wordlife Are Going To Grab The World By The Butt

Sydney duo wordlife are on a mission: to make dance music sexy again. Not "raise your hands, party 'til dawn"—they're talking straight-up sexual chemistry with the inevitable smashing together of bodies.

With a massive tour about to kick off with The Presets and Beni, we spoke to them about working with people you look up to and the disappointing new party restrictions in their hometown. Oh and how they plan on grabbing the world by the butt.

Thump: You guys are about to go on tour with The Presets, that's a pretty big call up to get.

Barney aka Kato: The Presets are artists we've been big fans of and have respected for years, it's amazing. To get a nod from them, and join their tour is great. Our good mate Beni is on the tour as well so that should be really fun, hanging out with those guys. And to take our music further around Australia than we've ever taken it, to bigger crowds which is really good exposure.

Your remix of The Presets new tune "Goodbye Future" which premiered last Friday, is really great. Have you heard from the band about what they thought?

Yeah well they approved it, and that's what we were worried about. It seems to be getting a pretty good response. We just kind of wanted to sort of add a bit, just slightly different vibe to what they'd done. But we liked the song structure that they had, so we kept that and kind of rebuilt wordlife-y stuff around it.

Is it daunting to remix the music of someone you admire? Especially when you're about to go on tour with them? Imagine if they just totally iced you the whole time.

It's sort of daunting in a way but it's also something that you relish doing. You're a little bit daunted but your also excited at the prospect of getting to do that. I guess that just drives you to want to do better work, the best work you can. I guess they always say a little bit of fear brings out the best of you in a way. We don't take anything in our stride, we're happy to earn every little bit by bit and work hard. That's kind of how we've done our thing and grown in the industry, slowly chipping away at it piece by piece.

You guys have been kicking around the Sydney dance scene for a while, are you concerned about these new government regulations that are coming in?

Yeah definitely, it's a bit of an injustice. I think that, I hope that the government will realise the folly of their actions. I think that time will definitely tell that. There are things that people can do to speak up about it, join those Facebook groups and sign those petitions and that's a great step. It's a good jolt for people to go "hey, we should get involved more politically and let our voices be heard". I feel like dance music is a bit low on politics, compared to you know like rock and that, and I feel like this could maybe jolt people into being a bit more politically conscious in general.

I read somewhere wordlife described as, "futuristic bass music with a mission to bring sex back to the raves of the world".

That was kind of something that we probably said nine-months or a couple of years ago. I fell like at the time we kind of made that claim dance music had got very "dudey" and aggressive. I guess that's what we're more thinking about just for stuff to be a bit more— I think that's fun and I think that's part of life for shit to be sexy. I think people are a bit afraid to talk about certain issues like that in dance music. There's like samples of you know "I love you, I love you, I love you" or "let's party" or some shit like that but we just wanted to be more interesting, a bit more physical.

It's good to see the missions going well and that progress is being made.

Totally, we're getting it out there. Hopefully we can find some subsonic frequency that makes everyone get naked.

Hit some horny channel.

Yeah the horny note… The pink note!

So what's next after The Presets tour and for the rest of 2014?

Well we're still working on just new Eps for Modular, we've got a few tracks we're pitching to record labels overseas. That's definitely a goal at the moment to get our stuff a bit more worldwide. I feel like we've achieved so much in Australia, and I think what's next for us is to take it to the world a bit more. We just want to meet the world and shake hands with the world. Give the world a big hug.

And start playing them that sexy stuff.

Tweak its butt maybe. Give it a hug and a butt grab.

wordlife are playing the Thump presented Not Another Boat Party with Basenji, Kilter, Softwar, and Parkside DJs  on 22 Match.