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Interview With Sigma

Drum and Bass | Thursday 25th September 2014 | Osh

Guestlist recently caught up for a chat with Cameron Edwards and Joe Lenzie of drum and bass duo Sigma to talk about success, collaborating with DJ Fresh, topping the UK Charts and their new single with Paloma Faith...


Guestlist: Let's rewind the clock a bit. You guys met at Leeds Univesity?

Cameron: Yeah, I was running big student nights up there and Joe was a scratch DJ. I booked him to play in one of my rooms and we realised we had a similar interest in the same music. We took it from there.


Guestlist: So you relocated to London, started a label as well, called Life Recordings. You're on 3 Beat now - is that running in conjunction with Life Recordings?

Cameron: We're not releasing our own stuff at the moment. We're focusing on 3 Beat productions. We're putting out some stuff from other people, which is going really well.

Joe: An for all the vinyl lovers out there, we're pressing up all the releases. We're gonna press up the VIP remix of 'Changing' and the original as a 12-inch single on Life.

 

Guestlist: Let's look at Lassitude; because that's where you started to get a bit more attention, collaborating with DJ Fresh. Tell us about track...

Cameron: It was actually originally a track that we wrote. We were relatively unknown then. We were doing stuff in the underground clubs and stuff. Fresh heard it; one of our friends played it to him and he really liked it. He was like, "Why don't we collaborate on it, switch it up a bit. We got in the studio with Dan and that was one of the first tracks for us that got radio play on Radio 1 on all that kind of stuff and it opened us up to a wider audience. It worked out really well and it was a great learning curve or us to work with someone who's got such a massive catalogue as DJ Fresh.

 

Guestlist: You were signed to his Chaos Records as well at one point, weren't you?

Cameron: Not necessarily signed. It was a loose agreement; we were quite tight with him. We still are, we're good friends. But now he's so busy, you know, with own projects.


Guestlist: The third single, 'Nobody To Love'; that took you to catastrophic levels, didn't it? That's had something like 55.8 million views on You Tube: that's like the population of a country. You hit No.1 with that - on release. What was the creative vision behind that track? Also it's got an engaging video as well...

Cameron: Basically we heard the original Kanye (West) tune '2 Beats'. We liked it, but liked certain elements more than others, so we just decided to remix the tune for our sets. That was basically as far as it went. We gave it away for free, didn't think anything of it. Radio 1 got hold of and it just went. We probably gave away about 5,000 copies of it. Then the label was, like, this could be a really big tune. We had the major labels, like Ministry of Sound, sniffing around. So the label did the right thing and we took it off and got everything re-played, almost like doing a cover...


Guestlist: So the video; who was the genius behind that one...?

Cameron: You can't really go wrong with two hot girls running around in bikinis. It was a kind of a no brainer, that one.


Guestlist: That's when people really sat up and started to take notice. Do you find that things changed; people recognising you and that type of thing?

Joe: Because we weren't featured in the video, because it was the hot girls and all that, people don't necessarily recognise us. We're kind of faceless, which is nice. So you don't get people coming up to you when you're staggering out of a club, having had too much to drink or when you're getting your groceries. But then people are quite impressed when they ask you who you are, they're like 'No way!'


Guestlist: So let's get up to date, with your current single 'Changing', having been released on 14th September and featuring Paloma Faith...

It was a track that got bounced around, there were a lot of people involved in it. There was a guy called Wayne Hector, who's like a hit writer and he had a part in it. And there's a bunch of guys from West London called TMS who write stuff. So all of us got involved, we bounced stuff back and forth together and turned it into what it was. Our management got hold of Paloma and we took it from there.


Guestlist: You guys have had a couple of EPs already, but then is the album coming?

The album will be early next year, that's what we're working towards at the moment. We've got a bunch of stuff, we're just getting it all together.

 

Guestlist: What's your most memorable experience on stage; one where you thought 'that was special; I'll never top that one'?

Joe: There was one time I played in a bar and cleared a dancefloor in about two seconds. It was the promoter's fault. They booked me to play drum n bass on an RNB night.

Cameron: This summer though, the memorable one was probably Reading. Glastonbury was amazing, we did it live on Radio 1. We did a massive event in Belgium at the beginning of the year called Rampage and that was amazing. It was an ice-hockey stadium and it was full.

Sigma's current single, 'Changing' featuring Paloma Faith, is available now on iTunes.

 

 

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