It’s Friday. Let’s celebrate this mini victory with a brand new mix from Swiss sound maestros Task Horizon. They’ve just released a rather naughty remix EP – Evolved – on Cause4Concern Recordings so what better time to check in. It turns out their mountainside idyll is wholly conducive to their trademark dark creations and they’ve got some mighty strong opinions on new year’s resolutions and gorilla suits.
Read on to see what’s going on at Task Horizon HQ and grab that cheeky free mix!
Hey chaps. How are things in Switzerland?
“Since both of are not into skiing or snowboarding, we can’t reap the obvious benefits of Swiss winters right now. But otherwise, yeah, Switzerland is great. We love it. Many electronic musicians seem to thrive on the buzz of a cosmopolitan urban environment, but we have too much of a buzz in our heads as it is –not chemically induced, we hasten to add! So the quiet rural settings we live in are essential to our wellbeing and productivity. Go outside for a break and gaze at the beautiful mountains, come back inside and make evil bass sounds. It works for us!”
Made any new year’s resolutions?
“No way, we think that kind of stuff is crazy. New year’s resolutions mostly are an attempt to better yourself in one way or another. And as we all know, they are often futile. Why not rather question what is causing discontentment with yourself in the first case? You cannot really progress if you battle the symptoms rather than address the cause. If people would love and accept themselves more the way they are, many of their weaknesses would naturally subside, or at least lose the power to control their lives.”
Wow!
“To any readers out there who had some, but broke them already, we’d like to say: Celebrate it. Don’t make yourself unhappier by imposing arbitrary conditioned expectations on yourself about what you should or shouldn’t be or do. Life is hard enough as it is.”
Deep! Let’s talk about your new release on Cause4Concern… The Evolved EP. This is a massive package! Tell us everything…
“The Evolved EP actually started out as a joke. In the beginning there were only negotiations for a remix of the C4C track Control Freak. Optiv gave us a very generous deadline, so we joked that we could make an EP in that amount of time. But instead of laughing with us, he remained serious and said “Go ahead!” Actually this suited us fine, since we had intended to make VIP versions of Letting Go and Kill The Pain anyway. It was a welcome invitation to go a step further and, rather than just extend the originals into a VIP format, take them to a completely new level through remixing. Finally, we decided to remix Droidz simply because we thought two remixes of our tunes and two remixes of C4C tracks would make a neat package together. So it started out more as an afterthought, but in the process we grew very fond of it because it’s so different than our other stuff.”
Your remix of Control Freak is plain naughty! Is it hard remixing classic bangers like that?
“Remixing can be effortless or real hard work, depending on how suggestive the source material is on the one hand, and how defining and limiting on the other. Control Freak was a joy to work on, because the defining element was this short but highly memorable synth hook line. It suggested a specific mood and sonic space while also leaving us enough room to extend its potential without running risk of overstretching the aesthetic boundaries.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II7aDGtUYqU
Let’s talk about the title… It’s a hint at your own label Evolution Chamber, right?
“Not originally. The working title was Repeat Offenders EP –a gang of delinquent tunes that, through being remixed, keep on being naughty. But ultimately we felt that the remixes had, well, evolved too much compared to the originals, and calling them repeats wouldn’t do them justice. So the word “evolved” was on our minds, and then of course the association with our own fledgling label became obvious too, which we welcomed. Cause4Concern have been very supportive of us and Evolution Chamber, and having an EP on their label with this name is a way of expressing our friendship. It’s our best work to date, and it’s a joy and honor to present it on their platform.”
Would you say you guys have evolved over the years?
“Oh, absolutely. We were in fact just talking about this a few days ago. Obviously, as an artist you are hopefully always evolving. But what we enjoy most nowadays is that we’ve become a great deal more relaxed about our work. We know that we can deliver the goods, so we’ve become a lot more laid back and can allow the music to be what it wants to be, rather than to forcefully impose our notions of what we think it should be due to conditioned expectations and personal insecurities. As a consequence, we’ve become more musically daring and stylistically diverse than ever, and the resulting music blows our own minds almost every time we hit the studio.”
Tell us what’s coming up on Evolution Chamber!
“Well, some info has already leaked, so we’ll officially announce that the next Evolution Chamber release is just around the corner. It will feature Swiss newcomer vocalist James Gruntz on the vocal track Perfection and our musical partner MC Spyda on the darker, harder-hitting iDrive.”
And please guide us through the mix you’ve done…
“The mix features our current battle horses plus a few sneak previews of forthcoming tracks and works in progress, alongside with our all-time favorites by other artists and some other stuff that we really like.”
1) Task Horizon & Kryteria –“Letting Go” (Task Horizon remix)
2) Teddy Killerz –“New Drums”
3) Task Horizon –“Sadistic Safari”
4) Task Horizon –“Kill The Pain” (Task Horizon remix)
5) Rockwell –“Memories” (Neosignal remix)
6) Task Horizon –“Cobra Khan”
7) Aeph –“One Last Chance”
8) Cause4Concern –“Control Freak” (Task Horizon remix)
9) Camo&Krooked –“Cryptkeeper” (Mind Vortex remix)
10) Dirtyphonics –“Dirty”
11) Dirtyphonics –“Dirty” (Metrik remix)
12) Task Horizon ft. MC Spyda & Rina –“Da Vibe”
13) Task Horizon ft. James Gruntz –“Perfection”
14) Neonlight –“Computermusic”
15) Task Horizon –Untitled, work in progress
16) Task Horizon ft. Rina –“6th Day”
17) Noisia & Phace –“Program”
18) Mark Knight ft. Skin –“Nothing Matters” (Noisia remix)
19) Task Horizon ft. MC Spyda –“iDrive”
20) Phace & Misanthrop –“Energie”
21) Noisia –“Shellshock”
22) Task Horizon & Spite –“Plug Your Wetware”
23) Noisia & Upbeats -“Dustup”
24) Calyx & Teebee –“Elevate This Sound”
Finally – please tell us some Task Horizon info that you’ve never told anyone in an interview before!
“Perhaps this is a good opportunity to mention a vital component of Task Horizon which often seems to be misunderstood: humor. People who know our work, especially the darker stuff, are often perplexed when they get to know us personally and discover that we’re down-to-earth people who are always in for a good laugh. No matter if it’s Tim who once donned a full-body gorilla costume and played Reece basses on a strap-on keyboard in front of a packed house, or us posting mockup photos of ourselves with comic-style captions on Facebook, we love to take the piss sometimes. It probably seems eccentric in this competitive world where everybody tries to come across as cool. But if you are hard-working and perfectionistic almost to the point of self-harm, you need some comic relief once in a while. At least we do!”