Interview: BOTZ 2.0

By Marney Beliveau • 16 Feb 2011 in Features

Thirsty for JUICE content? Quench your cravings on our Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp

From the 2008 JUICE DJ Quest, to playing all around KL with the night Blow Up, you’re bound to have heard of the electro movement known as Eclectic Botz! Botz is back, redesigned and relaunching into a new atmosphere. Meet BOTZ 2.0, JUICE spoke with the new reincarnate to get the deets on the new concept and this weekend’s Blow Up! in Ipoh…

Alright so Eclectic Botz has evolved into BOTZ V2.0. Can you explain the new concept and what we can expect from 2.0?
BOTZ V2.0 is more bolder, stronger, a more solid image and more mature. The Botz mascot from before was more fashion based with the jackets and sneakers. The new Botz mascot is inspired by Tron Legacy. From the illustration, the body is no longer wearing the jacket. Overall color is a black-turquoise tone. There will be some collaboration along with the locals in promoting art culture so the new BOTZ V2.0 is not only about club and dance.

Any new music direction for V2.0?
Yeah, we will be playing much more underground tunes. We’ve cut out more commercial tunes as it’s played everywhere else. Still, we won’t stop till the dancefloor is moving!Â We’re not interested in making pennies, we want to make fans.

What inspired the evolution of Botz? Any particular reason?
Instead of staying at one kind of image, we decide to change into different image. Not only has our image is changed, but our performance and content wise is different from what everyone has seen before. There’s lots of possibilities to explore in bringing a different way of performance to the crowd not only tweak the nob and tab the cue. We’ll be dead boring if we do the same stuff.

We’ve noticed you always have a graphical character to go along with your DJ persona, what’s the reason behind this?
The reason is, we wanna keep our impression different from the others. We’ve always emphasis on our graphical character; The Botz. It’s part of our commitment to promoted local art as well. I’m sure some people out there know about our mascot drawn by Michael Chuah aka C2V.

Tell us about Blow Up! happening in Ipoh this weekend? Is it Blow Up 2.0 as well?
It’s gonna be wicked! The fans in Ipoh are getting into electro music. The number of fans had grow from the first time we touched down in Ipoh. We’re tie-ing up with Zero Revolution Club to deliver more quality and proper dance tunes to Ipoh scene. Blow Up had been our signature theme night since last year. The concept of Blow Up is combining fashion, lifestyle and music. For the newly launch Blow Up in Zero Revolution, the concept going to be more fun and we will be putting in lots more lifestyle features into the party.

So Blow Up will be happening in Ipoh the 1st and 3rd weekend of the month.
Why Ipoh? What’s the scene like in Ipoh compared to KL?
For a long time, people in Ipoh travel to KL in and out for latest happenings, products and updates. So more or less, the Ipoh scene is pretty much inspired by what’s in KL. Furthermore, as we all know there’s quite a lot of Ipoh people working in KL. So the influence is there in Ipoh from time to time. For us, the Ipoh scene has a lot of opportunity to expand but it needs time to be educated and shared. So we decided to move our focus to Ipoh to show some love. The comparison is, there’s not much politics going on in Ipoh compared to KL. To them, everyone in Ipoh is family. Somehow, the people in Ipoh will dance from start till end of the day.

Do you plan on taking Blow Up to other locations in Malaysia as well? Like Penang or KK? Which place do you think is going to be the next party city that we should look out for?
Yea sure we do! Penang is next in our list. But it will be different concept till then. We think that, each city has their own way of partying. Exploring each city will be an awesome experience in life. No matter who’s spinning the tunes, everyone will keep dancing to the good rhythms.