The disco-fixated duo on commercial dance music, funkiness and how to make music together when you live in different countries

Who are you, and how did you end up becoming Televisor?

We are Tim and Tom. We're both from the UK, but Tom has been living in Amsterdam for the past 14 years.

We originally met on Soundcloud when working on solo projects. Collaborating produced some funky stuff and we became really good friends. We knew we had found each other's Simon and Garfunkel.

Describe your music-making process

Since we're both in different countries we have to send and share our projects with each other. We've used Dropbox to share all of our projects for such a long time now that we couldn't work without it!

In terms of writing the music we both play integral parts in this process. Typically one of us will start the initial idea, whether its a chord sequence, a drum pattern or a bass line, and then we will send it over to the other person who will add / chop and change it. As the projects grow it becomes a massive collaborative process and we have so much fun doing it.

We tend to write lots of songs, but only a select few get to see the light of day. If our feet start tapping whilst working on it, then thats the sure sign that the song will be put in the 'good' pile.

What does disco mean to you?

Melody and harmony play a huge part in our music. We love playing around with live instruments such as guitars and old synths and disco happens to be full of all that good stuff!

Disco is like black coffee and fried chicken. Its not all about the flares and the massive gold chains. Its music which you can't help but dance to. Music that to the vast majority of people is timeless. If its funky everyone can feel something in that type of music.

What are your thoughts on the current state of dance music?

Well a couple of weeks ago, Swedish duo Daleri made a mash-up out of the main hooks from the top 10 Beatport dance chart. Needless to say, the mash-up sounded like one long song.

In terms of mainstream dance music, we're not big fans and the majority of tracks that get played in festivals by charting DJs all sound the same.

There are two sides to the coin when it comes to commercial dance music. On the one side you have music which is written and produced by DJs and producers who are still very much still in creative control of their music, and on the other you have more commercially accessible music which is built upon the framework of modern pop music.

The music David Guetta produces is quite simple and nothing that a bedroom producer couldn't write after a year on a PC using FL Studio. However, every song he writes has a vocal hook in it driven by a commercially successful pop singer that helps carry the song along.

Some of the songs we play in our DJ set are by artists that you may not have heard of – Eumig and Chinon, Futurecop, Tobtok, Robotaki, Majestique – these guys excel at their ability to write great music, yet are nowhere near as succesful as the popular names in commercial dance music who knock out the same tired sounding crowd pleasers.

Who would you class as your musical peers?

Thats a tough question. We often see other musicians and producers and think to ourselves 'why can't we sound as good as them?' Tobtok and Oliver Nelson are great producers, although we consider these guys to have a more solid and refined sound than us, so it's great to know that equally they love our music just as much as we enjoy theirs!

Thats not to say that we don't sometimes think 'You bastards!' for having written such a great hook. It's not a competition by any means, but if they write good music, it keeps us on our toes. We know we have to deliver something great!