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The restaurant bar at the top of King Street holds it weekly ‘Room late’ series every weekend with resident DJs - Synthia.
Synthia are our Saturday resident DJ's in Manchester.
Synthia are an electronic music duo from Leeds, UK who currently specialise in making some surreal and straight up, electronic dance music. They enjoy using original synthesizers and pieces of found sounds as well as using retro forms of beats and percussive rhythms all forming to create an amalgamation of genre and influence.
Synthia is Tracker05 aka Gus paterson, having famed past through his Oxford D+B roots and progressing his electronic composition through various forms of software, began creating more organic forms of electronic music.
Average White Boy aka Matt Hope, formed his roots through his genre busting approach to DJ performances and his degree level influence to his electronica production, Synthia follows Average's last project being his 2005 album, 'Domestic Sporadic'.
Their influences and similarites have been linked to popular acts as Mylo/Daft Punk/James Holden/Bent and they are increasingly being cited as forming a new kind of genre bridge between dance music for clubs and dance music for listening. The missing link between French-styled disco and German techno with a British crest of developed creative consiousness.
Synthia continue to DJ and play live in and around the Leeds plus various gigs around the UK.
1. For the unacquainted, who are Synthia - Synthia are two men Angus Paterson and Matthew Hope who love making all types of electronic Music. The name itself comes about from the music being its own entity – like a person with its own identity, we thought it would be interesting to give this entity a feminine gender and twist it with a reference to the varied use of synthesisers in our music.
How long have you been together, has it always been a duo?
We have now been working as a duo for 3 years, although it has not always been this way. Both of us have been making music independently for a long time producing tracks that pretty much span a wide array of genre and subtle styles. This is something which established our working relationship and allows us to approach our projects from different perspectives and both act as catalysts for each others creativity.
How did you all meet?
Initially it was probably at a house party but I can’t really remember talking much sense. Matt was Living with a uni mate of mine and we just got chatting on evening over a cup of tea and some vinyl listening and realised how much we had in common we became best mates and now live together-people often mistake us for brothers or twins-we sometimes just say ‘yeah we are’, our birthdays are only two days apart, so we kinda guess it was meant to be. Since then we have been djing together constantly for Room Lounge / restaurants UK as well as a stint at a 1 release record label (homemade recordings) to now, a fully blossomed creative partnership.
2. Who influenced you most - and who do you think is most influential today?
Our influences are best not to be realised, I find myself being influenced by anything, not just something that is music or sounds, I think, in such a modern world where cultural beliefs and political messages are scattered globally every second of the day in every different form imaginable its wrong to pinpoint just one or two factors, we are no longer in the times of obviousness where people only watch tv at night, and work in the day, people do whatever whenever – and in turn they think whatever when ever and in turn they create whatever whenever. This is especially evident being in a city environment with all types of noises, sounds and music all the time. It would be unfair to name a few miniscule contributions to vast sum that influences our creative approach, designated style and musical character. Or we could say just what you wanna hear that our influences are daft punk, bent, luke vibert and various significant others.
3. How did you get and how long have you been involved in electro/Synthia? - at what age/time did you think 'electro/music is my calling'?
1981- we were born for electro although we don’t just make that!! Synthia - Is a guise that we can use to make anything we want, we tend to not concentrate on genre/scenes/or movements, just good music.
4. What do you believe to be the essence of electro and how do you feel Synthia communicates this?
It’s just a type of music made from electronic instruments. We use synthesizers! They are electronic. That makes us well electro!!
5. What attracts you to a DJ collective such as yourselves?
The ability to create and manipulate tracks on a laptop as opposed to instruments? We do use instruments, though we concern ourselves more with the outcome of the produced music rather than, say, the performance of a / our band on stage, if we knew people who played all the instruments’ that we like to involve in our work and the way we use them, then we would have a band --- but were not gonna spend our time looking for those people when we could just get on with writing the way we do. This is something we have found ourselves doing so we don’t see a reason to change?
6. Are synthia playing any gigs soon?
Yes!, were playing at unity day soon - were hosting a tent between 12-4pm (irration tent) including the performances of some beautiful friends of ours like Prod, Semi-squared, sounds of the Baskervilles and Tarentum.
7. Do you believe that the electro 'scene' [for want of a better word], in Leeds is confused? or is it thriving?
Even though there is a lot of electro influenced music around at the moment, I’m pretty sure the electro scene finished years ago. What we have now is a lot of crossover music, bands, and acts that use elements of electro. I think putting things in genres and creating fashions for each makes things complicated. I wish the old unity and vibe of the 80s would come back as I was a toddler in the early 80s a bit young to do a headspin back then .
Are clubs like Mission and Space only outlets for commercial electro that will persuade the punters to pay £12 for entry?
No there are loads,
Do you think that at some point you might have to compromise the original premise of the band, to truly succeed?
The reason why we are being noticed globally is because we do not compromise the original premise of the band—also we don’t hold things too precious --- it’s a massive mistake to make in the modern music industry.
10. Why should people get involved with Synthia and listen to your musical expression?
We’d rather not answer that as we want people to ‘find ‘ our music for themselves—you don’t have to ‘get involved’ you can just take it or leave it---its not politics ,its not culture, its just music.
11. What is it that sets Synthia apart from the rest? In short, why the hell should we listen to you?
We only know of a handful of people making music the way we do the world over, most of them are not on any record labels (kinda enlightening and increasingly un-necessary). We like our music to communicate specific feelings to people what that feeling is doesn’t matter its more about people being able to find something in our music for themselves quite easily. A lot of girls dig our stuff, they naturally listen and create music in a completely different way to boys. Sure our music may sound like a lot of other similar stuff at the moment ‘at a glance’ but once you have a good listen it’ll be like meeting your long lost best friend that you almost forgot about. Madonher is out on Nano records at the end of the summer And ‘hold up’ e.p by (aka hope and paterson) is out on Midnight records later in the year Synthia are available for remixes, radio web stuff, live gigs, and please no more weddings and barmitzvahs) Remember Synthia are always here for you xxx
Thank you! Best Wishes, Synthia
Top images courtesy of www.lindashakesby.co.uk
Guarantee entry by making a reservation for dinner in our restaurant.
Room (Manchester) 0161 839 2005
or use our online reservation system
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