Upclose with Brahms & Co

HK Magazine: How did Brahms & Co come to existence?
Co: It was six, seven years ago. One night I was supposed to play at a nightclub on Champs-Élysées with this guy, but it happened that he decided to quit music the day before. So the organizer brought a friend of his to play the gig with me, telling me that he’s a great DJ and we’d get along perfectly. I met Brahms on stage and started playing right away, didn’t talk at all. After the show’s over, he gave me a ride home and invited me to play at his upcoming gigs. And that’s how the collaboration first began.
Brahms: It was love at first sight.

HK: What were you guys doing before you met?
Co: Well, Brahms was selling weapons and I was a drug dealer.
Brahms: We also did human and organ trafficking from time to time.

HK: Seriously, guys…
Brahms: Haha, I was DJing. I started it long time ago in southern France. At that time DJs weren’t big stars, just some dudes in the back of a dark room. My family wanted me to have a real job so the whole I was also working as an architectural engineer.
Co: I’ve always been a musician. I play the trumpet and the keyboard, although I went to school for music, and I can’t read music either.

HK: Can you tell me about your live shows?
Co: It depends on where we play and what events are they. But usually we try to make our live shows a journey into music and sound—starting with downtempo beats and progressively moving onto jazz, soul and funk. Our gigs are quite long, and about 70 percent of our live music is improvised.
Brahms: And we take influence from the country we play at. For example, for here, we’re going to use some Chinese music and remix it, just for the Hong Kong shows. It’s like cooking—we have our own style, but also like to use local ingredients, learning from the local culture, local DJs.
Co: That’s so true. You see the glamour of touring foreign DJs like us, who play from place to place, but the thing is that all the around the world, a lot of local DJs are way better than guest DJs. And just because they’re local, they don’t get the same level of attention and recognition.

HK: Having played around a world, you guys must have a lot of crazy, bizarre stories.
Co: Oh, you have no idea! Some clubs we’ve performed at are owned by the Mafia so there’re a lot of strange stuff going on. Once we went to the bar owner’s office to collect our pay after the gig and saw a tiger in there. Another time we were in a car on our way to the gig, and the driver, who dressed like a soldier, asked us if we could stop for a minute so he could “deliver something.” We said “no problem,” and without knowing what it is, we insisted on helping him carry the stuff. We ended up carrying loads of machine guns and bullets for him… We’ve also played in Kabul, Afghanistan. The people there partied hard, cuz they knew they might die tomorrow.

HK: How much time do you spend with each other?
Brahms: Too much. More than we should! If you put all the days in a year that we spend apart, that’d only be one month. I see him more than my own mother.
Co: We often get stopped the checked at the custom. I thought it because of him looking like a terrorist. So we tried to split while going through the custom, but each of us still got checked. I’ve tried everything to get rid of him, but I just can’t.
Brahms: We argue a lot. Last big one was at Miami airport, where we needed to make a phone call. But neither of us had any American dollar coins to use to public phone. We blamed it on each other and it escalated into a fight. Finally the airport security guard came. We even thought about switching to other occupations to avoid spending time with each other.