Coming to Luxembourg - 'We Have Band', Sam has interview

The second edition of the Koll An Aktioun festival in Martelange takes place this weekend with 23 bands performing over 3 stages in the Belgian bordered town. 

Both local and international act will be featured but he highlight of the festival is undoubtedly the appearance of We Have Band, The English alt-electro group recently released a new EP, The Woods, and Darren Bancroft took some time to talk to Sam Steen ahead of their arrival.

We Have Band have always done a lot of gigs around Germany & mainland Europe, what is it about the band that has struck a chord with that audience?

Well we were signed to a French label, for our first three albums we were signed to Naïve Records, we had a couple of early songs on the Kitsuné compilations so I think that kind of, in terms of the general continental Europe vibe, helped us a lot, and then we just played here quite a lot! I always think Germany, with electronic music, you know they really seemed to embrace us.

You had been working with Naïve Records is that still happening?

We released three albums with them and we had a three album deal so at the moment we’re kind of free (to do what we want), we just released an EP which we haven’t released ourselves it’s come out through Republic Of Music, our management company and they’re also distributors so it’s a great situation where they can say y’know, “we manage you but we also distribute so you can put something out and everyone in the world can have it and it can be out right now.”

We’ve done the EP thing before in a kind of extended single way but never as a stand-alone piece of music. I think Ep’s have had a bit of a resurgence really, it’s just a great thing, you can have four or five songs and you can just be like, “yeah these songs are going to come out now”, I think the album format is obviously still fantastic and we love the album format but there’s something quite nice about the Ep if you’re in a transition phase or at the beginning of something or at the end of something, it’s a really nice thing to do.

As a band who do a lot of remixes, what is it like when someone else remixes your music?

It’s always quite funny when it comes back… I think for us the more, the further away it is from our original I think is the most exciting. But I think it’s quite difficult to remix our stuff because it’s already quite dance focussed so actually the weirdest remixes we get are the ones that move away from that y’know that become something really obscure or much slower

Have you been to Luxembourg before & are you looking forward to the festival?

It actually, genuinely really is a really good thing to get Luxembourg because we’ve only been once before, I think it was in 2009, so most places, you know it’s always exciting to go to a new place but actually when I saw Luxembourg on the schedule I was like oh yeah that’s pretty cool I don’t know that much about Luxembourg, Luxembourg will be really special, and all of us are saying it! Thomas, Dede&myself have been but our drummer and our sound man have not been to Luxembourg before so it’s going to be really nice, we’re very much looking forward to it.

We Have Band performs this Sunday at 9:15pm at the Koll An Aktioun festival in Martelange, for more information go to kollanaktioun.lu

The Woods EP is out now, check out their website: www.wehaveband.com

Hear the interview in full by Sam Steen below:

Sam's Scene!

Read Sam's other articles in his very own dossier on wort.lu : Sam's Scene!_________________________________________________________

Sam Steen on ARA City Radio

You can catch Sam in his "Freshly Squeezed Breakfast Show" on ARA City Radio every weekday morning from 6-9:30am. For more info visit the website: www.aracityradio.com_________________________________________________________

Don't miss the news – sign up to receive the  wort.lu newsletter in English  delivered to your inbox six days a week.