Boozoo Bajou - Welcome To The Boozooniverse
Boozoo Bajou return with their third album Grains, the album they “always wanted to make”. 3D’s Huwston scrunches producer Florian of the duo between his feet and finds out what the two have been up to since Dust My Broom.
Sometimes being at the tail end of an interview schedule, you don’t always get the best out of your subject. On a miserable morning in Germany, Florian from Boozoo Bajou coughs and mutters his way through the questions before him, although we probably did not get off to the best when I asked if the album is a reflection of the duo getting older.
“We didn’t focus on any trends, we did what we really like, Peter and me, we really like slow tempo… we didn’t look much out to what’s happening like, ‘we need some dubstep bassline’ or something trendy. We did what we enjoy to do,” Florian says.
Focusing so much more on local musicians and an organic process for recording, Florian says it was both the quickest album they’ve made and, stylistically, the most spontaneous. “This album was very much unplanned, the style, it just came. The other two albums have been much more conceptional, this one we just did one track after the next. We’re not trying to tell a story and it was the fastest album so far, it [took] eight months to make.”
Recorded in a studio steeped in the history of German folk music, the duo realise how easy it is to make electronic music and how difficult the constraints can be for the live elements; to write, record and create in a special space in a short amount of time.
“Nowadays when you’re doing electronic stuff it’s easier than years ago, you don’t need money and space. If you want to create something in the studio it’s an interesting way of creative working,” says Florian, as opposed to picking up on a track you left on your hard drive months ago.
“Compared to the last record, we spent much more time focused on our local mates around here – great musicians, you know- This album we just have two singers and the rest are our local homies playing instruments, [whereas] the last album, a lot of people from overseas like Willie Hutch, Joe Dukie and Tony Joe White were on it.
“We didn’t feel any need to make dance tunes, there are a million dance tunes out there. We started to make some dance tunes but maybe we release it under a different name.’
Grains is a product more of their local environment than anything. Living in a provincial part of the country, they say they’re not influenced by touring, but by the records they love, which does not include Florian’s punk rock roots.
“The last 7 Inch I bought was The Brides, from Chicago, a one-sided 7 Inch single, ten years ago,” he says, and when asked if the hippy spirit and punk spirit are one and the same he agrees. “But we are not so political, we are boring old farts – we are not political missionaries.”
WHO: Boozoo Bajou
WHAT: Grains through !K7 / Inertia
WHEN: Out now
MORE: inertia-music.com