Laura Jones and Gavin Herlihy are DJs from the UK and Ireland respectively. Both their works have started from different tangents, but now their talents intertwine. CLAYTON LIN reports.
Fate has brought Laura Jones and Gavin Herlihy to down under shores. The English-Irish tag team have certainly impressed thus far on their Australian tour.
“We danced a merry dance around each other for a while until one fateful night, one made the other an offer they couldn’t refuse under the seductive pull of a full moon over Hackney,” Jones says. “We’ve been doing remix collaborations over the past 18 months and so it seemed like a natural progression to play some gigs together as well.”
Jones has been rising through the ranks in the DJ Scene, only starting out very recently, as of 2011, and has also found time to carve a niche as a remixer of old dance hits.
“I started off as a vinyl addict heavily digging for underground house and techno,” she says. “Then technology changed and I couldn’t afford to buy records so I started buying more digital music. Now that I’m touring every week, I’ve gone back to buying vinyl again but when I started making music I was feeling my way around the studio making things by instinct. But it wasn’t totally representative of the music I play. Now, I guess my production has evolved to be more representative of my style as DJ, especially on my Visionquest EP.”
Jones has certainly made her mark as a DJ, but it wasn’t long before the remix route came calling.
“It started with our remix of Romanthony’s classic house cut, Let Me Show You Love, and then our friend Matt Tolfrey asked us to remix a track from his album, which led us to remixing the Todd Terry classic, Bounce To The Beat.”
Gavin Herlihy’s trajectory has taken more of a slow curve, having been purveying electronic music since his conversion in 1994 during a pilgrimage to a festival, in which likened EDM to something that sounded like “…the future being beamed down the radio waves, and I’ve been chasing it ever since.”
Herlihy has much to say about how things ebb and flow in the scene: “Technology is the obvious big change. From DJs using vinyl to laptops and USBs, and some in cases back to vinyl. But I think a lesser talked about change is the shift in focus from an obsession with the new to our current obsession with the old. Years ago it was all about having the latest promo or dubplate that no one else had. Now it’s all been about digging out old school gems on discogs.”
Jones and Herlihy are hard at work producing new releases, with Jones unleashing an EP – that serves as a follow up to Visionquest – along with a couple of other remixes, and has a dropped hints that she may be launching her own label in the future. Herlihy has two remixes, under both Decay and New Violence Records labels, an EP under the Dogmatik label, and a couple of secret projects the Irishman isn’t keen to divulge the details of.
At the time of our conversation, Jones and Herlihy had just finished their Perth leg of the tour last Friday at Geisha Bar. The rest of their Australian tour sees them playing to revellers on the East Coast.
