Eli Goldstein and Charlie Levine began collaborating as Soul Clap some 15 years ago, running house parties around the Boston area.
It’s odd to think that from these humble beginnings, the funk/house duo managed to establish a career that not only took them touring across the globe, but into an encounter with long-time hero George Clinton from Parliament Funkadelic. Levine reminisces on Soul Clap’s journey, talking about how two guys with a love for old records managed to create an imprint on Boston, Brooklyn and beyond.
“I think the launching point for that was when the excitement around Wolf + Lamb and the Marcy Hotel in Brooklyn grew around the area,” says Levine. “People were flying over to experience this thing in Williamsburg and there was a lot of hype around that. There were people like Seth Troxler, Nicolas Jaar and these kind of names coming out of that era – in many ways, the Marcy was the launch point for many of them and for us.
“There was a community around then in Brooklyn. We got really lucky, because people were really excited about this community, but we had the hunger to tour tremendously. At that time, Wolf + Lamb had a lot of things on, they couldn’t play as many dates, and we just took the ball and ran. That’s kind of how it works – places of inspiration, pools of talent you find in different cities, communities of guys interacting with each other,” Levine says.
“Our original agent from the Geist Agency was an agent with a rich history of starting careers, and that helped a lot. There were many pieces of the puzzle. A lot of it also had to do with our song- and pop-oriented music. 2008 was a time of minimal techno and we were always guys who represented house and disco; we introduced people to classics that they’d never heard before. There’d been such a big gap since the guys in the electronic music scene had listened to the classics.”
During the time when Soul Clap rose to fame, there was a shift in the musical world. Information-sharing was becoming a larger practice as the years passed, giving rise to new and expanding opportunities for artists and listeners to engage with music worldwide. This gave Goldstein and Levine a chance at a new market.
“The networks existed, but how did we get so far out? I don’t really know,” says Levine. “I think it’s just the nature of the internet. We had podcasts and a website that people would visit often, which got us a lot of traffic early on and helped us branch out internationally. The internet helped a lot. There’s a few songs and edits that we did that had a lot of legs. Our edit of ‘Bakerman’ by Laid Back; the Jamie Foxx ‘Extravaganza’ bootleg that we did travelled really far and put us out there as guys that take risks.”
Over the years Goldstein and Levine have been in the industry, they’ve become known for amassing an arsenal of vinyl, which has been crucial to their six-hour-plus DJ sets. However, the pair are renowned as cunning producers as well – despite not always having enough time to practise.
“I’m standing above many, many synthesisers as we speak,” says Levine. “We’ve been collecting pieces of gear for a few years now, but that’s been a change since the time we were getting started, and now we’ve amassed a pretty cool studio. With each addition, we add another layer or possibility. I’m really grateful that I’ve had time in the past few months to come off the road and really get in, dig deep. There’s been a lot of musical ideas we’ve been wanting to work on that [are] incomplete – so one after another we’re now finishing these projects. It’s going to be a good musical year for us.”
Levine’s meeting with his hero, Parliament Funkadelic’s George Clinton, remains an undoubted highlight of his career. “It was a chance of fate really,” he says. “We were huge fans and trying to emulate some of these ideas in our music and emulate the philosophy of funkiness – be the guiding light to your life and lifestyle. We were doing an interview with The Village Voice, which is a popular magazine in New York, and the guy interviewing, Chris Tarantino, happened to know a guy called Chuck Fishman, who happened to know George – [he] was working with George and Parliament Funkadelic. He is more in tune with electronic music and had heard of us.
“When the interviewer said, ‘Hey, you called your record EFunk. What do you know about George Clinton? What’s your favourite George Clinton song?’ I started spitting out some poem that George Clinton speaks. He says, ‘A luscious bitch she is, true / But it’s not nice to fool mother nature / The proud mother of God like all hos / Is jealous of her own shadow / So who is this young Vic Tanny bitch who wish to be queen for a day?’ I don’t remember the rest now, but at that moment I was zoned in. I saw their faces, they knew we were really P-Funk fans. We got asked to go to Clinton’s mansion. We were flabbergasted – we got to meet the legend. We got to see his master tapes, going back to the ’60s, the masters. It was the vault.”
[Soul Clap photo by Tim Jones]
Soul Clap are playingReturn To Rio 2015, Friday November 13 – Sunday November 15 at Del Rio Riverside Resort, Hawkesbury River. They’re also appearing at Rio Recovery, Factory Theatre, Saturday November 21.
