By KEVIN TAN
alltherage@thestar.com.my

Kev Nish, J-Splif, , Prohgress and DJ Virman of Far East Movement had many reasons to be excited about peforming at the MTV World Stage Live in Malaysia last Sunday in Sunway Lagoon, Selangor.

“We love the crowd. The energy from the Malaysian is audience is off the hook. The last time we were here was during Merdeka, and oh my, the crowd was just crazy,” said Kev during the press conference.

The hip hop/electro pop group had even more reason to celebrate that weekend as their latest album Dirty Bass had just been certified gold here as the result of the combination sales of digital downloads, streaming, and CD. “We received this fantastic news, and now there’s just more reason to come back again and again.”

Aside from music and the dedicated fans, the boys also had another reason to be excited about their return. “We’re big foodies, and you guys have some of the best food around. I mean, you guys are just up there when it comes to fried rice!” Kev expressed.

Far East Movement, known for their collaborations with popular artistes like Snoop Lion and Justin Bieber, had recently worked on production alongside Mandapop king Wang Lee-Hom.

“We are actually producing a few songs on his (Lee-Hom) new album. It’s exciting working with him because it’s really humbling to see his success and what he’s been able to accomplish in China.

“He has really opened our eyes to a new market – the South East Asia pop market, which is something that’s very appealing to us,” said Kev.

This party-starting group would best describe their music as “ear drum killer”, as they pride themselves in “turning the bass up”.

“Every time when we are in music production, we’re like ‘uhh let’s turn up the bass!’. We pre-meditate and think of how we can blow up the speaker, turn the bass frequencies up and equalise (EQ) it in a certain way so it’ll just hit a bit harder.”

Far East Movement had a big breakthrough with their single Like A G6 in 2010, which featured The Cataracts and Dev.

However, that was just the beginning for them. With the amount of success Far East Movement has achieved, the boys are set to fly even higher than their Like A G6 days,.

“We don’t feel we’re near where we want to be. We see it as a definite marathon. We never want take for granted what we do for love and this opportunity to present music to amazing places from Malaysia to America.

“We always want to stay hungry and never slack or get lazy. You’ll never catch us relaxing, although we goof and joke around. We are (involved) our career (decisions) – from contracts, to logo designs, to social media, to music production, to even what we eat tomorrow,” said Kev.