Only five years ago, a little band with a big sound entered the music industry almost unnoticed, through what seemed like the back door. They did so ever so quietly and politely, yet had a colossal impact on the scene at the time. That band was Bloc Party. Indie music has a tendency to have its heroes and Bloc Party were amongst them. As for Kele, he politely filled a whole other hero niche; black, gay, articulate, intelligent, somewhat nerdy – he became an unlikely hero and front-man, but admired nevertheless and perhaps more so because of it.

Bloc Party’s first album Silent Alarm is ranked among the finest of its generation; its epochal sound really captured the minds, ears and hearts of its audience whilst also having great crossover appeal with its heavy bass lines and club-friendly sounds. Two more albums followed, headline slots at festivals worldwide, five years of non-stop touring and then the end of the road seemed imminent. Like most front-men and bandleaders it was plain to see Kele needed a new creative outlet and so he went solo. Kele’s first solo album is called The Boxer, which he and performed at it is at ‘the Electronic Beats Festival in Cologne on May 20. that Kele performs his first Electronic Beats show.

I caught up with Kele whilst he was in Berlin before his gig at Weekend to talk about Bloc Party ending, his new album, not working with Hudson Mohawke, drugs, and how becoming a DJ and growing up as child of immigrants in England shaped the music he makes.

Kele, so you’re playing at Weekend in a couple of weeks, are you aware Will.i.Am of Black Eyed Peas fame is playing there this week? Are you a fan?

“I never played there before but I am looking forward to it. I mean I’m not really a fan of theirs, I think they are super cheesy. That song they did; ‘Where is the love?’. At the time, I thought if a band has released this and are capable of producing it, then I am never going to like this band. But some of the BEP singles I’ve heard this year have been quite good. I really like ‘Boom Boom Pow’.

You’re currently on tour; how’s it going and is it different without the band?

I’m currently touring the album on a press junket. For sure, it’s completely different, you’re on your own.

Where did the decision come from to go solo?

I wanted to make another Bloc Party record at the beginning of 2010, but some of the others decided they wanted to take some time off. Which is fair enough considering we’d been on the road for the last five years non-stop. So, I just thought I’ll do my own thing for the next year and the album was born.

What’s everyone else up to?

The guitar player is playing with Ash at the moment. The bass player has started up a new super group who I don’t think are particularly super and the drummer is at home in New York, watching Lost and playing computer games. An interesting way to spend a year…

The musical direction of The Boxer is really different to Bloc Party’s. Was the decision to go solo born out of a creative difference?

Not really. But I guess it was important to me when I started that I didn’t want to do this record in the same way. I didn’t want to start with guitars for example, because then it would just be Bloc Party. I went to the studio and just programmed some rudimentary beats, and then laid some synth lines and then just added stuff on top of it. It was a new way of working for me. Then it kind of leant itself to a more electronic realisation in its sound.

The new sound, although not a million miles away from Bloc Party, is still quite different. How does that reflect where you are at personally?

I’ve always said from the beginning, I’ve always been inspired and interested in electronic music of all kinds. Be it house, techno, r’n’b or pop music. All those mediums excite me the same. The longer we were making records with Bloc Party, the more my interest in music outside of that grew. My interest in guitar music is really waning and anyone that been following Bloc party will see that we’ve been trying to incorporate different sounds as well as different ways of playing.

How was making this solo album different to the creative process with Bloc Party?

Well, with Bloc Party we’d all sit in the room together and just jam. However, with the last record, Intimacy, at least half the record was just the producer and me sat in the studio just chopping stuff up and editing it, so the band weren’t really involved in that. They’d play and we would kind of mess around with that, It wasn’t necessarily a band composition as such. That approach has stayed with me and has fed into this project I think.

Welcome to the world of Canyons, where nothing is quite as it seems. Formed by school friends Leo and Ryan, Canyons are a slow-burning story of success who have built a word of mouth reputation through little more than their music, which has been carefully and slowly eased into this world from another dimension.

With one EP and a clutch of remixes, Canyons’ repertoire is lean and mean and stands apart from their many contemporaries who have been lazily monikered with the nu-disco badge. With one self-released EP on their own Hole in the Sky label, a single on DFA, and the inclusion of the ‘Blue Snakes’ on Cosmo Vitelli’s ‘I’m a Cliché’ compilation, the band are currently preparing their debut album which is set to disengage the duo from a wonderfully twisted dance-floor trajectory.

With only a handful of releases they have gained a strong and loyal following, having had their songs picked up for mixes by an unusually wide range of DJs from Kate Wax to Jacques Renault (who incidentally has released a record of fantastic edits for the pair’s Hole in the Sky label).

A number of stunning remixes for the likes of fellow Australians Tame Impala and DFA operator The Juan Maclean have helped to add more fuel to the Canyons’ fire where they have fused aquatic rhythms with a peyote disco shimmer that has lit up the blogosphere. However, they have generally remained somewhat elusive figures, popping up for occasional bursts of activity such as a DJ tour organised by DFA in America or a club residency in Melbourne and then retreating back to their home base. In fact, at the moment Canyons only exist as DJs, and this restriction has informed much of the music they have made so far.

However, to categorise Canyons as a purely dance band, or in fact any one thing, would be a grave mistake. Their debut album is rumoured to have moved the music into a less restrictive dimension where they can let the full force of their inspirations run free. Existing somewhere in the swirling maelstrom where folk, psychedelic, progressive house and cosmic music meet, to call Canyons otherworldly would be an understatement. On the one hand they manage to rein in their more ethereal elements with solid grooves and an eye for the dance-floor – a perfect example being ‘Fire Eyes’ taken from their debut EP. A mutating swirling beat is married to a disembodied vocal that does little more than declare: “fire eyes are paradise”. Its shaman-like quality calls to mind classic New York tribal house such as Men From The Nile. On the other hand, they let their astral influenced jams run and run, moving with the music in whichever direction it seems to be taking, which is where the inspiration for their upcoming album comes from.

Recently signed to Modular, being on a local label will no doubt prove to be an even greater incentive to push their sound into the wider world and beyond. You may not have heard of Canyons before, but you can expect to hear a lot more of them soon.

Canyons' as yet unnamed debut album will be out on Modular and will be released this summer.

French house producer Martin Solveig is releasing his fourth album called SMASH next year. Solveig is known for his very poppy take on techno – his latest track ‘Boys & Girls’ got over 2 million hits on YouTube, and is actually not too far away from Lady Gaga’s soul-destroying pop. This alone is probably not of much interest. And neither is the fact that the first single release called ‘Hello’ is collaboration with the Canadian electro-pop band Dragonette.

However, to promote this single, the French musician has produced a music video which is basically a homage to one of the most humorous movies of the past decade: Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums starring Gene Hackman, Gwyneth Paltrow and Bill Murray.

Martin Solveig is adopting Richie Tenenbaum’s role, which in the original movie was played by Owen Wilson’s brother Luke. It all gets started at a wall where Solveig’s poncey manager (DJ Gregory Darsa) tries to drum into his protégé that it takes “a lot of skill and a lot of energy to become a DJ” naturally all explained in a heavy French accent. Later on Solveig – a self-confessed Björn Borg admirer – finds himself on the centre court of the prestigious tennis championship Tournoi de Roland-Garros. His opponent is none else than a André Agassi look-alike and chart-jacker Bob Sinclair. The match gets quite exciting when a handful of tennis pros from real life and a girl simply called ‘She’ are entering the scene and start messing up everything…

Whether you like the music or not, the video is lots of fun!

Wolf + Lamb are currently one of the hottest names in house music. From their New York headquarters they have been pushing a sound that has one foot firmly in the realm of 4/4 beats and the other somewhere completely different.

With a casual attitude towards collaborations, parties and nurturing new talent, the list of names who have been associated with the label from Seth Troxler to Soul Clap read a like a who’s who of dynamic, exciting house music. However, at the heart of all that is, Wolf + Lamb are Zev Eisenberg and Gadi Mizrahi, two long time friends who were chipping away at the coal face of dance music, way before their productions, record label and parties became NYC’s hottest property.

In fact, I must admit that I was somewhat slow to catch on to Wolf +Lamb. A lot of what I heard was not chiming with my expectations, and none of their more obtuse tracks had caught my attentions. That was the case until I bought the first Double Standard Release - Wolf + Lamb’s Vinyl only offshoot. From there I had found my entry point to the world of Wolf + Lamb and as they saying goes, I haven’t looked back since.

I caught up with Zev and Gadi to find out what’s what in NYC, the Marcy Hotel and everything in between.

Hey Zev, hey Gadi - Wolf + Lamb were one of the breakout acts (and labels) of last year. What were you doing before your success?

We'd been throwing parties in New York and patiently trying to make a dent on the music world with our labels. We had been cultivating our artists for the world stage as well.

I have read in the past that you are often switching your style of music – do you become bored easily?

I don't think it's that we get bored, it's just the nature of constantly playing out and also getting a stream of new influences and ways of using them from the music we buy and the music our label artists are making in their laboratories.

How is the Double Standard label coming along?

It's been off to a perfect warm welcome by the vinyl community and it's up to its third release. So far the feedback has been perfect.

Does it become tiring having to explain about the Marcy Hotel – is it still a creative hub? Do you actually live there?

It does, but we're honoured by the interest! I (Gadi) still live there and it's certainly the creative and spiritual hub of the label. No Regular Play is living upstairs and the energy of the thousands of people who have laid it all on the line over the years is there to fuel new ideas all the time.

How difficult is it to balance the label, your joint and individual projects and all of the party’s?

Actually that's the easy part, we've always gone by what we feel like doing. Like waking up in the morning and do we want to find new music to DJ with and do some touring, or are we tired of that and maybe some of the artists sent new music that's blowing our minds open and now we need to focus on putting out music. Sometimes we're just bored with one aspect of Wolf + Lamb, so we focus on another!

What comes first?

The chicken nugget.

How do you continue to be inspired?

I'm (Gadi) inspired by listening to different genres constantly, for me it's hip hop and R & B right now. Zev's inspired more by life in general and somehow manages to channel it all into music when it's appropriate. Also the creative output from all of our artists has been a big inspiration for both of us, and whenever we're a little low maybe one of the artists will hit it our of the park and get us both excited about the possibilities.

Do you ever think you will move away from music that has its roots in ‘beats’?

We already have at times. Gadi finding 'The Student', which launched Nicolas Jaar's career with us had no beat! Dancing is a massive part of the social fabric of our community and the parties have been so instrumental in passing on the vision and the context for the music that it will probably always have some roots in beats of some kind. That said, there's no telling with us, we just follow our hearts and ears where ever it may lead!

What have been some of the highlights of the past year?

Definitely the W+L Experiences & Showcases all over the world, having the vision and feeling from the Marcy and our parties in New York translate in new countries with thousands of new people was something we were worried about for many years leading up to it, but they turned out to be pure magic. A lot of the music that came out on the label, as specially some of the edits on the black label were real high points as well.

Is it important for you to nurture new talent?

It's very important, it's something we're very proud, but the kids have grown up and are off to college so there'll be no more of that for a while. We get a lot of new music sent to us every week and there's some gems among them but we just can't take on any new artists at whatever level they are since we've got our hands full!

How do you discover new artists for both yourselves as DJs and for the label?

For ourselves, we find artists on Beatport like the rest of the world! Some from promos we get from labels we like and from friends. For the label, each artist has a unique story – some we're through friends, some were from demos we got of mostly local artists when we were still accepting and listening to them. The key was that we felt connected to them and wanted to have them as a part of the family deep into the future.

Any plans to be back in Berlin soon?

Absolutely, I (Gadi) will be staying there for a lot of the summer, and Zev's coming to play at Cookies on July 20th.

Tell me about your album Love Someone – what’s the meaning behind the title?

I think at the heart of Wolf + Lamb is love, in whatever form it means to the listener or the person that's receiving it from us. It's what's motivated us over all these years to keep on pushing forward, and to anyone who's been to the Marcy or our parties, you get sense of that more than anything. Zev and I are not always in love, but when we come together to do our art, it's always in that context. So the album, which is a year of our work together, while touring and sharing our music with others, takes heavily from that and the title seemed appropriate.

Are you happy with it?

Very much so, I think we were humbled and a little surprised by the reception and the excitement around it, but we worked countless hours and went through a lot to make it happen - there's an amazing feeling of closure now that it's getting out – also in a way clearing space for the next generation of ideas that are coming in now.

Are you selling many lamb burgers for room service?

It's fallen out of style with the new health craze in New York, Zev's organic garden burger's been doing a little but better – but time will tell..

Wolf + Lamb - Love Someone is out now