Yolanda Be Cool Interview

Yolanda Be Cool – Back With A New Sound For 2016 Sound

Yolanda Be Cool (Andrew Stanley and Matthew Handley) have been rolling out hit after hit over the past few years. Starting out with their global smash ‘We No Speak Americano’, which sold over five millions copies worldwide, the duo have gone from strength to strength.

We talked to the boys about their influences as well as how they have managed to adapt their sound over the years.

Hi Guys, how are you?
Awesome. No complaints

Where are you at the moment?
Matt: I am in LA and Andy is up on the north coast of New South Wales having a belated Easter break.

Lets get straight to it with the new single, From Me To You. The song uses a Beatles lyric as the hook. Why did you choose to re-work this particular tune?
We are big Beatles fans and when we found the vocalist and the reinterpretation he came with, we were sold.

Having listened to a lot of your stuff, you tend to use samples that perhaps are outside your genre, such as Rodriguez. Is combining genres and maybe taking influence from further a field a real intention to do something different?
Yes. Absolutely. We like to juxtapose things. So taking things that don’t go together naturally and then finding the magic in them, that’s our goal when we sample stuff. So sampling stuff from electronic music wouldn’t really make sense given this.

Over the past few years you’ve moved away from the Electro Swing sound from We No Speak Americano to a more traditional modern electro sound. Why did you make the move or did it just happen?
Well, we definitely don’t consider our music EDM, at least when we think of that term, we think of the really aggressive electro sounds and big drops and builds whereas we like to think our music is a lot more groove based. In regards to electro swing, I guess we felt that genre got a bit repetitive so we started looking for more interesting sounds and things to sample.

You guys obviously get to travel a lot, where are some of your favourite places to play?
Ibiza is number one for sure. We’ve actually never dj’ed in Berlin but it’s def one of our fav places to party. Miami is always good. We played in Medellin in Columbia last year and that was amazing.

Where are some the weirdest or interesting settings you’ve played at?
We played in an abandoned fort in Bosnia. That was amazing. Burning man tops everything though. Playing on a huge boat that had been converted into an art car as the sun rose was def one to remember.

When you’re in a city to play a club do you have to time to explore and see the place or is it just a case of in and out?
It varies. Sometimes it’s all very rushed and other times you have a day or two to explore which is always our preference. At the very least, we love sampling the local cuisine wherever we go.

What are your plans for the future?
We have a big Aussie tour for May and June and then looking forward to getting back across to Europe and the states to make sure we don’t have to deal with too much winter.