Sound Revolt: What does “Return to Mono” stand for?
Slam: Return to Mono basically means .back to basics – how it used to be. Return to Mono is a chance for us to go back to what we used to do. We’ve always been resident DJs – first and foremost. We do Pressure in Glasgow which is a bigger thing for few thousand people, whereas Return To Mono is a smaller club night.

Sound Revolt: You said that working with vocalists on “Year Zero” was a bit unusual. How much freedom did the artists have in the studio?
Slam: None at all, actually. That was a kind of retrospective album in a sense. We’ve never really done that before. We’ve always tried to make futuristic music but we came to a point where we decided to draw some of the other influences. To take it to what we used to been into. We wanted to show what we are all about and what we have been about. A lot of people think Slam equals techno but there was a point when we were thinking techno equals schranz. I said: “I don’t like that expression anymore, I have to do something different”. Electronic music came from funk and other various cultures and “Year Zero” gave us a chance to show all those influences. Tyrone Palmer brought his Chicago flavour for example.

Sound Revolt: You’re saying Tyrone brought his Chicago flavour but it’s a flavour you figured out. You said the vocalists had no freedom.
Slam: Yeah. But you know, there aren’t many guys in Glasgow who can sing like that (laughs).

Sound Revolt: And what was the key in choosing the collaborators?
Slam: A few people got in touch. I’ve been a friend of Kevin Saunderson and a big fan of his for years and we wanted his wife, Ann, to do a track with us. Dot Allison and Tyrone were great on our previous album so we just chose people we would feel comfortable with. Billy Ray Martin got in touch and I used to love her stuff.

Sound Revolt: “Blind Lights Fading” is one of my favourite tracks on the album.
Slam: It’s my favourite one as well. It’s probably the best one, because it has that really clinical, electronic sound that I really like and then she adds soul with her vocals.
Elbee Bad is a guy we met in Berlin, who’s just a mad role character who comes from Brooklyn but lives in Berlin now. He is involved with the scene, he DJs there. He came and he did this rap. I played him a track and he said he could do something with it. We had very good relationship with all the people we have worked with on “Year Zero”. We wanted to work with people that were special to us.

Sound Revolt: And that will listen to your orders easily.
Slam: Yeah (laughs).

Sound Revolt: Have the works on Billy Ray Martin’s album started yet?
Slam: I don’t now. She wanted us to produce some things but I didn’t really want to go there, because I didn’t want to be bugged out on someone else’s project. At the moment we’re recording a new album.

Sound Revolt: Is it going to take ages?
Slam: We decided to do a track a week. Just record it, experiment with sounds. It’s going to be a completely different album from the last one. This one is going to be about what we think the future of electronic music is going to be like. We decided to take out all our favourite films and make music to images. Image can evoke emotion and we thought this could be interesting.

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