The Dutch duo on the 1970s “sweet spot,” songs that sound recorded underwater and the quiet power of a record to keep someone company.
Feng Suave describe their sound as “reminiscent of bygone times when vocals are drowned in reverb and instruments are seemingly recorded under water.” Put on their self-titled EP and you know exactly what they mean. The songs drift in slow and warm, as if they were pressed onto tape decades ago and only just surfaced.
The duo, Daniel de Jong and Daniel Elvis Schoemaker, are proudly Dutch and unapologetically in love with the past. You can hear the fuzz of a Hendrix guitar in their music and catch a little of Curtis Mayfield’s falsetto in the way the vocals float.
The duo treat the last five decades of recorded music as a “treasure trove,” and they pick through it with care, lifting a texture here and a rhythm there.
“We feel all the music you’re exposed to will seep through in your own creations,” they say. “The wider the variety of music you listen to, the more you can venture into the grey areas between genres.”
The wider the variety of music you listen to, the more you can venture into the grey areas between genres.
Still, one decade keeps calling them back. “We tend to always come back to 70s music,” they say. “We both feel that’s the ‘sweet spot’ in history. They had good enough equipment to make warm, crisp, stereo recordings but shitty enough equipment to prevent it from sounding all polished and glossed-up.”
That philosophy shapes how they write. They start from the bottom up, searching for what they call “a groovy foundation that the rest of the song can float above.”
There is one part of modern music they keep at arm’s length: their phones. In a business that often measures artists by their followers, Feng Suave barely post.
“We both just enjoy being off the grid, so we don’t really like our phones buzzing with notifications all the time, maybe that’s part of it,” they say. They know an online presence matters, and they do want to connect with the people who listen. They would simply prefer those people look up from the screen now and then. “We also want people to get off their phone and smell a fucking flower for once,” they say, “and then come to our show.”
Recently, the band learned that their music had helped a man stop using crack cocaine. Recovery is never down to one thing, and a record cannot claim the credit. But if a few songs kept someone company through something that hard, that is about as much as music can hope to do.
Their songs are slow and patient, recorded on old gear for people willing to sit with them a while. In a feed built for scrolling, that’s rare. Put the phone down and press play.
Feng Suave’s self-titled EP is out now on all major platforms. Words by Sam Farrell. Images courtesy of Feng Suave.
