Quadron Opens for Raphael Saadiq

While Danish based music group Quadron was in town a couple weeks ago opening for Raphael Saadiq, I had the opportunity to chat with lead singer Coco. I'm learning that musicians are very shy and reserved aside from their on stage persona. She was very soft spoken, shy and a sweetie pie. Not jaded by her group's popularity one little bit.

Coco wasn't joined by her other half Robin but instead she had a musician by the name of August to fill the void. Now I've never seen Quadron perform live before, but I thoroughly enjoyed their set as a newbie. I can't begin to imagine how it feels to perform to a lackluster crowd. I swear I was the one dancing like my life depended on it. Sadly enough, the crowd had no idea who they were except for me and like 10 others so they were just staring at them on stage.

I get so frustrated with Baltimore because they are such a hard crowd to please. I've even heard very well known artists say that Baltimore crowds are tougher than New York City- that blew me away. Luckily-they sold all of their cds after their set before Saadiq came onstage. That brought a smile to my face. Always makes me happy when independent artists win over a crowd and gains new fans. I suddenly feel like a proud parent.

Coco's voice had me speechless. She was so animated on stage while grooving to the sound of her own voice. Don't you just love when singing is so effortless for some people?  Keyboardist August played all sorts of sounds on the keyboard. Amazing what you can do on the keys. August played the heck out of the saxophone on the keys. It was un-be-liev-able!

Chanel Laren: How is it being signed to indie label Plug Research?

Coco: It's pretty dope. We were pretty happy about that. It came out of the computer one day on Myspace they were interested in us. We didn’t have any expectations for the U.S. at all- we were just happy that it got released in Denmark.
CL: Do you think you’ll do any collaborations with your label mates?

Coco: We are both big fans of Bilal and Flying Lotus. We would love to and now it’s out there. We’ve met Bilal a couple times. We are doing the Jazz Reggae fest he's going to be a part of the ensemble I’ll be performing. That will be one step closer to a collaboration.

CL: How’d you come up with the name Quadron?

Coco: We wanted the name to be something we had in common and have a nice one word. Robin and I are both a quarter black. Robin’s grandfather is West African American and my grandfather is African. That is one thing we have in common. Quadron comes from the word quadroon. Quadron is the same in Danish except its spelled kuadron...it makes sense in English and Danish. It could be a quarter of soul, electronic music- a lot of things. It’s good word to build on.

CL: Have you fully digested your success?

Coco: The internet is crazy…its hard to feel what’s really going. You read a lot of stuff and you don’t know who these people are or what it means. For instance, we discovered that a radio station in Seattle was playing Average Fruit. We found that on the internet. Sometime you google your own name. We were excited that an American radio station was playing our song. We didn’t know what it meant because we didn’t know what that meant and now we’ve figured it out. Between internet and touring that’s how we feel like things are happening. It’s nice to connect to the fans. It’s nice to put faces with the people you write with like right now.

CL: How’d you and Robin meet?
Coco: Copahagen is really small, you almost know everybody when you do music. He was in a group Boom Clap Bachelors and had a dj friend who was a common friend for us. He had worked at a record shop and my friend told me about him. Eventually he took me to the record shop digging for some instrumentals that I would sing on top of at local night clubs. And he introduced me to Robin and invited him to one of our shows and he didn’t show up. But a week later we did another event and he was there with Boom Clap. I sang and they liked it and asked me to be apart of the live band. I was asked to stay and one day Quadron was born.