After a year in the studio, Hotknife vs Mister Tee have emerged with
their self-titled debut album of 12 tracks that you’ll want to put into
heavy rotation. Fusing elements of disco, funk, soul, and EDM, they
describe their singular sound as “electro soul for the masses.” It is
the kind of music that not only makes you want to get up and dance
but also get all your friends up to dance with you.

In this interview spotlight, I chat with the duo about their latest project, challenges, technology and more.

Full Q&A along with links and music below.

Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)

We are from Glasgow, Scotland and we’d call our music ‘Electro-Soul’ – a mix of Disco, House, Techno, Funk and Soul, keeping to one style is always an issue for us, we mix live vocals, guitar and bass with electronic elements to achieve our primary goal of getting yo ass up on the dance floor.

What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to keep going?

I’ve been a professional musician and studio engineer for a number of years and as “Hotknife’ I’m finally making the music I love, not just to pay the bills 🙂 Mister Tee was a initially a customer at my studio and upon hearing those soulful vocals I knew I had to work with him and its really the first time I’ve had songwriting partnership that we can’t off the creative ‘tap’ – taking time out to promote and not write together is the difficult bit !

How is this new release different than previous ones? Were you trying to accomplish anything specific?

This is our first album and we took the opportunity to self title it for that reason, but it certainly won’t be the last, watch this space…

Name one or two challenges you face as an indie musician in this oversaturated, digital music age? How has technology helped you (since we know it does help)?

In order to really cut through the crowd I think being yourself is number one, in past projects I’ve tried to follow trends/ markets but now I’ve come full circle in the realisation that your USP is you ! Having always straddled both dance music and live music, merging both together via computer production and adding guitar and bass myself allows me to create the ‘band’ and streamlines the songwriting process that I believe is really the most important thing in music. I don’t need to worry about who’s going to show up to band practice etc or deal with inevitable  band politics, technology helps me concentrate on what’s important, the songs.

What was the last song you listened to?

‘The Climax Blues Band – Couldn’t Get it Right’ – classic feel good 70’s funk

Which do you prefer? Vinyl? CDs? MP3s?

I Love Vinyl and DJ’d it for many years (I have over 2500 in my flat), what I love is the experience of putting the needle on the record but as a sound engineer I don’t necessarily think it’s a ‘better’ sound (who really wants all those crackles and pops?), It’s the fact that it’s the original masters on there. Too many CD re-releases have been remastered and I believe that takes away from how the tracks should  have really sounded. Take The Beatles ‘Revolution’ for example, it sounds fat as hell on records and would rock any party but the 90’s remaster has had all the bass frequency stripped out, a great shame in my opinion.

How about this one…. Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?

I find Apple Music/ iTunes  too unnecessarily  demanding with passwords, 2 factor authentication and the like (I’m not trying to open a bank vault 🙂 so I have recently switched to Spotify. Spotify is far more aimed at artists with stats on Monthly Listeners and Play Counts etc. so it gets my vote.

Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?

All links to all things ‘Hotknife’ can be found on my webpage ‘www.hotknifeshaus.com‘ and our new album ‘Hotknife Vs. Mister Tee’ is available on all platforms

Anything else before we sign off?

We’d love for you to give our record a spin, available on all platforms and much respect to middle Tennessee music for all your great work in championing new music !