Sweet Music TeamBrazilian talent Redu X catches up with Sweet Music about his career in dance music.
by Rodrigo Airaf
Hi Daniel! Your project Redu X turned 5 in April. What have been your main lessons since turning to music?
Redu X: Hello Sweet Music, thank you for the invitation and for having me.
In my point of view, what I took most from wisdom in the musical part, maybe it was in the sense of my effort, resilience and also courage, knowing how to control and have a balance of anxiety for me was very important. Focusing on solid goals and objectives, and especially the will to learn something new, which was particularly an “unusual” and vast universe. Music never stopped teaching me new things day after day, it always left me and still leaves me dazzled.
You’ve been managing your own label, inner.art, for some time now. What are your curation criteria for choosing an artist to release?
Primarily the originality, genuineness and their truth. I practice this a lot on my label and on the artists who release with us, I prioritize and give a lot of emphasis to the work that the artist there intends to express in their work, regardless of their musical gender. inner.art follows a primer that breaks the paradigm of “gender-only labels”. We’ve released many artists ranging from veterans to newcomers in their careers, and we treat everyone equally as a community, because what matters, at the end of the day, is music.
Now getting specifically into your sound… How do you explain it?
The foundation of Redu X has always been influenced by Deep House, Tech House, Techno, Indie Dance and Nu Disco, although currently I have aligned my project to melodic and progressive lines. I always take advantage of these influences to build my sound and my identity within these variations; little by little I have determined a more musically concrete meaning for my project. However, I’ve never enjoyed holding on too much. When I produce, I like to let my ideas flow freely, to deposit all of myself and my essence without pre-determined recipes.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ynCLxCgCMtCObMVCt2Skf?si=9a8f80cc9f5f44ba
Your work seems to flow from careful planning and it requires multiple skills. What would you say are the main attention points today, for DJs who want to have a career on the rise?
I think it’s necessary for the artist not necessarily to dominate, but to understand everything that revolves around the construction of their career, obviously the more skills they have and are developed, the more points they will have in their evolution, in my point of view, whether in the matter of image, marketing, communication, and of course always keeping in mind music as the main base and this will always be the best developed skill in your arsenal. I affirm from my own experience that the artist must be as well organized as possible, trying to outline their goals and try to complete them with a plan, even if simple at the beginning.
You have diverse works, ideas seem to come from many places. How do you get inspired to produce your tracks?
All the work I produce tends to have a meaning as I develop it. It can be a feeling of a phase of my life that I’m going through, or an inspiration in a theme that catches my attention or I identify with and like… In almost all my latest works released, there was this “base”. I believe that this makes our work more intimate and richer, and that it also reaches and affects the people who consume them in a unique and very singular way.
So tell us about the two most outstanding tracks in your process as a music producer and why.
Without a doubt among them is my track “Courage”, my last work released, a tribute I made to my father after his departure in 2019 due to depression. Its development was for me an explosive deposit of everything I was feeling in that period of loss and grief, it’s a track that has a great intimate value and, to my surprise, it’s always one of the tracks that stands out the most when I play it on my performances.
And, maybe, the second track, I believe to be “Rouse”, which was a song that marked a lot of an evolutionary technical process in my point of view in terms of learning, I wanted to give it a feeling and sensation of “waking up” to something important, along with the encouragement to face the day to day, as if it were a climate of “awakening” in our lives.
Now that the pandemic has reached a kind of stability in your country, you’ve been able to perform a lot more live. Bring back memories of favorite dancefloors you played on.
One of the ones I’m very fond of, and we’ve had several special moments together is the party I saw grow up close and of which I’m a resident here in São Paulo, the “Sextinha”, it’s the type of dancefloor that always responds to the height with the public we help to build in it. And recently, despite being smaller but not less important, due to the more selected audience, a party that I created a very great bond of affection also from here in São Paulo called “Butech House”, which created a very nice proposal with its seal on the idea of showcases in pubs focusing on the strands and sub strands of House.
What can we expect from you in the coming months?
Next semester there will possibly be some new work that I’m planning to release, maybe on my inner.art label, as well as tracks on other labels. I’m also going to release some sets that really reflect my passion for the segments that influence me, like the last one I released, on the German channel Obenmusik, where I played some Indie Dance influences, a scene that I’m also very passionate about.
Follow Redu X on Instagram.