Interview with Krowdexx

Sometimes you find a track that sounds interesting in many ways. When you follow the artist for a longer period of time you can feel their music, you start to understand it. This kind of artists do trigger, you want to know more. This made us decide to interview Simone Calvino and Giulio Destefanis. These youngsters are working hard, deliver some amazing tracks and want to strike down at many events in the future. Let’s have a chat with these talents, we are speaking about Krowdexx!

Hi guys, thanks for this interview. First let me ask, how are you guys doing there in Italy?

Very good now! We just finished our school exams a few days ago and now we are totally focused on making new tracks!


For our new readers, can you give us a short introduction, who is Krowdexx?
We are a raw style DJ/producers duo from Italy. We are 20 years old and we perform with a mask and a uniform, a good alternative to our faces, haha!


Since you guys are a duo, how did you meet?
Well, when we were eleven years old we started the same secondary school in Alba, a city in the northern Italy. In these years we became very good friends and, at the age of fifteen, we bought our first midi controller (Behringer bcd3000). Since that time it began, our love for music!

When did you guys start listening to Hardstyle music, was it love at first sight?
Of course! Before that ,we listened only pop music broadcasted on radio stations, but when we listened for the first time “Headhunterz vs Abject – Scantraxx Rootz” we thought: “This kind of music is literally amazing!”


What did trigger you to create your own music?
So, it’s a really strange story. At the age of fourteen, Simone had a serious accident with his motorbike. This bad moment changed his life and his projects and, being best friends, it changed Giulio’s life too. In the first months, Simone was in a wheelchair and in the afternoon, instead of playing out like the other guys, we spent a lot of time on the computer. Being tired of the usual video games, we surfed on the net for looking for something useful and we asked ourselves: “How do you create music?”. Then we became aware of Fl studio and started our path.


Who was your hero back then?
Certainly Headhunterz. Every of his track made us closer and closer to hardstyle music.

Krowdexx is an interesting name, how did you come up with this alias?
Is a really difficult question. We started with the alias “Noisedominators” but it was too similar to Noisecontrollers and it wasn’t original. Then, after one year, we decided to change it that to make us more identifiably. We tried to combine a lot of words to create an alias without a real literal meaning to be easily found and be unique on the web.

You guys wear masks as Krowdexx, a thing which we see often in our genre of music. Still, your masks are creepy and original, where are the masks from? Is it designed for Krowdexx or?

Yes, they were designed for us as we tried to create an original brand. The design was made by a friend, a painter, who managed to develop something fantastic starting from our basic ideas.


For those who don’t now your tracks, how would you describe your style?
It depends on the track. Usually, we really like to combine euphoric elements/melodies and banging drops because, for us, raw style is more than simple screeches and hard kicks. However, in these days, we are working on very hard tracks produced mainly for the dancefloor.

You are from Italy, a country which has many great Hardcore artists and a few Hardstyle artists as well. Raw doesn’t seem that popular in Italy as Hardcore, does it? Can you tell us something about it? Do you have great events in Italy as well?
It’s true. Here you can find Rawstyle and generally hard dance music in few clubs. The main problem is the average Italian, that would rather spend a lot of money to go to bigger, foreign, festivals like Tomorrowland, Qlimax etc., but without caring about Italian hard events. This led to the closure of some good projects with many prospects for the future. Probably at the moment “E-mission” is the most important event in Italy, but we hope to see a lot of new events in the future.

As Krowdexx you did recently release ‘Deathmatch’ and ‘Castaway’. Deathmatch was a rough track with a brilliant drive in the first drop, Castaway is a track with a glimpse of the euphoric side. Can you tell us something about these tracks? What do you guys prefer?
Sure! ‘Deathmatch’ was created especially for dancefloor while ‘Castaway’ has more epic sounds and a fresh melody more suited to a home listening. One thing that characterizes much “Castaway”, in our opinion, is the vocal by Nikkita which was very helpful for the creation of the atmosphere as well as the melody, unlike Deathmatch where we   did start to develop by starting with the kick. Honestly, we haven’t a real preference, we like them both.

For the other talents out there, what does your studio look like? Can you tell us something about your equipment? Which studio software do you use?
First of all, we have two home studios, both were designed and build ourselves. We made two studios because we live in two different cities and so we can alternate the travel every week. The equipment is very similar: krk rp5 + sub krk rp10s as monitoring systems, focusrite scarlett 2i2 as audio interface, iMac as workstation, M-audio oxygen 49 as midi keyboard and a Virus Ti Snow. Since 2014 we started using Logic pro X. Our advice is, if possible, to produce on Mac OSX because we think that is the most reliable operative system.

As a duo, you can have different roles within one alias like Krowdexx. Do you guys have different roles? For instance one of you is the better producer the other one runs the social media and loves to DJ?
No, Krowdexx is a duo but we work as a single person. The roles are the same as for production and we decide together every social medias stuff.

What was the craziest event you guys did ever visit?
For the moment we have never been to a foreign event. In Italy the best we visited was ‘Legend Summer Festival’ but, as we said before, unfortunately, it’s no longer organized.

Where do you guys love to play sometimes?

There are many great festivals out there, Defqon1 is always been one of our favorites so playing there would be definitely a dream!

We see many labels covered with talents from Holland, the country was the Hardstyle scene is at an absolute peak and has its foundations. What do you guys think about the opportunities for producers that live outside Holland?
Well, we think that it’s a really hard path for the non-Dutch producers because in other countries there aren’t many events and it’s too difficult to increase the visibility. In our opinion, hardstyle and raw style music is still very niche, limited to northern Europe and a few other countries.

Would you like to live and build your career in Holland as well? Or do you prefer to stay in Italy?
Yes, it would be a wonderful opportunity to build our career in Holland and being in touch with the greatest artists of this genre and Dutch fans that, despite having never met, already shown us a lot of support and a warm affection. We are very attached to Italy being born and raised here, here we have all our friends and our families, but we think it’s a big limitation to our musical career.

As mentioned before you guys did release Deathmatch and Castaway a few weeks ago, can we expect something else coming?
Obviously! Now we are working on some collab and a solo banging tracks. So, stay tuned guys!

Final Question: Would you like to share something else, maybe something exclusive or something for the fans?Yeah, in these days we are recording a video trailer to present one of our collabs, but for the moment we can’t tell you more! 😉 Anyway thanks a lot for this interview, see you soon guys!