Dino Coskun and Juliette Bourdeix are multi instrumentalist musicians and producers. The type of artists that fully engage with music and the audience when they are on stage, providing a delicious mixture of world and electronic music.
Youthie & Kino Doscun have gifted the listener with several releases on Youthie Records and Merkaba Music, taking the traditional music world and blending it with dub patterns in a high-quality manner.
It’s a pleasure to talk with them today about music and life.
Interview by Shantiago on 25/01/24.
Cover image by Les Travaux de Julia, content images by Carl Ypreeuw.
Hi Dino and Juliette. How are you? Thank you for spending some time with us.
Hi Santiago! It’s a pleasure, it’s always so interesting to read the interviews on psybient.org, so we’re happy to contribute!
How was last summer season in France? It seems that there are plenty of interesting events there to enjoy.
The summer season was really fun, there ‘s a lot of interesting events indeed. We played at People are Strange festival in the south of France, it was the first edition but it was really well done.
We also played at the Nataraja festival where we met you, we’re playing every summer at this festival since 5 or 6 years, we really feel at home on this one!
We played also at the Isis Garden festival, in the south of France also, a great place for downtempo/midtempo psychedelic music .
Let’s start with music talks. Who are Youthie and Kino Doscun as artists? What is your musical journey and background?
Kino Doscun: I started music by playing guitar in a rock band around my 14th, a bit like everybody! Some time after that we started to play other experimental stuff with with our band, doing a lot of improvised music, playing free jazz in a tekno free party’s…
It’s where I met Iurii Gagarin by the way! He was in Paris at that time, and was searching for people to help organizing chill out/psybient parties. So we did an event with him in a big squat in the suburbs, we were doing the live/improvised stage and he was managing the psybient stage. After that, we definitely fell in love with the psychedelic chill out music, and I started to produce some tracks, thanks to him!
Some years ago I felt into the world of traditional oriental music, and I learned to play the Oud, Saz, Persian Târ, and a few other strings instruments, started to incorporate that into my music, and released my first solo project inspired by that on Merkaba Music in 2021. Also I work as a sound engineer for live performances and in the studio, so my work is really inspired by sound, sound design, acoustic instruments and the different ways to record them…
Youthie: I’ve had a rather eclectic musical career, both institutional, with a long classical training on trumpet from the age of 6 to 25, and self-taught on the other instruments: flute, accordion and bagpipes. I started playing reggae and jazz at the age of 17, when I joined a band called “Natty Princess”, and then I discovered electronic music, including psytrance and dub, as well as the world music scene, particularly oriental and balkan music. I like to mix my different influences in my compositions: reggae, jazz, world music & classical music!
How did you meet and merge to collaborate together?
We met via a friend in 2020, we were going in the same car at the Nataraja festival (it was the only trance festival in France this summer due to to covid), and we spent the rest of the summer doing music in a studio called La Briche where he lived at that time. We recorded some flute, accordion and trumpet for our first EP together “Sabir” this summer, and as it was going well after that we worked on the second solo album of Youthie ”The Root’s Explorers”, and so on.
Your sound is full of world music inspiration, fusing dub, Middle Eastern melodies, reggae, organic instruments, or electronics. What is the intent and message of your project in delivering these delights to the listener?
We don’t know if there’s a special message behind it, but the intent was to make psydub/downtempo music that is really focused on the live instruments and the performance, and to highlight more of the characteristics of instrumental music in it.
Middle Eastern/World flavours are used really often in psychedelic music, but it’s most of time as samples, to give an atmosphere, a little touch to spice up an electronic groove (and that’s great!). But we wanted to construct our tracks more as an instrumental thing that can be baked with electronics, we’re thinking the “focal point” of the story more on the instruments/melodies/solos than on the sound design/arrangement most of the time.
How do you organise your work when creating new songs? And how do you give names to your songs?
It depends, for “Sabir” we did the beats and grooves first, and we jammed over it to find the melodies and themes.
Lastly it’s more the other way, we start most of the time with an acoustic motif or melody, maybe playing around it over a simple percussion beat, and we build the rest of the track around the instrumental parts. We also try to play our tracks live with our instruments on stage before choosing the definitive arrangement, this way we can experiment, and see what works best.
For the names it’s not an easy thing haha, most of the time we find the definitive names just before finishing the tracks, we search a lot of different names to begin, and we don’t know why finally some appears to fit one track better than the other, so we keep it.
Could we know what kind of musical instruments you play when you perform live? What about in terms of hardware/software?
For our duo project usually we play flute, trumpet, oud and Persian Tar. We would like to bring the other ones too, accordion, viola da gamba, percussions… but too complicated to carry most of the time.
There’s a little condenser mic attached to the flute, a dynamic mic for the trumpet, and for the Oud and Persian Tar there’s a contact mic system build into the bridge of the instruments, so we have no issues of feedback. Everything goes into a RME UCX soundcard, and we do all the mixing and levels for the PA and monitors in it, this way we have a consistent mix each time and we can be efficient for the sound checks, which are very quick in electronic music festivals (if they exist!).
We have a little Midi controller and an I-pad that controls the sound card remote software and Ableton Live where we play our stems and our effects. This way we can control the mix, dub and add effects to our instruments and to the stems, and that’s it!
What do you do musically with your own projects? Kino Doscun-related and Youthie-related.
Kino Doscun: My solo project is always around dub and oriental instruments, but it’s at a slower tempo, more atmospheric and with more strange sound design and textures in it.
Youthie: In my solo project I make roots reggae music, only instrumental and also with influences of all parts of the world, Balkan, Latin, Jazz…
Do you have any plans to create music and perform together in the near future?
We are creating some tracks together for compilations, and for the moment we’re more focused on our solo projects, the next solo album of Youthie, released this January, and my next Solo EP. The next Duo EP is also in the making… let’s see how it goes!
Would you like to send a message to the psybient.org community?
Keep spreading the good ambient and chill music, and thanks to this community to open such great musical worlds to us!
Thank you so much for your words, observations and wisdom. We keep ourselves inspired with your music message full of creativity, dance and calm. See you soon surrounded by movement and sound. Hugs and peace.
Listen and follow Kino Doskun & Youthie:
https://merkabamusic1.bandcamp.com/album/sahar
https://youthie.bandcamp.com/album/inna-hijaz
https://merkabamusic1.bandcamp.com/album/sabir
https://soundcloud.com/kinodoscun
https://soundcloud.com/youthie-records
https://www.instagram.com/kinodoscun/
https://www.instagram.com/youthie_records/
