French-born Amsterdam-based electronic duo Parallelle recently announced a ground-breaking project titled ‘A Day In’. The project will feature electronic music infused with cultural sounds from different countries and aims to preserve ancient learnings and cultural heritage for the future while shedding light on foreign cultures, communities, ethnicities, instruments, and rhythms.
The first EP ‘Essaouira’ is to be released on May 5th via their Klassified label, featuring the sounds of Essaouira, an 18th-century port city on Morocco’s Atlantic coast lined with stunning ramparts and historic brass cannons. During the Moga Festival’s edition of 2019, Parallelle, Maalem Omar Hayat and his crotales players performed a unique show combining Gnawa music infused with electronic music. It came about as an initiative from Moga Festival called Moga Creation. Parallelle took this chance to create a video ‘A Day in’ translating Gnawa and Essaouira into electronic music.
You can watch the first video in a series of 11, filmed in Essaouira in Morocco.
What do you do or are doing to be greener when you travel?
Offsetting flights is where we can make a change. We collaborate with www.thegreenplus.nl for our flights. They work with carbon credits, units that enable us to offset their carbon emissions by reducing, preventing, or even extracting carbon emissions elsewhere. Some recent projects we invested our carbon credits are the development of waste energy and wind energy.
How do you manage your carbon footprint on the road?
We are very mindful of this issue, especially through flights. That is why first and foremost we prioritize train rides when it is not too far (London, Paris for instance). When having overseas tours we prioritize cities with short distances between them. And finally offset all our flights together with Greenplus, with whom we work. Eating less meat and fish has also an impact, we always favor local and biological farming.
What can you do to make your shows more sustainable?
We are part of the Bye Bye Plastic Foundation initiative to have eco-riders (no single-use cup/plastic bottle allowed on our gigs). We favor electric rides to our shows and like to bring our own water bottles. Unity creates change so when every artist requests no single use of plastic in events, it will become the norm.
Outside of work, how are you looking to make your life more sustainable?
Fresh products from the local market, a good sportive routine, and a minimum of 7 hours of sleep per day. This alone makes our life and mind healthier. The quality of life in Amsterdam is quite sustainable as we don’t own cars or scooters and travel by bike. We only go to bio shops like Ekko Plaza that have fresh products and little single-use plastic packaging. We do not own much and favor all the sharing apps (like BIYU or Sharenow) where you can just rent tools and other things when needed instead of having them in storage.
What are brands of products you look to as being sustainable and useful for your work?
We believe in the circular economy and love giving second lives. We produce our merchandise (such as our earplugs and our notebook cover) with recycled plastic. We press vinyl with the eco-pressing plant in the Netherlands called Deep Grooves.
In terms of brands, we like to use BIYU app to have access to quality brands and not own anything. We like the brand LOCH for reusable bottles, Wearebasics clothes, and any vintage shops in Amsterdam.
How can fans be greener when attending music events? What do you want from events and venues to become more sustainable?
We really like the green initiatives DGTL Festival is doing. Reusing materials to build the festival, using only renewable energy sources, having only electric transportation, using wastewater systems for sanitation, eliminating food waste, and much more.
When an event organizer shows already the right example, it is easier for the fans to follow.
Fans can be more mindful of their transportation to big events, and their single-use plastic consumption and try leaving no trace in the environment they are partying in.
One crazy if it is technically possible, is to have a dance floor that generates energy the more people dance on it.
Grab their release here.
