Sigma: 'Kanye West has been in touch about 'Nobody To Love''

British drum and bass duo Sigma shot to number one in the UK charts back in April with their hit 'Nobody To Love', a reworking of Kanye West's Yeezus track 'Bound 2'.

Now on the cusp of releasing their follow-up single with Paloma Faith, Digital Spy caught up with Joe Lenzie to talk about an offer from Kanye West and why Ella Eyre turned down an appearance on the new single.

Obviously 'Nobody to Love' was a reworking of Kanye West. Do you know if he's heard the track?'Up until 3 or 4 weeks ago we weren't sure if he'd heard it or anything, then his management contacted us asking if we'd be prepared to somehow put together some exclusive VIP thing that he was gonna perform when he played at Wireless, but I think it was so last minute and we were in Miami at the time filming the video for 'Changing', so we ended up just not doing it basically. But I'm assuming that that means that he must like it in one way I guess.'

Are you a fan of his music?'Yeah, I mean I've always been a big fan of Kanye, not so much recently but his early stuff was amazing, it was great.'

What was it that drew you to remix 'Bound 2' then?'Just the hook essentially. We loved the sound of the piano chords and the Charlie Wilson vocal and we just thought that could really work as a drum and bass track. What we do when we have studio sessions is we spend a lot of time just listening to other stuff to try and see if we can get influence from different genres. I think the fact that it was perfectly half speed for drum and bass as well that can be a big part of what's actually gonna work. You might hear something that's a great chord structure that you might think about remixing or whatever but if it's the wrong speed it just kind of kills the vibe.'

Your new single features Paloma Faith. How did that collaboration come about? 'It was just via our management. We'd written the track and originally we had Ella Eyre featuring on it but I think she was trying to move away from the dance stuff and she didn't want to be the feature artist. We were basically just trying to find someone to replace her because obviously she's got such an amazing voice. It's quite hard to get someone as solid as that, but Paloma's performance is amazing on it so we just kind of took it from there.'

Did you listen to much of her stuff before 'Changing'?'Yeah, we'd heard quite a few of her tracks and because there's such a soulful, gospelly element to the track we thought it kind of worked with her style and her fashion style as well, which is quite cool and quite quirky and different and retro.'

Do you feel pressure to match the success of 'Nobody To Love'?'I dunno, not really. I think the main thing for us is when we try to do something that we want to translate to a wider audience it doesn't work, whereas with that we kind of did it to give away for free on our website basically to get more hits and I think following that ethos we just moved forward to working on the next single without trying to put that kind of pressure on ourselves. I know that's always gonna be slightly in the back of your mind, but I think a lot of the time the most successful tracks are the simplest and the ones people have the most fun making.'

Are there any more collaborations in the pipeline?'We just sent a list of people off to our management so I'm hoping we're gonna get them all booked in for the next month, but I can't remember who was on it off the top of my head... loads of really good people.'

Do you think it's harder for Drum and Bass acts to break through these days because the market is so saturated?'I guess that's a good question - I dunno. I think it just depends on how accessible your music is because there's so many people that write tracks that aren't and a lot of it is about how current your sound is as well. I don't think we've necessarily adapted our sound massively to what it always has been - I think it's just being in the right place at the right time. It's definitely quite hard to break through. Obviously the tempo's not as accessible as something like house music. It's a lot harder to get something that is accessible because it can seem quite frantic if it's not done well.'

And are you working on an album at the minute?'Yeah that's on the to-do list! But we don't have any release dates or anything yet.'

'Changing' is released on September 14. The duo will appear at Ministry of Sound on September 13 for the launch of the new single.