A Little Chat About Back Home

We had a little chat with the guys from Defected about our single ‘Back Home’.

You know a Chocolate Puma track from the first moment it knocks you around the head with its absurdly punchy beats. A ridiculously catchy vocal will follow soon after and that’s it; it’ll be in your head from when you first hear it, throughout the rest of the day or night and probably for a few days afterwards. You’ll either love it or hate it (although we’ve found most people sit firmly in the former camp) but regardless of which it is, it’ll bounce round inside your head for a considerable time.

Now, the Dutch duo have dropped a new track that’s set to follow in the addictive footsteps of its predecessors and attach itself to your brain like a house-loving limpet. We caught up with them to find out more…

Guys..this track is banging! What’s it all about?

For us this track was about taking our classic Chocolate Puma sound to the next level; making it tough and powerful but still trying to have as much soul and funk in it. And a bit of nanana, naturally.

Tell us about the vocalist Colonel Red…

We got introduced to Red by the guy who featured on our Dub Of Boom track. He is an amazing soul/jazz singer, originally from the UK, currently living in Rotterdam, Holland. You might know him from his Sweet Liberation album and his own Ruff Language label. The cool thing is that he is a genuine soul/jazz guy but at the same time knows everything about acid house, clubbing and Robert Owens.

You have a very distinctive, punchy sound…any production tips you’d like to share with us?

Choose the fattest sounds you can find. Use sounds with different characters and layer them. For example, using an analog synth sound, combined with samples from an old scratchy record, and live recordings from your kitchen ware gives you much more depth than just staying ‘in the box’. Also don’t think you need much equipment. ‘Cause you don’t. We just use Logic and use the standard plug-ins. That’s all. Oh, and good ideas don’t hurt either. Also, we just started giving production tips on our website chocolatepuma.com. We already got some features about eqing and compressing, so you definately should check that out.

The artwork for the single is also fantastic…who did the design?

The artwork is done by Dutch multitalented artist Marc Sokpolie aka Zwazi. We had a cool brainstorm session with him about all kinds of things we’re digging. After a few weeks he came up with this great illustration of us floating in space, with in the background the debris of the ring of Saturn replaced by wrecks of all the cars we like. The artwork for this single is actually a fragment of this bigger illustration. We even have made t-shirts!

When is the happiest you’ve ever been to be ‘Back Home’?

We love playing all over the world, and being at all these exotic is great. But at the same, being away from your loved ones is not always the easiest thing. Especially when we were stranded at Sao Paulo airport for a million hours due to a strike. Coming ‘Back Home’ from that trip made us quite happy indeed.

What can we expect from you for the rest of the year?

We made lots of bootlegs over the last year and we will share some of them with the rest of the world in the next few months. Also, we’re re-launching our label Pssst Music, which will be our little playground for tracks that won’t fit in the Chocolate Puma/Defected picture. Demolishing clubs and causing mayhem at the summer festivals is also on our to do list.

Anything else you’d like to tell us about..?

One of us is going on a holiday to Iceland. No kidding.

Back Home is out now on Defected Records.