I was able to get in touch with the hard hitting electro duo, Valerna, just in time for their recent EP release “Amazing.” Amazing has two quite different sounding tracks, Wrath of God and Amazing. Originating from Los Angeles, Valerna consists of long time friends Brett Sorrentino and RJ Buchanan. They have had a fair amount of presence on hype machine and currently have several dozen tracks on Beatport. Luckily for me, they were kind enough to grant me an interview and let me share some of their dopest tracks with you. Check out what they have to say about their future, their origins, and how they perform as a duo.

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Crash-It: How did you guys get together, whats the story?

Valerna: Brett & I became friends in our sophomore year of high school.  We bonded over synthesizers & metal bands.  We were both in different bands so we started making some electronic music together back then, but it didn’t get serious until we were living together in Boston after high school.

Crash-It: What did you do before Valerna?

Valerna: When we started Valerna in 2002, it was a five piece live band, built off the sequence-based composition we did in FL.  But the sound we wanted was expensive to attain.  We decided to start making and selling hip-hop beats to fund the project and that took off.  We had a successful studio in Boston for a few years before we signed with a high-end studio in Malibu as ghost producers.  When we left that situation in 2007 and re-started Valerna.

Crash-It: Is there anything behind the name?

Valerna: Kind of.  There isn’t some deep political or romantic story behind it.  As with many of our decisions (believe it or not), it was very calculated.  For right now, I’ll just say we see it as a perfect phonetical representation of our sound.

Crash-It: What was the hardest challenge to overcome in this industry?

Valerna: The clash of the old DJ-based electronic culture with the new production-based one, and moreover, the lack of discernment there seems to be between the two still.  We’ve seen several “big name” DJ’s (in the rare occasion we’re out at a club) who, if all goes accordingly, are aiming to simply tempo blend one beatport top 10 track into another all night; and still, you’ll hear not one, but three, maybe four trainwrecked mixes in an hour set.  After saying that, I’m thinking of one guy I saw who plopped his laptop down and never touched a deck or piece of hardware once.  The club essentially paid Ableton Live to DJ that night.  Not to say there aren’t some fantastic straight-up DJ’s who still approach a set with creativity and a musical ear (my girlfriend being one of them).  It’s more that the growth of electronica into the “mainstream” is in an unsure, awkward, teenage kind of phase right now.  It will all inevitably come together.

Crash-It: Do you prefer the software or hardware route when it comes to synths?

Valerna: It’s been 15 years Brett and I have been twisting knobs and pulling pitch wheels.  Obviously, in a perfect world, you’d want everything to be hardware based but fully integrated, for automation sake, with your software.  There’s a precision to composing on a DAW I enjoy.  But in the real world, most people don’t have 40 grand to blow on synths, so we’re primarily VST based with a few outboard pieces.

Crash-It: Do you utilize any unique production techniques?

Valerna: A lady never tells…

Crash-It: How exactly do you guys delegate what to do when performing live, do you guys tag team or constantly do stuff at the same time?

Valerna: We perform live together simultaneously: myself on the tables and Brett mans a Korg Kaoss Pad.  We’ve been together so long, that we perform in sync as one “DJ”(so-to-speak). Because 90% of our set is our own music, and our tracks tend to be drastically different from one to the other, they are not easy to blend.  Brett has an innate ability with that Kaoss Pad.  He can grab a 1-2 second piece of what I’m spinning and seamlessly change it’s texture/pitch/etc to accommodate where we’re heading next.  It makes for a set that resembles the flow of a 70s album rock band like King Crimson or Yes, more than just “hey! here’s a song!….aaaand here’s another song!”

Crash-It: Any advice for aspiring producers?

Valerna: Whatever music you want to make, study it intensely first. Stick with one platform and never get lost in one sound

Crash-It: Favorite hobby/thing to do when you aren’t in the studio or touring?

Valerna: No such thing.  In between those two activities, I listen to a lot of Howard Stern and Brett does a lot of reading.

Crash-It: What’s in store for Valerna in 2011?

Valerna: We’ll have a big presence in television and film placements this year.  We struck deals last year with a lot of shows on MTV (Real World, Road Rules, etc), E! (“The Kardashians”, “Return of the Kardashians”, “The Kardashians Save Christmas”, & “The Kardashians vs. Predator”), some VH1 shows I don’t remember…  I know we’re on next Monday’s [Jan 31, 2011] episode of MTV’s “Skins” which seems to have a lot of heat right now.  We’re also the only non-score track placed in the new David Arquette / Bijou Philips film “Land of the Astronauts.”

Other than that, we have a remix for PeaceTreaty out on Dim Mak Feb 8, a remix for Mercurius FM out on MSTRKRFT’s Teenage Riot Records soon and a way crazy collab track we did with my girlfriend Heavygrinder due out Feb/March on Cold Blank’s Burn the Fire.

Also we should be putting together a solid 2011 tour schedule soon…results of our quest for proper mgmt/agency permitting