Quiet Village is the downtempo project of Joel Martin and Matt Edwards (better known as tech-house producer Radio Slave). The duo recombine long lost classics from Balearic vaults, film scores and even much-maligned soft prog-rock.

Dazed Digital: What were the beginnings of Quiet Village?
Joel Martin: Matt and I got together around 1995 through a mutual friend. We instantly struck up a friendship through love of music and films - we came from a similar backround. It was very easy for us to waste quite a lot of time playing music and films to each other, going cycling and talking about art. We spent a long time doing that and that’s when we came upon the idea to start putting out compilation albums of lost music without stylistic limitations, such as film music, disco, library music, old house music.

DD: Can you tell us something about your compilations?
JM: We started this label, Consume Music, which became an outlet to put out our mix CD‘s that we gave to our friends. I did a mix called Esoteric Disco and Fragments of Fear, and Matt did an Italo Disco mix called Disco Energy.

DD: Quiet Village production heavily relies on sampling other people’s music.
JM: I think we fell into making sample-based music. It was a way of making music in a form that got forgotten about. There was also quite a lot of stigma attached to sampling and still is. These days, there are either rock bands or house bands that make programmed dance music - no one really samples anymore. People make edits now. The vast majority of edits that come out now are a medium for DJ‘s to get work as producers and subsequently more DJ work, essentially missing a point of what an edit is. An edit in a traditional sense is making a bad record – or a record with only one good part – playable, whereas people now edit great records that they shouldn’t touch. I don’t think of what we do with Quiet Village is editing - obviously there is editing involved in it, although I’d say it’s sampling in the same way as DJ Shadow’s music is sampling,

DD: What is your opinion about the age-old discussion about the original vs the borrowed (or sampled) in music?
JM: I was watching a programme on the BBC and Eddy Grant [Guyanese-born musician and record producer] was talking about plagiarism. He said that there is only a finite number of chords and notes in the world. Every musician is basically a sum of everything of what they have heard. People have been sampling since time began whether it’s Mozart, John Cage, Stockhausen or the Beatles. The trick is whether or not you make something original using an influence and that’s where the talent lies.

DD: Is sampling a way –  as with the compilations – to bring these classics back to the attention of listeners?
JM: Matt and I wanted to make a record we would like to listen to that we didn’t think was being made. Something that was not club-oriented that would bring all the elements from the genres that we like – pop, reggae, soundtracks. Hopefully, there is a deeper level to it, not as commercial as one might think on an immediate listen. You can listen to it on very different levels.

Silent Movie is out now on K7.