Blood Runs Thicker Than Water With Love Thy Brother

Music has the ability to create a special bond between two people. Artists who produce music together often feel like family. For Montreal-based producers and DJ duo Love Thy Brother, that musical bond is as thick as blood. Love Thy Brother, consisting of Conor and Liam Clarke, have been making waves with a string of well-received remixes and originals over the past year.

The pair got their start DJing about a decade ago, during the explosion of underground electronic music in Montreal. Conor, the eldest, quickly fell into the late-night dance music scene while attending college, devouring the new electronic sounds that were emerging in afterhours venues and loft party throw-ups around the city. "I loved that loft scene. Montreal's emerging afterparty scene. You could do whatever the heck you wanted to." With some like-minded colleagues, Conor started the production company Saintwoods and began booking artists and gigs around the city. Jumping into the DJ game himself seemed like the next natural move. "I had a head start position there," he remarks. Liam, while still in high school, had already started producing his own electronic music back in Toronto. "Once I started DJing, I dragged Liam up to Montreal from high school to play shows with me," Conor says with a laugh.

The already closely-knit brothers found a new shared interest in electronic music. "It was the first time we started listening to the same music," says Liam. "That was a big thing. When Conor came back from school, we were pretty much on the same page for everything." Once they started DJing together officially, deciding to produce original tracks came easily. "It just naturally evolved to us wanting to take production seriously," says Conor. "We knew from the start that we could do this."

Today, the two brothers are definitely no strangers to the music industry. Conor is the CEO and founder of WAVO, a technology music startup providing a marketing platform for new artists, while Liam composes licensing music for film and TV. "We live and breathe music, to us it's all just one," says Conor. Having their careers so intimately tied to music has provided them with a unique outlook on how they make their own productions. Both are much different than your run-of-the-mill bedroom producer. "Working in this industry all day, every day, together, we see how creative you have to be to really make it," says Conor. "Writing for film and TV, you're basically trying to make a hit every day," continues Liam. "It's not supposed to be cool. It's trend music. There's a huge difference between that and writing Love Thy Brother stuff. We're trying to make music that will actually still sound good in a year or two."

The brothers do utilize the impressions they've gained of the music industry when working in the studio. They continually focus on originality and inventivity in lieu of exploiting a popular sound. "Obviously a lot of people are just doing whatever is big and trendy," Conor explains. "Techno, deep house, progressive house…It's very easy to just check out big artists' sets, what's trending, and put that together." The pair emphasize a different approach. "It has to work on the dancefloor and in the headphones. It shouldn't just be some passe trend, says Conor. "We make the best song no matter what," adds Liam. "It's gotta be cool. It can't just kind of work."

Recently, Love Thy Brother released their remix of "Feels" by Kiiara, a break-out vocalist garnering heavy support across the blogosphere. The duo swapped R&B styled production for dark basslines and lush electronic dynamics, bringing a pulsing deep house sound to lift Kiiarra's emotional vocals. "The remixes that work the best are the songs that we find and love," says Liam. "It's really not about caring so much about what label a song is on. It's like, 'okay, we love this track, let's go figure out how to remix it.' That's worked really well and that's what we're going to keep doing."

The duo is looking to ramp up their releases over the rest of 2015 and onward. "We've been working with Damian Taylor, our neighbour in Montreal, who has produced with everyone from Arcade Fire to Björk. We've got an album's worth of original material and there is a lot of excitement going on with what we have for that," says Liam. "The wavelength we're now on," concludes Conor, "after working musically together for almost ten years. We're just getting started."

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Kiiara is on SoundCloud

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