Rise Of The “Roughstate” – Catching up with the guys behind the label.

A short time ago, a four musical mastermind acts joined forces to create and launch a brand new hardstyle label, going by the name of “Roughstate.” Combining their individual strengths and musical capabilities, Adaro, B-Front, Ran-D and Frequencerz have opened their full creativity to the world as they showcase their signature sounds within the label.

It’s no doubt that beginning your own label from scratch is hard work, however with “Roughstate,” the guys have executed the process and already have a plethora of killer releases lined up to wow the pants off their fans! We had the opportunity to pull Adaro, Ran-D, B-Front and Frequencerz aside for a quick chat about the label in general, some fresh and new music and their showcase at Dreamfields Festival in June!

1. Ran-D, Adaro, Frequencerz & B-Front! Thanks for chatting with me today! Firstly, together as a team you guys have been working hard these last few months to begin your own hardstyle label “Roughstate,” was it hard to keep it all a secret?
Adaro: Thank you guys for this interview! Yes it was quite hard to keep it a secret because you get a lot of questions about the release of certain tracks.

B-Front: No it wasn’t that hard, but of course you get exited about it! We had a lot of questions about it from the fans also because of rumors around the scene, but we kept it silent!

Ran-D: For me, not so much. I’m pretty good at keeping secrets.

Frequencerz: Well of course it’s really hard to keep such a cool secret to yourself. This is something we like to share with everyone because we are so excited and proud about this whole new step in our careers.

2. Okay so a little bit more about the label. Can you give me a quick rundown on the main reasons that you all came together to start up Roughstate?
Ran-D: Some time ago, Thijs (Adaro) and I talked about starting our own label. We’ve been working together for a long time as Gunz For Hire (and before this, we did some collabs as Ran-D and Adaro) and we are also very close friends! We felt it was time for us to start our own platform for releasing music. We also knew that B-Front & Frequencerz had plans to start their own label and since we’re all friends and good colleagues who play and support each others music, it felt logical to talk about starting an ever stronger label by joining forces. That’s how it all started!

Frequencerz: Last year we had a talk with B-Front after a great festival season about our act B-Freqz and its plans in the future. We all agreed that we had reached a point where we’d like to start something for ourselves, where we can build our own platform. Seeing as we love working with B-Front and also help each other with music, we thought it would be nice to work as a team and release our music together on one label.
Soon after that, we spoke with Ran-D and Adaro during one of our many gigs about their plans for the future and they told us they loved to have their own platform for their music and ideas as well. So, we thought “why not all work together on this?” We all liked the idea of starting a label with 6 different acts. Ran-D, B-Front, Adaro, Frequencerz and of course our live-acts Gunz for Hire (Ran-D & Adaro) & B-Freqz (B-Front & Frequencerz).

**B-Freqz – one of the live-acts within Roughstate**

3. Was it easy to start up a label from scratch?
B-Front: For me it was all a new experience! To be honest, I’m a bit lazy! (Hehe) I just want to make music and perform, however it was a really good experience to have discussions with the team about the label.

Ran-D: To begin with, you have to come up with the right look and feel and a name for the label. We all feel as though a label is a brand and a brand needs to have a unique look and feel. Finding a unique name has been quite a challenge because a lot of names are already taken in social media and URL’s, so we did a lot of brainstorming. So there’s the part about choosing a name, look and feel that everyone’s pleased with.
Parallel to finding the right name we talked about the look and feel for the label. With the creation of Roughstate, a new era in our career has started, so we came up with an imaginary ‘post-apocalyptic’ world where only a few survivors are building a new world, called Roughstate. With this theme, and the brand name, we asked a Graphic Designer (Niels van Hoekel – Dokodemo.nl) to design the logo and create the visual world we had in our mind.
Besides this, there is the more boring administrative side of starting a label, which I don’t want to bother you guys with to much ;-). You have to find the right parties to work with such as the publisher and the people who make the contracts for the Ltd, etc. All pretty boring stuff, but absolutely necessary if you want to start a company together. But now that’s finally done we’re all really happy that we can start releasing some music and get this label going!

**Roughstate Artwork**

4. As artists, can you talk a little bit more about your own musical vision and how you will bring this to the label?
Adaro: I produce music that I would also like to play in my sets: varied rough hardstyle with a dark edge, lots of old-school influences and a strong party vibe! Together with Ran-D, we will also bring the Gunz For Hire releases to our label. With G4H we have big plans, lots of tracks will be produced and released in the upcoming months.

Frequencerz: We think that our music and style together will help contribute to a high-quality label. We will keep producing tracks that will have the typical Frequencerz feeling, but now with our own label we can also experiment a bit with other artists and musical ideas in the future, which will give us more freedom in producing. Besides that, we can share ideas much better and faster with our colleagues on this label which will help us all to achieve an even higher quality!

5. As a team of diverse artists, what strengths do you all separately bring to the table?
Adaro: We all have our own style that you can hear immediately. So with all of these styles together, you can make a broad musical palette for every hardstyle lover that loves hardstyle with muscles!

B-Front: The word is still coming back: QUALITY! We want to show the fans and music lovers high class productions and maybe set the tone for the music.

Ran-D: I think we all have our strong points. I think one of my strong points is sound design. I spend ages creating new sounds and new kicks. I also write a lot of my own lyrics and do a lof of the vocals myself (so even if I’m not doing the vocals myself, I’m always able to make a good demo for a vocalist, so the concept is already clear).

Frequencerz: We all have our different traits, so to speak and all of us also have our own production methods – so it’s also good to be able to learn from each other and build off of one another. I think working together, we’ll all discover each others strengths and weaknesses and we’ll be able to fill in each others shortcomings ;-).

6. Do you feel as though running your own label gives you the chance to unleash your full creativity?
Adaro: Yes for sure! There’s no concessions, we can just release what we want.

B-Front: Yes, Of course! Our focus is on hardstyle and you always have the creativity to do what you want to do, however we can try new things and like I said, you can set a new tone in the music.

7. Are you looking to recruit upcoming talent on the label?
Frequencerz: For now, we are not recruiting new talents for Roughtstate because we want to work on this platform first by ourselves in order to get it to that point of perfection. However, that’s not to say that if we hear good tracks that we won’t be able to guest release them on the label. We’re just seeing where it all goes from here – you never quite know what the future may bring 😉

8. So what about some upcoming releases? Any news about when we can hear some fresh Roughstate music?
Adaro: That will be in the upcoming months, all of the artists will release their unreleased material from the last year.

Ran-D: I think a lot of you have already heard our Roughstate mixtape. Apart from the mixtape, we have launched the previews of coming releases on our media, so there’s a lot of new music coming up really soon!

9. What kind of music can we expect from Roughstate? Will any of your signature sounds be changing now that you have began the label?
Ran-D: I personally think that as a producer, your sound will always develop. If you follow raw hardstyle, you wouldn’t have missed the fact that the music is getting even more raw and is showing a lot of similarities to hardcore. Personally, I like the way that kicks have been developing, but there’s still a lot of room for creativity. Besides that, I’m still going to make hardstyle, not hardcore. I like the element of making the music more diverse, with more raw kicks, but still with the aim of keeping it within the hardstyle genre.
As a producer, you want to keep things interesting in the studio so you always develop your sound. I don’t know where my sound is going to go, but I’m always searching for new fresh elements in my music.

Frequencerz: No, we will not directly change our style, we just want to release our music on our own platform. The music will be hardstyle and every artist will keep his own style.

10 I also heard that you will be doing a huge b4b set at Dreamfields Festival this year, what is your excitement to showcase Roughstate in front of such a huge crowd?
Adaro: We all love Dreamfields Festival! This festival is a huge opportunity for us to show the people what the Roughstate sound is on a large scale! We can’t wait for this!

B-Front: It’s great to play b2b with your buddies! I think that’s also where this huge ‘power’ comes from, as outside the music we are also friends! We always call each other, hang out and do fun stuff together, so its going to be a great experience to get on stage and express ourselves together.

11 Where do you see Roughstate in five years time?
Ran-D: I hope that in 5 years time Roughstate would have grown to become on of the pillars of (raw) hardstyle. We strive to become a strong label and a forerunner that stands for quality and originality.

Frequencerz: In 5 years we wanted to be one of the biggest hardstyle labels in our scene and hopefully this will take our music to a more international market, so we can showcase to the world what we stand for.

12 Finally, what will Roughstate ultimately do for the hardstyle scene?
Adaro: We hope that we can give a positive injection to the scene. Lots of hardstyle tracks nowadays are sounding the same with a low-level mediocre production technique and a non-emotional, non-creative approach. With Roughstate, we will try to give the hardstyle scene the quality it deserves.

B-Front: I hope we can bring back some quality in the scene! We want to bring tracks with ‘thought’ behind it and top class productions!

Ran-D: If the hardstyle scene wants to keep on developing, it needs good music and strong platforms for releasing this music. Roughstate will be one of the labels that will provide you with this.

Frequencerz: Roughstate will provide the hardstyle scene with music of a high standard. We only want to release high quality tracks that are well produced. Besides the tracks, we want to do some cool events and club nights and also release merchandise from all of the artists.

Thanks to Adaro, Ran-D, B-Front and Frequencerz for chatting with me today! We cannot wait to see what Roughstate brings to the table in the coming months and years and we wish the label all the creativity and success!

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