Hello Andrea & Manny, a pleasure to have you guys with us today. How are you both doing and whereabouts are you chatting to us from right now?
Hello, Thanks for having us. We’re both doing great. We’ve both been based out of Los Angeles since 2014.
We’re pleased to be chatting with you around the official launch of your Unidos project, kickstarting with ‘Todo Empezara’ on Riva Starr’s revered Snatch! Records. Congratulations to you both on this. Before we get into the release, we’d love to hear about how and why you came together to form Unidos.
Thank you so much. We were friends for a long time before ever collaborating. Then after working on a few tracks, it became evident that we worked together fairly well. We made an EP in 2019 that was released on Insomniac Records which we named Unidos after both agreed that title resonated with us instantly. Years later it felt natural to call the duo Unidos as well.
The two track Todo Empezara arrives October 13th on Snatch! Records and is a stellar way to get things underway for Unidos. What can you tell us about this release and the inspiration behind it?
We started working on a body of work just as covid began. After having a few tracks together we then started looking for what the project meant to us. We hosted a few private listening sessions with some heroes of ours which allowed us to learn how the music was connecting with people. Todo Empezó and Sucias were crowd favorites in all our sessions so it made it an easy choice for us.
Snatch! makes a perfect home for the release. How did Todo Empezara come to land on the label and how does it feel to have such strong backing for Unidos’ first outing?
Andrea and Riva go way back. We were able to play him some of our music while he was in town. It all came together pretty smoothly. We’re both big fans of him and his label, so it’s a dream come true to release on Snatch!
We’d love to dive into your creative process as a duo. How do you usually approach creating and do your methods differ from how you would approach things solo?
It’s a different approach on every track, but our strengths don’t seem to overlap which makes it easy and fun to work together. It’s great to have a partner to bounce ideas off of as well. It’s much different than working on a track solo because of the lack of feedback.
Can you run us through your studio set-up? Are there any key bits of equipment that have featured in Todo Empezara and will play a part going forwards?
We’re both mainly “in the box” producers with Ableton as our DAW of choice. We also have the benefit of Andrea being a Beta tester for some of the latest mixing plugins so we get to really push the boundaries sonically as well. We like to practice a Rick Rubin approach to everything and keep things as simple as possible.
Now that Unidos is a main focus for you both, can we expect output to continue under your individual BOT and Manolo aliases?
Yeah, we both have some releases lined up into 2023 for our solo projects, but our main focus is definitely Unidos moving into the future.
Thank you both for your time today, it was great to chat with you. We wish you all the best with the future of Unidos and can’t wait to hear what’s next. To round things off, is there anything else in the pipeline that you can share with us yet?
We have a lot of music in the pipeline which includes another EP on Snatch in 2023, but that’s all we can say right now. Thank you again for having us. It was a pleasure.
