MEB Staff Writer/Photographer Murjani Rawls caught up with Ivri Lider of The Young Professionals to talk about the group’s first album, 9 AM to 5 PM, 5 PM to Whenever, their remixing process, thoughts on electronic music today and more.
MEB: Thank you guys for speaking to Mind Equals Blown. Can you introduce yourselves?
Ivri Lider: We are TYP [ The Young Professionals ] a group from Tel Aviv. we are signed for Universal France and released our first album 2 years ago in Europe. We are creating electronic pop music and we also love working on arty music/vid productions like openings we did for museums and projects with arts that are out of the regular music world.
Your first album, 9 AM to 5 PM, 5 PM to Whenever, had a good medium of get out your seat dance songs and some really emotional songs. Can you let me know how the recording process went?
We wrote that album over a few years. There are different vibes and concepts in it. We recorded a lot of the album in our home studios in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and wrote a lot of it while traveling and touring.
You guys have done remixes with songs from Lana Del Rey and Tony Bennett + Lady Gaga. Do you find it a good challenge to go for songs that may not be considered “dance” to remix?
Yeah sure, working with songs that originally are not “dance” music is great, because then we can make a big difference to the style of the song and offer our take on it, which is very different from the original.
The video for “All Of It But Me” is pretty heavy art wise. You guys have also demonstrated this with the short film for “Fuck Off Berlin”. Do you find that the visual aspect is just as important as the musical?
We consider the visual aspect very very important in today’s music. Music today is usually “seen” at the same time as it is being “heard” and that gives us another great artistic medium to work with .
With electronic music today, there has seemed to be a recent resurgence of experimentation and actual instruments incorporated in the world of dance. How do you guys manage to stay true to yourselves where electronic music seems to go by trends?
We always pay attention to the trends and if we like where it’s going and it fits us we are going with it, but if it doesn’t then we don’t really care about it too much. It’s important for us to do only stuff we connect with and love.
Are there any plans to come to the USA in the near future?
We always have plans for the US cause we LOVE playing there. I hope we’ll get to do that again this year.
What is some of the music that you guys are listening to now?
Clean Bandit, Sam Smith, Ben Howard, Sohn, Stromae, Disclosure, The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, Sia.
I hear that you guys have an album in the works for later this year. Is there any word on when it would come out or what it will sound like?
Not sure yet about the date for the release but we can say it’s an up-tempo album with a lot of cool collaborations we really enjoyed doing.
Thank you guys for talking to us. Anything you want to say to your worldwide fans?
We want to thank all the people who like our music and videos and everything we do. It’s great to know that people are connecting to our music and we are very excited to meet them one day.
