Breathe Carolina & Their Wonderfully Enticing Auras [Interview]

Irresistible by style, sound, charm and performance, Breathe Carolina cracked open the dance industry with their wild energy and thrilling exploration of music. Both David Schmitt and Tommy Cooperman spearheaded their transition to electronic music in Denver, Colorado, and since then this straight up sexy duo takes crowd after crowd by storm with blood-pumping new music, energy-packed sets, and their wonderfully enticing auras.  

Over the past few years, Breathe Carolina has gained enormous momentum in developing themselves as an electronic duo. Whereas their musical background stems from alternative and pop punk roots, their success in switching over to electronic music has done nothing but unlock their creative potential and unleash their musical force onto new audiences and crowds. The originative minds behind hit singles like “Rhythm Is A Dancer,” “DYSYLM,” and “Blackout” (just to name a few) Breathe Carolina has nailed collaborations with numerous DJ/producers and musicians from Bassjackers, to Haliene, to Sunstars, Dropgun, and more. Whether touring small, intimate shows or playing in front of massive festival crowds like Tomorrowland, EDC and Paradiso, Breathe Carolina’s stage presence blows every performance out of the water, leaving crowds in high anticipation for their next show.

Fans caught an extra special glimpse of Breathe Carolina during one of the biggest parties of the year, during Miami Music Week. This year’s Spinnin’ Hotel returned yet again to take over the Nautilus in South Beach for a whole week of events and performances, including one stand out set by Breathe Carolina on Wednesday at Spinnin’ Sessions. After another huge success at Music Week, we can look forward to more sold out shows across the globe, and a stacked lineup of music releases this year by Breathe Carolina.

Check out everything David and Tommy had to say about their hectic yet awesome tour life, airport lounges, their obsession with shoes and coffee, and more in our exclusive interview below!

The Nocturnal Times: Welcome to Miami Music Week! Tell us about what you’ve already been up to since arriving?

Breathe Carolina: Today was our third show and we got in yesterday. We played until 6am this morning at E11 and FDR at Delano last night. It’s not as fun to play E11 as to go there…to play at 6am you’re kind of just like what the fuck are we doing?!

The Nocturnal Times: You just had an incredible set at Spinnin’ Sessions. We went into the crowd which was nothing but energy. Did anything unexpected happen?

Breathe Carolina: Yeah a ton of stuff. We played on new equipment we’ve never played on, one of them didn’t work. We had a few technical issues that were happening throughout like half of the booth monitor wasn’t working. It was only to us, I don’t think anybody else knew.

The Nocturnal Times: How do you react when stuff like that happens and the crowd can’t always tell?

Breathe Carolina: It’s hard to not feed into it you know what I mean? If something is going wrong that’s like your part of it. Imagine the speakers went out in a crowd, they would stop enjoying it. But when it’s only happening to us it’s hard to keep acting like everything is fine. You just have to power through it. There’s a lot of people on the stage who know what’s going on so if something goes wrong it’s usually quickly fixed.

The Nocturnal Times: Tell us about what else is lined up for the week? Either your performances or friend’s sets your excited to see?

Breathe Carolina: We are playing three shows tomorrow, two shows the next day, two shows the next day and one show the next day… so with 10 shows and five days that’ll be good. We’re going to hang out with a bunch of our friends and we’ve been going to muscle beach which is fun. Doing a lot of pull ups and stuff and we’ve been drinking an absurd amount of coffee. We’re done for the day which is crazy, this is our last interview which is nice because yesterday was so gnarly. I’m ready to just relax.

The Nocturnal Times: Will you guys will be at Ultra at all throughout the weekend?

Breathe Carolina: No, they didn’t ask us to come so we’re not showing up! (laughs) No it’s just really hard if you’re not playing. It’s hard traveling into Ultra and you’re kind of stuck out there all day and it’s really hot. Honestly I don’t even know if we have time we have three shows tomorrow. We played the live stage in the past which was kind of a weird situation. We played a little to early…it was early in our edm career but it was fun and it was a great experience.

The Nocturnal Times: I remember I asked you guys this last year –  I know it’s been super cool seeing you guys going from Warped Tour to now. I can’t think of anyone else we used to enjoy in that scene who has made the transition into edm.

Breathe Carolina: I don’t think there is… I mean Cash Cash may be the only thing that’s close to that. I don’t think anyone has the balls to try and do it. It’s really hard. It was extremely hard and everyone told us, our whole team was like you guys are insane, don’t do this. Because we were doing really well in the rock world so people thought we were crazy saying don’t do it don’t do it. We had to switch our whole manager and everything. We could see the scene changing and see the scene fading away, we could see our interest in the scene fading away and at that point it’s like even if we fail at this, the scene would have failed anyways…Warped Tour is over so kind of what do you do now. So now we look back and think alright we made it. We did kind of die with the Warped Tour scene as sad as it is to say. I mean we’re always evolving and we’re always trying new stuff so for the future we’ll see what happens.

The Nocturnal Times: What is it about Miami and Music Week every year that keeps you coming back and excited as opposed to any of the other events for the year?

Breathe Carolina: It’s a vacation where you still feel like you’re at work… so you don’t feel like you’re not doing anything. You don’t feel like you’re wasting time but you’re on vacation. This is kind of like New York or Milan Fashion Week for models, and this is it for electronic artists. It’s kind of that time. Everyone is here, everyone wants to hang, meet up and talk and everyone has something in common. Everyone is in the same scene so you’re walking around a bunch of your peers.

The Nocturnal Times: You guys spend the majority of your time in the studio, performing and touring, but we’re all still human. What do you guys like to do outside of all that just for fun?

Breathe Carolina: David likes to cook. I do like to cook (David) we don’t really have time to do anything. Honestly I try to take two or three vacations every year with my girlfriend and her family or my family (David). So if there’s time I try and do that. Otherwise we don’t really have time to do shit. Or we come home and have two days at home, usually you’re doing laundry to leave again and sleeping since you didn’t sleep for four days. And I can cook at my house so, other than that we go to the gym every morning and we eat food. We eat food, go to the gym and buy shoes. Those are the three things we do. If I had to breakdown our life into three things – oh and coffee so four things. We’re very simple. We’re definitely very chill and easy.

The Nocturnal Times: How’s the tour going?

Breathe Carolina: It’s been great. This year’s been really good, we have a lot of sold out shows where we did the market last year and it wasn’t sold out, so this has been a good marker. It sets up the year and you hope that everything still does set up. We hope, it should. Should be good, everything is good we have a lot of European festivals coming up that we’ve never done, I think 10 so that’ll be good. We have music planned until July so that’ll be good. We’re rockin, our lives are music and traveling so we’re doing both those things. We got upgraded on our last flight to Asia so that was good. That’s what we look out for – do we get updated to first class for free because we don’t want to pay for it, and is there fire food at the airport. That’s pretty much life. Hong Kong is the best, and the Philadelphia airport because they have a fire shoe store. The Hong Kong airport has an insane American Airlines lounge and that one feels like you’re walking into a different world. They have heated floors and marble showers it’s crazy. It’s like a 10 star hotel on steroids. It’s amazing. These are the things we get really excited about by the way.

The Nocturnal Times: Do you have a suitcase for your shoes…??

Breathe Carolina: No. I travel with three shoes I think he does too (David). You wear a pair and two pairs go in the suitcase. I do three or four pairs every time we go because we go home every three to five days. So we try to change it out but we don’t want to check our bags so we have to bring the right amount of clothes and shoes.

The Nocturnal Times: Do you have a certain memory of a specific crowd, festival or club performance from the past that sticks out as a favorite?

Breathe Carolina: We’ve played Myanmar twice. We played New Year’s there and played 808 Festival there. Those two are probably the greatest. We had this weird scenario where Hardwell had to last second go play a different show, so they gave us Hardwell’s set time. So we got all his production, fireworks, all this shit and he got our set time which was the one before. Nobody knew this was happening so the crowd was just shocked and we won over the crowd. It’s a really small country so big things don’t happen a lot. When big things happen everybody talks about it. Then we went back to Myanmar and we were walking by the Temple and were getting swarmed by people. It’s just because it’s a country where a lot of stuff doesn’t happen so that happening, that was crazy. That was cool and then Budapest was really sick. Here (Miami) was sick too…we just started playing this party and today was by far the craziest. Kids were just more hype. There were more people too, I think people just got here. Everyone had really fun energy and seemed like they were having a great time. The lineup was really good this year too.

The Nocturnal Times: When you find a crowd who isn’t reacting to your set the way you hoped, is there something you guys do to pivot?

Breathe Carolina: Oh yeah we look down at the CDJs, and at each other a lot and pretend like it’s not happening. That’s really hard, some crowds even if they love you to death they just want to kind of stand there. And it makes you feel really awkward…we’ve had shows where people literally don’t move and then after it’s over the promoter is like that’s the craziest show we’ve ever had. You guys just saw us play I mean we jump around a lot so it’s weird for us. We’re not just DJing like that, we love to jump around and if people aren’t doing that with us it’s super awkward. It puts us in a position where we have to do things we don’t want to do like look down the whole time and pretend we’re doing something. Feeling awkward and people staring at you I mean that just feels weird. I’ve been trying to not let that happen. We played a show the other day in New Orleans for St. Patrick’s Day and it was a really weird set up for a show, but we had the best time and we made people have fun!

Photos: Courtesy of Breathe Carolina’s Facebook and Nexus Lounge