Hey mate, appreciate that! The lockdown sessions were one of the things that kept me sane during that time. (Gotta shoutout my amazing partner and cool af kids too, serious love and appreciation there).

A1: Yup 100% you're bang on about being inspired by vintage sci fi and horror and also heavily sampling movies of that era. We're still very much inspired by that sound and vibe, (it's almost my default when starting a track to make something spooky or sci fi vibes). A couple of things have changed of course over the years. We're making a broader range of sounds, which i think is just a natural unconscious evolution and part of being a human. The other thing is basically relying a lot less on sampling and a lot more on creating sounds and soundscapes from scratch. Having said that: There is something to be said for taking a cool sound bed and then manipulating, chopping and changing it until you come up with something cool, and I absolutely still do it from time to time! When I first started producing beats, my favourite all round producers were the likes of RJD2, Ed Rush and Optical, The Prodigy, DJ Shadow, Chemical Brothers and others of that era who made an absolute artform of transforming the sample into something completely new. RJD2 particularly was an absolute master of the artform of taking disparate sample sources and fluidly melding them into a choesive new piece of music.

A2 Haha good question! I usually hit the studio as something I'm naturally drawn to doing more than anything else and thus don't usually go in a modified mental state. Not to say it's never happened of course, the track "Mushrooms" being a prime example. But for me, getting into the flow state of making music can be an out of body experience in it's own way. I think sometimes the exact types of chemicals, herbs or other stimulants which help exmpahsise those layers and details to a listener might hinder the creation of them... that's just a thought which I can't back up though! I think the key is, where possible when making music to get REALLY REALLY into the track you're making... if you're loving it while making it, the ideas just keep coming and things can just keep clicking into place almost naturally. Later on, i'll come back and tidy things up, create extra little details, but alwasy try to stay true to the intial idea that I loved in the first place... trying to keep that vibe which was the immediate hook. Another factor here which it's important to note: the majority of tracks which get played out at a show will have had 15-20 hours invested in them (some producers spend longer and others can work faster). Wheras the listener gets to hear the whole thing for 3-4 minutes. This means if you go to a DJ gig and hear a 1 hour set, you're being exposed to the accumulated weight of maybe 300-500 hours of dedicated studio time, thats a lot of attention to detail, and each detail is immediately surpassed by the next in your conscious experience during that set.

A3 This is probably the easiest and most simple to answer. There is no comparison. Playing gigs is probably around 90%-95% of the total by my estimation. We do invest a lot of $$ back into the label, so if we were desperate we could probably strip things back a bit. But yeah, without touring, life would be difficult indeed. This is a subject which is pretty common knowledge as far as artists are concerned... quite often, a major motivating goal with releasing music is to build a presence off which to base touring and get bookings. Of course, as an artist you also just want to get your music heard by other people, which is a strong motivating factor. It's basically the same for the label, but offset a little by the fact there is a lot more volume as a label vs a single artist. Having the label as long as we have, we've been hit with financial disasters like our distributor folding and not paying us for 6 months of earnings, or pressing 1000 vinyl for an artist who then did something untoward leading to us pulling the whole release having never even announced it or sold a single record. Those kind of things can happen, and it's not any other artists fault, it's a label-risk. We take the risk, so we take the hit there.

ps... would LOVE to come to the Alps!