Flosstradamus Sends This One Out to the Ladies

Take two talented kids from the Midwest on a mission to make music fun, factor in the house-centric Chicago music scene they grew up in, throw in the techno, trance, ghetto-tech, hip hop, R&B, rock, crunk, juke music they’ve been exposed to up until this point and you end up with Curt Cameruci (aka Autobot) and Josh Young (aka J2K) at the forefront of the mashup genre. They can stand behind their declaration that they “were never told that there should be boundaries to music.” On the verge of releasing their debut LP, Flosstradamus has dropped their first official single, “Big Bills,” a dance collaboration with Chairlift's Caroline Polachek intended to make the ladies go weak in the knees. The duo, a key part of the original scene that spawned Chicago rappers Kid Sister and The Cool Kids, are primed and ready to spin, rhyme, mix, and collaborate their way to the top.

How’re you feeling about your first official release?
Josh Young: Pretty excited. The video is up on MTV, and they did street snipes like posters and stuff, and we just saw one for the first time a couple days ago. We’ve been in Kid Sister’s videos before ... made little cameos ... but this is our first single and video, so it’s the first thing we’ve actually starred in.

Why did you decide to collaborate with Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek on the first single?
J: She has an amazing voice, she’s pretty, and we like that Chairlift song “Bruises.” Green Label asked us to submit a list of people we wanted to work with, and we feel like she was the one that worked out best. Her voice was perfect for the song. We wanted someone who wasn’t going to be too overpowering like Mariah Carey. We wanted someone who would just be a little bit more laid back, and she just nailed it perfectly.

Your musical style’s pretty different from Chairlift; what sound were you trying to achieve with this track?
J: They’re not very electronic, they’re a straightforward indie-rock band. But we wanted to make kind of a girlie disco-y dance joint, and when we approached Caroline about it, she was behind the idea, so we sent some tracks back and forth with her, and it ended up working out really well.

Why did you want to make a girlie track for the first single?
Curt Cameruci: That was just the approach we took at the time. We didn’t want to go too crazy club because we knew this would be played on MTV, and that it would just be out in the public more. If we were to get crazy-rave with our music—like some of the other songs we do—it wouldn’t have been too well accepted, I think.
J: Plus, a lot of the parties we’ve been going to lately have been all dudes, and there’s something wrong with that to be honest. When you’re DJing to a bunch of crazy dudes, going nuts ... it’s fun, but at the same time Curt and I both feel personally that the girls kind of make the party, so we wanted to do one for the ladies.

Since the single debuted, have more girls been checking you guys out?
J: We haven’t actually done too many shows because we’ve been in the studio, but on Myspace, our friend requests have been primarily girls lately. Before it was all dudes like, “Yo man, check out my beat!” and we were like ... alright. But now it’s girls saying, “Check out my beat!”

Mission accomplished. You guys are Chicago-based and Chairlift is Brooklyn-based. Do you guys play up the Chi-Town/BK combination at all?
J: Well, not really. We’ve worked with people from Brooklyn before, like Matt and Kim. But it’s one of those things where we feel like Caroline is kind of an international girl so we weren’t really focusing too much on that, but you know, maybe we will. The music is definitely strong in both of those places right now.

Did you have a lot of input in how the video was shot?
J: When he was asked for our opinions, we mainly just told him that we wanted to keep it minimal and let the music do the talking, and I think that he did a pretty good job with that. We shot it in Brooklyn, on the day that there was a blizzard outside; it snowed like 20 inches or something ridiculous, and it was about 10 degrees inside the warehouse where we shot it. So if you see Curt in a T-shirt, as soon as they said cut they covered us up with blankets, parkas, and everything. It was a pretty extreme video shoot.

Working on Green Label—do you guys have a lot of freedom with your music?
J: Yeah, they gave us a lot of creative control, a lot more than I really expected. Because it’s Mountain Dew, and it’s a corporation, people have asked us, “If you weren’t doing this with a corporation, what would change with the song?” or “How would it differ?” And honestly, it wouldn’t differ at all. They really didn’t mess with us too much on the creative front. In this day and age, when major labels are tanking, I think they’re having to let musicians do a little bit more of what they want. For example, I know Lil Wayne is on every record ever, and the scene is becoming a little oversaturated, but if you look at what he’s saying on “A Mille,” which is a huge record, it’s not like he’s talking about riding on boats going to the club—that record is 100% him, just saying whatever he wants, and it was the biggest record in America for a long time. I think that says a lot about what’s going on right now in music.

Would you ever want to work with someone like Lil Wayne? Or is he too commercial?
C: No, no, we’re willing to work with anyone in any genre of music. We’re very versatile as DJs, and with our music, we listen to everything, and there are no limitations. I’ll do a track with Dolly Parton, I don’t mind. When we produce we can produce anything and we produce cool variants of someone else’s music too, no limitations. The only people I wouldn’t want to work with are people that are assholes. Aside from that, if you make good music, I’m down to work with you.
J: Yeah, that’s the only restraint. If you can’t get our jokes, you don’t want to hang out, and can’t be down for the party, then you can’t make songs with us. Other than that we’ll work with anybody.

You’re both DJs originally. How does that affect the way your sound evolves?
C: Initially we started out at a little bar just having fun with it. Even when we were making remixes and edits, it was all in fun, it wasn’t like “this is going be the hugest single ever!” It was about making a song and having people go crazy to it—and it still is that, but we’ve absorbed so much more music by traveling. We go to different parts of the world and hear different genres of music, and that totally influences what we produce, how we work, and how we like music. We’re the type of DJs that play everything, so when we produce music we can take a little element from some weird trance song and then we’ll take a hip hop break down and put in some juke or drums, so we’ll use all different elements from multiple genres and multiple time periods in music.

Do you let people in the DJ booth, or do you need calm so you can focus?
C: Oh, they can be all up in there, touching the turntables, we like that! That’s how our original party was—we had everyone around us, Josh and I were cramped, getting bumped, with drinks getting spilled on the turntables.
J: We use a lot more equipment now, it’s a little bit more expensive, so the whole drinks getting spilled on the laptop thing is not cool—not a good look—but we’re definitely into it. It’s all about the kids, all about the fans.
C: The energy around you is just crazy.

When can we expect the album?
J: There’s still a lot of work, but it’s because we do remixes and so much production in between. The album’s a priority, but we keep getting all these side-production offers, and it’s made it a little bit longer of a process than we would’ve liked, but our plan is to drop a digital EP before SXSW this year.