Interview: ELEVNS

Citing Steve Jobs, street artist KAWs and the future hip hop of Kaytranada as inspirations, electronic duo ELEVNS are much more than your average production team. 

Featuring the talents of ICMP alumna Gramm and Aurelian, the pair first met in Switzerland, then again in London, connecting via a series of musical projects and a shared love of beats and bleeps.

ELEVNS released their debut single 'Let Me In'  in 2019 and have never looked back, continuing to release killer tracks, performing in London, Paris and seeing their music featured on myriad Spotfiy playlists.

With a recent sample pack, 'CUES' , aimed at helping live performers and session musicians, they're gearing up for a busy 2020 with even more new music up their sleeves. Get to know Gramm in our interview below...  

How did you start your musical journey? Was there a person or record who started everything for you?

I joined my first band when I was 14 years old. And I played my first show when I was 15 years old. I then started playing for different artists and became a session guitarist.

How did ELEVNS get together? Did you meet at ICMP? And what inspired you to start the project?

ELEVNS started in the summer of 2017 between myself and Aurelian, a friend of mine from back home. We were both part of another project as producers but it was not really going anywhere. We had realised that we both worked well together, so we decided to start ELEVNS.

We wanted to create a project where we could work with a lot of different artists to feature on our beats. This would help us have diversity in our music and sound alongside full artistic control." 

How do you approach the creative process in the studio?

It really depends. When we’re both together with the artists we usually start from scratch but sometimes we work with an idea that one of us started on our own.

How important has London been to launching your career?

London has been really important from all the opportunities this city has and especially the network you create from places like ICMP or Tileyard London. It is really a place where everyone has a chance to live off their music.

You recently put together a sample pack, 'CUES'. How did the project come about? And what was the aim of something like this?

I’ve been using click tracks for a long time while performing live, especially with ELEVNS. We started using cues in our click tracks because we play with a lot of different musicians on stage and we want to make their life easier. We used to record them every time we had a show or if the song structure was changing. It was really a painful process so we decided to create pre-recorded samples of common cues and create midi instruments to trigger and place them along the backing track. From that we decided to make it a sample pack available to any musicians who perform live and wanted to use cues.

What other projects are keeping you busy? And what have you lined up for 2020?

ELEVNS is my main priority right now. We have a few singles / EPs and international collaborations lined up for the year already.

For aspiring musicians, what would be your essential advice about making a career from music?

Treat everybody well and with respect and maintain good relationships with your peers because you never know who can help you at some point in your career.

Visit elevnsofficial.com to find out more.