Vik-Bitta are a duo (Lewis Stieven & Harley Denton) hailing from north-east Victoria, who are currently holed up in the basement of a Reservoir share house. They’re crafting crispy beats in isolation, trying to water the seeds of Australia’s emerging Brazilian Bass scene, so that when we can all safely go out and get munted in clubs again, it’ll be ready to bloom. I caught up with them the other week; we all sat a safe distance apart and talked about all about their new single Hold On, which is available now on Spotify.
For starters, who is Vik-Bitta, how did you come together, tell us a bit about yourselves?
H: So… Vik-Bitta is an Australian Brazilian-Bass music duo; Lewis and I grew up together, we drifted apart a bit over the years, but then at one point we ended up catching up together, and just basically started getting absolutely fuck-eyed and making beats. That’s pretty much how it all started. From there we started edging away a bit from drinking quite so much while we were doing stuff and started taking it a bit more seriously, and ended up moving in together, and kept doing more and more and… here we are today. You got anything to add big boy?
L: Yep. In a minute.
What sort of music do you guys make, how do you describe it?
H: We describe it as Brazilian Bass. It’s pretty much if you took all the structures from house music, and inserted a bunch of really, crazy modulated modern synths in there – so instead of having sampled old-school sounds from 80’s and 90’s classic synths, it’s much more you know, modern, digital sounds making really crazy stuff you might get in heavy bass music. it’s a bit more in your face, basically. Is how we feel about it, I suppose. We both just sort of had a mutual love for it which is what started us making music together in the first place. It’s not something that’s really huge over here yet, we’ve been hearing a bit of it, but it’s absolutely massive in South America at the moment, and that’s sort of where we’re getting a lot of our influences from.
How’d you decide on your name? How did you end up deciding VB was the best beer to represent your tasty grooves?
L: I Don’t really understand the question.
H: Yeah, we’re not affiliated with VB, I’m not sure quite where you’re coming from. First off, it’s spelt completely differently, for someone to read it and think that, it’s completely ridiculous, you know? Vik-Bitta was just one of those things, we were sitting around and you know, you’re just throwing around cool words and stuff. But yeah, I don’t mind the beer but it’s not something that’s occurred to us before. That’s funny!
L: Such a coincidence. I’m having a VB right now!
‘Hold On’ is your new track, what was the production process like, and how do you feel you’ve built on your sound since your first couple of tracks?
L: That was the first track we tried to do with any sort of lyrics, and yeah, we just mucked around and wrote them together over a few hours and thought ‘fuck it we’ll just give it a crack.’ We both had a go at singing it, and definitely decided Harley was better, so it was a pretty obvious decision there.
H: It was definitely a bit funny for me releasing vocals, I definitely don’t consider myself a vocalist, but I think they turned out pretty well in the end, so I think that’s sort of cool.
L: The whole composition of it actually came together really quickly. It’s good – we bounce off each other a lot as well, getting into a flow feels sick. You don’t always see eye to eye – we have differences, but always find something we’re both happy with.
H: Yeah and I think having quite different music tastes a lot of the time, it feels a bit like we might trim the fat away from each other a bit, having someone actually able to be completely honest with you and tell you when it’s shit is really helpful. When you’re stuck in a room by yourself you can just end up going down a weird train of stuff that doesn’t sound good to anyone but you. But yeah, It came together really fast, in terms of getting together the general idea and then spending ages just fine-tuning stuff – learning more, and just trying to get closer to sound, and the direction we want to take, we’re pretty excited about it.
What’s in store from here?
L: Hopefully play some shows before the end of the year depending on how this virus shit plays out.
H: Yeah, we had some lined up but they’re just not gonna be happening now.
L: We actually had a sold-out show at Rod Laver booked in, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen.
H: Actually, the very first track we wrote together is going to come out very soon. We did a remix of ‘SexyBack’ by Justin Timberlake, but it’s just been a bit of a nightmare trying to work out how we actually get the rights to that – it’s not too easy to contact Mr J.T But got it sorted, to the point we can get out on YouTube and it’s not gonna get taken down. We’ve also actually just spent the last week recording saxophone for our new one that we’re working on which is pretty exciting, I think we’re still just exploring and finding our sound and trying out different things within the subgenre and trying to find exactly where we want to sit our stuff. This one is sounding real bouncy, it’s a lot of fun.
Check out the single below.
Written by Liam McNally
