Freshly Landed – Interview with From The Airport

Is it difficult to translate your recorded music into a live set with just the two of you? What are the difficulties, and how do you overcome them?

Zee: I think because we have so many instruments on our recordings, right? And it’s just us two on stage, so we can’t really play everything at once. Obviously he plays the guitar and the vocals and then synthesizers, and we only have two hands at once. We wish we could’ve played more instruments. Maybe we’ll do it in the future maybe, we’ll also need more musicians. But for now we have to play back some elements. I think that’s the hardest part. Figuring out which instruments to play.

Since you both work on the production side, what tools and systems do you use? Do you have a favorite set-up for live shows?

Zee: We use Logic Pro X for productions. We use Cubase to record, audio record. I think Cubase is a little better for the audio part. And for live we use Ableton Live. Our setup is basically we use a controller called APC 40 to control the Ableton. We connect all our vocals, all our synths into the audio interface, and then that’s the brain of the live performance, and goes back out to the house mix area. It’s pretty simple. It’s just hard to configure which instrument to send to the house, which instrument to mix ourselves.

Milo: To balance for live is a bit different from the albums. It takes a long time to figure out the balance.

Since you both have talents that lend themselves to producing music outside of From The Airport, how do you decide what songs you want to make for the band, versus the ones you use for other projects?

Milo: We kind of make music together on the spot. So I bring chord progressions and melodies. Zee will add in, like, the bass, the arrangement stuff. So for our side projects we kind of do it alone with our own styles, but when we make music together that becomes the From the Airport style. It’s not just a one person thing. So I guess it’s kind of natural. But if we work together on it, it becomes the style of From the Airport.