Touching Bass: Bodhi

Luke Welsby and Olly Howells make up deep house twosome Bodhi. Hailing from Cardiff, their sound is a wonderful mish-mash of influences from as far flung as Motown and funk. They’ve made a habit of flipping pop star hooks into fluid house jams and also made appearances on labels like Aussie imprint Future Classic. While battling with some limp Wi-Fi, we chatted about Glastonbury, sampling basketballs and Wales before they put together an hour mix for Touching Bass.

YNTHT: How’s it going guys, what have you been getting up to?

Bodhi: Yeah man, it’s been going well. Obviously we just had the release out on Future Classic with “Imperfection”. We’ve just been making tunes and doing gigs to support that. It’s out on vinyl and digital so we’re super excited about it.

I read in a previous interview that you guys like to use a lot of percussion. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever sampled?

We did a session where we sampled us bouncing some basketballs. We played with bubble wrap and literally just set up a mic in the middle of the room and recorded anything we could find really. Like, we had an empty can of Red Stripe and then layered that on top of a snare and it sounded really cool.

How much time do you spend on sampling?

More recently it’s become more important and we’ve been gathering more samples. Even things like speaking out of a window or other ambient sounds. It gives it more of a natural landscape to work from. We’ve got this release coming out on Ten Thousand Yen and we’ve gone quite heavy on the sampling with that, centres heavily around cowbells.

Great. I heard you popped your Glasto cherry this year too?

Yeah, first time. It was quite an experience because its such an overwhelming festival. We definitely enjoyed it. I think apart from DJing ourselves, the best bit was listening to Carl Craig.

There’s Stone Circle on the hill as well. We spent the morning there and watched the sun come up. Things got a little bit weird towards the end. It was getting to that time around 6am and we just landed ourselves in the middle of chaos. We were really lucky to only have a little rain.

Is Cardiff a rainy spot?

Think it’s just as bad as anywhere in the UK to be honest.

What’s your set up like at the moment?

It’s quite a basic bedroom set up at the moment. We’ve got a set of KRKs, a MIDI keyboard and some MIDI pads. We recently bought a Yamaha DX7. We’re just slowly expanding with hardware and trying to stray away from dealing completely ‘in the box’.

Ha. One of my tracks from you both is “Don’t You Know”, how did you go about making that track?

That was made a few years ago actually. We didn’t really rate it that highly to be honest but I’m surprised you brought it up because it’s one of our really early tracks.

What about future releases then? What have you got coming up?

We’ve got the release in December for Ten Thousand Yen. We’re really looking forward to that one because it’s more dance floor orientated and a little bit different to what we’ve been doing. We’re also just readying ourselves for next year. We want to progress on what we’re doing at the moment and play as many shows as we can. We want to get out to America at some point and do a couple of collaborations with people.

Bodhi are readying their next release via Ten Thousand Yen. Keep up to date with their movements via Facebook and Twitter.

TRACKLIST

Kon - Love Youx (Don't)

Lukas - Narwhals

Blured - Everybody Knows

Max Graef - Ignorance Is Bliss

Chesus feat. Kofi Tarris - Monster

Bicep - Satisfy

Kry Wolf - Nightmode (Pedestrian Remix)

Daniel Avery - Water Jump

Ejeca - Music Sounds Better With a 303

Dense & Pika - Colt

Bodhi - No More

Alex Metric & Jacques Lu Cont - Safe With You (Marcus Marr Unsafe Remix)

Ten Walls - Gotham

The Organ Grinder - Changes All The Time

Doc Daneeka feat. Ratcatcher - Walk On In

Sampha - Without (Bodhi Remix)

Maribou State - Moon Circles

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