Cosmic Legends back in business (Cosmic Gate interview)
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By Dominic Wren
After listening to the album a few times I can really say that this is straight up fire! After meeting up in Montreal last March, Cosmic Gate humbly kept their word for setting up an interview in the future. So without further of ado, here it is! The Cosmic Legends are back in business!
Before reading the interview, I recommend that you have a listen to album.
Enjoy!
You’ve been playing some of the songs on the album in sets around the world for a little while now, how does it feel to finally release them to the world?
“In all honesty, we were excited to finally release the album! We have been playing a few of the tracks for quite a while as you are saying, and we simply wanted to share the full album with our fans.
A release always is a bit of an anxious moment, very exciting, to get wider reactions from fans and colleagues, the question if will they share our taste, even after so many years it won’t leave us cold, but fortunately the reactions are pretty much awesome, just a great feel for our team and the two of us :)”
With reworked/edited tracks blended with brand new tracks, would you consider this album as a reminder of the past or a start of a new future?
“We tried to basically wrap an album together which stands for what we have been doing in the last two decades, so in musical terms, quite a long time period. We wanted to remix some of our classics, sure write new music, and on top remix tracks that were important for us on the way, tracks that influenced us, like Need To Feel Loved and Lizard. So basically the album is a reminder of where we come from, but in the sound we stand for in 2019, but also its hinting out new horizons, new sounds and structures we will use for new music, which is basically in the pipeline already and waiting for last finishing touches only.”
Your Grammy nomination must’ve sparked many different feelings but what was the first thought that went through your heads for this major accomplishment?
“If you do genre club music like we do, a Grammy certainly is not anything you would ever think about, at least we didn’t, so the whole nomination honestly took us by TOTAL surprise. Still now thinking about it we do not know how it happened to get nominated, nor we are thinking its ever going to happen again, we just enjoyed the fact and the positive irony of happening during our 20 year anniversary, which made it somehow even nicer and appreciated to say the least.”
During the process of creating this album, taking in factor the name suggesting time moving forward, were you guys looking to create new Cosmic Gate sounds or were you looking to continue mastering your traditional sound?
“A new album is always a mix of both. Its the natural signature sound we do, basically our style, independent if it was back in the Hardtrance days or now with the more progressive sound, a sound which on top of that, always very natural gets upgraded and pushed forward by us. Breaking boundaries, bring in new influences and ideas, this happens slowly from single to single, remix to remix, its not big changes at first, but when about two years have passed and a new album is done, we hear the small differences that step by step make quite a difference in the sound and style of a new album. And this is a good thing, in general we feel art has to develop and move forward, on top speaking for ourselves, we literally would be bored to do the same sound over and over again. in the end the album title was a bit of a statement from our side, about our way of handling things, our thinking about music, pretty much about the way we work.”
Out of the whole album, which song has the most impact on you guys and why?
“Every single song of the album is special to us, that’s why they are on this album. A lot of history, memories, stories are behind every track, so its kind of impossible for us to pick one and put it above others”
If you could describe the album in one word, what would it be?
“COSMICMOTHERFKNGATE :-D”
Emma Hewitt has two features on the album, she undoubtedly brings a sort of personalized voice to fit the Cosmic Gate sound, but could you guys explain why her voice is a sort of perfect fit for your tracks?
“To describe emotions and feeling is a pretty hard thing to do, but it seems indeed that Emma’s voice and our sound combined, seems to have a lot of magic for a lot of listeners. As said before sometimes things just fall into places, simply work well together, and so sure is our collaborations with Emma...
Now being 20 years into this incredible run, do you guys think your sound has progressed over the years?
“We pretty much touched this subject before basically, so you know we indeed feel our sound did progress a lot during the 20 years. To maybe turn things around a bit, imagine we would basically sound the same like 20 years ago, how poor, let alone from an artistic point, would this be? How could we even not musically develop in this fast pace changing world, as growing personalities that have the privilege to travel the globe and meet people from different cultures and backgrounds? But to be honest, we feel a lot of music in the trance world still sounds a lot like 20 years ago, and there is nothing wrong with that, music always turns in circles, but for us it would feel like we’ve been there and done that, where is our personal fun? We are far from making music unlike anyone else, but we love change and new influences, we like the challenge to push boundaries, the natural sound of cosmic gate, our signature handwriting no matter what will always be there...”
Shall we be expecting another project soon? ;)
“Absolutely :) as mentioned before, new music is already in the pipeline, FEBN was a current reflection of our past and present, we continue pushing our productions and sets towards new horizons in the future”.
There you have it ravers! These guys may have been around for 20 years but I feel like they are going to pull out 20 more outstanding years. Nic & Bossi are some of the realist personalities in the industry, which is absolutely beautiful to see and I hope that they stick around for 20 more years.
If you haven’t checked out the album yet I highly recommend you do! It’s really worthwhile even if you’re not big into the trance scene!
