Two childhood friends making music together. That is the story behind the synthwave duo Tom Selica. In this interview we talk about making music, plans for the future and the vision of these two mysterious men about the contemporary synthwave scene.
Hi guys, how did you meet?
We are childhood friends. We met in elementary school and have more or less grown up together. We've enjoyed being in bands together over the years and both found a genuine interest in the aesthetic and the nostalgia. This project started as a mad (and reckless) experiment in a forgotten graveyard, late one night. Now, we are bound as a single conduit for which we perform Tom Selica’s bidding.
What was the reason for you to choose Tom Selica as an artist name?
When you summon paranormal entities from beyond our dimension, you don't really get a choice in what their name is, unfortunately. You kinda just have to go along with what they tell you.
When working together in the studio, how goes the process for creating a new song?
It really depends. Often times, one of us will have the skeleton of a song written out. From there, we'll each keep adding our own spice to it until we have something we both enjoy. The key for us is to get the song written before anything. After that we get to have fun with sound design and tying parts together, trying different things and seeing what will sound the best. Each song we write together we learn a bit more about the other guy and improve our collaboration skills along the way. And satiate Tom's thirst for fat, funky beats.
After listening to the song Last Stop I was wondering which of you is such a good guitar player?
Well, we can't really talk about specific names or anything too much, such is the contract we have with Selly (that's what we lovingly call the aforementioned paranormal entity from another dimension). What we CAN say is that the dude who plays talkbox isn't playing guitar, and the guy playing guitar isn’t playing talkbox. Clear as mud? Fantastic.
What other equipment do you use in your studio?
Along with guitar, we try to give a little more flavor to our sound with bass. But we get a ton of use out of Serum, it's very intuitive and streamlined. Plus it sounds great. Talkbox is played with the Yamaha DX100 and the Roland Alpha Juno on our earlier stuff. Other than that, we just picked up a Boog that we're really excited to start incorporating into the mix.
Can you tell us something about your current project(s) and future plans?
Sure! We currently have a three song EP that just went to mastering. It's a re-imagining of our very first song, Fright Night. All three songs seamlessly blend into each other, so it's basically a 12+ minute long ballad. It's something we've never tried before and we're really interested to see what people think, can't wait to share it!
Synthwave is a growing musical subgenre, with for instance more synthwave soundtracks in video games? Where do you think synthwave will be going for the next couple of years?
Hopefully, it continues to be a strong go-to sound for movie soundtracks, video games, etc. and finds more exposure there. It seems to find a lot of traction in those arenas. More importantly though, we'd like to see synthwave and its related sub-genres branch a bit more, and find even more influence in modern sounds and types of music. As an example, there are lots of pop producers that adopt synthwave-type sounds and tones for their tracks, and that sort of thing reinforces that vibe with audiences who might not be familiar with this music. That sort of cross pollination and influence can only be good for the scene, in our eyes. We hope that we as a community can move towards continued experimentation, and push the boundaries of what this genre can become in a sonic sense.
And finally any last words to the Dutch synthwave community?
There is a whole lot more Tom Selica coming very soon, and we can't wait to grow and share more of our musical journey. Again, new EP is dropping very soon, and after that we have a couple more projects in the hopper we haven't announced yet. Stay tuned and thank you for your support!
Thank you guys and I look forward to your new EP!
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