Having recently released their fourth album, Elektrafone, Beats Antique is an up and coming band to watch as they continue to impress audiences and develop their world fusion/electronic music with each album. Continually touring and recording music along the way, Beats Antique has a hypnotizing quality and their music appeals to people’s sensual side as they deliver an entrancing stage show. They take electronic sounds to a new height with complex layering of organic sounds and synthesizers.
Their latest album, Elektrafone, stays true to their roots while still developing an edge to their sound. Adding in more glitch and electronica to their new album than previous albums may be unexpected but seems to be a natural evolution for their sound and to stay competitive in the current musical world. “Cat Skillz” begins the album with a siren calling your attention to the song instantly and winding you up for what is to come. Other standout tracks like “Skytalk” start off with a thought provoking east meets electronic sound building into heavy layering of both violin and viola. With a heavier focus on electronica then their previous albums, Elektrafone, has the potential to take the group farther than ever before.
During a recent interview with Beats Antiques’ Zoe Jakes, Tommy Cappel and David Satori, they opened up about their latest album, being professional touring artists and how they transcended the original boundaries set before them to become the band they are today.
Examiner: So what has the feedback been like for your latest album, Elektrafone?
TC: Shows have been really good; we’re loving our crowds on the East coast.
ZJ: Some people have seen us before so we have some die hards in the audience, and lots of new people, it’s really cool.
Examiner: How did you come together to form Beats Antique?
ZJ: All of us have similar interests in some kind of Eastern sound. And this particular project, what molded it was the limitations that were put on it early on; the limitation that it was a belly dance album. World music for the belly dance crowd with an electronic edge.
TC: I had the great opportunity to go to a brass band festival in Serbia, which was the most amazing festival I’ve ever been to in my life, with thousands of bands. European Brass band music is like pop music for America, they take it very seriously. It’s a normal thing when you’re studying music your whole life to look into something else, you can only spend so much time studying rock music.”
DS: I studied in West Africa and was inspired by North African music. I was in an Afrobeat band for three years (similar to Fela Kuti or Femi Kuti), that had a big influence on my sound. I also studied a lot of Middle Eastern and folk music from Eastern Europe which lent itself to our project. Writing for belly dance music influenced us and now it just turned into its own sound which we’re just following and shaping. It seems limitless what we can do, it’s really exciting.
Examiner: What is shaping your sound now?
ZJ: What I think is shaping us a little bit is finding ways through organic sound to create these big thick sounds that you hear from electronic music like Glitch Mob, and Bassnectar. On the last tour we brought a horn player on baritone sax who was doubling the heavy bass sounds, so (we’re) using a more organic approach to creating a lot of this stuff that gives a visceral feel to the audience.
DS: We like to layer our music, we like to orchestrate it. While a lot of electronic music is just using synthesizers, we like to take those synthesizers and double them with live instruments and do it a couple times. Like take one melody and double over the violin, the horn and the synth to create these beautiful sounds.
Examiner: So how do you approach recording and making music currently?
DS: Time has been our biggest issue.
ZJ: When you are a professional touring artist there is a discipline to it, you don’t just wait for the inspiration you go into the studio and you make it happen.
TC: And we also just sit down just make stuff, at the end of the day that’s kinda like the luxury of what we do.
DS: With technology now it’s pretty easy to get an idea out on your computer on the road.
ZJ: It’s the follow through that gets challenging.
TC: Because we like to use acoustic instruments as well, it’s then like, you write a sketch and then you want to put these instruments on it and then you have to go do this and that and edit it…
Examiner: So before Elektrafone, when did you have that “we made it” moment?
ZJ: Contraption (EP Vol. 1) was our first self-release, it felt like a full album to me.
TC: It was a definitive moment for us. It was more of an electronic based approach where our previous two releases were live based. So that album for me was very much a game changer.
ZJ: It’s when we became Beats Antique the band, not Beats Antique the recording project. That was our statement that “we are a band”.
Although Beats Antique won’t be in Orlando anytime in the near future, if you are traveling you should definitely try to catch them on one of their many upcoming Tour Dates.
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