In September 09 Pikaya participated in a fantastic GS LIVE night. GS LIVE is an experimental party series at Club Zukunft in Zurich. The concept entails all artists performing and improvising live – a challenging task, not only for the musicians but also for their audience on the dance floor.

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Hello Daniel – tell us a little bit about this GS Live Night at Club Zukunft.

It’s a great idea to create a club night featuring live acts only. I’m sure that is is exciting for the audience to listen to music that hasn’t yet been released or maybe even never will be, music that can’t be found in every dj case and can’t be ordered online for no money. We are really looking forward to play at the Zukunft. Crew, PA, club size and atmosphere are simply perfect and the line-up is always well chosen and carefully compiled. We easily get into a conversation with the other participating acts and like to seize the opportunity to discus about technics and get inspired by each other.
The great collaborative release (editor’s note: Gregorythme / Pikaya – UmmO / Amsterdam – GS06) that has come out of it tops the whole thing off and bundles the different approaches.

What are your musical influences?

Electronic elements in all different styles of music have always fascinated me since the time when I first came in touch with computers in 1992. My motivation was to find out how to make these sounds. Trough the Demoscene around Amiga and the C64, I started to create music with tracker programs. 4 mono tracks and 8 bit – that basically forces you to explore the boundaries. These boundaries and experimenting are my motivation still today to make electronic music. With this consciousness the mass of today’s possibilities is seen in another light. I like to go back to these former times mentally and am happy about the new open technical landscape, the almost endless space to sample and bout the precision you can achieve with the current technologies.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

If i need a little reset, I often listen to jazz, funk or classical music. Other important references are still Depeche Mode, Yello, Kraftwerk, Stockhausen, John Cage and rather unpopular stuff from the sixties or seventies. From 1995 on, house started to become very important to me.

And what about Franky?

Franky’s inspiration comes more from the dj side. In the mid-nineties he started to combine jazz with hiphop, funk, dub, electronica and indie. Our tastes are often quite similar in terms of these musical genres. We have been inspiring one another since 2000. Franky inspires me with music I would never have come across and I inspire him with technical ideas at the computer and the synthesizers. I am the one that consumes less music and he is the one who is less into technics. But from time to time this weighting shifts and swaps and produces interesting results. Pikaya has been working with this interrelation from the beginning and there is no end in sight!

Any news for 2010? What can we expect from Pikaya?

There are definitely more releases about to come in 2010. The next album wont be released on Cadenza in its original form as planned originally due to the release schedule. It would have been put on hold for to long otherwise. We therefore decided to split it into different releases. In March comes an EP on Meander Music, which will contain three of the more danceable tracks. The less club-orientated tracks will probably come out as digital bonus tracks, maybe also on other labels in combination with new material.
Besides this, there is still a remix project for Catenaccio Records, the labels of Benjamin Fehr aka FFWD, in the drawer.
And last but not least we will totally change our live set. We will play regularly during summer at Club der Visionäre in Berlin. We are also planning some jam sessions with Franky as DJ and me at the keyboard with guests like Frieder Klaris (HDT), DeWalta (Meander) und Ion Ludwig (Quagmire). So get ready for some nice Berlin summer nights!

www.gs-zurich.net | www.zukunft.cl | www.myspace.com/pikaya | Gregorythme / Pikaya – UmmO / Amsterdam – GS06