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New collaboration is danceable and Fully Loaded

Livingstone & Canosis and Funk Hunters' new EP now available through JunoDownload
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If you've been looking for a local dream-team musical collaboration, look no further than your local boys Livingstone and Canosis.

Why? Because they've shacked up with Vancouver dancing kings the Funk Hunters for a new four-song EP.

Fully Loaded Vol. 1 is a seriously danceable exercise in ghetto funk, hip hop and various forms of bass music. It's the product of a perfect marriage between two of the most talented DJ duos working in ghetto funk right now. It's also an exercise in some serious crate digging, featuring samples from Nina Simone to "Puttin' on the Ritz" to Akrobatic.

"These are songs that are sort of like bootleg records, so they're mainly sample-based but there's still a bit of creativity that goes into it with writing the bass, the different synths," says Tim Livingstone. "Each bass sound may have five or six different synths on it, just to sort of keep it moving and rolling."

Livingstone first met The Funk Hunters — or known individually as Nick Middleton (or the Outlier) and Duncan Smith (or Dunks) — in late 2010, when he invited them to play his weekly set at Tommy Africa's. They went out for dinner afterward and hit it off while talking about music and forming their own collaboration.

Over the next year, Livingstone and Canosis, better known as Dave Rollie, would travel to Middleton's Commercial Drive studio in Vancouver and start to jam out some tunes. Livingstone says they worked well together but four people working in a room can get a little cramped.

"You get a lot of different opinions about what should happen in the tracks," Livingstone laughs.

"A lot of the tracks, Canosis and I would start them, get the song laid out, the structure laid out and get a rough version of it done, then take it down to Nick to sort of finish it off."

It's taken just over a year to complete and release Fully Loaded, due, in part, to the time-consuming nature of their songwriting process. Livingstone says the samples always come first — they stitch them together and then usually write the bass lines and drums themselves, and then throw some hip hop a capella samples over top.

"We're always on the lookout for a good sample. Canosis and Dunks... do a lot of digging for the a cappellas and I guess we're always looking for a catchy hook in a song to remix," he says.

Fully Loaded is available now through JunoDownload and is the debut release for the Funk Hunter's label ReSoul Records. While the four of them have only recorded the four songs that will be released, Livingstone says they'll "definitely" be working together on more music for the label.

Last year, Livingstone and Canosis's debut single spent five weeks at number one on dance download website JunoDownload. Rollie has been living in New Zealand since September and they've been collaborating over Skype since then on a host of new tracks due out for release in the summer.

So far, there's no Fully Loaded release party booked but Livingstone says he's working on bringing the Funk Hunters back up to Whistler sometime in April.

In the meantime, Livingstone plays every Friday and Saturday night at Brandy's and every Wednesday night at Tommy Africa's.