Busy Gangnes of the unfairly hip duo Telepathe tells Mark Tjhung about ditching math-rock for dancefloor beats

Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais are the embodiment of Brooklyn cool – they’re mates with Diplo, have an album produced by TV on the Radio’s David Sitek and create the kind of primal electro-pop that’s flourishing in the borough. With their dance-oriented debut LP Dance Mother in the bag, the duo are now hitting Hong Kong.

Before Telepathe, you and Melissa [Livaudais] were in another band, right?
We were playing in a band called Wikkid. That band lasted for a couple of years. And then Mel and I started Telepathe. Our sound completely changed from what we were doing. We started using a lot more technology and getting into a new way of structuring music. Essentially we caught the technology bug, and started using drum machines, synthesizers, and making stuff on the grid, whereas our old band had been completely live –it was even math-rock, with a lot of time signature changes.

Why spurred that change on?
A laptop came into the mix. And it just exponentially grew from there. We were also listening to Hot 97 [a New York hip-hop and R&B station] incessantly. And we just found that music so cutting edge and way more creative than any else we were hearing. And we wanted to emulate it.

You played the drums in the previous band. Are you the chief beat creator?
There’s no hierarchy in the way we operate now. It’s very collaborative. We both pick sounds, we also arrange the beats, either taking turns or collaboratively.

You also sing in unison all the time. Tell me about the unison vocals that are becoming a bit of a trademark?
Conceptually, we try to be non-hierarchical. We just started blending our vocals together and after a couple of tries at it, we just loved the way it sounded. We both have fairly different sounding voices, but when they’re combined, it ends up sounding quite unique to us. So we went with it.

It’s pretty cool that David Sitek produced Dance Mother. How was working with him?
It was great. He’s a maniac. I’ve never met anyone more excited about making music and being in the studio. He’s got a giant collection of vintage synthesizers and drum machines. He loves to work for 12 hours in one stretch and beyond. We’d set up at 4pm every afternoon, and we’d leave somewhere between 4am and 7am the next morning. And that was his rule – he loves to record at night because there are no distractions – you’re just completely in this realm of making music.

Artistically, what do you think he brought to the album?
We wrote the majority of the material at home on a midi keyboard. He made our songs sound huge. We just started adding layer upon layer, and by the end of it, we had roughly 100 tracks per song. Even if they’re not prominent, they’re adding ambience to the music – he just made it sound magical and huge.

So I’ve heard you’re writing some new stuff. What’s going on with that?
It’s hard to say exactly. But Mel and I definitely fell in love with pop structure on our last record. I feel like every song we wrote became more and more concise as far as the musical idea – everything had a verse, a chorus, a bridge, which is so far from what we used to make when we first started making music together. But we found it really challenging and interesting to take melodic and beat ideas and put them into a pop song. So I feel like we’re going to keep exploring that for a while.

Telepathe play Grappa’s Cellar on December 26. Tickets: Love Da Records (2264 1025) or HMV.