Podcast
UuU
Discussion with Léo Lallemand, Victor Arnault and Matthieu Colin.Today, for the second episode of Abracadabra Radio I’m super happy to welcome : UuU.
UuU is a young collective from Brest. Oscillating between house, electro, breaks and so on, they definitely know how to be eclectic during their sets (but also to be funny).
How did you met ?
Léo joined the group much later, around 2020. They met through friends of friends and it was an instant match!
You started on vinyl ?Matthieu and Victor were already playing when they started hanging out together. Like a lot of people, they started on a controller then moved to a CDJ setup. They finally started mixing on vinyl with Victor's older brother during the first lockdown. They had been wanting to do it for a while, and they had time on their hands, so it seemed to be the perfect moment for them.
Leo started to learn how to mix by himself during the first lockdown. In the end he quickly realized that he hadn't learned much!
Then, by hanging out with with Matthieu and Victor, he learned how to play on CDJs and on vinyls simultaneously.
Do any of you play an instrument ?
Can you talk about your relationship with Radio ?
Thanks to his family, Vic listened lot of Webradios with a wide range of styles, such as Radio Nula, Radio Fip, Radio Jazz 24 to name a few.
Otherwise, at work or in the car, we sometimes listen to Nova. They have a lot of little shows, it makes us discover a great range of cool tracks, and it allows us to listen to something different than what we could dig!
We also sometimes listen to or even participate in a small show about local electronic music broadcasted on the Brest University Radio (hey Bside Airlines).
Finally, we all listen to a lot of podcasts on Soundcloud, such as Alec Falconer's shows on Rinse, the Kermessworld channel, RadioSofa, the Rakya’s podcasts/Just Us, and more.
What does UuU mean?
Ahaha it doesn't mean much actually! It was born from an expression we use when we hear big organic house musics from the 90's that make people in the crowd raise their arms: "wow this track is completely U".
We wanted to launch a project for all 3 of us for a little while but we were really struggling to find a name, we wanted something visual enough that would allow us to have a nice graphic identity.
In the end we found that a U could represent a character who was partying, we are 3 in the crew, two big ones and a smaller one, that's how UuU was born!
Our dear friend Juju (@justnrv) managed to come up with a very cool logo
Can you tell me your common influences ?
Globally we all listen to a lot of good "U" tracks ahah !
More seriously, we are looking mostly at house music. From Tech House to Progressive House to Italo House and more Trancy/Dub/Breaks...tracks, whether it's recent releases or much older ones!
Can you tell me your respective influences ?
Vic has a little crush for Synth pop and housy tracks. At the same time he digs a lot of hip-hop (which he also plays)!
Mat and Léo tend to dig more electro discs. Tracks that sound a bit more funky with humming basses (a bit like the podcast).
Léo has more Break, UK Garage or Ghetto House influences, while Mat tends is more into 90's/2000’s house music. Sometimes Deep house when the atmosphere is right for it.
Is your common mix different from your solo mix?
Completely - Since we all have different influences, we offer sets that go through a lot of styles. We try to do it in a coherent way by adapting to the spot and time we play at but it's clear that every time we start a set, we don’t know how it will end, it's spontaneous we'll say!
Any good record shops in Brest ?
Brest doesn’t have many record shops compared to big cities, but a friend of ours opened a bar/record shop, the "Fono", which offers some very very cool discs.
Your favorite record shop ?
Since we live in a remote corner of France, we don't really have a go-to address, so we digg almost only on Discogs. We purchase from different sellers all the time so we can't really answer this question!
We'll say Fono to support the local record shop ahah!
How is the scene in Brest?
The electronic scene in Brest is very developed, the Astropolis festival certainly played a huge role in that! There are several dozens of collectives in the city, from disco to indus techno and ghetto.
Can you take 1 or 2 vinyls and tell me why it is important for you?
Victor :
Leslie Winer - "Witch" (I don't have words to describe this one, the album just transcends me...) and all the edits of the Razormaid who, for me, are the bigboss of edits on earth.
Mat :
Tiga - Pleasure from the Bass :
A record that I love to play in peak time because it always puts everyone in agreement with its well pronounced acid bass !
St Germain - Boulevard
A great French classic that I love to listen to in moments of relaxation at home, I love the dub, house and jazzy side of this album and it is for me one of the best.
Leo:
Jimmy Edgar - Color Strip, a huge bomb that can be a little experimental at times. You can listen to it at home or play it in front of an audience to break the dancefloor!
A various named "Street Plastic One (Nu school collection)" that I love, a record mixing breaks and electro with a good hip-hop touch! More particularly it is the track Freestylers - Drop Tha' Bomb that I find absolutely perfect. It is well named ahah!
(Otherwise I would have also put the Opik-Opik that Corentin has already put in his interview!)
How do you prepare your sets? Podcast or events
We prepare almost nothing ahah! Usually, when we go to play at a show, we agree by message if we only take deep tracks, if we take everything or if we want to get crazy and play hard. Then we improvise on the spot.
For the podcast it was a bit more complicated to coordinate. Since we want a more coherent result, we are a little more demanding on the sequence of tracks, but we don't really want to prepare it beforehand either. We want to keep this spontaneous side when we play, so it's a bit more complicated indeed.
In the end, we think that on this podcast we were maybe a bit "too coherent" which makes the set a bit linear, unlike our live sets.
Are there any artists that you dream to see ?
Given that we moved quite a lot in the clubs of the region, that we made the Nostromo all 3, the song of the birds (2 times for Mat and 1 time for Vic) and that at the time even when we answer this interview Mat and Vic are in Tisno in Croatia for the dimension festival we already saw a good package of artists whom we admire! (Quest, Laurine & Cecilio, Francesco del Garda, Hicham, Sibil, Joe Delon, Alec Falconer, Truly Madly . )
All the same, Vic would love to see Hugo TSR, for Mat it would be Solal Reyes and for Leo it would be Daft Punk or The Egyptian Lover !
Are there any clubs you dream to go to ?
Yes no doubts on that, we would love to go to CDV or Hoppetosse in Berlin!
What advice would you give to people who want to make a collective?
We would tell them not to look for colleagues in order to create a collective together. According to us, creating a collective should be done naturally, it's above all sharing moments with your friends, so it's essential to ensure a good understanding in the crew!
Second advice is not to be afraid to make flops during the first events ahaha!
A tip for newcomers to mixing on vinyl?
"Practice makes perfect", practice as much as possible! After the technique is important but according to our vision of things the selecta and the digg remain the most important points!
Don't be afraid to put breads when you play in front of people, it's not so bad it happens even to the best ahah, you just have to move quickly to something else (we almost called ourselves La Boulangerie for the little story ahaha)
How did you prepare it ?
As said in the previous questions, we didn't prepare it track by track beforehand. This meant that we had to do it several times because we weren't always happy with the result, plus we had a lot of technical problems (because we wanted to record the set in video format) so we had to do some more takes. In all we did 6 tries I think, 3 of which we finished.
Regarding the general vibe transmitted in the poddy, we wanted the beginning of the podcast to be quite deep and that we go up crescendo (without going too much on tracks teufs) before resting the vibe on the end (classic ahah).
In the end the take we decided to keep is more electro oriented, but we did some more housy / "U" takes that weren't clean enough technically as well as in the coherence of the transitions. After the take we decided to keep is far from being technically perfect but we thought that it gave a kind of charm to the podcast!