OneEDM sits down with and interviews up-and-coming artists Alien Fuel before playing at Nightmare Festival 2017. As their fan-base continues to grow, Alien Fuel has shown that they can bring a ton of diversity and depth to their sets.
Interview:
OneEDM: So we are sitting here with Alien Fuel at Nightmare 2017, your guys’ set is at the Barn Stage at 4:30 PM. Is this the first time you have played this festival?
Alien Fuel: No it is the second time
OneEDM: Is it a favorite of yours to play?
Alien Fuel: It is a lot of fun because it is a lot of people from back home and a lot from around the country.
OneEDM: Back home as in?
Alien Fuel: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
OneEDM: So do you guys have a plan for your set, like Halloween theme kinda stuff?
Alien Fuel: We do not plan our sets, we like to improvise but we have a lot of edits so we will probably play a lot of those.
OneEDM: How long have you guys been DJ’ing together?
Alien Fuel: Five years, but we did not really start this whole thing until like two years ago. We did warehouse parties, house parties, and like 50-person basement parties. That is how we started.
OneEDM: What inspired you guys growing up that made you want to become DJ’s?
Alien Fuel: I mean I never necessarily wanted to be a DJ, but I always wanted to do something with music. I taught myself how to drum and I was in a band for a while that ended up breaking up. Then I found Sam and he was DJing. I’m like “that was crazy music you were playing I hope I can DJ with you one day”, and here we are.
OneEDM: Has everybody been supportive of your DJ careers like your family?
Alien Fuel: Definitely. It is definitely different because my parents were always working a regular job nine to five, and then they were just like, “Can you actually make money doing this? Can you actually go the distance?” As long as you invest in yourself you can make it happen.
OneEDM: So why the name Alien Fuel?
Alien Fuel: *Laughing* Because we were in the car on the way to one of our shows we were trying to think of what to name ourselves looking around and out of nowhere, “Alien Fuel, let’s do it!”
OneEDM: What were some of the other names you guys thought of?
Alien Fuel: Oh my god, well one that I came up with that I did not like was half a mile. Then other random things.The thing is we do not really like DJ names. My (Sam) original DJ name was TBA, her (Nicole) original name was Nik-a, so we did not take it seriously. We take it seriously now, when we came up with Alien Fuel it just clicked.
OneEDM: As upcoming artists where do you see yourselves going next? Do you have any plans or albums you’re working on?
Alien Fuel: The plan is to grab as many fans as we possibly can and travel, and just keep traveling until something we do catches on to the point where people want to see us in their cities. And like we work with a couple different companies that do major festivals and stuff like that all over and like they bring us out there and they let us do our thing and we can rock a crowd.That is what it is all about, no offense to these guys that are great producers, they are great at what they do, but they are all missing the connection. Like there is no connection, they go up there play their songs and leave.
What we try to do is we try to bring that feel back that everyone is like “oh my god I didn’t know I liked this song”. Why would we stick to one genre in a set when we could have 100? We are really versatile with all of our stuff. We incorporate hip-hop into our sets, we incorporate house music, heavy trap, melodic trap, a lot of stuff like that and we also do a lot of live edits so we do a lot of live flips. It could go from a really melodic track and flip into deep dub or like a really deep bouncy trap.
OneEDM: Is there any message you would want to send out to your fan base or possibly people that may have never heard you play?
Alien Fuel: I mean to our fans I would love to say we love you. Please just keep following us and keep coming out to our shows. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your pets, tell everybody, tell your goldfish. To the people that have never heard us, they should come out and see us because we will make you move period. We will play something that will spark your interest.
You wanna know what the difference between us and a lot of other artists is? That together we go up (to a set) with about 16- to 20-thousand songs between the two of us. So per set, we have 16- to 20-thousand songs to choose from. So no show you go to will be the same. As an opener, if you cannot set the mood, you should not be there. If you have to play banger after banger to make the crowd move you are doing it wrong. We have gone out there and played house to a dubstep crowd and got them dancing because we have the house music that has the low-end wobble that dubstep fans love and they are like “damn that is cool”.
OneEDM: So are you guys going to make any new music once festival season cools down?
Alien Fuel: That is usually what we do. In the summer everything is a little bit slowed down. We kind of went on a mini-tour at the beginning of the year which slowed down our winter producing, but this winter we will probably have like an EP out.
OneEDM: Are you guys doing anything crazy for Halloween this year?
Alien Fuel: We are opening for Slushii at the Theatre of Living Arts.
OneEDM: Are there any sets you guys are looking forward to seeing tonight?
Alien Fuel: I have never seen Figure and I played last year here and missed it. I would really like to see ASADI really bad. Almost everyone you guys mentioned in your ‘artists-to-watch-out-for’ article I would love to see.
Afterthoughts:
Alien Fuel is an inspiration for aspiring artists, showing what you can do if you are original and work hard. They continue to gain a loyal fan base with their performace at Nightmare 2017 and the other sets of theirs across the country. In upcoming years, watch for them to continue to grow as artists and start moving up the set-lists. OneEDM was excited to interview an artist-duo on the rise that may someday be headlining a festival near you.
