The Snowgoons interview
Written by John Pikpas
To V-R παρουσιάζει την αποκλειστική συνέντευξη ενός από τα πιο δραστήρια γκρουπς στην Ευρώπη τα τελευταία χρόνια, με πολλούς φανζ στη χώρα μας. Μόνο στα Αγγλικά γιατί το εκπροσωπούμε internationally.
To begin with, bearing in mind the international noise you made after so many albums, I wonder if you have any particular plans for the future.
We actually just begun! 2009 was a good year and it was important for us to see that we can have a lot of output! We already working on a few projects but its to early in the game to name something. 2010 will be another year of the goons!
The new album “The Trojan Horse” uses (as the first album) samples of Greek music and of course a title based on Greek mythology. What exactly is your relationship with Greek culture and I would like to know what type of Greek music have you been listening to…
We already used greek music to sample also on other releases we had. We basically listen to all typ of European music. The greek music just got that little extra touch of funk! We wanted to reflect the greek mythology with the Trojan Horse transported to our century and specially to the hip-hop culture. We want to bring a different sound of European influence into America and worldwide. That’s what Trojan Horse stands for us. Other than that we are good friends with Sifu Versus and he is featured on the album plus he helps out with grafix and videos.
Seeing hip hop from the producer’s point of view, how do you see hip hop -both mainstream and underground- nowadays?
I think the main difference is underground is more sample based and mainstream is more keyboard based. I personal like working with samples. At the same time that doesn’t means if you workin just with keyboards and plugins your are mainstream but if you listen to the radio or tv the most popular socalled hiphop songs sound like a bunch of techno/house/trance songs. I really cant relate to that.
I would like you to describe a typical day of Snowgoons making music. From digging crates to the studio…
Mostly Det comes up with a sample that he found and we start talking about where we can loop it and what parts we gonna use even before we really start working with it. As soon as the main loop is ready we start adding all type of drums and sounds to it. Sometimes we change the whole drums part cause we want it to sound different. But we always know after the drums are done if we got a burner or not.
Underground hip hop is usually poor on sales. How difficult is it for you to live from music?
As an underground artist you cant live just from music. We all got other jobs that we dealing with to get some bread. We mostly doing this music thing for fun and our own pleasure. This way we don’t have any pressure and nobody can tell us what we need to do.
We see a great amount of top mc’s on your records. Are there any artists you want to collaborate with? What are your criteria for choosing a rapper to work with and how is this Germany-based/US thing working?
Yeah there are always new artists or even old artists we want to work with. Personally I want to work with Nas or Fat Joe. Its obvious that we prefer to work with artists that having the same music background as we have. Its also important that the contact to the artist happened personally. I wouldn’t do music just trough a manager or just because somebody got a big name. There must be some kind of connection.
Your sound is very characteristic. Does this feeling that your music creates make a statement? What is this?
Snowgoons sound will always be original boom bap sound but also we bringin it to a new level. We mixing a lot of “old” sounds with modern technique and we always hear that people like that epic sound. I guess its because in all this pop music you can find a hard and epic sound. People start getting tired about this pop sound. The pop sound I mean is Auto-tune and all this cheap Keyboard sounds.
The first decade of the zeros is gone… Could you please list me your personal top five records (from all kinds of music) for this era?
Oh that’s really tuff specially for the last 10 years since im more influenced by the 90s but without any order I would name this albums: Reef The Lost Cauze – Feast Or Famine, Jedi Mind Tricks – Violent by Design, Ill Bill – The Hour Of Reprisal, Serj Tankian – Elect The Dead, Jaylib – Champion Sound…there are more but that’s what on my mind now!
Last but not least, as European hip hop artists, what do you consider as the basic differences between the hip hop scenes in Europe and the other partside of the Atlantic?
I thinh the biggest difference is that the US scene still setting the trend. I can specially speak for the german scene and the commercial influence of hiphop music is really big. Every rapper over here is a wanna be Lil Wayne or Gangsta Rapper. But then on the otherside the underground scene is really dedicated also to the old school.
