Hours before their performance at Boiler Room x Ballantine’s True Music finale in the Port of Valencia, I got the chance to sit down with Lawrence and Lenny, two of the five brothers from the legendary Octave One. We chatted a little about the early days of Techno in Detroit, the scene today and their unique creative process that has made generations of clubbers dance since 1989.

Before you start reading their answers to my questions, allow me to say it was hands-down one of my favorite interviews in 9 years of getting to meet my musical heroes and asking them questions. Lenny and Lawrence were hilarious, candid, insightful but most of all extremely humble and still as passionate about making music as they were nearly three decades ago when it all started.

You’re actual brothers, and apart from your live performance, it’s all five of you that work together. What’s that like?

Lenny: You know, we disagree all the time. You try not to be too attached to anything, and you try to be open. That really helps the process. Just because you think you’re a genius, doesn’t mean that the other four brothers are gonna think you’re a genius man. So, it definitely keeps you grounded, and also it’s good to have another set of ears, especially when you’re making music, because you might be working on something man, for like weeks and weeks and weeks, and you let somebody hear it and they go “man, that’s out of key”, and this and that. You might be mad, but you also look at it from another perspective. You’re like, I guess you’re right! You learn that over the years. You have to trust the other person, and that’s what it’s really all about.

What’s one party or event that you look back fondly on today?

Lawrence: Marty Barnes and Jay Denham were our next door neighbors, and one day we just went over and other friends came through like Derrick May. Carl Craig’s sister lived upstairs in the same apartment building too. We ended up jammin and recording something really special.

Lenny: It’s somewhere, I don’t know where it is. I think we gave it to Derrick and it never resurfaced from there. Derrick might have it somewhere man! That was the funnest days, we were just making music and we didn’t think about it coming out, we were just making music.

So, the big question always is: digital or analog? What’s your take?

Lenny: Seriously, it’s everything. We’ve been using digital instruments and analog instruments from the beginning of our careers. A lot of people associate hardware with being analog, which is not. Analog is a way of sound being made, but it’s not always necessarily hardware. Like, the 909 is digital and analog at the same time. So, it’s just people not understanding the differences.

Really, music is everything, especially electronic music. I mean, it’s electronic music man, so you use electronics, analog electronics, digital electronics, so for us, whatever fits the bill at that time will be used.

Your musical structure and composition doesn’t always stay in the rigid four-on-the-floor format we’re used to hearing, especially from Detroit-style Techno. How would you say you arrange your productions?

Lenny: For us, it’s just how we think of music. We really get bored easily, so it’s hard for us to just do a track with these slow builds. We appreciate those tracks, big time, and the actual musicians who do that. We don’t have that gift. Ours is, we kinda think, even when we’re doing a track, we kinda think kinda like a song.

But you know, it’s a gift and a curse, it helps us when we’re structuring things. Like, let’s say a lot of people can gravitate to, but when we’re trying to do a straight dance 4-cut, sometimes we need to let stuff ride, but just can’t.

We can appreciate other people’s records, but it’s hard for us to do that when we’re making it.

I’m sure you saw the recent video of an EDM artist at a big festival’s cazy live performance. How do you feel about EDM being much bigger than Techno and your type of music in the US, where you’re from, but Techno being bigger in other places around the world like Europe?

Yeah, we saw that. It’s very commercial. We’d never play like that. Never, nah nah *chuckles*

In the US, the scene is so structured. Even when they brought EDM in, it basically fell into the structure that was already there. They really had to do songs, songs with vocalists, and even without vocalists, it’s structured in such a manner that’s so rigid that it fits the US market. We were doing rebel music, we were always doing something that was different. We were doing something that was contrary to radio. That was actually part of why we were making this music. We weren’t making radio music. It was designed to be anti-radio, EDM was not designed that way. It was designed to be radio-friendly, and for the masses. So, you understand why it did so well in the US, because record labels could understand it, and say “oh, we could put money behind that, this structure we already understand”

Have you heard anything about Beirut? Would you wanna go there soon?

Playing in Beirut would be cool man!

Octave One LIVE at the Boiler Room x Ballantine’s True Music Valencia Finale