Interview: PhaseOne Talks Up His Latest Single, ‘Enemy’

Australian born, LA based PhaseOne is an electronic music DJ and producer who often fuses EDM and dubstep with metal, having collaborated with some huge names in the metal scene for example, Northlane, Periphery, Thy Art Is Murder and most recently Silverstein with vocalist Shane Told lending his guest vocals on their new track ‘Enemy’.

We caught up with PhaseOne to chat about ‘Enemy’, working with heavy hitters in the metal scene and being back to playing live shows.

You have a new single featuring Shane Told from Silverstein titled ‘Enemy’. Silverstein were and are still a hugely influential band, how did that opportunity with Shane come up?

Yeah, they’re OG’s, they’ve been around since like 2000 it’s crazy. Last year throughout the pandemic I started writing more melodic and accessible music—more structured music, more accessible to spotify rather than the club. I had this song written and they had a remix competition going on where they were giving away stems to their song ‘Infinite’, so I downloaded the stems and it just worked so well. Like oh man I really wanna work with these guys and they were so down. We ended up replacing those vocals and Shane wrote some original vocals for it. He was so on board with it he even wanted to be featured in the music video, really cool guy.

And the music video, it’s a bit post-apocalyptic and futuristic, who came up with the concept and direction of the video?

My girlfriend basically wrote, directed and starred in it, she’s the female lead in the video. She wrote the whole thing and a guy that works with the label filmed. She basically did it all by herself literally the week before the song came out, it was all pretty last minute and it turned out so well, the shots are beautiful.

You’ve played some shows here in QLD and Perth recently, how does it feel to be playing back in Aus practically covid free?

So surreal! All the venues are like half capacity for safety and everything and the first show we did with half capacity had 1300 people… like this is so strange, no ones wearing masks and I haven’t seen this many people in one space in about a year, it’s crazy. We’re just so lucky here, I’m stoked to be able to get on stage again.

Going back to the beginning, you started producing very young, around 14, how did you go down that path of EDM and metal?

I’ve been playing guitar since I was 5 years old, then when I was a teenager I started playing in bands and had an interest in audio engineering so I was like the in house producer for my band and my friends bands. Then I went to college to further study audio engineering and then I discovered electronic music randomly. I thought dubstep was cool and like electronic metal, so I started messing around with that and quit my band. Then I missed doing metal so I thought why don’t I try to do both and put them together…best of both worlds or whatever and I’ve kinda been doing that ever since.

I feel like recently people are receiving this metal/edm genre a lot more now, I feel like a while ago people would just be like ‘Oh you can’t mix this doof doof music with screamo metal’ But now everyone is so much more embracing of it.

Yeah, there’s definitely a fine line, some people try and do it and it just sounds cheesy, there’s that fine line where it blends well ya know! 

You’ve worked with some big names in metal like Thy Art Is Murder, Periphery, Northlane and now Silverstein, who would you want to work with next?

I’ve got some goals set, they’re not unachievable but they’re pretty high…I’d love to work with Parkway Drive, Bring Me The Horizon—obviously because the stuff they’re doing now is super electronic influenced as well, it would be perfect, but thats pretty high up on the priority list.

What are your plans for 2021?

Just writing more music. I’m doing an EP with an Australian metal label called Unified, I’m going down the route of doing less EDM and more metal, so i’m trying to do an EP for them with the idea of having feature vocals from a different band on every track, kinda like how ‘Enemy’ was but a bit more metal I guess.

Before we let you go, would you like to share any final words?

I’m releasing a mixtape and it has a whole lot of stuff that I’ve been working on, a whole lot of unreleased material with all my producer friends. It’s called The Sounds Of Mayhem Vol 2 and it’ll be on soundcloud and youtube!

‘Enemy’ is available now on all good streaming sites via Disciple.