that tropical setting.
I don’t know why it was called “tropical.” I guess it was just me in the studio experimenting with different sounds, and I ended up with that synth sound. I thought it sounded really good. It might be because it’s very cold in my hometown, raining a lot, and I was sitting in my room and thinking about the beach and summer.