For the next track in our Free Download series we will be delving deeper into the artists that create each edition. The next instalment comes courtesy of the husband and wife team of The Apricots.
For those that are perhaps not well acquainted with The Apricots, we are certain that you will know the artists behind the alias. Speaking from their home in Romania, we lift the lid on this special pairing, “Hello, we are The Apricots, the electronic music family duo of Alexandra and Adrian aka DJ Slim Fit, happily married, based in Bucharest, Romania. Alexandra is a DJ with a 15 years long career, she is a resident at Black Rhino Radio with her monthly show Ears Wide Open and co-founded the Berlin-based label Melliflow. Adrian is DJing and producing electronic music for more than 10 years.” Alexandra goes on to explain that there is an even more well known artist at the core of this outfit, “In the past he released music under the alias “Pîrvu”, before switching to DJ Slim Fit. He also produces and plays Liquid Drum And Bass music under the “Random Sabotage” alias.”
This truly heart-warming story of the pair began many moons back in 2017, and as Alexandra recounts, the project started life slightly different, “The project “The Apricots” was born in Berlin, in 2017 and it all started when we lived together in Berlin and Adrian was working in the club. Initially we started to produce ambient and downtempo music, but we expanded to electronic music for the dancefloor like house, electro and breaks and Djing together. He was always bringing me apricot juice, our favourite type of juice. In German, apricot is translated to Aprikose, so we started to call each other “Aprik”, and at that moment we started to produce music together. We thought the artist name “The Apricots” would be nice, funny and fit for us. And also sounds like the name of a band, which is funny again.”
With such a wide and varied history in electronic music between both artists it is always interesting to delve into where the two elements join and where their joint musical influences comes from, “We both grew up with the 80s and 90s music, with pirated and radio-recorded cassette tapes, with old vinyl records, with pop, hip-hop, rap, big beat, trance and euro-dance. MTV Europe’s music of that decade influenced and led us to electronic music. We have always listened to all areas of British music and we think that’s also a major influence for both of us. And also, the spectrum of the human emotions exerts a powerful influence in everything we play and create, so we always try to filter our creations and selections through our souls.”
Even at this early stage in the conversation, it is clear that both parties are perfectly in sync with each other and with a mutual love for electronic music being the bedrock of their relationship, but both artists having separate careers this cannot be an easy thing to manage. Having such demanding lives as solo artists it was again a beautiful thing to hear recounted how they manage this life, “The strongest ingredient of our marriage is that we are best friends and best team partners, along with love, respect, trust and a strong sense of humor. We feel deeply connected and synchronized with each other and we easily agree about decisions, as we have similar tastes or we complete each other gracefully. We love to spend time together, we have fun together and we talk about anything and everything, every day. We spend the entire week together at home, cooking, relaxing, producing music, digging music, walking in the park. And lately we have been playing together as The Apricots a lot, so we are together during the weekends too.”
Conversation soon moves on to the nuts and bolts of their working life and how they handle the creative process, and as you might expect from such a well matched couple the process is a joyful one, “It goes like this: we wake up in the morning, we prepare coffee, we feed our beloved cats and eat a healthy breakfast. Then we go into the studio to create music between 9AM and 12PM. During this time we finish a track, most of the time. We usually start deciding which style of music we want to go, and the rest of the creating process is pure improvisation. We are only creating while we are in the studio, we never do it while traveling. What is even more inspiring about their creative process is that they do not have any set roles within their home studio, “we are making music together, improvising, looking for sounds, exchanging ideas and brainstorming about the creative process.” Being the consummate artists that they are, there is always a new project or track cooking and it was at this point that we uncovered their future plans for The Apricots, “This year we’re launching our party Apricots’ Jam, with first events at Platforma Wolff in Bucharest and Club der Visionaere and Hoppetosse in Berlin and we’re going to connect a podcast series under the same name. We are also planning to start a label to release our productions.”
Finally, it was time to discuss their Free Download track “Storm Of Hope” and if you are familiar with both individual artists’ work you can almost envisage them working on this track. With DJ Slim Fit’s background in drum and bass, the drums and percussion may be a safe bet that this came from him, but perhaps not as Alexandra’s Melliflow imprint and own DJ sets has its fair share of breaks. The emotive element of synth arrangement could quite easily come from either artist, but in the end, it is safer bet to assume that all sections of this track was lovingly crafted by both artists working in unison. Who better to explain the inner workings of the track than the two artists that created it, “Usually, we finish a song and then we brainstorm for the title. But for “Storm Of Hope” we reversed the process. We chose the title first and created a soundtrack for it. “Storm Of Hope” is an emotional, dreamy song, an introspection with a touch of sadness. The percussion, that has dance energy, meets the synth waves of emotional melody, “a happy-drama” as we like to call it.”
Download the track from our Telegram.
More info on The Apricots
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More info on Apricots’ Jam
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More info on Alexandra
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More info on DJ Slim Fit
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