FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

NORTHMIX: HolloH

For this week’s instalment of Northmix, HolloH brings their UK and French influences to you.
Photo courtesy of James Drobik, Body High Showcase at Wrongbar

For this week's NORTHMIX, we caught up with the Toronto duo, HolloH. Nick and Parker had a chance to stop by to talk to us about their love for experimenting with electronic music and details about their upcoming full length EP.

So let's start from the beginning, how did you two meet?
Nick: We were in high school and there's not a lot going on in the east end of Toronto, so we'd always end up going out to the middle of nowhere. One night, we were just too drunk, and it was easier to get to my house, and I didn't really know Parker that well. We were just friends through friends.

Advertisement

Parker: I just asked him if I could sleep in his basement…

N: I came down in the morning and it was my dad's birthday and they thought he was someone I'd known for ages, so my mom was like "invite him for breakfast, he's coming with us!" [Laughs] Meanwhile I don't really know this guy, but we started messing around with DJ stuff that morning and that was like seven years ago now?

What kind of electronic music were you listening to at the time?
N: I grew up in the UK so it was a lot of old dance tunes and tracks from the early 2000s, "The Weekend" by Michael Grey was a huge one. Then I got into drum and bass and jungle. Around '07 we wandered over to electro.

P: I got into it through the electro blog explosion and from there discovered the French touch—sort of early 2000s stuff.

What made you guys decide to become an act?
P: We would hangout on weekends and be like "hey, come over and make some tunes, play some music," we were just doing that anyways. And then we played a couple of gigs when we were 18.

What was your DJ name before?
N: I went into like this weird path of dubstep, then drum and bass when that all happened in 2010. I used to play at BassMentality, I was a lot younger then. I think I was barely 19 at the time. I was producing tracks with Parker anyway, and we just decided we knew what we wanted to do.

P: This would be the third name we've played under together, but the first one we've taken seriously. The others were very questionable [laughs].

Advertisement

N: We were getting really experimental back then, we were just figuring out what we wanted to do.

P: We both love house music, and kind of kept going back to it.

Tell me about your releases with Rare Beef.
P: We heard about them because our manager and Warren, who works at Rare Beef, goes way back. We sent the label some new tunes and they gravitated towards our sound.

You have another release coming out, can you tell us a bit more about that?
P: It's an EP, after doing the first one, the label was very interested, and since Rare Beef is not just an electronic label, we felt okay about it. We're still going to make a dance and more club-oriented sound, but we pitched them this idea of coming back in a few months with a cohesive mini album. We went back and wrote this piece from scratch that ended up being six songs. Four songs, an intro and outro.

What are some challenges you guys are currently facing as DJs and producers in Toronto?
P: I feel that there are only a few places that you can go from here. We can play shows in Toronto all the time, but there aren't many cities around that have our scene. Unless you start paying for expensive flight, so there's sort of this black hole of "where do you go from here?"

N: There's Montreal, which is great.

P: You can play a university show, but there's no longevity.

Is there an event you guys have played that really stood out to you?
P: The most fun I've had while playing a set was when we were playing Hudson Mohawke at Mosquito. For some reason that place was packed. The crowd was into what we were doing; there was a strong connection to the crowd at that show.

Photo courtesy of The Supermaniak, Hudson Mohawke at Mosquito

Do you prefer producing singles or remixes?
P: I really enjoyed writing this EP. We had this blank canvas to do whatever we wanted. We weren't writing for really any reason in particular to be honest. We were just writing anything we wanted to say. The remix work is always fun too though. It already has a structure that you can re-purpose and transform.

N: Especially over the past year, working with a lot of people from Toronto has shown us the importance of collaboration. We did one with Hunter Siegel recently and it was really interesting because his sound comes from such a different background. He's extremely talented. So when we came together to make a tune—we learned a lot. We also did a world cup theme song with our buddy Kwikfiks on the weekend. We invited him over it was great.