Who are you? How did you meet?

Well, we are Tom and Zip and together we are the Dutch production duo Homework. We met each other through our work at the Amsterdam based record store Concerto. In the beginning we didn’t really know each other, but after a while we noticed that we both had a great love for electronic music, in the broadest sense. Tom was already djing at that time and Zip was aspiring to be a dj, so we hooked up and played at a (legendary) birthday party for a mutual friend. After that we never played solo again. The whole production thing sort of evolved from that dj brotherhood.

Where does the name Homework come from?

Our home is indeed our studio and we feel most at home in our studio, but the name doesn’t have much to do with the location of our studio work. The name had a sort of nice serious yet playful ring to it. And it’s always nice to be the thing you hated when you were a young kid in school, haha.

What were your roots and influences when you started out?

When we started out we were mostly into the electro sound. Tiga was our god, haha. But through the years our interests changed from the electro sound to a broader respect for contemporary dance music in general. Still, we would dub our style as house music.
 But the thing that still arouses us in a big way is the more experimental electronic music out there. Aphex Twin (really looking forward to his new material), Boards of Canada, and the whole Warp Records bunch, and guys like Jeff Mills, Drexciya those guys really opened our eyes for what’s possible in music. 
Separately we were both inspired by different things as well of course. Tom still has a great love for soundtracks and owns practically everything Ennio Morricone ever made.

What is more important? Good reviews from critics and others artists or seeing a crowd go wild at one of your shows?

Haha, that’s a difficult question to answer. We used to have a poster on the studio door saying: “Do you want to be famous or do you want to be happy?” As with this question: both things are nice! Appreciation from your fellow artists is very important in a way, because they actually know what they are talking about. But our gut would say that there is nothing a beautiful as a crowd going crazy to one of your own songs. Especially when you are not the one playing it. Brodinski playing ‘Fissa Tune’ at Paaspop Festival in front of thousands of people… that’s the stuff dreams are made of.

What track would you say is your proudest work?

Homework: Every production is like a child and as a proud parent we love all of our children equally. Of course Fissa Tune has a special place, because it was so well received and gave us so much attention internationally. Also our remix of Paradise by Art Nouveau is very dear to us. We tried to do something totally different with that one.

Who would you say is your favorite producer at the moment? Why?

There isn’t really one in particular. We admire a lot of artists from all sort of different genres. Within the house spectrum we’re really impressed by the new work of guys like Tim Green, Round Table Knights, Ramon Tapia and Jesse Rose, but also by what the guys over at Wolf + Lamb Records are doing. But we’re just as psyched about for instance the work of Bibio, even though that might not work in a club environment.

www.myspace.com/officialhomework
www.jackmode.de

The Jackmode Show with Homework will air Saturday August 14th at 22:00.