BUKU Music + Art Project’s first day opened with Back Alley local duo, CHRISCROSS. Members, Christian Turner and Christian Thompson just finished their set and while the crowd was small, the two were more than excited to put on a show. The Daily Reveille sat down with the CHRISCROSS and learned a little bit about their experience.
The Daily Reveille: You just finished your set. How was that?
Christian Thompson: It was fun. It was a weird vibe at first, but it was still cool. It’s different than anything I’ve ever played. It was a good crowd too. I definitely had a lot of fun, and it’s an experience to remember for a long time.
Christian Turner: I’m still a little shell-shocked, myself, with trying to process it. It was really cool though. It was a super unique stage, and I don’t think we’ve ever remotely played on anything like that.
TDR: You all kicked off BUKU’s Back Alley stage. Were you nervous?
Thompson: Definitely. The first five transitions my hands were shaking.
Turner: I wasn’t bad until about 30 minutes before, but then once we got through the first couple songs, it was good.
TDR: Have you ever played any other festivals?
Thompson: This is our first major festival. We’ve played a couple other smaller ones.
TDR: How did you two meet?
Thompson: High school art class. I actually moved from Dallas about three years ago, and I met him through school.
Turner: We just happened to find out that we both like music and the same style. It was like “Let’s go buy a DJ controller, I’m sure we can do this.” We just kind of played around in our bedroom on this little $150 controller that doesn’t even have an on-board sound card so that we could listen to the music in our headphones. It was really bad.
Thompson: Those were the days, dude.
TDR: When did you decided to become involved with music?
Turner: We just decided to start making music pretty soon. We got FL Studio at first and then he started getting into it with Ableton, and we just kind of got better at it.
TDR: How would describe the music you’re creating?
Thompson: I don’t want to say different because everybody says different , but we get that we’re different [from other people] a lot. We actually took the last nine months redesigning our sound and what we want to be like. We actually ended with a song that we’re going to release in the future that kind of shows what we have now and what we’ve done. It’s a very indie-rock, electronic, hip hop because I’m from the hip-hop base and he’s more electronic.
Turner: We got our name with house music, and that’s probably the reason we got put here. I heard Porter Robinson’s stuff and a lot of other people that are making this weird experimental trap stuff called “future bass,” and I got into all that. We do our best to sort of mesh the styles together.
TDR: What’s been the most challenging part of your career so far?
Thompson: It’s kind of hard when we do music together because we do two different softwares, and they don’t link up, so we have to take each channel and do it as a wave and send it back and forth. It’s such a little problem, but it takes a long process to do it back and forth.
Turner: My biggest issue is now that we’ve gotten bigger, we’re not just doing strictly these opening sets at clubs. Now that we’re playing bigger things like this, with that comes the Internet and their criticism, and I think that one’s definitely hit me the hardest. You’re going to have people that love you, but at the same time, regardless of how fantastic you are, you’re going to have people that hate you. I think that’s been the hardest thing to cope with — I’m sensitive.
Thompson: That’s hard, but there’s also people that help us a lot and lift us up. It makes us happy, and when we go places, people recognize us.
TDR: The most rewarding part?
Thompson: This. Getting ourselves in situations like this. We played our first show last year, February. We’re taking it slow piece-by-piece.
Turner: We’ve gotten really lucky. Aspiring musicians would come up to me at shows and ask how I got a gig. Honestly, I can’t really give them a real answer because we kind of just got lucky that someone happened to find our music and booked us on a whim. We’ve been so lucky to get all these crazy opportunities to play in fantastic clubs that people have been trying to play in for five years and still haven’t, and we got to do it in a year.
TDR: What’s next for CHRISCROSS?
Thompson: Show-wise, nothing. Honestly, just producing and making music. We’re trying to put it out as consistent as we can, but quality, not just putting stuff out to put it out.
Turner: Over the last year, we put out a lot of remixes, and so we want to show everybody that we can do original stuff.
TDR: Anything else you want to add?
Thompson: Thank you.
Turner: This is the most cliché thing to say, but so true. I’ve discovered this in probably the past six months of doing this, but really just do you as a musician. Don’t even think about what everyone else is doing. A lot of people really recognize the genuine music, and I think it’s gotten us a lot farther.