Dial AWE for Awesome.
He probably won’t answer… He’s too busy touring or buried deep in the studio.
Or the phone might be engaged while he has one of his transatlantic chinwags with grime/bass pioneer Plastician.
“Plastician has been amazing,” grins AWE, real name Zack. “He’s helped me with a lot of things, not just production but questions about the industry. He’s been so helpful. He knew the industry before digital sales, he’s been in the underground, he’s played to tens of thousands of people, he’s hosted his radio show… I’ve asked him so many things about his experiences because I know I’ve got a lot to learn. He has a great work ethic. I’m just 20 and it’s hard to imagine having that amount of experience in the business! It’s great having the opportunity to work with him on something and feel like I’m giving back a little.”
That ‘something’ is this killer remix he gave us last month:
With previous UKF outings such as Crystals and Jurassic still making us pull crazy bass faces – not to mention his fine line of bootlegs on his Soundcloud – we’re keen to know what’s lined up next in the AWE machine…
“The next thing is going to be a track called Griffin,” he reveals. “I’ve kept it pretty low-key and only given it to a few DJs. It will come with another original and possibly a remix. I’ve been playing a lot of really cool underground venues recently and I’ve been inspired by the four-on-the-floor stuff and a lot of Latin techno stuff which I’d love to be able to switch into an underground set. There’s loads more, too… I wish I could talk about the other projects I’m doing right now, but I can’t!”
We’ll have to wait to hear about them. In the meantime, these are three facts about himself that he can tell us…
He thought he was going to be a palaeontologist
“Between the ages of about six to 11 I was dinosaur crazy. I knew everything about every dinosaur. I still do. It’s so important to know about them. It’s the coolest thing that they ever existed! I went to the National History Museum in Washington DC and New York lots of times, I read every book, I could draw them all. I just loved them! If I could be a dinosaur I’d probably be a velociraptor, they’re super quick and pretty cool. Fuck being a t-rex, everyone says that… That’s boring!”
He’s a huge b-movie fan
“I LOVE low budget films! If it looks awful, has awful writing and the music is terrible then I’m watching it. Check out anything by Andy Sidaris. One of his best is Hard Ticket To Hawaii where someone pulls out a Frisbee that has razor blades super-glued to it and it chops someone neck in half. Later on someone with a blow-up doll on a skateboard gets rocket-launched into the air and explodes. The whole thing is unbelievable. The budget was about $60,000 tops. It’s so terrible, I love it! There are tonnes of them… The Room is a total classic and a very famous awful movie. Troll 2 is essential, too. It’s considered one of the worst films ever and has a really big cult following. The casting is awful. It’s a sequel to nothing; it has no relation to the original Troll at all. There aren’t even any trolls in it!
So yeah, gratuitous nudity, bad cinematography, terrible acting, lots of violence… B-movies take you away from everything and are so much fun to watch. I buy them bulk on Amazon, they’re so awesome.”
The first record he really got hit by was The Fury Of The Aquabats
“If we’re talking electronic music then the first record that really hit me was Hold Your Color by Pendulum. That one hit me hard! But if you want to go way back to when I was kid then it was all about the Aquabats. They’re a ska band who created this universe where they were super heroes and fought off giant apes and got sucked into movies and had races with robots and all kinds of shit.
They’re just great fun and great musicians too. They had a huge following in America and The Fury Of The Aquabats is their first album. It came out when I was about four years old. I found it when I was about eight and I started playing drums. Travis Barker the drummer from Blink 182? This was one of his first bands!
This was the roots for me; the drums on any ska and punk music, especially these guys, is very drum oriented. I really attached myself to them. They’re so fun and they don’t take themselves too seriously. It’s like ‘hey, this is fun, this is music, come and enjoy it!’ That’s an attitude I hope I’ll always keep myself!”
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