Two years is a long time. It’s an especially long time if you spend it waiting for new original music from some or your favorite musical artists. New York disco duo Holy Ghost!, made up of Nicholas Millhiser and Alexander Frankel, understand this, and feel bad for keeping fans waiting. The last (and only) non-remixed material the group released was an iTunes Single of the Week, entitled “Hold On,” in 2007. As a result, the apologetic DFA-signed pair is releasing its next song free via GreenLabelSounds.com on June 24. I sat down with the guys and talked about touring around Europe, transitioning from Hip Hop to disco, and how technology is changing the world of DJing.
Why don’t you guys take me back to the beginning… where’d you guys meet?
Nick: We met in grade school. We’ve known each other since we were about 10 years old. We both grew up within a couple blocks from each other, went to school together until high school, and have been playing in bands together, to varying degrees of professionalism, since we were really little. So yeah, we’ve just been good buddies ever since.
What kind of music were you guys making when you initially combined forces?
Nick: Well the first serious band we were in was Hip Hop. Alex has played piano since he was really young, I played drums, and then sometime early in high school we got totally obsessed with rap records and rap production. We all bought samplers and started making beats, but we’d always played in bands since we were really young so from this sort of like bedroom, 4-track MPC project we had we started a real proper band- with live instruments- and that was the first really sort of serious thing we did. That lasted until we were 22, 23 years old, a couple years ago.
So then you guys made the classic transition from Hip Hop to disco.
Alex: (laughs) I think it was the other way around. Well, not for us, but I mean, classically.
What brought you guys to disco? Was it the samples you were using?
Alex: Yes. I would say it was the samples that we were using in Hip Hop, because we both were dollar-bin nerds.
Nick: Yeah, like we’re both big record buyers, but we’re not “nerds.” Like, I wouldn’t spend 40 dollars on a record.
Alex: Right, we’re not really big aficionados or anything like that.
So record buyers, but not collectors.
Nick: No we’re not collectors; we’re “users” or the records.
Alex: So we definitely both had spots wherever we were living that had dollar bins and before the Nu Disco movement emerged you could still get really nice South Soul and West End records, which always had big fat breaks in the beginning, for a dollar. And also kind of more obscure, electronic stuff that we were buying for samples for Hip Hop. At least for me what happened was buying those disco records for samples; I started to really like the songs.
Nick: Which happened in general, like that’s how I found out about so many records that I’d buy because there was a funny cover or something.
Alex: Yeah, because when it’s a dollar, you see a cool cover and you’ll be like ‘yeah, I’ll take that,’ and we just started falling in love with a few of the tracks on it. From there I very clearly remember James [Murphy] – when we were working on the Auto[mato] record I found a record on the street and it had an awesome percussion break in the beginning. I brought it into DFA to play thinking it was like 125 bpm, very dancy, and James was like, ‘Can I play that tonight?’ and he took it and played it down at APT, and watching him play it and seeing that we weren’t alone in liking this kind of music – I mean there are tons of disco heads already at the time, but we were kind of insulated into this Hip Hop world – I think that’s how it started for me at least, getting into disco through the samples.
Nick: James and Tim [Goldsworthy] definitely validated it.
Alex: Yeah, ‘get gayer,’ I think was the [message].
Nick: Yeah, like I remember talking to Tim about Quincy Jones, like the Michael Jackson production and stuff like that, and I was like ‘I have this record he produced by Rufus and Chaka Khan, I hate to say, but it’s really good,’ and Tim was like ‘Oh yeah, Masterjam, that’s a great album!’ and I was like ‘Really?’ and he was like ‘Yeah, “Do You Love What You Feel”’ and was just listing off all the great songs on that album, and I was like ‘You know that record?’ and he was like ‘I love that record!’ and I was like ‘Oh, OK… cool. I love that record too.’
So they smoothed out the transition?
Alex: Yeah they made us feel OK about our inner desires.
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