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Rhyw: We wanted it to be something kind of warm. I guess that was the theme
Mor: warm, sweaty, dancefloory…then the word ‘fever’ came!
Rhyw: …yeah…fuzzy, warm…also both from the mediterranean
Mor: ...then the AM is like nighttime! Because it's club music
Rhyw: …yeah, AM/PM..and also…Alex…Mor…A.M…
Mor: …yeah… it kind of happened really fast.
Sat on a sofa, somewhere in Berlin’s Mitte district, Mor Elian and Rhyw reminisce on how their label name, Fever AM, came to be. Mor is sat bolt upright, hands waving, as if to conjure the label's vibe into something tangible from the air. Rhyw moves between reclined and seated, mooring Mor’s light and breezy, kite-like energy. Throughout our conversation, it feels as though their thoughts and ideas are intertwined–swirling–as they fill in and finish each other's sentences (at times, one even interviewing the other). Cheeky grins and belly laughs galore. You could imagine them being primary school best friends–a mischievous twosome on a mission, exploring the world–real and imagined–together.
That is, if they were from the same place. Mor grew up in LA and Tel Aviv. Rhyw was born in Wales and grew up between the UK and Greece. But considering their respective upbringings were over 7000 kilometres apart, the musical overlaps between them are quite something, almost parallel. Both into bands like Deftones, Queens of The Stone Age, Radiohead and Blur. Both with a love for electronic groups like Boards of Canada. And both with an appreciation for the weirder corners of dance music in labels like Warp. As kids of the CD-era, they both collected music from a very young age. The Prodigy, the UK rave band, was also a big one for them; Rhyw aged 8 and Mor aged 12. “I used to go into the CD shop and hound them for the new album… And clippings! I’d cut out all The Prodigy stuff” Rhyw remembers “But what was the most uncool stuff [we liked]…”
Rhyw: The really uncool thing would be Incubus!
Mor: Incubus! [both burst into laughter]
Rhyw: All these early 2000’s…
Mor: Oh my god, please…
Rhyw: …No, this is great. [grins]
Mor: …oh my god…
Rhyw: ...all these late 90s, early 2000s guitar bands that weren't necessarily cool or heads-y.
Mor: You’re really trying to make us uncool... [still more laughter]
Rhyw: Yeah, I am.
Mor: “We were like 13 or 14!” [still a lot of laughter]
Joey Anderson can be thanked, in part, for Fever AM ever becoming a thing. Booked to play at the same party together, Mor closed her set on Anderson’s track "Nabta Playa” which caught the attention of an on-listening Rhyw; the start of what would become a deep musical connection. At the time, Rhyw was still producing music as part of the techno duo Cassegrain and running the label Arcing Seas, when the techno scene was a little different to now. “When we met, it was at a time where I was gradually becoming more interested in doing other stuff” he remembers, “I had kind of fallen into this grey techno scene, where everything was all very black and white, but I was always into other stuff. We had this similar vibe that we were both interested in and so we decided to start this new platform [Fever AM].” Cassegrain stopped making music together during the pandemic.
The fact that Joey Anderson’s music is so hard to place seems like a fitting (some might even say fateful) way for Fever AM’s story to begin. As we start to get into the nuts and bolts of what Fever AM is, it turns out to be something equally as hard to define, “Maybe we're looking for a certain technicality level and vibe. But it's almost a feeling, when we hear something that we know belongs on the label, but it can sound completely different to any of the other tracks on there,” Mor explains, “our thing is that we don’t like to have too many labels. We don’t want to be reduced”
For Rhyw, the music on the label is about “mutation…when something exists in the in-between zone”. But their personalities are the glue that binds everything together. “We are very silly people together. We love silliness in music. We love cheekiness and colour” Mor adds. Indeed, there’s a feeling of vitality across all of Fever AM’s now 7-years worth of music, that matches Mor and Rhyw’s own lust for life; a feeling of youthfulness. “The human experience is ever evolving and I think this moment where you stop evolving and developing is what I'm really scared of in life–it’s this place I never want to arrive–because it’s when you lose that youthfulness.” says Mor. “I want to stay in the world of exploring the unknown, discovering and experimenting–creatively and personally–for the rest of my life. I will continue developing until there's no more. Literally…no Mor!”
The impetus to start Fever AM came from both Mor and Rhyw’s yearning for a new direction. Mor wanted to take the process of putting out music back into her own hands and Rhyw was starting to establish his solo project once and for all and break away from the techno world. He also had the experience of running a label from his Arcing Seas project. “I was like “Okay, you know how to do it, I want to do it, let's do it!” Mor remembers, “We wanted to create our own universe…I guess this is kind of where we exist.” They both had a lot of tracks sitting around without a home and so, Fever AM was born.
Rhyw: It was organic. We thought it would be fun to do this project together…no massive steps, no massive plans or goals, just that it would be fun to do it…
Mor: …plus a need for us to express ourselves. We felt like we wanted to say something individually and we could do it together…
Rhyw: …yeh, it’s a support system…
Mor: …and it still is…we love doing this together. We love this project.
Even though Fever AM started as a world for Mor and Rhyw to spread out in, it’s not 100% all about them. “We love to platform people. It's really important for us.” says Mor, “It’s a huge passion to give people a platform, build a community and give back. It brings us a lot of joy.” Besides solo EP’s from Georgia’s Gacha Bakradze and the enigmatic US producer, Xen Chron, they have also put out a number of compilations. Their V/A, I Hope You Are Well During These Strange Times, distributed 100% of the profits to the artists involved, in the early stages of the pandemic, when they had no income and times were uncertain.
There’s a lot of love and care that goes into the running of Fever AM. In the music selection and charitable mobility, but also in their visual identity too, which is Rhyw’s department. As a graphic designer and illustrator, Rhyw uses fairly DIY methods to create the Fever AM artworks. Him and Mor screen printed every copy of their early output, all the way to number 10. More recently the visual identity has gone through an evolution–a ‘mutation’ so to speak–as there’s been a switch up from physical to digital production methods. But of course, they still find room for silliness within that new format. For example, the art for Rhyw’s recent Mr. Melt EP looks like a complex 3D render, but it actually started life as a photo of dripping, melted, cheesy pizza…
Rhyw: I chopped it out. Masked out all the melted cheese, repeated it and layered it…
Mor: ...taking something and shaping it into something else.
Alex: And, full circle, we’re at the word ‘mutation’ again.
Mor: The space between the plate and the pizza, is where we like to exist. [laughs]
Alex: Yeah! Fever AM is basically…hot cheese.
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