Introducing: Affiliate

Give a brief introduction to yourselves, to include your names, ages and hometowns.

Hey gang, thanks for getting in touch. We’re Affiliate, a duo from London and go by Prash and Will. We met at some point during secondary school in Watford, where we both grew up. Hard to pinpoint an exact time we said hello to each other because it was like 12 years ago. Realizing now whilst writing this just how long ago that actually is considering we’re both 24 now, haha…

According to your Instagram, Affiliate came to be almost 5 years ago – have you always produced under that alias? How did you two initially meet?

Prash: Affiliate as an idea actually came about around 2-3 years ago. Before that, we produced under solo monikers but played a couple of gigs together. I started producing during school and cycled through a few DnB aliases whilst at uni (Ramage & Rho) and Will was known as Womba or DJ Womba Man to some. I probably shouldn’t put this in but his very first identity was Sloth Boy…Will was DJing quite a bit at uni and wanted to get into the production side so we hooked up to see what we could do. Affiliate came out of that pretty much – once we released our first collab “Gully Creeper” on In:Flux Audio as solo artists, we decided to make a joint name for anything else we made. It tied in quite nicely actually, because I set up the brand OVERGRND, which we still run together now, with my mates at uni in Leicester and invited Will to play at some of the events. Musically, we started linking up from then and things just clicked. From there, we decided to make Affiliate (took days to decide on a name) to start pushing our tracks.

Talk about your beginnings with Saucy, some of the people you’ve met along the way and your favorite track on the label, to date.

Will: It’s a funny one really, after our release on In:Flux we had a couple more songs ready to go and shortlisted a few labels we wanted to try to release on by the end of 2016. Saucy was always at the top of that list because our idea of UK bass music resonated most with them, and they already had such huge acts come through the camp. We’ve always had mad respect for Marc and Sam, they constantly put out quality music, not even for themselves – but just to help build the scene that they love. Prash was initially approached by Marc to do a liquid remix under “Rho” and started chatting about Affiliate off the back of that. We showed him some of our ideas and that’s how we landed our first Saucy release: a remix of the mighty Pelikann’s “Badboy Sound”. We couldn’t believe it at the time, the label we had set as our serious long-term goal asked us to release with them within 3 months of making our shortlist! After that, we didn’t really know where else to aim for label-wise so got stuck with them really. Saucy have done a lot for us in a very, very short space of time so it was definitely the right decision, haha.

Through OVERGRND and generally going partying, we’ve met a lot of people; people that we look up to and just genuinely people who love their music so it’s hard to say one person above the other as their all just as important to us! Pretty much impossible to choose a favouite track on Saucy ’cause there are literally too many that we love, but out of our tracks it would have to be “Change Your Mind” with Dakota Sixx OR the “Badboy Sound” remix. The remix was special because not only was it was our first release with Saucy, but finding out that My Nu Leng played it in their Radio 1 Essential Mix literally had us doing backflips. I think at the time we found out I was severely hungover – best hangover cure to date!

You’ve produced numerous tracks with Dakota Sixx, most recently – “Change Your Mind”, which skyrocketed to the top of the Beatport bass/breaks chart. How did your work with (Amber) come about?

Prash: Will’s mate George from uni has honestly the deepest knowledge when it comes to any genre. He’s a proper DJ who actually digs for his music and he suggested Dakota when Will sent him the instrumental for Breathe. She had previously worked with Nuvaman and that’s how he’d heard of her. We hit her up online, sent over a couple ideas and it just clicked. Props to her, we think she wrote the top line and record the vocals in like an hour! We were blown away with what she did to Breathe so we just kept flooding her inbox and Change Your Mind eventually came about. We wrapped up 3 tracks in total, the third one is coming out soon.

Your tracks are very vocal-centric and melodically focused, which I feel is quite refreshing amidst all of the festival bangers and club oriented tracks out there. How do you find inspiration for your tunes – are there particular artists you look up to?

Will: That’s really nice to hear, thank you! Inspiration definitely comes in waves and is even harder now we’re both working. As we both live in separate houses, we usually just bring solo ideas to the table and see if any are worth pursuing. We have built up so many ideas in the past and now it’s more working out the best way to spend the limited time we get with each other. I usually goes to Prash’s after work or on a weekend and then try to fit in as much as possible in the couple hours we have a night. Work is definitely a massive hindrance to creativity sometimes. Once we’ve taken an idea further and we’re both into it, it flows from there really until we get sick of it and start fresh, haha. In terms of our style, we’ve always been into the melody-driven/atmospheric styles that blow you away both at home and in the club. It’s what stuck with us when we were growing up. We’ve been into electronic music from 13/14 and it’s tough to tell you which artists we draw inspiration from ’cause there are too many…even outside of electronic music. A few household names that seem to come up when we get asked this question include Chase & Status, Nero, Sub Focus, Culprate, Magentic Man, My Nu Leng, S.P.Y, Break, Distro, the list really goes on!

What can we look forward to from you in the upcoming months? (Solo tracks, EP’s, collabs)

Prash: Since being taken on by Marc and Sam, we’ve been trying really hard to boost our gigs and push ourselves socially, so a lot of time recently has been spent on that. We do, however, have quite a few tracks currently in the works. Collabs include tracks with Sketchi, Archive, Ali Mck & IYZ and Barely Royal. The third track with Dakota we mentioned earlier is just having label stuff finalized and will be out around September, coupled with a remix or two. We’re currently working on our next EP and potentially we’ll have one of the collabs on there, but this probably won’t be finished ’til the back end of this year. As for free downloads, we’re releasing a tune in August as a thank you for all the recent support! And to top it all off, we’ve been given an opportunity to remix one of our favorite tunes on Circus Records, so you’ll be seeing that soon too hopefully. Hope we haven’t waffled on for too long but thanks again for running the interview, I think this will be our first one to go up online!

Affiliate
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