Introduction to Skip&Die: René Kuhlmann

Skip&Die would like to introduce all bandmembers to you, so you know who you support when funding the project with Emza on Africa Unsigned. Why not let each band member introduce themselves? We kick off with one of the newest band members, René Kuhlmann. Don’t forget, if you’d like to see them play live with Emza, support them. Find out more here or grab your $$ and go straight into our payment system. I’ve been a proud member of Skip & Die for a couple of months now. What started as a two-man project (originally just Cata.Pirata & Crypto.Jori), has now been transformed into a full-fledged 4-piece band. I joined the band to give extra power to the live show with beats, synths and FX. The first couple of shows I did with Skip & Die already blew my mind; Since then there have been quite a few gigs in Holland, we were the opening-act for Goldfrapp and we even got the opportunity to play at the EXIT Festival in Serbia.   Now that we’ve been playing together for some time I’ve started getting more and more involved in the production of the tracks. I originally studied music production in Holland for 4 years and produced various artists in diverse musical styles.   I think that within every musical style its really important not to only search for great composition and sounds, but to create sounds that fulfill there own function in the track. It’s easy to make a phat sounding bass or a screaming synth, but it’s more of a challenge to make these elements work together and elevate each other to a higher level.   Normally in the creation of a production, when there is a lot of reference material in the style I’m working in, I first seek for the key elements that make the sound work. Once I’ve found those elements I start to experiment with them to see where the borders of the genre are; and of course, I try to break those borders by creating new working sounds.   In Skip & Die there are so many different influences in every track that it’s a big challenge to find these elements and put them into the right place and time. Due to this, every track is a new puzzle to solve. At the moment, in the studio, we are working with the material that was recorded by Crypto.Jori and Cata.Pirata in South Africa in collaboration with a whole bunch of great new South African artists, Emza being one of those talents.   Skip & Die is a totally new experience for me because of the great variety of artists playing on the forthcoming album; each artist bringing in their own style to add to the equation. Due to this variety its quite a fun challenge to create tracks around the recorded material, without losing the original feeling of the performing artist while still putting something extra in it and creating a full Skip & Die sound.   René Kuhlmann   Here's a video from before they were a 4-piece band

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