LargeUp: How would you describe the music on the soundtrack?
Q Major: You know, we never actually slowed down from the work to really step back and analyse it. We just went with the flow. We’ve given it all sorts of names though, like Damian calls “Good Swimma” “contrapcious music,” cause it’s a mix of conscious and trapstep. But for me it’s just a refreshing take on our local sound.
Damian Marcano: Lou Lyons [from Freetown Collective] calls it “Sonically Unsafe,” but I like “Rockstone.”
LU: Why name the album Laventille?
DM: That’s where I am originally from in Trinidad.
LU: What influenced your choices when it came to producing the album’s particular sound?
AB: The film. Damian always knew what he wanted it to look like, and sound like.
Q: I like electronic music and manipulating sounds. I hate anything boring so there was a lot of experimenting to come up with something fresh that hadn’t been done and was capable of getting our culture out internationally. And I wanted it to focus equally on the artist and the music in a way that doesn’t even match what we generally consider a song to be.
LU: How did you all come together?
AB: At first Damian had all these songs as guitar recordings but no matter how we worked with them, they never excited us or fit what was in D’s head until we reconnected with Q.
Q: I had worked with them on the Freetown Collective mixtape Blacks and White in 2011, but we lost touch after. Then this year we met when they came over to Tobago. Damian showed me a cut of the film and gave me a copy of the music he had. I went home and in half hour sent him a mixed version of the song “Laventille”. He went crazy over it and now here we are.
DM: And we didn’t even go over to Tobago for work. Alexa had a blackout while we were working with Machel Montano’s “Fog” video for Carnival 2013 due to what we thought was overwork. Later we found out she was actually pregnant. So we dropped everything flew there for her to relax. If she had never passed out, we may have never met Q back when we did.