Thursday 14 November 2013

SoulKing Q&A

Your name: 
My name is Johan Dahnberg, but from time to time I perform under the name DJ SoulKing.

Where are you from? 
I'm from Falkenberg, Halland, Sweden.

Name of band: 
SoulKing.

Who else is in your band? 
You find BenBolt and SadArms here as well, also known as Lars Hillerström and Björn Karlsson. But, if you look deeper you'll find more important folks in the band, more or less regular. Raymond Aguilera, Blind Pony Ricards, Da Happy Toasta, ScratchCat, Harold Easy and many more. We are family.

How would you describe yourselves? 
Very nice people. Happy and curious. Without limitations if you speak music. We let our music take the way it like to go. So, the result is very diverse. Smooth pop, jazzy things, German beer-drinking music, gay house, pub music, electro and so one. Cool to make; but perhaps hard to wrap in a parcel for the market.

Who are your main influences musically? 
French -00 music like Cassius, Daft Punk and St Germain, and of course Kraftwerk and also we must mention the British big beat movement with Fatboy Slim and Chemical Bros, even if they are not the coolest inspirations to out in 2013. But it's true. And we have a deep interest for film scores and soft jazz, old school hip hop and 80:s pop and Italio Disco. And progressive 70:s acts like Pink Floyd and Gentle Giant. So. Yeah. Diverse.

What do you hope to achieve in music? 
It would be lovely to make a living out of it. For me I'm happy when I am in the studio. So, money, yes, would be nice. But no luxury over the top fame income. But more goals? A massive radio hit would be nice. And a club hit. I love when people enjoy my creations. And I can speak for all of us when I say, that we would LOVE to make music for a movie. Definitely.

What has been the highlight of your career so far, and why? 
Oh, we had a lot of attention in our early phase, when PPQ and Tricatel released our music; the feeling when our first 7" single arrived from London was hard to beat. When SoulKing was performing our Astrid Lindgren show live in the presence of Astrid's daughter (and got a brilliant review in the newspaper for it) was another kick. But, all the moments in the studio when it all got perfect, that is what matters most.

And what’s the moment you want to forget?
In fact it must be our own lack of drive to take care of the small success we had. Of course we should have took a plane to London and Paris when we were hot there, not just waiting for someone to call for us. But, that is who we are. Make us entrepreneurs, and the SoulKing spirit might disappear.

If you had to pick just one of your songs to represent your music, what would it be and why? 
Yeah, thank you for asking after the upper description of our music... Well, then I must choose Get To Me from our latest release Just One Of Those Summer Days In The Life Of A Swedish King of Soul. It contains our slow disco beat, our basic instruments Roland Juno 60 and TR 707, and is a typical vocal chorus without verse, I guess that is SoulKing song writing in a nutshell ...! Lovely tune, by the way.

Where can we listen to it? 

Where can we find out more about your music? 
Try facebook.com/soulkingfalkenberg and you cover most. And our record label White Line Recordings has useful info at facebook.com/whitelinerecordings. We try not to tweet or instagram. As I said, SoulKing is a bad, bad entrepreneur.

Anything else you’d like to say about your band/music that I forgot to ask? 
I love talking about SoulKing, so it's sad there are no more questions. More to add? Well, SoulKing recorded like a 100 tunes between 1999 and 2005 and after that we basically been wondering what to do of our production. White Line Recordings releasing our material is brilliant. And we have made ourselves two promises: To record again, and to perform live with our most club fit material. Good? Yeah!

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