Bursting onto the scene earlier this year with their first single ‘Smile‘, Christian Karlsson (Miike Snow) and Linus Eklow (Style of Eye), both boasting illustrious music careers, have come together to create something wonderful and exciting called Galantis. Just twelve days after releasing their inaugural six song EP, Galantis took a risk and made their performance debut at Coachella. Simply put, they blew the roof off the Gobi Tent, creating quite a buzz in the wake of the aftermath. The dynamic duo’s infectious music and insane stage chemistry is unparalleled, it’s hard not to love them. Bringing their live stage set up, complete with drum kits and analog mixers, across the US on a short debut tour, EDMTunes had the opportunity to sit down with Seafoxes, Linus and Christian on the final stop of the tour at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles. The boys weighed in on their Coachella performance, their creative vision and what’s next for Galantis before they took the stage for another mind blowing performance indoctrinating the whole audience into the Seafox Nation.
People are just starting to get to know you guys and who Galantis is. What brought the two of you together out of your other careers to form Galantis?
Christian: We’ve known each other for a long time. We are friends from the Stockholm music scene. When I was with Miike Snow, I reached out to Linus as Style of Eye and asked if he could do a remix of Animal, so that was how we started hanging out in the studio. From there we spent more and more time in the studio. We met each other out on the road too a lot and we grew organically from there. Two years ago we started we started for real with Galantis, kinda of finding out what do we call this? What is it? And after that remix we really started to talk about it and find out.
Linus: Yea, it took a while to find out what we should do….also we were doing different things on the side, so it took a while to find that sound, the sound we thought was us.
You guys had a massive performance at Coachella, what did you expect for your debut? How does it feel now?
C: It was hard to expect anything. We were worried of course, because we had just put out our first piece of music, the six song EP, twelve days before. Of course ‘Smile’ was out on soundcloud and stuff before, but really people didn’t have much run up, so we didn’t really know what to expect. So it fucking blew our minds when we got out on stage and started performing and we heard huge crowds sing along to our music. First gig. Coachella. Ten thousand people singing your songs…it’s like shit…. (Laughs)
You guys have massive chemistry on stage, what roles do you guys assume in the studio vs. on stage?
C & L: We are both very similar
C: We are both always up on each other’s stuff, trying to do things. This is the thing, if I’m not mixing then I’m at the drums and then if I’m mixing, Linus is probably on the drums. We don’t really decide anything, like who’s going to do what.
You pick up each other’s slack.
C&L: Yes!
C: It’s like we are building a Galantis house. Oh he’s working on the door, I’m gonna fix the roof!
Its all got to get done some how.
C: Yea, that’s pretty much what it is
You have very androgynous vocals in your tracks, what was the mentality behind that element and the process that went into making it?
C: You’re the first one to use that word actually
L: Exactly
C: That’s the point
L: That’s what we wanted.
C: We wanted it to be “oh that’s so beautiful…and I don’t know what this is..male or female, man or robot.”
L: We both have a pretty big fascination with that type of sound, or vocals. Christian is pretty tired of the human voice. (Laughs)
C: I prefer a robotic voice (Laughs)
L: It’s something we love to fool around with…treating it more like a sample than just a vocal recording.
It makes it more relate able, anybody can pull into that.
C&L: Yea
C: I think one thing that is also good is that it kind of kills the visual you have in your head when someone is like (sings) “Yeaaaaaaa” and it’s about them singing…..It’s easier I think to relate to some lyrics if you don’t hear if it’s a girl or a boy or what it is, or if it’s a crowd.
Over the past few years, the veil between POP and EDM has started to fade- given your history in both realms, what do you have planned for the future of this movement in integration?
L: For us it’s more about the actual songwriting, we don’t really think about that other than keep it in the back of our minds.I think actually when we are on stage, it’s more about bridging things and being like a typical DJ or typical band.
C: And for genres…I don’t think we really care.
L: No, No (it’s not something we look at)
There’s no genre. It’s just Galantis.
C&L: Exactly
What is the driving force behind your unique sound and creative voice? Having been so hands on with so many influential artists- what elevates/differentiates the experience you’re looking to create?
L: This is us. This is basically what we want to listen to at home. So from everything that we’ve done separately in the past, that gives us a lot and it lets our ears grow. It’s just stuff that you put in the bag, whether it’s going to a show and seeing someone else produce or whatever it is you collect those things. So that’s what I think that we bring to the table in the studio, it’s more about us and not making someone else happy when it comes to another artist. We know when we are happy with a song, that’s why it’s taking a long time.
C: I feel after all these years writing for other people and stuff and being in different bands, we learned how to trust our own ears and to make sure and be like ok this is the song right here. It’s the bomb.
L: We don’t care what anyone else is saying and we are happy when we get it right.
Kaskade was a driving force in promoting your music, you guys shared a label, but what other connections do you guys have with each other?
L: He is a really good friend and we’ve been sharing music, sometimes when we have new music and he has new stuff we will play it for each other. Its been a few people really big in the scene that have been really good friends of ours and have been that for a long time. But the thing is, no one would play our music just because we are friends. I wouldn’t play anyone elses music just because we are friends either, but when someone you know makes something that you put it in your set, and you’re like “wow, shit, I love it”, then you have to tell people and encourage them.I think that’s where the start was, Kaskade, Steve Angello or Tiesto, someone like them saying it was amazing. Most of them didn’t know we had a thing called Galantis.
L: It was more a lot of explaining…
C: This is what’s going on and they came around of course saying “this is dope, this is great.”
L: So I was like yea, send it to them. (Laughs)
C: Check your email!
After this debut tour, what’s next for Galantis?
L: Studio!
Is an album coming?
C&L: YES!
C: We have a full body of an album. All the songwriting is pretty much done. 90 % done with the songwriting
L: 96%
C: A lot of programming and production and the mixing
L: So that’s going to take up most of our time
L: But we are going to do a few warm ups here and there too
Is Galantis always going to be a live show?
C&L: I feel like right now we are focusing on the live show
