Interview | Soul Clap

People have disputed me on this point, but deep house went through a serious downturn in the States around 2007. Electro took off and dubstep was waiting in the wings to become the genres of choice amongst a more youthful club-going public. Soul Clap's Charlie Levine and Eli Goldstein will back me up here. Catching up with them in Detroit over Memorial Day weekend as they wrapped up the tail end of their marathon DJ-KiCKS tour with brothers-in-deep-house-arms Wolf + Lamb, I talked with the Boston duo about what it's like partying in their hometown, the recent success they've been having and how sexy house is seeing a big resurgence.

 

Is this your first time here at Movement?

Charlie Levine: This is our fourth or fifth year attending the festival, but this is our first year performing. I’m really excited; it’s my favorite weekend of the year.

It’s definitely the perfect way to kick off the festival season. Do you have a lot more things like this planned for the summer?

Eli Goldstein: Well, we’re playing Glastonbury in the U.K., Garden Festival in Croatia, Sonar in Barcelona and Welcome to the Future, outside of Amsterdam.

So the short answer is yes?

CL: Oh, and Burning Man. 

And then Burning Man? Right on. I have a couple buddies who are diehard burners. You may have to rethink which is your favorite weekend of the season after that.

CL: It can be our favorite week. 

So with this and all your touring, how does it compare to clubbing in Boston?

CL: I don’t think there’s any comparison between what we’re doing and anything in Boston.

So you’re a one-of-a-kind thing up there.

EG: Well, there’s our homie Tanner Ross and we have a lot of friends who are DJs there. There are a lot of really small, intimate after-hours that have built up there over the past 10 years from our group. But just like a lot of cities in the U.S., the clubs close at two so it’s very underground and very small.

CL: It’s very funny to think back to the beginning of when our whirlwind of touring was going on. We’d come back from a weekend somewhere, like Amsterdam or Berlin and try to do a show and it’d be a total bust. We’d come from all this glory and insanity to just the dive bar scene in Boston. It’s just really wild, they’re like parallel universes. 

How’d the whole Soul Clap thing evolve?

CL: I think when we forged our relationship with Wolf + Lamb, that’s really when everything took off on a grand scale. But we were working very organically with a label called Air Drop for the first few years. We helped them get off the ground and they release our first records. You know, we were generating a small buzz, but when we joined with Wolf + Lamb, I think that’s when we really discovered our sound and hit that stride. It was very much a kindred spirit connection. They had an agenda and a more historic sound. We were very much aligned with that.

What about you two, how’d the connection start there?

EG: At the parking lot of a rave. 

CL: Yeah, we met raving. We’re rave babies. We had a mutual friend who went to my high school. He was like, Eli deejays, Charlie deejays, and we were like, oh shit, I know you from raving. And we just started sharing a record collection. We formed Soul Clap in 2001, but we’ve known each other since ’97. 

How did your sound come together?

EG: Just years and years of experimenting.

CL: To survive in Boston you had to play anything that would come your way, be that a wedding or a private event, a hip-hop club or a dancehall night. So we’re doing these other nights professionally, with the dream of doing electronic music the whole time, and finding along the way that by fusing everything together we became very interesting.