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CARL COX: HEAD TO HEAD

Nicole Moudaber faces up to Carl Cox as she interviews him about bikes, running a radio show and getting in the mood...

When dance music’s beloved don Carl Cox lauds your music, you can rest easy knowing two things: you’ve got real production chops and the burgeoning DJ career you were hoping for will assuredly be a fruitful one.

Nicole Moudaber started out promoting parties in her native Lebanon, before eventually ending up in London. However, after buckling down in her studio with the discipline of a monk, she exploded onto the scene almost immediately in 2009 as techno’s force to be reckoned with.

With a little shove in the right direction from Cox, who released her productions such as, “One Day Later” and last year’s “Roar” EP on his Intec label, Moudaber took off like an X-43 scramjet, spinning across the globe at Carl Cox & Friends festival stages as well as his residency at Space Ibiza.

After last month’s In The MOOD takeover at Miami Music Week, Carl Cox joined in on the festivities to celebrate the April 7 release of “See You Next Tuesday,” on Nicole Moudaber’s own MOOD Records. The two-track offering is a techno apparition, starring the Cox original along with Moudaber’s deep mix, a groovier spin with sophisticated drum patterns and fresh basslines that drive everyone directly to the dancefloor.

A beat-match made in heaven, DJ Mag asked Nicole Moudaber to interview Carl Cox last month just before their reunion in Miami. The result? A personal exchange between the two spinning mainstays that delves deep into the heart of the music’s MOOD like never before...

Nicole Moudaber: “How are you? It's been ages since we spoke!”

Carl Cox: “I’m very well, how are you doing?”

NM: “Not too bad, I’m in Miami right now, chillin.”

CC: “Yeah, I’m following you. I have a beeper and I can see you in Miami right now, so the GPS is working well (laughs).”

NM: “You've been on your bike rides in Oz and New Zealand. Tell me what it's like on these trips.”

CC: “One of the reasons why I do what I do with the bikes and the cars and go cruising is because this sort of stuff gives me the headspace with the music when I come back. Then I go full force into my record productions, record label, into my club nights and festivals.

My head is cleared when I think about other things apart from the music. I really enjoy going out on these bikes rides. For me, to visit New Zealand every year is phenomenal, I would say most people should do that at least once in their life - to see something really beautiful, and then to get around somewhere that is absolutely an amazing place to be”

NM: “When you’re on those bikes do you listen to music or do you just prefer silence?”

CC: “The thing is, on a motorbike it’s quite hard to listen to music. You need most of the attention on what you’re doing. It’d be nice if it were a long straight road to the next town or destination, and you could actually listen to music, nod your head going along... but the kind of bikes I have are quite noisy and also very fast.

So to listen to music, at the end of the day it would be a little too difficult to do the two together.

Some people can do it, but I need all my focus and attention on what I’m doing while riding these motorcycles. It’d be nice to marry the two together, the love of riding motorcycles and the love listening to music. But I make them separate, I ride motorbikes and cars, and listen to music once I’ve stopped moving basically!”

NM: “I heard you haven't done a pool party in Miami on 10 years, and you accepted to play the In the MOOD party at the Raleigh, what do you have in store musically for such a cool gig?”

CC: “I do enjoy playing pool parties. I’ve played pool parties in Miami before, but it’s been a while. There are so many really cool, deep, powerful, emotional and beautiful tracks to play at a pool that you really wouldn’t play at a club.

It’s gonna be hot, there’s gonna be people wearing less clothes, people in the pool, outside the pool, relaxing, listening to music, some people dancing in the sun, under the stars. There's such a great open air vibe that the music allows itself to become more open, so I’m able to really just go left or right field of what I normally do. I can’t wait. People only see me at a festival, smashing the place with my house or techno music, or I’m doing a long set in a club somewhere between six or eight or 10 hours.

In a pool party, you express yourself based on the mood of what’s going on with the people at the party. Expect the unexpected. For me, I don’t really know what I’m going to play until I get there. I do know that I have amazing music to play, which I probably wouldn’t get to play anywhere else. It will really be a different Carl Cox experience.”

NM: “Let's tell everyone how our collaboration came about.”

CC: “Oh absolutely, because when you put your hand to one of the first remixes that we did, that we got an award for as well. The track we chose was from my album - it was a drum & bass track that you turned into an amazing techno track. I just thought what you did was phenomenal.

A lot of producers would have stayed away from the track, because of the nature of the genre and what it was to begin with. But you turned it on its head, turned it into something absolutely amazing.”

NM: “Thank you.”

CC: “To be honest with you, if I gave someone a four-second bassline they would have laughed at me and just walked away, but you kind of laughed at me and then said you’d do it. That takes some guts to do something like that. Not only did you do it, you did it in such a way.

You turned something from nothing, turned it seriously predominant, and that’s the nature of what you do and I think that’s unbelievable. You have to be creative I think, making music is a creative force. If you’re given all the nice parts, given all the nice basslines and strings, sometimes a lot of artists can be lazy, they just want to use those parts and call it their remixes.”

NM: “That bassline in our track, it's mega. How on earth did you do that?”

CC: “It was a four-second bassline, which I had created years ago, sitting in my computer doing nothing, and I just thought of you straight away because the bassline is quite nasty. It has all the elements of sub-bass frequency beyond the depths of hell.

I knew you would be able to grab that sound and turn it into something serious. You surpassed my expectations in what you created. I’m really pleased that this track has the elements of what I like and what you’ve done. It’s phenomenal and people need to know where it came from.”