Italian producers Paolo Martini & Paul C need little introduction. Veterans of the game, their sounds have been pushed by renowned labels across the board including the likes of Hot Creations, 8Bit, Moon Harbour, Saved, Snatch! and Noir Music. It’s been overdue! We’re delighted to finally welcome the pair into the WWD hotseat. The boys have provided a very special sixty minute mix for your ears and took to a bunch of our Qs. Enjoy! 

WWD: Thanks for joining us guys! Did you get much of a break over the last few months?

Hi everyone! Not really as we were playing across Europe and Italy a fair bit, but we also had the time to enjoy some days off with our beloved family so everything was balanced in the right way 🙂

WWD: Most useful gifts you both received in recent times?

A Pioneer RMX 500 to use in our DJ sets which is very useful and fun to play with!

WWD: Are New Years resolution you’re thing?

Besides keep working hard as we did in recent years, we are seriously considering making our first album together, but we’ll see ..

WWD: Where does your focus lie in 2016? In your eyes, what would you still like to achieve?

We’ve been part of the Snatch! family for a couple of months now and, besides taking care of our management, we feel there’s a spirit of a real team and family with all of them, such as Michele, Gabri and the boss Stef (Riva Starr). We are looking forward to reaching new heights together, both in 2016 as well as the following years. We also respect all the other talented artists involved in their roster, so we think that finally we’ve found the right team to work with!

WWD: Your new release is ’99 kHz EP’ on Under No Illusion . Can you talk us through the production process behind the tracks? Are you still based in different cities?

UNI is a label that has grown impressively in the last couple of months, plus Ki Creighton, the owner of the label, is a good friend of ours. So when he asked us if we would like to made an EP for him it was an easy decision. Both tracks have the typical elements of most of our productions, but there’s also two brilliant remixes by Ben Grunnel and David Glass to complete the package. We are really excited about this one! And yes .. we are living in two different cities but the distance is not far. It’s only one hour by car and, thanks to the technology, we can sometimes work individually in our own studio whilst regularly sharing stuff with each other.

WWD: Can you tell us about the last time you had a disagreement with regard to production/music?

You know, working as a duo, you can sometimes argue about things. This could be something important or something more trivial such as a slight difference in the sound of a bassline … working as a duo is like a marriage and you have to find a compromise sometimes. At the end of the day everyone is happy! 🙂

WWD: Your tracks are signed to a plethora of top quality labels. Do you still get excited about where you sign your work?

Sure, every time is like the first time! We’ve been working hard to reach those ones and it wasn’t easy at all. Whilst approaching different labels we always find that there’s brilliant people behind them, so we are extremely happy when we establish a great friendship as well.

WWD: You’ve been a partnership since 2010. How do you feel your sound has developed since then?

It has changed the way we approach and how we treat certain elements, such as elaborating, filtering and manipulating them. The first two years we were not as consistent as we are now and were making tracks more sporadically whilst taking time to define our sound. We believe we started finding our direction with ‘Moonclouds EP’ on the Spanish label Kiara Records back in 2012 before getting increasingly more noticed from 2013 with tracks like ‘Spunk’ on Material or ‘We Repeat’ on Cecille. Also we can’t forget ‘Take Some Time’ on Terminal M or ‘Get This’ on Hot Creations! Even if some of our productions might have a different mood you can recognise that they’ve all come from us, as we’ve always been focused on the groove elements, the percussion and rhythmic sections which is the main thing for us – and of course the bassline!
Of course we’ll always do our best at improving whilst not repeating the same formula, even if it’s not easy at all. We think we’ve really evolved over the last three years particularly in refining our sound.

WWD: Three artists you expect to have a big year?

There’s so many but if we have to choose then we’d go with three young Italians talents – Luca Ballerini, Paride Saraceni and Vincenzo D’amico. They’ve all developed their own sound right now and we wish them all the best.

WWD: Give us the big dates music and gig wise coming up for you in the next few months!

We will have a lots of gigs around Europe in the forthcoming months and we are really excited about it! We’ve just returned from BPM in Mexico, where we made our debut at the Snatch! showcase alongside Riva Starr and Pirupa. It was absolutely great and we’re now looking forward to the next ones including Magdalena in Berlin, Electric in Brixton, a big festival in UK we can’t yet announce, Piaf and Petrol in Antwerp Belgium and looking forward for our debut in Manchester around the summer as well. At the moment our management is also dealing with some proposals in Australia and Argentina, so we hope to bring our music over there in the near future!

Follow: Paul C & Paulo Martini