URB Exclusive – An Interview with Grum

by DJ Dennis Sebayan

As far as indie-dance and electro is concerned, someone missed the bus on the quintessential bass touch that makes club music bounce. In his current productions and remixes, Leeds-based Grum has solved this problem, making fuzzy, polished dancefloor numbers and spreading them like wildfire across the Internet. Through the label Heartbeats (of which he is a staple artist), he even utilized innovative design-meets functionality artwork (by David Ross, who created Mylo’s “Destroy Rock N Roll” artwork) with a 2-D barcode. When mobile phones (with functionality and the right app.) take snapshots of the barcode, the music fan is whisked to websites where they can listen to quality streamed versions of the track and learn where and when to buy. As a label exclusive to URB, we’ve got the Grum Remix of “Eyes As Candles” for your downloading pleasure:

Passion Pit – “Eyes As Candles” (Grum Remix)

Look out for his upcoming Lady Gaga remix, which is FIRE!!!

URB: You’ve cited influences as far-flung as Giorgio Moroder, Cut Copy, Quincy Jones, Fleetwood Mac, Daft Punk and The Eagles. Somehow, it all comes through in your work. What has been your creative process in remixing and recreating tunes for Friendly Fires and Passion Pit? How about some words on your original productions?
GRUM: The main process with remixes is stripping the original parts down and finding sounds or ideas that I really like, and then interpreting them in a way that works for me. Sometimes, I just end up using the vocal as in the Friendly Fires mix, and basically writing a new song to go with it. It’s hard to quantify what it is I like about certain songwriting and musical ideas, but I just get it all arranged in a way the ‘works’ for me.

With original stuff, ideas can start with a sample or a musical motif…other times I maybe want to create a certain vibe and just write to fit that. I think it’s really important to have vision when creating music.

URB: Can you give us some of your background?
GRUM: Well, from my early teens I’ve always been interested in dance music, mostly from the technical point of view of production. I went to uni to study music technology when I was older but actually got a bit disillusioned with the music and found it was getting a bit stale for me. Maybe, as some sort of reaction to this, I started writing my own tunes with a view to do doing something a bit fresher and different – trying to draw a variety of different influences into what I was doing.  Since I started putting music on blogs etc, things have just been getting bigger and bigger.

URB: What was your first ‘moment’ on the dancefloor?
GRUM: The first proper DJ set I really enjoyed was seeing Erol Alkan in Leeds a few years ago. I think the whole indie dance/electro vibe just clicked for me then and all made sense.

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