With a Sharp New Venue in Brooklyn & Fresh Music in the Offing, Soul Clap Continues to Give Up the EFUNK
New York City – The landscape of the modern music industry is an unforgiving place for aspiring artists still learning how to navigate it, and with the advent of digital music and the Internet, prospective fans are constantly being bombarded by both literal and figurative noise.
Enter Soul Clap: a funk-tastic DJ and production duo that represents the archetypal “working-DJ” success story. We’re not exaggerating—Airdrop Records delivered Soul Clap’s first releases when they were still DJing in Macy’s department stores to pay the bills.
Later, after starting their “Dancing On The Charles” party in their old hometown of Boston—an event which inspired the annual Soul Clap Records compilation of the same name—the duo forged a partnership with their Crew Love collective co-founders and fellow disco dons Wolf + Lamb. That’s when everything changed.
After paying their dues in the trenches as Massachusetts mobile DJs, both playing and throwing every kind of party under the sun, Soul Clap blended the old and the new, curated an unmistakable sound, and found a special group of peers who shared their vision.
Fast-forward to 2014, when Soul Clap received the honor of being “soft-knighted” by Dr. Funkenstein, aka Parliament-Funkadelic bandleader and principal architect of P-Funk, George Clinton. The duo was invited down to Clinton’s Florida-based studio to produce several tracks for the most recent Funkadelic album, First Ya Gotta Shake the Gate, and they later released a remix EP of that material.
In 2015, Soul Clap played an all-vinyl set at Berlin’s Watergate club, and the ensuing compilation—the first live recording of the German venue’s venerable mix series—received critical acclaim after it was released by Watergate Records.
Of course, 2016 is shaping up to be a monster year for Soul Clap, too, as they’re gearing up for the February launch of a Crew Love record label through a long-awaited collaborative album. Crew Love – Based on a True Story drops early in the year, and once the dust settles, Soul Clap will release its second artist album as well.
To learn more about what make them tick, we linked up with Soul Clap—Charles “Cnyce” Levine and Eli “Elyte” Goldstein—at a rare Sunday rooftop gig at Brooklyn’s Output club. The resulting discussion covers an abundance of topics, including how Charlie and Eli honed their extensive knowledge of DJ history, their studio secrets, their crate-digging methodology, and what aspiring DJs need to do to replicate the runaway success of Crew Love and Soul Clap Records. Get out your notebooks, kids.
