Loud luxury’s Body tastes UK chart feat

Electronic dance music is seldom far from the top of Britain’s official singles chart. Canadian producers, remixers and DJs Loud Luxury are visiting the upper reaches for the first time with their track, Body, which also features the vocal talent of Brando. The song has spent 11 weeks in the UK top 40, eight of which have been in the top 10.“The chart success is beyond anything we could have imagined,” said Andrew Fedyk. “Joe (DePace) and I have had a number of successful dance records and we play sold out DJ sets. But we’ve never experienced mainstream success like this.”Andrew and Joe became friends after meeting at Western University in London, Ontario.“We linked up through the electronic music scene,” Joe remarked. “Our London is much less glamorous than London in England. But Western is known as a massive party school and actually has a club dedicated to DJing. Andrew and I started exchanging music and everything went so well that we soon realised we should work together.”Their professional collaboration began in 2012. Much as they may have loved their home country, a move south to the electronic dance music hotbed of Los Angeles was deemed necessary to further Andrew and Joe’s career.“Money was pretty tight,” Andrew admitted. “We lived in a one-bedroom apartment. It happened to be an old home from the 1960s of the songwriter, cult leader and murderer Charles Manson. We saved money on food by eating oatmeal almost every day. Most of our time was spent on SoundCloud messaging artists we liked in the hope that we could get to work with them.”The smash hit Loud Luxury enjoy now stemmed from an invitation by one of those artists on SoundCloud. But not in the manner they might have expected.“We were invited to this showcase performance,” Joe recalled. “It was just down the street from where we lived. We went to check it out but there was another band on first. Brando was their singer. We were so blown away by his voice and performance that we actually forgot to say hi to the artist who had given us the invitation.”“It was one of those times when you hear someone’s music and feel it is just super right,” Andrew added. “There was this obvious feeling that we had to do something with Brando.”E-mail exchanges led to Brando showing the boys a track called Body On My.“It was a hip hop demo,” Andrew revealed. “We weren’t particularly excited about the music which we felt was too slow. But we were very excited by Brando’s vocals. We wanted to see what we could do with the track. We sped it up, put some more emotional chords under the original music and ended up with something which we thought was amazing.”Loud Luxury had already began to make a name for themselves. Remixes of Dzeko & Torres’ Home and Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop The Feeling led to a collaboration with Borgeous on Going Under. A remix of the Martin Garrix single, Scared To Be Lonely, brought further recognition.“We’d made a track with the vocalist Ryan Shepherd called Fill Me In which Martin really liked,” Joe explained. “We got told that it was playing in the background on some of his Instagram posts. Scared To Be Lonely had just been released and we loved the song. We reached out to Martin thanking him for supporting our tune and also asking if we could do a remix of his track.”Perhaps surprisingly for dance music producers, Andrew and Joe are keen to emphasise the quality of vocals in their work.“We feel the vocals are so important,” Andrew stated. “That’s one of the reasons we were so excited about working with Brando on Body. We always feel collaborations work out best when we are fans of a particular artiste. The whole process is so much better if we work with a vocalist who we would specifically want to listen to.”Show Me was another big dance hit for Loud Luxury last year. But it was Body which brought them major mainstream recognition on the international music market. Britain is by no means the only country where the song is hugely popular. But it was hardly an overnight success. Body was initially released 12 months ago.“I guess good things come to those who wait,” Joe laughed. “We love what we do and it’s great to entertain so many dance music fans with our songs and DJ sets. It would be nice to think the mainstream success of Body will encourage people who wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves as pure dance music fans to come and see us live. They’ll certainly be welcome.”