Hotel Garuda, comprised of producers Chris and Aseem, have epitomized the DIY culture of modern dance music since their beginning days. With their latest track, Fixed on You, they continue providing the feeling that you should move your body and dance the night away. The ability to integrate their sound with artists of varying genres – this time being Violet Days – proves scintillating vocal control on full display, with Violets tone and texture not being overshadowed, but being accentuated and brought to life in a way that only Aseem and Chris of HG could accomplish.
We sat down to ask Hotel Garuda some of the inspirations for “Fixed on You” below
Cover Photo by Théo Gosselin
Words by Hotel Garuda
Relationships
A lot of the music we make stems from inspiration from the people that we meet. Whether it be new friends, old friends, people we date, our families – the experiences that we share with them are channeled directly into our music. We’re both relatively lively people who love to have fun and Fixed On You was no exception to that characteristic – production wise it’s very bouncy and lively, but the lyrics by Violet Days were something we instantly connected with. Funnily enough, we’re both sometimes hopeless romantics and that shows through in the lyrics of this song.
The Internet
The number one source of where we hear new music is from the internet – through soundcloud, spotify, twitter and similar channels of social media, we are able to be exposed to such a huge amount of music (and memes). What we try and do with that new music that we discover is take bits of pieces of what we really liked and try to incorporate that into the music that we make. The internet culture is such a strange and vibrant world that has made it easy for us to take bits and pieces from to form our identity in our music.
Food
If you find us cooking, you’ll most likely find us jamming out to our favorite songs. Neither of us are experts in the culinary arts but we both appreciate the hard work that goes into cooking. We find it pretty similar to making music – we take bits of pieces of high quality ingredients (chords, samples, vocal toplines), cook them through our method of choice (in music it would be the program that we’re making), and present them in a nice package (album artwork, branding, etc.). We like our food like we like our music; honest and made with love.
Other Music
This project started out of our mutual admiration for music and artists who we both connect to on a deep level. It may sound obvious that artists take influence from other artists but we’ve constantly tried to distill our influences in into our music in ways that are original and fresh. We want to make sure people know that we were fans first and foremost, and without a really deep love for music we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Books and Print Media
Lately I (Aseem) have been traveling without my laptop and it’s given me time to get back into reading – I studied economics and mathematics in college so i love reading nerdy yet accessible books like Freakonomics , as well as books by Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis. I’ve realized that by examining how people think and react to stimulus, you can really learn a lot about yourself and use that to further inform your creative output.
