donovan

lately i had the chance to send over some questions to formerly known killdahype aka donovan and nicolas was kind enough to answer some of my questions concerning the band. check out these parisian youngsters.

who are you, where you're from and how did you start making music? what kinda instruments and technique do you use?

we are david and nicolas, both from paris. we began to do music together summer 2006, before that we were both making music on our own, one year for me, nicolas, and three years for david. we use computers and software, but we also use some hardware, such as two synths, compressors, guitar and bass.


leonard de leonard - screaming dance (donovan remix) (ysi)


who are the artists you're influenced by, who did you like when you were yound and what are your favourite artists now?

as we listen to a lot of kind of music, we were influenced by a lot of artists from erick sermon to cassius or nina simone to dj hell. but the kind of music which linked us is funk, with bands such as bar-kays, kano, cameo, etc pp. our favourites are mostly not contemporary artists, but for the electro scene we like teenage bad girl, shadow dancer, sebastian and sirusmo, some others too.


do you play live a lot? are you djing? is there something special about your sets/gigs?

we do dj sets, we prefer not to do live gigs for now, because when we'll do a live gig, we want it to be special, not just two guys behind their laptop clicking for 2 hours.

as i like your style designwise, is there something you do besides music, like graphic design, fashion etc pp?

no, we are only into music, even if we know that the visual impact is very important, as i said before e.g. for the live stuff, we consider that we should take our time to do something very interesting about donovan. but yes, wo do stuff besides music, i'm a student of economics, and david works as a sound engineer.


donovan - mixtape volume III


obvious question is why did you rename yourself? what was wrong about killdahype?

nothing's wrong with killdahype, for example most of our tracks will be released under this name. but killdahype was not a name we choose, it was just the name of the myspace i created long ago before the band was created, so that's why we wanted to rename ourselves. also we didn't want our name to deal with anything concerning hypes, trends or fashion, mostly because we hope that we won't last as short as a trend.

though donovan sure is a nice 80ies name, what is it about? do you like jason donovan, former film-/seriespartner of kylie? and if so, do you like her?

donovan was more a kind of joke about the main character, mike donovan of the tv show "v", you know, giant lizzard alien eating mices.

well, no kylie love this time. surprise, surprise. if you want to find out more about donovan, check their myspace, grab their music, espcially the nice mix, above or find some more via hypem. show a little lovin'!