Adventure Club Talks Tour Life & 15 Years Of Music In iEDM Interview
Adventure Club was a popular rising name in the dance scene during the epic rise of dubstep of the early 2010s. Their track "Gold" is forever a classic with sexy vocals from Yuna that are still sang by any crowd it's played for.
This Canadian duo have been friends for years that came together for the love of music and the love of dubstep. Overtime, their sounds and styles have evolved together as Adventure Club.
Fast forward to today, and Adventure Club has been nominated for a Grammy and played on main stages across the world. Right before their set at EDC Las Vegas 2019, iEDM got to sit down and chat with the guys in an exclusive interview. Here is what they had to say.
iEDM: So you guys just played Red Rocks last night! What was it like?
Christian: Woohoo!
Leighton: Yeah, we played Red Rocks, literally last night.
Christian: It was about the same kind of weather it was tonight. Right? It was a little cold.
Leighton: A little rainy and cold.
Christian: The majority of people think it's windy and cold. Me and Leighton being Canadians and being people who embrace the cold. No problem with the wind or temperature.
Leighton: Pretty much summer weather for us. Shorts and t-shirts.
Christian: In Montreal summers get hot but, we like cold. This is way warmer than I keep my house.
iEDM: Yeah? Really?
Christian: In the winter, at least.
Leighton: Red Rocks itself though, was amazing! It's one of our most favorite venues. We had some of our favorite artists playing right alongside us. The show sold out. The crowd reaction and everything about it was amazing.
iEDM: That's awesome. And you guys I saw you tweeted to see if Said The Sky would play with you tonight. Is that going to happen?
Christian: I think so.
iEDM: That's awesome. And how was playing your new collab with him at Red Rocks?
Leighton: We actually premiered it!
Christian: Yes! First time out there.
iEDM: Yeah? Crowd loved it?
Leighton: Yeah I really hope they loved it.
Christian: I loved it! I loved how it sounded live, that was our first time getting to listen to it live. It's always a little scary playing live like the absolute first time you drop a track, because just from a production standpoint, from a mix standpoint it's just, you know, it's going to reveal certain things. I thought that the track sounded really nice. It passed the test for me.
iEDM: Cool, now I get to hear it tonight! So you guys just got off your Death or Glory Tour! What was your favorite moment from the run?
Leighton: I think it was the last show in Minneapolis was just like a combination of everything. On tour you build such an intimate bond with everyone that's on the bus with you. Just to be able to share that last moment of tour with everyone. Also my mom came out!
Christian: Yeah I agree with you it's fun having inside jokes on the bus. You start getting a little crazy, like three months in basically like...
Leighton: You just act like a bunch of sixth graders.
Christian: Every week that passes I think that you lose a year or two.
Leighton: Oh yeah.
Christian: So like, you know, by month number three you're looking at like you know 24 years down, or 30 so basically that last day we were six years old.
Leighton: Somebody said the word penis and everybody just goes crazy.
Christian: This one night near the end of the tour where we, I think it was late, I was in bed, you got 12 people in a tiny little space, its about the same dimension as this, right so about 12 people, triple decker bunks on either side, and they can just decide to throw out like a little text to speech, something super, I'm not sure I don't remember what he said..
Leighton: It said 'John is a bad boy.'
Christian: Yeah, so John he's our tour manager also happens to be a member of Terravita, and is an absolute best friend of ours, so that just got us. The whole bus just went crazy with that. Everyone started downloading text to speech apps and shooting out the most immature stuff and see what they could come up with. That was our night for a couple nights back to back, three nights running on that, no one would sleep because text to speech and all that in the little bus space.
iEDM: Hey at least you were entertaining yourselves.
Christian: Yeah yeah. Lots of laughter.
iEDM: So you guys have a busy festival season coming up ahead, what are you guys looking forward to most?
Leighton: EDC Korea, can't wait for that!
iEDM: Yeah? That's dope.
Christian: I'm looking forward to tonight! I'm REALLY looking forward to tonight! I checked out the stage earlier and it's so dope!
iEDM: I know the production this year is insane and the bassPOD is definitely one of my favorites. So you guys started as a hardcore pop band.
Christian: Yeah!
iEDM: That surprised me when I read that how did that transform into the music you make now?
Christian: I think you would be less surprised if you listened to us on the microphone tonight because it sounds like we're trying to pretending we are a screamo band.
Leighton: *Laughs* Yeah we just live vicariously.
Christian: It just comes out you know, you try to keep it contained but it just comes out, you know. So that's where we came from, that's where we cut our teeth.
iEDM: Were you guys called Adventure Club then?
Leighton: No we were called something way different then, I'm not going to tell you. You can maybe find it on the internet if you look deep enough.
iEDM: If I don't put this in the article will you tell me?
Leighton: Nope. *laughs*
iEDM: Okay I'll do my digging then. So how did you guys decide on being called Adventure Club?
Christian: When we first started you know diving into the dance area, dubstep area, we were coming off that hardcore kick so we were like very much focused on making super grimey dubstep. I don't know if you can kind of like picture the landscape. Ten years ago, 12 years ago, like that era of like grimey, disgusting sounding dubstep. That's what we were listening to and that's what we were planning on making. You know and we were looking at everyone's names and they were all kind of pretty aggressive representative names of music you know?
iEDM: Like who?
Christian: We got Funk Case you know stuff like that, if you rearrange a couple of letters in Funt Case.. *laughs*
We thought it would be fun to just have like an ironic name that was just like happy fun but we ended up changing our sound as we evolved.
iEDM: Totally, you guys play everything from grimey stuff to the pretty stuff too. So how did you guys end up meeting?
Leighton: Band camp.
iEDM: What did you play?
Christian: Guitar, we both play guitar.
iEDM: Guitar? That's cool, how did you decide to become a duo?
Leighton: We've always been a duo.
Christian: He said it like a joke but it's true. From the first band we kind of project, first project we started together when we were 15 to now, we've always been musical endeavors and it's always been together. In the band we had certain members rotating in and out, but we would always be together.
So what happened was we were Adventure Club always on the side, we were also in a band, and then it kind of took off, and we just stuck with it. Everything we have done musically, we've done together over the past 15 years.
iEDM: What's your process in the studio together?
Christian: We've got a yin & yang thing in the studio.
iEDM: You guys were nominated for a Grammy. How did that feel?
Leighton: We were, we were.
Christian: Indescribable. I mean it was last year like last year and even the mention of Grammy when you just brought it up is like holy...
Leighton: Tears were shed in public, which is not common for both of us.
Christian: We were on a plane, we landed over from a red eye flight and turned our phones on they were blowing up. We thought everyone was pranking us but it turned out we were actually nominated and so we like jumped up and got yelled at by the seatbelt people.
iEDM: That's cool, so did you have any idea that was coming?
Christian: No clue.
iEDM: That's cool, what a great feeling, so I love your latest collab with Krewella, are you guys are good friends with them?
Leighton: Yeah and Crankdat! Yes absolutely.
Christian: Long time - we kind of came up on the scene together right
Leighton: It doesn't feel like that long ago. Everyone was like what took you so long to come out with a new song together. Every like couple of months we will hit up Krewella and be like 'yo we should do another track together and they're like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah but eventually, this one felt like the right idea and the right time.
iEDM: Who's your dream collab? Someone that you would love to make a track with but you haven't.
Leighton: I'd love to get Cat Power on vocals. Christian I think would love to get Chopin to write a nocturne for us.
Christian: Oh my god imagine that, like a classical composition. Classically composed dubstep! I would love to hear Chopin interpret dubstep and what we do!
iEDM: That would be pretty cool. So what are you guys working on now?
Christian: We got a crazy amount of releases lined up. We're kind of like you know just doubling down our focus on music right now since we came off our tour. It's really, really cool to be basically throwing inspiration in the bank on tour. You're blowing up all this inspiration, all these ideas, all this energy. You finally get to get back home, back in studio and you're just firing from there. That's what we're doing now. And we are in the fortunate situation of already having a lot of music lined up to release, so I mean that's just our focus right now just music, music, music. We got a lot coming out and we got a lot we are working on.
iEDM: Do we get to hear some new stuff tonight?
Leighton: Absolutely!
Thank you Adventure Club for taking the time to chat with us! Stay up to date with their new releases on their SoundCloud HERE.
Check out more exclusive interviews with your favorite artists HERE on iEDM!
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