Getting to know Skylevel

skylevel interview

I’ve picked up each of the three Skylevel release and rarely do I pack my record bag and at least one doesn’t find its way in there. The latest release, which has just landed in the shops, is ace! So ace, that it annoyed me that I knew next to nothing about the label. As a result I searched them out for a quick chat…

Skylevel records, nice to meet you, who am I talking to?

You’re talking to two devoted record collectors who go to sleep and wake up thinking about vinyl. Yes, we’re quite the nerds, but we love going out and dancing as much as we love Djing.

Can you tell us a bit about yourselves?

We’ve been friends for a long time and spinning together ever since, so I guess you can say that skylevel is music by DJs for DJs.

How did the label come about?

It’s all real simple: We’ve been saving up the money until there was enough to do a small 12” pressing. Since we earned the money together, it felt like “Okay, we can use this to gamble.” Skylevel 01 got made and luckily enough people picked it up so we could do skylevel 02. Same with number 3 and hopefully number 4.

What’s the thinking behind the the label?

All the music we made for Skylevel is not stuff that we’d put out with our names credited for production. We believe in the high art of editing a song, but the whole creation process is different from remixing or composing original material. We generally take it seriously when it comes to what and where you can sample. Skylevel is like a playground with less rules and more fun.

Where do you stand on the recent inevitable back lash against all the ‘edits’ that are doing the rounds at the moment?

Many tracks simply don’t need to be edited, it looks like many people jumped on the train, because by doing an edit it’s possible for people to release a record even though they have hardly any skills or feeling for music. We don’t like to dwell on the negative, so many people are doing inspiring edits that take good songs to another level.

What have you got in sort for the coming months?

We’ve been “signing” a few tracks, some of them directly at a party where we heard them and with a drunken mind.. Maybe that’s not too smart, but it felt good in every case and has already worked well for number three.

The ‘drunken mind’ sometimes its the perfect gauge of a huge track, sometimes its the opposite… I’m looking forward to hearing it.

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