The Love & Logic behind Soup NYC

The SOUP NYC brand is bigger than ever with the 2016 launch of the SOUP record label and ceaseless fierce music that the label’s been putting out. SOUP boss-men Chris Love and Andy “AB” Logic have also racked productions for major labels including King Street Sounds, Snatch! Recordings, Guesthouse Music, and Smoke City Music (which Andy used to head). Chris co-founded Stuck On Earth Productions back in the 90s with partner Jeff Cohen who is now joining the SOUP NYC team along with current partner, Chris Porter a.k.a Zenbi. These two have collaborated with power players including Derrick Carter, Doc Martin, Supernova, and Solardo, amongst so many others. Love & Logic have done prime work in selecting some of the freshest new artists for the SOUP label including Joe Pompeo, Sydney Blu, Return of the Jaded, Namy & Akio Hara, and Zenbi, to name a few. This powerhouse duo seems to be on the constant up and up, always with something new up their sleeves…

We caught up with Love & Logic near their Brooklyn studio to talk about SOUP NYC – past, present and future…

You guys had quite a busy summer hosting several SOUP parties, plus two killer boat parties, and your label has been putting out a nice balance of music these past few months. How’s life been treating you guys post-summer?

Love: I hate it ha ha… I love to ride my bike every single day, but that gets tough in the winter.

Oh no, are you cold?

Love: Right now? Yeah, just a tiny bit (laughs)… I’m a summer guy and I ride every day, even in the winter. It’s a bummer when I can’t go out and ride, and it’s getting dark early. It’s 6:30 and it’s dark, I don’t like it ha

Logic: I get excited about the fall because around this time of year there’s a big buzz around going out. Everyone that was out of town is back, the student element that goes out to parties is back. Everyone is kind of in “work mode,” so on the weekends when people get out it’s party time. It definitely helps business for us.

Weekends are the time to let loose, and it’s pretty warm in dark rooms with dance music, right? So how do you two know each other?

Love: In the mid-2000s I was the creative director for a club called Studio B here in Greenpoint. Not sure if you’re familiar with it, but it was a major club for Brooklyn back then. It was one of the first big clubs in Brooklyn to bring “a certain type of new music.” We had Diplo, Santigold, MIA, Wu-Tang members, Moby, LCD Soundsystem… We had the greatest, you know what I mean? From there, I was throwing a party and I said, “Hey, let’s do something from my era, the golden era of rave days. Let’s start bringing in dance music like Doc Martin, Derrick Carter and people like that.” We brought in Derrick Carter which was a great party, and Andy “AB” Logic was there that night. I don’t remember meeting him, but that’s where we officially met… and I didn’t like him at first (laughs).

A familiar tale of how some of the best relationships start…

Love: Exactly… I just remember him as this cocky, arrogant dude and I was like, “I don’t like this dude.” Some of my friends would say, “Hey, let’s go to this guy’s party” and I would be like, “Nah, I don’t like that dude.” After Studio B closed I said to myself, “What am I going to do now? I don’t want to go back to running a club, I’m bored with that.” So, I started DJ’ing again and I started up SOUP again. SOUP started in the ‘90s, around ’96-’97 but then took a little break. When SOUP started it was successful for the first 3-4 years, then after September 11^th I “deaded” everything, I just left. I said, “I’m going to take a break from all of this.” So, I got bored after running the club and said, “Okay, now I’m going to DJ again and throw parties.” So, I started off small in the basement of Stay Lounge and I gave Andy one of the nights there to host a party, and he did a really great job business wise. He was on top of the ball, he kept calling me to make sure everything was on time and everything was flawless. I said to myself, “Aright, this guy has really great work ethic, which I don’t have (laughs).“ I like to be creative and bike ride. I liked his work ethic, so I asked him to do parties regularly. Then he teamed up with me to do the SOUP parties, so then I said, “Alright, I guess we’re partners now.”

Logic: From then on, we were playing at a lot of parties together and other promoters were seeing us both on lineups, so they started booking us together to tag, so we tagged for a while and it started becoming a thing. We were trying to come up with so many different names, we were racking our brains for months, then finally realized all we had to do was drop our first names. We continued playing together and that year when we officially teamed up in 2015, things went off very quickly. All the big clubs started booking us, we ended up playing one of the main stages at Electric Daisy Carnival that same year and that went really well. At that time Sullivan Room was still open so we moved the SOUP parties there (Rest in Peace, Sullivan Room). We had guys like Derrick Carter and Mark Farina who were really pushing the kind of sound we were into at that time. Then Sullivan Room closed so we moved the parties over to major New York nightclub, Cielo. Then we started working with Output and some places around Greenpoint.

Love: Jen Schiffer was booking us often for Verboten and that was a big push for us too, until all the craziness happened… Currently, we’re in talks with Schimanski and venues like that. We’re still doing events at Output, we have something booked for December. We keep looking at new venues, but our main focus really isn’t events so much…