I was in London last weekend and got a chance to interview Amit Duvdevani and Erez Eisen of Infected Mushroom (homepage, Wikipeida, twitter, myspace, Facebook).

We had a chat about signing to Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto label, fan remixes, on-line distribution, and their upcoming album Legend of the Black Shawarma.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (BY-NC).

Photo by Hugh O’Brien
dd: We’re here in the Ministry of Sound in London with Duvdev and Eres. How has the tour been going so far?
duv: It’s been really great, massively touring the United States at the moment, and that side of the world, now coming to Europe a little bit, it’s been great so far, most of it live. As you can see here today there are a few DJ sets this year and yeah, it’s been good time.

dd: Do you prefer the live sets or the DJ sets?
duv: We prefer the Live set, this is what we’ve done lately, for the last three or four years, a massive live set with all the crew. It’s kinda weird for us to DJ now, because it’s only me and [Erez], travelling like back in the old days. But it’s fun as well, it’s a different approach. We like both.

dd: I head that you play 190 night a year?
duv: Well, 120 live sets a year, sometimes…
dd: Are you insane? That’s a huge amount.
duv: It’s crazy.
dd: Do you get to go home much at all?
duv: well we basically play weekends, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday. Never mind where we are, we spend 2-3 days at home and go again out. So it’s not a conventional kind of touring way but it’s worked for us and it’s kinda good.

dd: So moving on, Vicious Delicious was a huge success and I suppose that what alot of us know you as, and you came to the mainstream a lot with that. We’re all looking forward to Legend of the Black Shawarma alot. But with Vicious Delicious came a lot of fan remixes and a lot more interaction with fans, fans taking your stuff and remixing it. Have you seen much of the stuff that’s been made? Have you seen many of the YouTube videos say?
Erez: Yeah, we get remixes all the time, from our website or myspace. We always get a lot of remixes.

dd: And you’re happy that people are remixing your work?
ez: Yeah, [they're] not official remixes, they’re not proper ones but it’s still cool that people try and make their own version of our tracks. It’s cool.
duv: As long as it’s being played as Infected Mushroom we don’t care, it’s more people having it, it’s more liking it. It’s cool.

dd: On that, you say it’s not an official remix. I know that for example Nine Inch Nails recently released an album, then fans remixed it and then [NIN] released the fan remixes. Would you consider doing that? Would you consider releasing a Legend of the Black Shawarma: Fan Remixes.
duv: Sure, you know this is something that we really… Me an Ez are really critical about the releases, so we really need to like all the remixes. But if we do, why not? NIN had a good idea with this, and brought a lot of fans trying to remix that. I think especially if you go to the fans and tell them, “Let’s do an album of remixes” then will come much more remixes and much more to choose from. So yeah, it’s a cool idea.
ez: The same for Depeche Mode, we did My Remix, you know this Nokia thing?
dd: No…
ez: So we gave files to people to remix.
duv: It’s for phone, but everybody who has a Nokia can do it, download Smashing the Opponent, the new single, and mix it. We’re all for people doing it in their own way, music should be reachable. If people want the file, we’ve done with them, after we do it, it’s done. It’s cool.

dd: You recently signed to Perfecto, Paul Oakenfold’s label. Does this open new doors in terms of collaboration? How do you see this enhancing Infected Mushroom?
ez: Well Paul is helping us a lot in any direction, we see alot of movie offers, to make stuff for movies, meeting a lot of people we never been able to meet before. And it’s just so helpful since we just met him, before we’d been signed. It’s amazing
duv: Yeah, Paul is really connected, in a mainstream base in the US, because he has been there for so many years, so he knows the major key players, stuff that was not open for Infected Mushroom and now is. Beside him we have alot of people working for us at the moment in the united states, not only Perfecto, we have Rocket Science, which is a company that service the label and does all the work, that did Prodigy, the did Crystal Method. There are a lot of people working on the new Legend of the Black Shawarma. So it’s been great.

dd: Excellent, how do you see the music industry panning out? A lot of people are no longer going for big labels, they’re going for smaller independent labels. A lot of people are trying digital downloads, the likes of Coldplay and Radiohead are giving away albums free. How do you see the music industry overall panning out over the next few years?
duv: There’s two approaches to that. Allot of people say I wont go to a major label because the major labels are afraid to sign new and upcoming bands because they industry today is falling down. And the big bands like you said, Radiohead and stuff like that, they don’t want to be with those labels any more. So there are two approaches, going in the same way. Today, to put your music out there it’s easier than ever. There are so many sites, there’s so many ways to sell music, you don’t need a label. But, there reaches a point that you do need one. So there’s two different approaches. There way that music is going in the future? I think because of Apple and iTunes becoming such a key player, people in the world listening to MP3, and downloading is so easy, I think the labels think it’s going to be over soon. People don’t consume music like they used to. They don’t go and buy a CD. It’s sad, and it’s reality, because a CD sounds really better than an MP3 on your iPhone. But on an iPhone, if you want a song now, you sit here and say “I like this song”, you hear it, you click it, you have it. It’s amazing. Both of the approaches are great, but this is the future, the future goes to that direction, and labels are not going to survive.

dd: People obviously download you music alot.
duv: Yeah!
dd: What are your words to people who do download.
duv: This has helped us from the beginning. We used to come and play in Mexico for 5-6 thousand people. We never sold a CD over there. They used to download it in Napster, back in the day. This is the main thing that broadcasted Infected Mushroom to the word, illegal downloading. We don’t care about it. We care that you come and pay a ticket to see us.
dd: That’s what get’s money.
duv: That’s the main income [for us], so if you download our music I don’t care. For us, we only care before the album is coming out, we don’t want it to leak. But the album is coming out in one month, in two weeks you’re going to see it leaking on the internet. It’s still unsafe but people are going crazy for Legend of the Black Shawarma, so if it leaks, it leaks. Then if people download it, there’s nothing to do, it’s cool.

dd: Legend of the Black Shawarma is an album about food. Why?
ez: Well we travel a lot and our main fun on the road, one of them, is food. So we are really fanatics about food, we like good food. Everywhere we go we look for the best, whatever local thing. So if it’s really amazing, we give it some respect, and write it on the album. So it was only a stupid funny concept, nothing too serious.

dd: Ok, that;s it, thank you very much. Look forward to the set, and I’ll see you again.
ez: Thank you
duv: Thank you very much, thanks.