You recently released your latest single ‘Main Character’ and it’s brilliant. For anyone who’s yet to hear it, how would you describe the track?
It’s got a classic hip-hop song; we’re talking our shit with swag, getting off witty punchlines. To quote the legendary group little brother “dope beats, dope rhymes, what more do ya’ll want”?
From an instrumental point, we decided to hybrid the Hip-Hop classic beats with Drum & Bass adding break beats and a hoover bass.
This song is a bit of a metaphor on life: beautiful things are often ephemeral and you have to know how to love the present moments otherwise they dissipate in the mist
Where did you record it?
Lex recorded the flow in New york USA, the instrumental part was made by Greg and Julien in Lyon France, Mirage worked on the sounds and mastered the track in Düsseldorf Germany.
We produced this track without ever meeting and from our own home-Studio equipment 😉
Your music interweaves so many different styles and sounds. If you could collaborate with anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
Lex: “This list is way too long to name. But for now I’ll just say 9th Wonder because his beats have this super lush soundscape; Ty Dolla Sign because of his melodies and bops; and trade bars with Little Simz.
For Julien: “i’d like to collaborate with a few good drummers (like Luke Flowers, Nate Smith, or Ariel Tessier for example) : i came from live music, so the ability to build a beat and to play it would be a great advantage for me, to disengage its writing with a Software.
I do really prefer live instruments because the real advantage is to produce more quickly”
For us as the Late Timers, we enjoy collaboration a lot, It is fun and you always learn something. We have the collaboration with Lex, and are open to anyone who we can enjoy making music together with. We have a few more collaboration in our pipeline for 2023, so stay tuned 😉
Greg says: It’s already awesome to collaborate with talented musicians such as Lex, Julien and Mirage de son. In our works we search good vocals and are really open for collabs. If we have the choice, it will probably be an awesome rapper like the legendary Q-Tip
What’s been your favorite musical experience to date?
For Julien: “JAZZ is the answer : the ability of musicians to interact lively and instantaneously with each others is awesome and brilliant.
Music just follows how you shape it, with the instant added value of the other players.
The Late Timers ‘s tracks are based on the same approach of increasing value by cooperating, but with the distance.
Each idea, each sensation, each note, scatch and word have their place in the building of a song : it just takes time to modulate, to insert, to search, to test every solution to send it in the direction that sounds to our heart : this is how we love to do it.”
For Lex: “Anything collaborative becomes one of my favorite musical experiences, including my work with the producer and artist P. Cruz, the mc Jam Young, singer/songwriter Dale Novella, the producers Dirty Chips, and of course The Late Timers. “
For Mirage: “Live music is always the best sensation, interacting with other musicians and the audience directly. But collaborating with great talents in distance and twicking every bits of a track to make it sounds as we want it to be is also fantastic.”
For Greg: “Probably the first day I bought my turntables and made my first scratch haha
my parents were quitesurprised lol”.
Where are you based? Can you tell us how the music scene there has inspired your sound at all?
For Julien: “rock, indie, funk, soul, house, folk, and of course jazz.
But I discovered the electro sound at the end of the nineties, and i loved every good ideas that artists made : Massive Attack, Cinematic Orchestra, DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, Jagga Jazzist, Bugge Wesseltoft, and more…”.
For Lex: “Born and raised in the classic hip-hop mecca that is New York City, so it has been my inspiration and training ground. “
Mirage:” I am a real Labrador of music, I love them all, classic to Hard Techno, the melodies the beats, the sounds.
Greg: The hip hop movement influenced me a lot. DJ premier is, in my opinion, the one who inspired me the most.
