10 Questions To… The Swing Bot

Interview With The Swing Bot (10 Questions to…)

The Swing Bot is probably the most mysterious Electro Swing artist, hiding his face under the mask of a moustache. You can search in vain on the internet for details about him, the behind-the-scenes of his musical work and how he produces his tracks. We know how much you love his electronic style and have been following the development of his career (as he is one of those artists who has released a whole host of new songs over the course of this year), which is why we are delighted to present you with an interview with The Swing Bot, conducted by LadyDot. This article will not only provide you with information about this producer, but also a quick trip back to the late 90s, when The Swing Bot screwed around in the world of music, exploring new genres and being inspired by the development of technology. Get to know this fascinating artist better and step into The Swing Bot’s world for a moment!

01. LadyDot: Hi, The Swing Bot! Admittedly, I know your real name, but you’re probably the most mysterious person in the Electro Swing artist community, so I won’t give away that secret! 😊 Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions, even though I know you have a very busy schedule. To begin with, I’d like to ask you, how did your adventure with music in general start? When did you decide to focus on producing songs and was that your first choice, or did you want to do something completely different in your life?

The Swing Bot: Hi Anna, well nice to meet you, thank you for giving me the opportunity to answer your questions.

It started when I was 14 years old in 1998, I visited a friend and when playing video games in the room I heard some music coming from his big brother’s bedroom. I went in and he was scratching on vinyl on some hip hop music. I knew instantly that this is what I wanted to do, feeling the music right under your finger was magic. So I sold my playstation, all the games I had and bought two turntables and a mixer and started my music journey.
Then I started to listen to a lot of music on vinyl, news and old ones. I began to do some mixtape mixing hip hop and rap acapella with some Funk instrumental and shared them with friends in my district in the city I lived at this time in the south of France. It was first recorded on tape but at the time when burning CDs started to be more accessible, I invested in a computer.

Computer was new for me at this time and internet was not like it is now, a friend from high school came to my place to fix it and installed some software, one of them was a Daw (Digital Audio Workstation) called “Reason” , I launched the software and was completely lost but I knew this was the next step I wanted to go.

Then I created some hip hop instrumental for some rap bands in my city and moved slowly to Electro/house music as I discovered more and more genres.

02. LadyDot: You have a great sense of what’s currently in vogue in music, and each of your tracks is incredibly polished and complex. This makes me wonder: are you self-taught, or did you learn music production at school or from some other producer? Do you play any instruments? I’m also curious to know if any subject in music production was difficult for you at the beginning of your career?

The Swing Bot: Well thank you for your kind words, I’m still learning and trying new techniques each time I´m working on a new song. I never learnt music theory, was never really interested in it, for me music was always from the beginning like Lego, you add some pieces together and at the end you create something that looks cool,or sounds nice in music.

I don´t play any instruments, I have no feeling for any of them so you won’t see a Guitare on the wall of my home studio. I do use some midi controllers but just to optimize my workflow.

With this background it has been difficult for a lot of years and still is today, so I try to do my best to play in the correct key and make it sound good.

03. LadyDot: Music producers often spend a long time looking for their path, the genre they feel most comfortable in. And what was it like in your case? Was Electro Swing your first choice, or did you produce music in a completely different style before? What do you like most about Electro Swing? The use of samples from old swing songs, or maybe something completely different?

The Swing Bot: Yes, music production on a DAW can let you produce all the genres you want, if you have the minimum knowledge about the software, and if you don´t , you can still have a ton of information very easily on the internet.

I went from Hiphop/breakbeat, to house music and some other genre. I do produce music under other nicknames as well.
For Me there are two points that interest me in producing ElectroSwing, the biggest is to listen and discover very old songs from many artists of an era, the second is the sampling.

So I don’t listen to ElectroSwing in general, but I spin some original Swing vinyl.

As for ElectroSwing, this happened by chance. One day I was just listening to a very old vinyl from Glenn Miller and decided for fun to sample it and add some electro element to it.

It was for me like an exercise, it took me two hours to finish the track and I thought I would never use it or share it with anyone, you know the kind of tracks that finish somewhere in a lost folder in your computer.

But then I remembered that my friend Vassili Gemini was producing similar stuff at that time (2012) and I sent it to him , maybe he could have done something with it or play it on his Dj set as I was sure to do nothing with it, as at this time more focus on House Music.
Then he came back to me after some gigs, telling me that this remix from Glenn Miller was making people go crazy during his Dj sets and he convinced me to release it and see what would happen.

At this time it was easy to create a Soundcloud account and share music, So I found a nickname in five minutes (question 4), released the track as a free download and all started. Two or three weeks later I was booked for an Eswing Dj set all around Europe. My first gigs were in Germany and I was very happy to share the stage with Vassili Gemini.

I played my first gigs in the ElectroSwing genre without knowing who Parov Stelar, Caravan Palace were at this time as I had no knowledge of this scene and He even had to borrow some tracks from his playlist to prepare my Dj set, crazy time it was…
If I continue producing ElectroSwing, it’s because of Vassili Gemini.

04. LadyDot: This is going to be a very short question: tell me, please, where did your artistic pseudonym come from? I think this will be somewhat related to the next question I will ask you, but I might be wrong, so please tell us about it.

The Swing Bot: As mentioned previously, I had to find a Nickname very fast. I knew that for the search engine optimization (SEO) I should better use SWING in it, and being a fan of Daft Punk I added the short name of Robot, BOT.

05. LadyDot: I know that you are interested in new technologies and artificial intelligence, among other things. You combine your musical and production skills brilliantly with these fields. How do you use these new technological developments? What is AI to you now and how do you think this innovation is useful in music making?

The Swing Bot: I first looked into AI for my video clips, as now music producers have to do everything by themself , from artwork design, to social network and video editing. These are all the fields that don’t catch my interest but I understand the importance of it. I think that there are two different ways of using AI, to create something and to modify something.

I prefer to keep the creation part from my ideas, but why not modify them using tools that are now available for everyone. I recorded all the videos myself, outside or indoors and just modified them with AI to add some touch to it and this in just some hours.
No prompt is ready to add a big mustache at the place of a human head. :)

As for the music I found out some month ago that I could use it to modify my voice (I´m a very bad singer) to get some very nice results, not perfect, but that I could work with.

As my production lacked vocals, because of the difficulty to sample only vocals on old songs and using AI modification on vocals resulted in a faster workflow. I worked with some very nice singers and I will continue because these are some great experiences but these are often projects that take more time to finish.

For the music creation, well everyone is free to do what he wants, but I know that creating a song from a prompt would remove all the fun and pain it took me to normally produce it by hand. I think that when you use it to create something, the joy, the feeling that you get is very short, short like the time it took AI to create it.

I do first music for myself, why should I give this to an AI. ✌️

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06. LadyDot: Well, this may not be a very sophisticated question, but I’m very curious (and I think not only me, but also your other fans!) why are you hiding under that illuminated mask of a mustache?

The Swing Bot: Another Idea that came just like this and I decided to go with it, It was also to add something more visual to my music. There are a lot of Djs in the ElectroSwing scene and I wanted to bring something cool to it.

07. LadyDot: You released a really strong, incredibly electronic and highly acclaimed album in 2023, ‘Art Disco’, which combines influences from many genres of music. By the way, one of the tracks from this album, ‘Waves of 84’, became a hit and has over 4 million streams on Spotify, my congratulations! Just a year and a half later you released another album, ‘Tournedisc’, making you one of the most productive and most frequently released Electro Swing artists. What was it like working on these albums? Did you just have dozens of different song prototypes waiting patiently in your folder for release? Or did you create them totally spontaneously, feeling a surge of creativity?

The Swing Bot: I´m amazed when I from time to time look at the stats of some streaming platforms as I still consider music as a hobby for me. But I would have never gone that far without the incredible team of the Freshly Squeezed music label, they are always on my side giving me the best advice and feedback since I released my first track with them and I would like to thank Nick for trusting me.

I really enjoyed working on these two albums, I tried to come up with each track sounding different but still with this way that I have to produce Electro Swing.

Yes I do have a lot of projects in progress, as much as I listen original swing songs let say, each time I get some idea when I listen old tracks then I start a new project, sometime I work around the sample, other time I add sample to a project I started myself, they are different approach working with sample.
With all these years passed to start new ideas, I arrived at a point where I had a lot of projects that I finished in a short period of time. Most of my productions are purely spontaneous as I don´t know music theory and work only with my ears.

The first thing I learnt when I started music production is that you can’t force inspiration, sometimes I can finish four or five tracks a week and sometimes I will not do music for months. It took me time to find my workflow and the surroundings to get my inspiration.

08. LadyDot: In your biography we can read that in your musical work you combine French Touch with Electro Swing. And it is about French Touch that I would like to ask you, because I am a huge fan of this musical genre. I love Cassius, Daft Punk and Étienne de Crécy, among others, and when I was preparing to interview you, I went back to the first tracks you released and in ‘It Had to Funk You’ and ‘Darktown Rag’, for example, I definitely hear a similar vibe. Also, the genre’s influence constantly runs through your musical work. Which artists producing French Touch style tracks have inspired you? What do you love most about the genre and why do you have such a fondness for it?

The Swing Bot: All the artists that you have nominated are more representative of what I usually listen to. I was fourteen years old when I bought the album vinyl of Daft Punk “Homework” and my bedroom was still full of Lego at that time.

I went to only two concerts in my life, Daft Punk “Alive” 2007 and Justice “Access All Arena” 2012, I think the entire Ed Banger record label is representative of my music background and other artists like Gesaffelstein and Vitalic.

I produced French house before ElectroSwing and still do it under another nickname, and from time to time, yes it mixes with my inspiration of Electro swing release and “it had to Funk you” is the right exemple. The difference is that jazz music is way more complex than Disco and French touch style cannot always be applied but I’m currently working on some production for 2025 that will mix more funky house and swing to bring back the French touch under the Swing Bot name.

09. LadyDot: Some time ago you were a DJ on the Party Like Gatsby tour. Please tell us about your impressions of these events. What countries did you visit? Where do you think audiences received your set most eagerly and which performance do you remember best? Are you also planning to go on tour soon? Or is now the time when you want to focus on your studio work?

The Swing Bot: I had the chance to do the entire tour for the last two years for the Party like Gatsby show and this was a great experience, this was a great show but after ten years they have decided to stop it and start another show, it did not stop due to lower audience as it was always full. Yes, people all over Europe still want to participate in Burlesque and ElectroSwing parties. They like to dress and are always so happy to enjoy this kind of event, I have never seen people enjoying and laughing so much as in an Eswing event. The Audience was always mixed and representative of our society, I enjoyed playing a lot of original swing tracks, also of course my track till the end of the night.

Mostly Belgium and UK shows were crazy but overall all Europe knows how to swing and drink so to say.

Of course, travelling every weekend last winter, I had to wait to be back in Studio. So this winter I will try to make the best out of it.
I think that there are way less parties and events like before covid, but the electro swing scene is still present, so hopefully I will travel again to show my big moustache to everybody.

10. LadyDot: Every fan of yours is surely wondering what else The Swing Bot will surprise us with in the future? My guess is that you absolutely do not intend to stop, because now is precisely your time! What would you like to achieve in the next five years and what is your biggest dream related to music?

The Swing Bot: Well I have some new featuring projects, remixes and new tracks for the future, I won’t stop electro swing till I enjoy producing it, maybe it will come back to be trendy before 2030, let’s see.

I think this last question is the most difficult, the world is changing so fast, technology continues to progress fast, music evolves. Staying on this rhythm of releases would be nice, and still being present would be great.

Interview by LadyDot; Date: 2024-11-26