“It’s kind of a real evolution for me,” he says. “Dabbling more in rap has been a great way to test myself and to do something new and different. I just feel like it’s exciting and to be able to immerse myself in that world, working with guys like Gucci Mane as well, it’s been amazing. I did a mixtape with him, he’s a rapper from Atlanta, and that’s been a pretty high-profile thing for me because he’s the real deal in the rap world. I’ve been wanting to work with someone of that kind of calibre for quite a while now. I’ve also been spending a lot of time in LA especially because I came out here to collaborate on some other projects with Switch as well. I started off with a lot of festivals around Europe and the UK but since I got to LA I’ve done a lot of shows already out here too. I just did the Mad Decent Block Party a few weeks ago, that goes across four different cities, so that was unbelievable! Mad Decent is a label but they do these great street parties, the one that I did in LA was with Major Lazer and Nadastrom. I’m still going to keep doing club stuff, but I’m really into focusing on trying new things right now.”
He always kind of has been, Sinden adds, but ever since playing host on his own radio show on Kiss FM, his musical taste has become even more varied. In addition to this, as the DJ points out, taking on the role of head honcho of his own record label Grizzly has further expanded his musical horizons, with Sinden revealing that literally hundreds of new tunes gets sent his way on a weekly basis. Sure, the majority of material coming through may not be earth-shattering stuff, but Sinden says that every now and then quality music does come through to the fore. And once again, it’s been the emcees that have caught his attention the most lately.
“I’m constantly being fed new music, whether it’s stuff that’s a potential release on Grizzly or whether it’s just stuff being sent to me for radio,” he states. “The label is going really well, it’s turning into a real little unit, like a real little family. It’s so great to see everyone getting along and the more parties and label events we do, the more the artists are meeting each other and building a family vibe and collaborating. The mentality is to invest in artists who I really believe in. The parties are really starting to take off over in the UK. The whole vision was to release music from across as many genres as we could. Actually, it was probably more of a techno-focused label more than anything at first, but it’s expanded so much more in a pretty short amount of time. Probably most of it is still house and hip hop, but there’s some garage as well and even stuff you can’t quite put your finger on musically. Basically, the motto is that we try to keep the music on the label as fresh as possible, we want people’s heads to spin and be like, ‘Who is that?'”
Aside from taking part in as many collaborations as possible, the other priority for Sinden right now lies in touring and doing as many live shows as his schedule allows. After the release of The Count And Sinden’s Mega Mega Mega debut album last year, most fans were left wondering if a follow-up was on the way. Mega Mega Remix came along soon after – chock-a-block with a complete do-over of the original album tracks – and that’s it for now as far as full-length albums are concerned, says Sinden. Fans should not hold their breath…
“We made that album because we’d always planned to do one from the start,” says Sinden. “It was almost like on the ‘to-do list’, it was just something we always knew we would do sooner or later. The fact that it ended up being quite successful was a bonus, but the fact that After Dark [featuring The Mystery Jets] was so popular was just wild! Having a hit track was probably the last thing on our minds when we set out to make the album – it was pretty big on the radio, not just the clubs, which was probably the biggest surprise of all. To think that The Count And Sinden would have a mainstream hit or whatever sounded pretty unbelievable, but it happened. That’s the thing with The Count And Sinden – the music really has a balance. It’s club music, but it applies to so many other settings too.”
To make Mega Mega Mega fit into a live setting, Sinden recalls how he and The Count called upon some of their good mates to lend a hand in transforming the album into a collection of remixes. Just in time for the European festival season, Mega Mega Remix proved to be just as popular as its original counterpart – something that further blew Sinden’s mind, according to the DJ.
“At the time it almost started to feel like we couldn’t go wrong!” he chuckles. “We’d been planning to makeMega Mega Mega for quite a while, like I said, but we didn’t ever really discuss a follow-up or anything. We had a whole lot of festival shows coming up and you always want to take it up a notch when you’re doing a live set, don’t you? We figured doing some remixes would get the crowd going, so we came up with the idea to do a remix album of Mega Mega Mega. People have asked me why we didn’t just do a whole bunch of new tracks, but we wanted to make sure we had tunes that people were going to be familiar with so we wanted to stick with the tracks on the album. We commissioned some close friends to rework the tracks in a different format so we could take some of the rap songs and turn them into club tracks. It actually just ended up being an album by pure accident! I’d like to maybe do another one, but not anytime soon because I’ve got other projects that I want to concentrate on and I’m really enjoying my solo stuff.”
