’Kenton Slash Demon – Harpe’
Danish production duo Kenton Slash Demon didn’t first appear on the pages of TMN until about a month ago, but they’ve been making waves in electronic music for over half a decade now. Across a series of EPs, Silas Moldenhawer and Jonas Kenton, the artists behind KSD, have displayed a versatility fueled by a passion for dance music of all kinds. Regardless of styles employed or influences evoked, there remains a distinct emotional power across their catalogue even with an often minimalist approach–using stark undertones as a powerful point of contrast. Perhaps some of that dynamic range also stems from Silas and Jonas’s work as half of successful indie-electronic outfit, When Saints Go Machine. Their latest project, the Harpe/Syko EP, sees the Future Classic-signees continuing their sonic evolution with two lush and textured, albeit vastly different, compositions equally appropriate for a festival sunrise or an at-home chill session.
We had a chance to catch up with Silas of Kenton Slash Demon about growing up in Copenhagen, their production approach and the emotions that fuel their creativity–check out the interview below. You can grab a copy of Harpe/Syko now here and check out KSD’s upcoming US tour dates here.
TMN: How did you and Jonas first start making music and were there any memories from early on that stand out?
Silas: I think it was around seventh or eighth grade when Jonas started listening to electronic music and I had an older friend who had been DJing who got me into it. Jonas had been listening to some Danish artists like Future 3 and Bjørn Svin—he bought those CD’s and played them for me. We were not really good friends at that point, even though we were in the same class. We kind of bonded over the music.
At some point, my dad bought an old school sound module with standard MIDI sounds and hooked it up to our PC with, I think, Cubase 1.2 or something, in black and white and with no effects. We had no idea about equipment, programs or synthesizers. We had never even heard about synthesizers at that time, so we just started trying to make electronic music from these standard MIDI sounds. At that point, it was psychedelic trance we were trying to copy and it sounded really weird because we didn’t have any of the sounds you needed to make that kind of music.
TMN: How important has the Danish music scene been in forming your sound?
Silas: We never thought about how the scene affected us, but looking back it had a massive impact–just getting inspired by what’s close to you, what’s going on when you’re growing up, when you start to go out to clubs and you experience your first rave. For us, the scene we were first part of was like shitty trance music in a club called Gorgeous and it was only on Wednesdays. I remember we had fake IDs to get in and we were not really participating in the party. We were just standing in the corner looking at the DJ and all the dancing, just trying to learn. We were really curious about the whole thing.
