For a couple of young, handsome, on-the-rise DJ/producers, Adventure Club (comprised of Christian Srigley and Leighton James) are an outfit that certainly spare no means in demonstrating how eccentric they are. After their tour manager herded a dozen or two groupies out of their green room before their headlining performance at Global Dance Festival Colorado, the Montreal duo sat down with DJOYbeat for a surreal Q&A session.
Somehow, their farcical answers shed more light on who they are than sincere answers would have – their recent success clearly hasn’t made them take themselves too seriously. The interview starts off tame enough, but by the third question the dialogue went, as Leighton put it, “off the on the record.”
What’s going on with you guys lately? What’s new and exciting?
Christian: We released a remix of “Shadow of the Sun” [by Max Elto] that’s been really well received. We went back to the classic Adventure Club sound, if you will.
Leighton: I think we racked up a million plays on Soundcloud in under 20 days, and those are really good numbers for us.
We haven’t seen a Superheroes Anonymous mix in a while! You guys just really busy touring?
Christian: Yeah, touring, but also studio time – we spend a lot of our studio time making actual songs, and not just mixes.
Leighton: But Superheroes Anonymous 5 is coming out [soon].
So last year you guys released “Wonder,” and people really love that song, so much so that you had that whole remix series. The Chainsmokers even did a remix of it, and now you guys are involved in something of a bromance with them, right?
Leighton: We are.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Leighton: Well they kinda got distant with their whole new “#SELFIE” fame.
Christian: [Laughs] They got that “#SELFIE” money, and as soon as they got that “#SELFIE” money they were too cool for us – but we were friends with them since day one.
Christian Srigley and Leighton James of Adventure Club to the left and right of Carnage, respectively, during the former’s performance at Global Dance Festival Colorado on July 18th, 2014. Photos by Sebastian Hernandez of Lucid Frame Media.
Leighton: Well off the on the record…
“Off the on the record?”
Leighton: Yeah, he’s saying kinda what happened, but the reverse situation of it, ’cause what happened was we wrote “#SELFIE,” and we thought it was, like, too cheesy to release as Adventure Club, so we gave it to them. And then all of the sales and all of that actually comes into our pockets, so we’ve been making a lot of money off of them and there’s a little bit of resentment there.
Are you sure you’re okay with me publishing this?
Christian: Absolutely [laughs].
Well moving on, with the new EDM movement in music there are a lot of breakthrough Canadian artists – especially in dubstep. Do you guys feel like that’s just a product of EDM being really global, or do you feel like Canada has more of an identity in EDM than some other countries might?
Leighton: I think it’s more the second, ’cause we get a lot of trends from the UK pretty early on.
Christian: Well yeah, we live in Montreal, and in Montreal, I don’t wanna say we get things faster… But we kinda’ do [laughs]. It comes over from Europe pretty quickly.
Leighton: Avant garde kids who wanna know the coolest shit on the block, like, we’re home to A-Trak, Chromeo, Arcade Fire, Botnek… The list goes on.
How’d you guys come up with the name Adventure Club?
Christian: We opened up the dictionary and pointed at a word, and then we opened it up again and pointed at another word. We were really lazy so we didn’t even bother opening the dictionary all the way; we just opened it up a couple of pages in, then a couple more pages and got the A and C.
Well what’s a typical adventure in the life of Adventure Club look like?
Christian: That was a very off-the-record question [laughs].
Leighton: I go home every night drunk, FaceTime my girlfriend from Krewella and fall asleep [laughs].
Christian: Yep. And, uh, I go home, I light a candle, I put on some glasses and I read novels.
Leighton: He listens to a lot of Chopin. I’ll walk into his hotel room and he’s smoking a joint, listening to some Nocturne [Op. 9], maybe.
Christian: And a very obscure novel. I try to read one a night.
To wrap things up, got any shout-outs to artists that you guys would like to give?
Leighton: I got a couple boys on the come-up that I would like to put on the radar: My boy Andru from Montreal and Snails. That’s all I got.
Christian: Is Botnek too cool now to give a shout out?
Leighton: I do love them, though, they’re awesome. They are the EDM version of the Trailer Park Boys. “Smokes, boys, let’s go.”
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