Exclusive Interview: Pegboard Nerds!

It was an honor to catch up with the genre-bending, world-travelling Pegboard Nerds for a few questions and, in their words, some "bad/dry Scandinavian humor." Check out what the talented producers have to say about their upcoming projects, their favorite places, and life on the road.

Electric Love: Do you have any collaborations coming up?

Pegboard Nerds: Yes, but we don’t think we can say with who yet. Lots of exciting stuff though! What we can say is that they are Monstercat artists

Electric Love: Do you have any new releases to anticipate this year?

Pegboard Nerds: Yes, many! We are taking some time off touring to more consistently release tunes the rest of the year, and setting up releases for next year as well.

Electric Love: What was it like working with Excision on Bring The Madness?

Pegboard Nerds: It was fun! It was a bit of back and forth, as it originally was a remix for a Destroid track. Due to various commitments it took a long time and after a while Jeff suggested it made more sense to do it as a collab, and with an original rap on it. We feel like the end result reflects both of our styles.

Electric Love: What would be your go-to synthesizer? What would be your go-to plug-in?

Pegboard Nerds:

Go-to synth: Serum
Go-to plugin: FabFilter ProQ2

Electric Love: Where is your favourite place to perform in the world?

Pegboard Nerds: Any place where we can make the crowd, big or small, go nuts to our music! If you absolutely want a specific location, Red Rocks last year was an amazing experience! But we have lots of favorite places, for various reasons.

Electric Love: Do you prefer writing music on the road or in the studio?

Pegboard Nerds: Definitely in the peace and calm of the studio!! But today’s life as a touring DJ necessitates writing a lot on the road, so we got used to that too. Writing on the road does help in actually finishing tracks though, because we get excited and want to play them out at our next show, then do edits and fixes, and then play the updated version at the next show after that, etc.

Electric Love: When did you start DJing?

 Alex:  Apart from some messing around in my youth I basically started DJing when we had our first show as Pegboard Nerds.

Michael: I started radio DJ'ing at a local radio station, playing acid house back in 1988. Had my first official club gig in 1991. 

Electric Love: Do you play any other instruments?

Alex: I play piano/synth and a little guitar. Or anything that makes a sound! Pocket synthesizers, the living room table, water bottles.

Michael: I only play the recorder and I can press play on a CDJ.

Electric Love: Who was your main mentor when you were first learning?

Alex:  At the very first I had none and had to figure a lot of stuff out myself, then Stephan Groth (Apoptygma Berzerk) taught me a lot, and then it was Michael later on!

Michael: I started back when there was no YouTube tutorials (early 90's) so it took me a couple of years to learn to program a TR-909.

Electric Love: Where do you see yourself in the next year?

Pegboard Nerds: We wanna take ourselves to the next level, both music-wise and performance-wise! We also want to “focus” our music more, and a bit less of the random genre-jumping from track to track. And that is what we’re gonna work on in the coming months. Hopefully we can do another big tour, where we can bring some of our friends as supporting acts.

Electric Love: What are you looking forward to about playing Electric Love, a small festival in the heart of a beautiful valley?

Pegboard Nerds: Playing our new music and old “classics”, meeting the people there, and Canada is such a nice country!
Electric Love: How would you describe your presence online? What elements of your personalities come through via social media?

Pegboard Nerds: Sometimes sporadic, I guess, haha.. Some of our bad/dry Scandinavian humor definitely comes through. Our hate for bad airline and airport experiences. Our love for good food.