After releasing their debut album Down To Earth over seven years ago, Flight Facilities have made a worthy return in FOREVER…
Sydney producer duo Flight Facilities (made up of Hugo Gruzman and Jimmy Lyell) have become a mainstay in the Aussie music scene since their debut Down To Earth in 2014, their hybrid blends of dance helping to maintain a salient presence in the dance sphere. Over the years they’ve maintained that energy, their renowned live shows and numerous singles helping to keep them firmly in the public eye. But today they’ve made a proper return, releasing their second studio album FOREVER, and they don’t disappoint.
The 11-track effort sees the duo double down on their EDM roots, exploring the vast history of dance music and culture. From the bustling Chicago house on ‘Move’ to the electro influences on ‘The Ghost’ and the timelessness of the title track featuring Georgia from Broods, the album as a whole is basically a love letter to dance music, all the while outlining where the Flight Facilities boys have been, are and going.
We caught up with the Sydney duo to talk the new album, their plans for live shows and of course, the iconic South Dowling sandwiches. Check it below.
It’s all happening for you right now! How does it feel to be in that pre-album release period again, after so long?
Jimmy: It actually feels really weird because we’ve waited for so long and have had a global pandemic in the middle of it all. But it also feels like there’s light at the end of the tunnel from all different directions. So that’s pretty cool.
The last time you guys put out a body of work of this magnitude the world was way different. How have you changed along the way?
Hugo: I would say that the difference is that we’ve tried to keep our appreciation for what we’ve always done and for why people like us. And then also just trying to make sure that we don’t deliver the same shit twice [laughs].
It’s about trying to balance those two things and using your experiences to do that. You end up realising that people enjoy the aspects you bring to the music in live shows and new songs, but then you also appreciate why they got on the bus in the first place. So it’s about trying to make sure there’s a balance between old and new.
Is that why it took you so long to make this album? To make sure you weren’t delivering the same thing twice?
Jimmy: It’s because we’re slow [laughs].
Hugo: I mean, there were two years that you can write off for a pretty good reason [laughs]. But the rest of the time we just spent a lot of time writing and we didn’t really look at what we had. And then, with some of the demos, we would think about them in the same way we’d think about the other songs.
We’d have them for long enough and we still wouldn’t mind listening to them. When that’s the case there’s a good chance that other people will find it good to listen to as well. So you put the time and effort into those songs because they’ll still sound good, even after however many years of being a demo.
Jimmy: We’re slow, but we’re really careful with our craft and we really love doing it. So people still appreciate the product when it comes out. And until that gets too much for them and they’re saying “You guys are taking too long for this quality of work,” then we’ll probably change our ways.
But until that happens, we’re happy with our process, as slow as it is. And I think an upside to it is it gives us longevity in the market, a market that really flips and forgets people quite quickly. So we’ve been really lucky in that instance.
Now to dip into the tracklisting. What immediately jumped out at me upon first glance was how collab-heavy it was, which was similar to 2014’s ‘Down to Earth.’ What draws you to collaborations so hard?
Jimmy: We can’t sing [laughs].
Hugo: That’s definitely one of the big ones [laughs]. The other thing is that it means our songs keep the basis of what our style is, but we also get different melodies throughout. I think there’s a propensity for artists to get into the same melodies or same types of songs if it’s just them writing it all. So we don’t really mind how many people we bring in to help us make a song, so long as it winds up being good.
And using other artists to help you do it is always the best way to go about it. And I know that there are people who are purists about their art and wanna make sure that they’re the only ones to write or produce it all, but that’s just never been us.
Jimmy: We also understand that our project only goes so far without working with extremely talented people. And we feel like those people that we’ve worked with have boosted our project by light years.
Hugo: We’d still be doing mashups otherwise [laughs].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEl6Onr4VKg
In pulling together all of these different artists, you’ve amassed quite a wide musical range on ‘FOREVER.’ Even though you cover house, pop, jazz and so on, was there a through-line you were trying to achieve in the track-listing?
Hugo: I reckon we had our bookends for where we knew we had to be and then everything else in between had to make sense. There were a lot of things that didn’t make it in, which we would’ve still been really happy to put out, but it just didn’t fit congruently with the album.
So all of this is just a snapshot of the stuff that we think fits well together. And there is other stuff that probably will come out once it’s got a place to fit with a bunch of other ones.
Jimmy: Yeah and like Hugo opened this interview with, Flight Facilities is about progression of the project and sound, but also staying true to where we’ve been. So our objective with this record was obviously to go beyond the boundaries, but also keep the reasons that people are listening and have become fans over the years. So we hope we’ve done that.
You’ve said you were taking a “concerted delve into the previously untouched niches and eras of dance.” What eras were you most trying to capture and how have all of them influenced the Flight Facilities sound as a whole?
Hugo: I could say ‘Move’ was nineties. ‘FOREVER’ has elements of 2008 EDM, and then ‘The Ghost’ has aspects of that 2013 techno era. Thats three I can think of just off the top of my head. We’ve explored them all on our own terms and in the studio, but we haven’t necessarily shown it to people/ Sometimes we’ll just go super hard on a genre and be like “We cannot put this out right now” [laughs].
Jimmy: We also went analogue in a gear and sound sense. So for this record, we went forward in a sound concept, but backward in the specific era of sonics. So it was a really good mixture of the two things colliding, and I’m really proud of those two elements and its really nice to reference a Chicago house sound with ‘Move’ and then actually play it with an analogue synthesiser.
Hugo: Definitely. I guess there were also conscious decisions made so they didn’t sound too authentic as well, so that it would work.
Jimmy: Yeah, it can become boring when that’s the case. It becomes too much of the same and Hugo and I have made this project to make juxtaposing things come together in an unusual way, much the same as his and my personality. But yeah, that’s definitely what we wanted to achieve. And we’re really happy that we got there in our own minds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yuy65JPprM
I also wanna touch on your upcoming tour and your Airfields show. How did you decide on the right way to return to the live show circuit? And why did you go so hard for Sydney?
Jimmy: We haven’t played Sydney properly in a long time. Sydney kind of made us in the beginning. So we always feel like we owe Sydney something and we haven’t given it anything for a long time.
And Sydney has been hurting pretty badly recently, and it deserves something big and we obviously wanted to do something that was outdoors, for safety’s sake of course. But yeah, it was just a no brainer.
Hugo: That’s where the origins are of our project and its nice to go back there and kind of make a bit of a statement. And it’s also good to just give people something to forget about the rest.
Jimmy: And for the rest of the tour we’ve been wondering “When is the right time? What do we do?” And there was so much thought, so much deliberation, and the inability to make informed decisions with the information that we had, like everyone at the moment, so we just went for it.
There seems to be a new event popping up every day now, it feels like that excitement of festival season is finally back. How do you think this renaissance we’re having is going to affect the Sydney and Aussie dance scenes as a whole?
Hugo: I hope the culture of Sydney and Aussie music comes back with a vengeance. It was something that created us in 2008, because there was such a strong culture behind the music scene and DJs. And there were so many venues that were always open late and there were always things to do. And since then it’s sort of dwindled, but we were lucky to surf that wave into a higher tier of live performance.
So I really hope that it builds to a point where there are the same opportunities for the younger generation. So that the next Flight Facilities have their chance to exist in that type of environment, because it’s so good for making music.
Jimmy: Yeah. And you said it best with the word “Renaissance,” because out of every hard time in history, and a global pandemic definitely is in that category, things are born and new energy comes. You can definitely feel it, that something new is coming and a new wave of music, especially electronic, is coming.
And even being here in Sydney, just after the lockdown ending, there’s a really good energy on the streets.
Now, I’d get roasted in the LWA office if I didn’t touch on South Dowling Sandwiches. For our readers who are yet to experience a ‘Hugo’ or ‘Jimmy’ sandwich, can you give them a quick teaser as to what they’re missing out on?
Hugo: Just a taste explosion! One of the best sandwich joints in Sydney and we cannot recommend it highly enough, to go there and get the ‘Hugo.’
Jimmy: [laughs] No, no, the ‘Jimmy’ is way better! It’s just got onion but you don’t need to be scared of that.
The fact that you’ve become such a mainstay of an establishment like South Dowling nicely mirrors your place in the Sydney dance scene. Being that you’ve been doing this for a while, how have you observed the scene to have changed around you, and how do you see it progressing?
Hugo: We’ve seen plenty of genres come and go, but the music that we listen to has always superseded those. It’s hard not to get sucked into them because we have taken a lot of influence from them.
So you’ve almost got to take what you can define as the timeless pieces of those genres and include them in your own music, because there’s such a tendency to make something of that genre and then become forever associated with it. So I guess where we were lucky was that we were just trying to make stuff that was pop music.
And we were listening to stuff that was 10 to 30 years old to find our references that had still survived. And that wasnt really intentional, its just that we like that music. And as a result, it just means that it gives it a longer shelf-life, because you’re not tied down to any time.
Like we were listening to pretty heavy electro in 2005 to 2007. That whole genre has sort of disappeared and it was an amazing scene to be a part of, but its not a sound that you can play anymore.
So it wasn’t intentional, but that was just our taste, and it just so happens that we’ve managed to avoid being thrown out with any sort of trends.
You said that the best way to describe this album is a “combination of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.” Can you give us a one word summary for each of those?
Jimmy: I think we can answer that in songs.
Hugo: Definitely. I would say where we’ve been is ‘Heavy,’ which will be the next single, and I think that’s a good example of where we started. Because theres a lot of similarities between that single and ‘Crave You’, which was intentionally done to show the fans what our roots were and to make sure that we still stayed true to them. And where we are…
Jimmy: ‘Stay!’
Hugo: Yeah ‘Stay.’ But even then a part of that makes me go back a few years. I don’t know necessarily where we are now, because you put out the album and it’s full of songs that you might’ve made two years ago.
Jimmy: Where we’re going is probably ‘Lights Up.’ We’ve always loved that sound, but we never thought it would be a mainstay for Flight Facilities. So I’d love to make another song like that, given the right elements in the equation. So that would be where we’re going, but where are we?
Hugo: I don’t know hey. I think the best example of all three is ‘FOREVER’, because its’ got the angelic voice of Georgia from Broods which is kind of the formula we started with, a nice female vocal. The where we are aspect is probably that it’s a bit more dancey. And then the analog part to it is we’re going.
So that song from beginning to end is a progression of where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going, along with the musical phases we’ve gone through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbDprMno3bo
Lastly, can we expect a post-album visit to South Dowling?
Jimmy: A hundred percent, we’ll do a little listening lunch party there [laughs].
Hugo: I think I’ll be there anyway. If you hang out there long enough you’re going to see one of us no matter what, any time of year.
Jimmy: We’ll probably end up serving you there at some stage [laughs].
Flight Facilities’ new album ‘FOREVER’ is out now. You can buy/stream it here. You can also cop tickets to their upcoming Aussie tour here.
