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10 TRACKS THAT INSPIRED BLOND:ISH

Blond:ish tells DJ Mag the 10 tracks that shaped their career...

Canadian duo Blond:ish have found a home at Kompakt and Get Physical of late, their discerning club sets having taken them around the world in recent years after they first teamed up in the late noughties following a chance meeting at the Miami WMC.

Their madcap Blond:ish parties in Montreal are what gave them their name, and since leaving their home city they've won many admirers around the globe.

Vivie-Ann and Anstascia took some time out from their busy schedules to record their new album 'Welcome To The Present' in Tulum, Mexico — and seemed to have got in touch with their spiritual sides.

“We are just a product of our environments, and we absorbed a lot of the vibes from our interests and surroundings,” they tell DJ Mag.

The album is a world away from a set of techno bangers, touching on new age sonics, world music, ethereal dub, cosmic Asian flavas and so on.

Think: the recent work of Damian Lazarus & The Ancient Moons. “Some of the fascinating new topics that we have been influenced by in the past few years include sound healing, eastern instruments and esoteric practices, tuning forks, how certain frequencies affect the body and environment around us, kundalini, psychedelics, cymatics (the study of visible sound), yoga, various indigenous cultures, how everything interconnects, and most importantly how to live more in the present,” Anstascia explains.

“When we found out that sound and music — our life passions — actually have so many more facets to them, you can imagine how excited we got,” adds Vivie.

“This whole new world of knowledge opened up to us, a whole other universe of possibilities of sound. We just wanted to make an album that encompassed some of the elements of our new inspirations that we’ve been witnessing and recording.”

01. MOODYMANN 'Shades Of Jae'
Vivie: “In 1999 I was a super-innocent raver, and this track just reminds me of the peak of the party when everyone is on one vibe! When you can loop a track all night over the top of everything else, or leave it playing for 30 minutes, and “Waaaaait for it”... respect.”

02. SHIRLEY & CO 'Shame Shame Shame'
Vivie: “This was one of the tracks that was in my dad's record collection, where I first got my inspirations. It brings back incredible memories. I would steal my mom's sewing needles and spin them on my dad's records. It's a silly track, but brings dance moves out of me, and faces that very few tracks can do! This track triggers something that I can't explain — play this at any house party and I'll be the life of it. Guaranteed.”

03. CAN 'Vitamin C'
Vivie: “In a past life I must have been in this time as well, because I feel completely connected to all the experimentation that the krautrock era brought about after the bubbly music of the late '60s. This track is a staple in my playlist, but the whole genre is endlessly inspiring. If you have creative writer's block, just listen to some krautrock — the weirder and more strung-out the better!”

04. LASOS 'Libra Sunrise'
Vivie: “Because Libras are the best — ha ha ha! Nah, this guy speaks my language, and one day I hope to just get lost in frequencies and cymatics in a bunker in the jungle, cos I can see music — sound being inter-dimensional. There's so much to explore.”

 

05. COMMODORES 'Nightshift'
Vivie: “This is a super-nostalgic track in my family. It also reminds me of the speech I heard from Moby at Lightning In A Bottle [festival] about sound healing and music therapy, and how a nostalgic track to a patient with Alzheimers can help with dementia...”

 

06. DANNY ELFMAN 'Alice In Wonderland Soundtrack'
Vivie: Apparently, according to my mom, I watched this movie over 200 times. So basically, subconsciously, everything about this movie became a footprint to my future — and here we are. I feel like Alice in this dimension. Tracks on the soundtrack like 'I’m Late, I’m Late' and 'Curiosity Leads To Trouble' — and the 'Red Pill vs Blue Pill' dilemma — are right up my alley — and still are!”

07. STEVE BARNES 'Cosmic Sandwich (Dominik Eulberg Remix)'
Anstascia: “For me, this is an epic Burning Man-ish classic never-want-it-to-end-ever mindf**k kinda record. Dominik's journeying minimal take on it really gets super-tangled, like a really good thriller where you never saw the twisted ending coming.”

08. ARUNA 'Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram'
Anstascia: “This is a new discovery for me. It's part of my 'commercial' Indian music collection.Viv calls it 'commercial Indian' because I've been playing it so often it's become commercial to us — ha ha. This was the theme song of our recent trip to India that really made a huge positive change and impact in our lives.”

09. PINK FLOYD 'Dark Side Of The Moon'
Anstascia: “It might be a cliché to name this album as one of my most influential albums of all time, but it's the truth. This was being played non-stop all-day whilst I spent my summers in the South of France as a teenager. It's very nostalgic for me and definitely influenced my love for psychedelic trippy melancholic music.”

10. MATHEW JONSON 'Decompression' 
Anstascia: “A definite classic that I've just started playing again, and it has passed the true test of time. It never gets old and always has an incredible reaction on the dancefloor. Anytime I hear it, I feel like I'm transported to a sweaty warehouse somewhere circa 1999-ish.”