The Floozies on Music Creation, Life on the Road, and Their Bonnaroo Set [YourEDM Exclusive Interview]

Anyone who’s been to a Floozies show can tell you how lit it can get. But the process of creating that unique live funk sound? That’s where we were curious. We sat down with Matt and Mark Hill of the Floozies on Thursday afternoon at Bonnaroo to talk about what inspires them, how they manage the touring lifestyle, and what they were about to create at This Tent a few hours later. True to form, an explosive funk dance party ensued and the Thursday night crowd on the farm couldn’t have been happier. If you’re lucky enough to be at Electric Forrest right now, make sure you don’t miss their set on Sunday.

One of your mission statements is to “create dance parties that seemingly come from out of nowhere.” You’ve been trying to do that all over the country – What are some of the highlights from the road?

Mark (Drums): I mean Hulaween man. Someone asked me what one of our best sets was and that was one of the first ones that came to mind. Because that was like, we didn’t really even have lights. That was a dance party created out of just music. Also, playing Red Rocks for the first time was amazing. Once again, that was daytime as well. We’ve done a lot of cool things. Electric Forest in 2013 and 2014. There are a lot of moments where we just look out and I laugh to myself. It’s hard to believe that this is real life sometimes. You know, for real like, I second-guess that sometimes. When you’re looking out at 10 thousand people and you’re…

Matt (Guitar): And you’ve done enough acid to where you’re sure or not (laughs)

A lot of people may not know that your sets are original. You don’t rely on samples or pre-recorded sets. What initially sparked that? What made you guys be like “you know what, we want to create something authentic”?

Mark: That’s just what we do. Our talents lent us to do that. Matt started out just looping gigs with his guitar at coffee shops and making music out of just his guitar, pedal board and a loop station. So then when we incorporated drums, we weren’t going to change that, you know I mean we definitely use a computer on stage now you know. It’s gotten different but.

Matt: Yeah like, I don’t know how to DJ so, It doesn’t really make sense for us to play songs that aren’t ours. You know what I mean? I’m not saying I look down on DJs at all, I mean it looks really fun; this is just what we’re best at.

You guys release all your music for free. A lot of artists have different reasons for doing that. What would you say compels you to want to share in that way?

Matt: It’s like show and tell man, as soon as I finish a song, I’m just really excited about it. Like sending it out on cell phone videos to everyone I can think of. So it’s like, we give it out for free. There’s a lot of reasons why it makes sense from a business standpoint, but really my motivation is just I’m really proud of it and I want to show it to the whole world.

Mark: Yeah you, you can share it with more people, you can share it with people who can’t afford it, I don’t even know if we really thought about it all that much, we just said “this is cool, lets give it out” and yeah, we love the live show so as long as we’re still able to do that, I don’t think we should be charging people. The more people that hear it, the longer we get to keep touring around and showing people what we do live you know, which is what we live for.

You two are brothers. What’s your experience looking over the crowd, being there with your brother, working off each other?

Matt: It’s always cool, we’re always excited to go on and it’s always really really fun once we get started.

Mark: I think it’s easier to constantly be stopping and being thankful when you’re with your family, you know it’s like “holy shit, I’m doing all this cool stuff and I’m sharing it with somebody that I’ve spent my entire life with. It’s like, you can do something cool by yourself but like, if you’re not sharing it, I don’t know how much fun I’d even have if I was just by myself touring, I’d want to bring him even if he wasn’t playing. So I think that that’s the thing, getting to share it with someone that has been sharing a bedroom with me since I was a little kid. It’s pretty unreal.

Is there anything new for today that the Bonnaroo crowd can expect?

Matt: We’re gonna drop a new intro we’ve never done.

Mark: And that we may never do again.

Matt: At least two unreleased songs.

Mark: One that he finished today, on the drive.

Matt: And that’s all I got.