Kompany Prepares for Imagine Festival [Exclusive Interview]

Kompany Prepares for Atlanta at Imagine Festival

9/19/2019

How has your experience as a drummer made you a better composer and DJ in this industry?
Rhythm is obviously really important for music in general, but I find it's mostly really helpful in the writing stages when I'm messing with fills and really small rhythmic places because obviously there's a lot of just like kick and snares going on, so you don't have a bunch of room for crazy drummer fills unless you're like messing with some sort of electronic drum kit. but it's obviously really helpful with DJing too with just staying on-beat.

What made us a fan of yours in the first place was they way you found to have a signature sound in the crowded field of bass music. You've spoken before about your love of Serum and sound design, how did you go about finding your personal sound amidst your other work for Cymatics?

Working for Cymatics went hand-in-hand with finding my sound because I was doing sound design as a full-time job for eight hours a day. When you're spending so much time on sound design, you find the little tricks that you like and want to reuse on similar patches. It also helps me drive one similar sound and use it to design a bunch of patches in one day using a single technique to make it in my style. So just doing a huge volume of sound design and kind of finding my tricks and things that I like to get the right light to tambor and character out of a sound was really helpful. Then also just like a lot of resampling and messing with audio and stuff helped as well.

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A post shared by Kompany (@kompanymusic) on Sep 12, 2016 at 9:25am PDT

Could you give us a glimpse into your creative and collaborative process by walking us through the making of "Broken" from inception to release?
Yeah this was a cool one! I actually just had like the banger-ish parts of the drop done and was shooting it around for feedback. I sent it to the Slander boys just as we were chatting about something else, and was like, "Can I get your ears on something?" And they were like, "Yo, this is crazy." They had a really cool vision for it, so they ended up hopping on and writing a lot of the vocal stuff. We got fknsyd on the track as well which is really cool. So it started with a good foundation for the drop and Slander helped me take it to the next level with a bunch of good ideas that elevated it above being just another dubstep banger that you hear a lot of nowadays.

We wanted to expand on a quote you gave in another interview: "When you play that many shows in that condensed amount of time you're going to come out a different performer." Could you go into detail about how this experience changed you as a performer?
I think I was mainly talking about when I did my first bus tour with Bear Gryllz, Dirt Monkey and PhaseOne (which was awesome) but it was just like immediately getting thrown into show after show. When I started, I wasn't super comfortable using the mic or doing double drops because I wasn't comfortable enough on CDJs. It ended up being really good for my stage presence. In the end, it came down to the same kind of thought process behind what I said with sound design - if you put that many hours in to into something, you're just going to see results no matter what. Going back to that interview, I think it's more about how comfortable you are rather than actually molding who you are as a person.

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Canâ€™t wait to hit up @imaginemusicfestival in a few weeks! This b2b2b gonna be so lethal @sullivanking @kaiwachiofficial

A post shared by Kompany (@kompanymusic) on Sep 4, 2019 at 10:42am PDT

Looking forward to Imagine Festival, what will you be doing to prepare for the bass-loving Atlanta crowd?
Normally, I would normally go in on certain transitions and spend some time on edits but this one is cool. It's a lot different preparing for the big back-to-back because I can just clump in a bunch of tunes I really liked and vibe off of Sullivan King and Kai Wachi and just see what happens!

Last time I played in Atlanta was for the Neon Phantom tour and I think I got almost a double digit double-digit amount of ATLHOE chants which is about what I expect tomorrow for this weekend so I'm really excited to be back. Lately, I've been getting some stuff ready for Lost Lands that no one has heard yet, so Atlanta might be the first to get a little sneak peek!

When traveling, what do you enjoy doing on your time away from the booth and studio?
I usually get in not too long before the show. so I don't have enough time to really like sightsee or anything. Normally, I get to my room and order some good food and hit the hotel gym. I like to spend some time on my set by finding some cool new double drops, chill out, and take a good nap. I'm usually playing a lot of shows on the East Coast, but since I'm from LA, I lose three hours on the flight over. We'll see how I feel on Thursday when I fly and maybe I'll get time to go check the city out, becauseI haven't really got to look around Atlanta before

Before we close out the interview, is there anything you'd like to tease or shout-out?
I've got loads of new music, some merch and tour announcements soon!

Thanks to Kompany for taking the time to answer our questions! Be sure to check him out using the links below! For more information about Imagine Festival, click here