We made some friendly small-talk recently with Cosmo of the Sydneyside producer twin-duo Cosmo’s Midnight, and copped some intel on their movements.
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What have you guys been working on this week?
This week we finished off the EP and sent it off to get mastered like 2 days ago. We got the masters back yesterday and we’re really happy with how they’re sounding. So basically the last week we’ve been frantically meeting deadlines.
Have you been keeping up with deadlines the whole way, or has stuff been pushed back at all?
Nah, we’ve got a date to finish it, and we kind of worked steadily towards it until suddenly we had a week left and we were like, “uh, wow, let’s get this done now”. It’s been a good process though, I think, it hasn’t been rushed. It’s exactly how we wanted every track to sound. Deadlines are good for getting things done for real, a lot of the time we need the deadline to actually write the music and get inspired. The last week has just been polishing off the tracks and kneading out anything we thought was rough, and mixing down the tracks. We just needed to smooth it out make sure it was perfect.
You guys have covered a lot of ground genre-wise; are there any other styles you can explicitly say you have your sights set on?
I guess we’ve always tried to make it our thing that we’re never stuck in one genre, so people know that we’re capable of doing more than one thing. For the album we will inevitably do one day, we’ll try to stick to one concept and set our eyes on that. I think within this EP, people will see a lot of different genres being covered. It’s a 6-track EP: we’ve got “Walk With Me” which everyone knows, which is kind of the house-y jam, then we’ve got some tracks that have huge drops, and we’ve got some cute tracks in there too. We want people to know that we can make different sounds, but still have it sounding like Cosmo’s Midnight.
It’ll be interesting to see where you guys can take a full-length record.
Yeah, we’re really excited to start working on that. We’ve already got some ideas, we’ve got some tracks sitting there to put into it, so we’re keen to get cracking.
Why would a track qualify for the full-length but not for the Moments EP?
It doesn’t seem to fit in the style of the EP, and we don’t want to oversaturate our first EP in over 2 years. I feel like once you’re going over 6 tracks, you should be looking at releasing an album, and we feel like releasing an album would be too much of a statement. People will take the album and say “this is what Cosmo’s Midnight is”. With an EP you can say “this is what we’re trying out, this is the style we’re going for right now”.
It’s like an offering without committing to a direction?
I don’t want to sound non-committal, but I feel like EPs are a good way of showing what you like and what you’re into right now, and people won’t judge you too harshly. I feel like an album is very important to nail.
For sure, especially in the electronic scene where a whole album is a very big deal.
For sure, that’s how I’ve always seen it. Sometimes an EP will just be one track with remixes on it…I feel like even this is pretty good, how we’ve put together this many tracks. And I feel like it’s been so long since we’ve given people a lot of music. I think our fans and people who listen to us deserve to hear what we’ve been up to.
So there are 4 unheard tracks on the EP, correct?
Yep, so there’s one with Sarah Bonito, got one with Lido, another with Wave Racer, and a track with Hi Tom from Norway.
Nice, I love the Rytmeklubben sound (a collective Hi Tom is a part of).
Rytmeklubben are sick, I want to go hang out with them. We were going to go to Sweden to do some writing for some commercial stuff, but we’ve pushed that back to next year. I would’ve wanted to go meet up with them because once you’re in Scandinavia it’s easy to go hang out with all the peeps there.
Do the Rytmeklubben guys do some commercial writing as well?
I know Hi Tom did a song with a cool rapper, but I think everyone’s interested in getting into production work for pop stars and rappers. That’s what we want to do, and we’ll hopefully get into that pretty soon. It’s a good escape from writing your own music, you don’t have to be so worried about making sure it sounds like you, you just have a brief, write a song that’s cool, and get paid.
Is there anywhere in the world you feel like there’s a particular demand for you guys to come over?
I feel like America has been constantly trying to get us over there, and it’s just a matter of us getting a booking agent. I think we’re going over to America next March, and it’s kind of like the second Australia in terms of the music scene. It’s good to start trying to make your way in America, because it’s a similar style. America is just huge, it’s really important to get a foot in that whole scene.
I feel like there’s a bit of a thing for us in Japan, because when we went there we played one show and it was really successful. We were thinking about doing an Asia tour at some point. There are so many people there, and from what I’ve heard about places like Japan, people just latch on to the cool thing. There’s more of a fanatic kind of thing, and I feel like when they know that you’ve come a fair way to get there, they appreciate it a little bit more.
Are you guys looking forward to Sea ‘n’ Beats?
Ah, “Sean Beats” as we call it…I reckon it’s going to be so much fun. Everyone’s going to it, all our mates are going to be there. It’s just going to be a huge party I reckon. I’ve never played a boat party before, but that’s always an exciting prospect. I guess it’s the Australian version of Holy Ship, so I’m excited to go on that and perform on a boat. It’s a really cool, luxe experience.
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Catch the fellas at the Australian-first boat festival Sea ‘n Beats in March 2016 – tickets available here
And let’s finish with Cosmo’s Midnight‘s recent single, ‘Walk With Me’ featuring KUČKA;
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