Wisseloord residency for Elephanz music duo
What happens when an established musical duo moves for a 3 week residency? Maxime and Jonathan Verleysen of Elephanz lived and recorded at Wisseloord for 3 weeks, working with other artists to create a large number of new songs. We talk to them about their time here.
“It’s magical, you wake up every day not knowing if you’ll be able to create. But every day we have found inspiration.”- Jonathan Verleysen
We invited brothers and music duo Maxime and Jonathan Verleysen for a residency at Wisseloord through our collaboration with the French Centre National de la Musique. The goal of this partnership is to create a bridge between the French and Dutch music industry. By doing this the artists and industries of both horizons can collaborate and expand their fields. For 3 weeks, they have been working on creating new music and collaborating with other artists in the Studios.
Collaborate with other artists
“We didn’t realize what it would bring us,” says Maxime. “We are always working exclusively together, a literal band of brothers. But to come here and work in such a big studio where you interact with different artists every day, that opened up our perspective.”
Jonathan interjects: “Not only that, it also helped us understand something about our own way of working. We discovered that we share a lot more with other artists than we thought, we can bring them in to work on ideas together. And it made us very productive, we have been writing one to two tracks per day, which is amazing. It really helped that we lived on site, at the campus, so that we could record at any time.”
Writing songs every day
“The residency also felt like a retreat from our French music career, a break from the pressure and an opportunity to work on new material. We certainly got the most out of our time here, we got a lot of inspiration and learned a lot about working with different artists. We have really enjoyed this environment,” explains Maxime.
When asked about what learning or experience they are taking with them back home, Jonathan is very clear: “We are workaholics, so writing and creating good songs is what makes us happy. Leaving here with a large number of songs that are musically composed [finished] is what makes this residency a success for us. We’ll finetune them some more when we get back home, when the whole experience has settled in, and after that it’s time for the publishers to do their job: find artists to perform our songs and make them their own.”