Exclusive Interview with Mango

Today we have for you an interview with one of the biggest stars in the progressive world - Alex Golovanov (aka Mango) !!! Owner of Mango Alley Records & co-owner of Silk Digital , Silk Royal & Silk Sofa Recordings! Also known as Shoreliners or Tokyo Bay Cruise.


Hi Alex!

We are very happy that you want to do this, our thoughts is to show up something that normal bloggers don’t do and we want to do it with the best producers around. Here we go.

Well we all want to know how it all started with you and the music. What’s your story?

Hey! Thank you for the invitation ;}

Well, it all started from me discovering FruityLoops. I had practically no experience in producing, so my first experiments were bootlegs of some of my favorite artists. I remixes tracks by BT, Chicane, John Creamer. then, when I became more experienced, I made bootlegs of Quivver’s “These are the days”, Lawrence’s “Somebody hold me” and a famous “Chasing cars” by Snow Patrol. These bootlegs became very popular, they were played by lots of DJs, and they can now be found all over the net and on youtube. After that I wrote a tune called “lollypop girl”, which was my first ever signed original track. It was released on Morphosis records, and so that’s how it all started!

Were came the name Mango from?

We used to have a Counter-Strike team (I used to be a real cybersport geek lol). The team was called “fruits”, and I was “Mango”. Then I took up this nickname for all my messengers, so my friends got used to it. And when I started to produce, I just decided to take “Mango” as my artist name. Tho now I’m working under 2 aliases as well, they are “Shoreliners” and “Tokyo Bay Cruise”.

Your sound is unique, what’s behind it? What equipment do you use in your studio?

My studio is lame lol. These days I mostly use my laptop for production, some custom VSTs and some nice headphones and speakers. Nothing really special and no hardware.

What’s your inspiration when you create music? What are your influences?

Really hard to answer that question. Everything that I listen, everything that I see, inspires me this way or the other. Sometimes it can be a photo I see on the net, sometimes some old tune of one of my favorite artists. Lately my great source of inspiration were japan emo rock songs, I have a big collection of that stuff!

What is your best tip to people that want to start producing?

Be ready to work! if you work hard, patiently, and with joy – everything’s possible for you!

We all know you are one of the busiest men on the progressive scene. How do you decide what to remix and not remix to people? We can imagine that you have a lot to choose from.

True. I get tons of remix requests! now I even stoped taking up remixes for a couple of months, because I just can’t do it physically, I need to work on my original production as well, and run my label. Usually the main point for me if I get a request from friend or a stranger. If a friendly label or friend asks me to remix a track – I agree most of the time. And if it’s a label or artist with whom I’ve never worked before – it depends on the name, to be honest. The sound of the original tune is not very important for me, as I usually create like a new “mango-track” and then fit in the samples from the original track’s remixpack. Recently I’ve changed my attitude to all this, so you will see very little or almost no Mango stuff coming out on big labels. Now I’m focused on working with my friends’ labels only, such imprints as Silk Royal, Silk Digital, Proton, and some more. And of course a lot of new original production will come out on my Mango Alley label soon.

What producers do you think are the best at the moment from your point of view?

It’s very hard to say. I still love Deadmau5! Nikitin & Semikashev are very solid techy guys, Jim Rivers, Guy J, Cid Inc. As for newcomers, I think Shingo Nakamura is one of the most promising melodic proghouse artists to appear this year, and Stimpack is a very talented techy producer.

What do you think of file sharing? Is it killing the business (because you don’t make a lot of money on it) or is it a good thing (helping unknown producers being seen)?

Both points are right I think. Of course it’s a bit frustrating when you realize you could have earend more for your work, on the other hand it gives you major exposure. But my attitude to this is very simple – it just exists and no one can do nothing about it. I even surf the net from time to time, to look for my music shared and read the comments about it, to see what people think of it. Usually people like what I’m doing. so it brings me lots of positive emotions!