Frash Magazine discuss main influences, latest ‘Frash Magazine’ album and more: Interview

Combining audio and visuals in the most unique of manners, Frash Magazine are well and truly on their way towards global dominance, and we of course are all for it. With this in mind, this is one interview you most certainly do not want to miss out on.

More than set on leaving a lasting impact within the dance scene, Frash Magazine combine music and art in the most immersive of manners, making for a musical duo that offers a different outlook to their creative process through their truly unique endeavours. Comprised by Svyatoslav Kudin and Luis Colindres, each act illustrates their passion to one’s craft, and through the fusion of their respective raw talent(s), Frash Magazine continues to enhance their brand, and of course, bless fans alike with each and every one of their musical and artistic ventures. Falling in that exact category, the duo has released a full-length album in the form of ‘Frash Magazine,‘ with this body of work combining audio and visuals in a manner that is quite frankly out of this world. The most scintillating of projects, we could not be any happier to be joined by Frash Magazine, as they discuss main inspirations and influences, their approach towards music production, the release of their album and everything it stands for, future plans and so much more.

Hello and thank you for joining us! Could you provide us with an insight on the main inspirations/influences that led to your chosen career pathway in music? 

“One of my biggest inspirations to this project is Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s ‘Gorillaz’ music project, which blends incredible music alongside consistent art and branding by Hewlett. They’ve worked together for all of the Gorillaz albums, keeping the same style and characters while at the same time reinventing the virtual band throughout the years.  Another big one for me is Linkin Park where Mike Shinoda, the band’s front-man, would also design and illustrate many of the band’s visual assets.” – Luis Colindres

“As a kid, I found comfort in playing an unplugged electric guitar because I didn’t want my mistakes heard. I practiced System of a Down songs, was fascinated by Buckethead, and decided that if I want to make my own music I should just avoid playing three frets in a row. It was difficult for me to get a band together in high school to record something so I pursued an interest in audio engineering. I was able to take a year of lessons for this at a vocational school because it was during the same time that my mum was very busy pursuing her dream of starting her own gymnastics school, IK Gymnastics Chicago, which was her original goal and the main reason our family moved to the USA. I then started the Facebook page, Ableton User Group Chicago, in 2013 but didn’t know how to manage a community page and focused on myself as a producer since.” – Svyatoslav Kudin

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With versatility a key aspect in the dance scene, we would like to know your approach towards music production, as well as the origin of your style of play?

“One thing that was important to us was to develop the music alongside many of the visual components to each track, some of which went more in depth than others. Sometimes we would create the visual assets and then be re-inspired and go back to the production for that specific track. The production has many sounds made traditionally or through analog components, so we wanted to keep that visual style within the same traditional parameters. As a trained illustrator using digital media, I did all the drawing assets by hand to compliment Svyatoslav’s analog approach. For the video assets, I experimented with various ways of manipulating the video so there’s a sharp contrast to the traditional art.” – Luis Colindres

“My style of play is improvisational and comes from a rock, metal, alternative background. My guitar playing is percussive because the chords I enjoy I strum hard with rhythm. I use MIDI controllers in a similar way and Ableton helps me keep everything in scale. I also often randomly roll notes, rhythms, samples and route them elsewhere in colorful ways. My approach is to find a bounce, throw everything at it, delete what’s least enjoyable, and repeat.” –  Svyatoslav Kudin

Mastering your craft on the daily, could you talk us through your Frash Magazine brand, how this duo came to be, as well as an overview on the goals you have to set out to achieve?

“We both knew each other in high school, but we didn’t get close until midway through college when I did artwork for his first ever musical release. It was such a fun and unique experience for me, especially since this was before I was doing this professionally, that we decided we should do this together as one. However, we were not expecting that it would take years and years to do but we wouldn’t have it any other way since we learned many aspects of the industry throughout our journey creating the album.” – Luis Colindres

“I was always a fan of Luis’s art style and after my earlier musical works, I wanted to create content with a stronger purpose. My goal was to help Luis become the artist of EDM. It’s an unrealistic, and unclear goal, but I knew it would be fun to figure out. We needed to know what that sounds like, what that looks like, and over time created this identity to become the artist we want to see.” – Svyatoslav Kudin

Combining audio and visuals in a truly immersive manner, we would like to know the main thought process behind your ‘Frash Magazine’ full length album, what each featured track portrays, as well as the origin of the art that completes this body of work? 

“The visual origins of the project came from our love of animation and film. We wanted to tell stories by simultaneously working on the audio and visuals. One of the first ideas was to tell a single sci-fi story, but over the years and through our experiences in life, it developed into each song having its visual identity, with an overarching theme of nature and urban setting. I was born in Chicago, but for the last decade or so I’ve been traveling to my family’s home country of Guatemala. And later on, I began to hike the country’s epic volcanoes, something that soon became the driving force behind the visuals. Almost all the tracks to some extent take place within the gaze of a volcano. I found them to be absolutely jaw-dropping spectacles during my hikes and really captured the otherworldly tone I wanted to express through this project.” – Luis Colindres

“Full length albums are fun to create because for every next song on the tracklist we have complete knowledge of what the listener heard prior. The first song is essential for setting the stage. Then, understanding what was played gives us hints at what should come next. These hints could suggest a change of pace, a change of dense composition vs something simpler, more lyrics vs less, more rhythmic complexity vs less, etc. As the album gets longer, the more limitations we end up setting for ourselves but it’s in these constraints we challenge ourselves to find fun and creative solutions.” – Svyatoslav Kudin

Balancing both analog and digital elements throughout your album, could you talk us through the wide range of musical programs and elements that were used, the overall concept that help shape ‘Frash Magazine,’ as well as any challenges you may have faced along the way? 

“The biggest challenge was finding the time to work on this. I was finishing college for a bachelor’s degree in business administration, then earning a master’s degree in human resources from the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business while also working as the General Manager of IK Gymnastics Chicago. I used electric guitar, acoustic guitar, cassette tape recordings, phone recordings, and commissioned vocals. I also assembled a euro-rack that includes Error Instruments and Erica Synths modules to dial in synths, noise, and percussive sounds. I use Ableton’s CV Instrument to allow me to easily improvise my euro-rack performance in sync with the project file and work with this recorded audio as if it were my guitar. Overall, I mostly use Ableton’s stock plugins but I sometimes also use Serum, Massive, Samples From Mars, Kontakt for Kurt Ballou’s Signature Series Drums, Output plugins like Portal and Thermal for effects, as well as Fabfilter and iZotope Ozone for mixing.” – Svyatoslav Kudin

Working alongside a vast array of singer/songwriters whilst creating your album, we would like to know how significant their role was in the success of this body of work, as well as how essential vocals can be when creating a body of work of such nature? 

“Their role was incredibly significant because their vocals were an integral part of the visual components to the track. Much like how we worked on the instrumental parts, once we had singing, their words were directly inspiring the visual process. For example, Lydia’s flow in ‘Let Go’ helped pace the storyboards and the story behind the music video.” – Luis Colindres

“Vocals play a crucial role in grounding ourselves to physical limitations in the same way that guitar or other recorded audio would. However, the unique quality to vocals is that they have lyrics. There is an intellectual depth to lyrics that is otherwise not possible in notes or rhythm alone, as the meaning from the words are independent of their pitch or how they’re said. This was an important element for us to consider in our rotation of constraints.” – Svyatoslav Kudin

Collecting all the art for your album with the main aim of creating a book, could you provide us with a further insight on this initiative, and what fans alike can expect from this upcoming venture? 

“We always wanted to have a physical component to the project, hence the origins of the “Frash Magazine” title. An early idea was to do a mini comic book, but since the album got more tracks added, we thought it would be better if each song had a visual identity and we can collect all those assets into a physical book. When I was younger, I absolutely adored the booklets movies, games, and CDs came with when they were still a sizeable part of the package. From cheat codes, to studio session photos, how-to’s and lore descriptions, these booklets were filled with additional content that served the main projects. That feeling is what we want to capture with the book. We also collaborated with many other talented visual artists like Brand1, Lou Funke, Tom Molloy, and Adelaido Olea, so a book is one of the best ways to showcase their talent.” – Luis Colindres

With 2024 coming to an end, could you talk us through what the future holds for Frash Magazine, always in terms of new music, collaborations and live performances?

“Now that ‘Frash Magazine’ has been released to the world, we want to continue exploring new ways to combine music and visual art. Having both the head producer and the head artist developing the project at the same time, we feel we can bring a fresh experience not usually seen in the electronic dance community. We plan on doing shows, but also doing pop-up events, art galleries, and pop culture conventions where fans can directly interact with us and the artwork.” – Luis Colindres

“For our live performances we are creating an experience that features all original music and visuals from start to finish. We also have a draft of album 2 ready, as well as the artwork for it, but we need more time experimenting before committing to perfecting the contents of it. We plan to start adding vocal features early 2025 but completing this project will still be several years away.” – Svyatoslav Kudin

Remarkable in every sense of the word, we will most certainly be keeping a close eye on Frash Magazine and all their future endeavours within our community, but for the time being you can stay fully up to date by following this immersive duo on Instagram and Spotify!