CMJ » Elissa Stolman

Bunker 10 Year Anniversary @ Public Assembly: January 4

Elissa Stolman — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:20:32 +0000

DJs usually look really cool with arm tattoos. Think of those club photos that show up on Facebook, the ones shot from the front of the booth so that the camera’s angled all the way up their arms, which are frozen in some purposeful knob-twisting pose with headphones askew. Those peak of the night shots can make even lame tattoos look appealing, but Eric Cloutier’s designs don’t need a photographer with a beastly Nikon to make them look magnificent. There’s a peacock feather wrapped around one forearm, which has a mesmerizing effect when he’s in action, fluttering from turntables to mixer to crate.

Cloutier’s most recent set took place last Friday at Public Assembly in Brooklyn, NY, where the longstanding New York dance party the Bunker has made a home for the past five years or more. This particular installment was a celebration of the Bunker’s 10th anniversary, and so the four resident DJs—Bryan Kasenic, Derek Plaslaiko, Mike Servito, and Cloutier—churned out tunes alongside headliners Vatican Shadow, Silent Servant, and the collaboration between Move D and Space Time Continuum known as Reagenz.

The well-tattooed resident played a decidedly more approachable set than Vatican Shadow (a.k.a. Dominick Fernow), who showed off his live set at the same time in Public Assembly’s cramped back room. Considering the body of Vatican Shadow’s work and his output under the projects Cold Cave and Prurient, this was no surprise. But somehow—and this is probably a personal failing—harsh noise music is always jarring. Fernow’s live set was lean and mean, with techno-influenced drums occasionally coalescing into a beat within the murk of searing sounds, which drove me back to Cloutier’s room. In contrast to Vatican Shadow’s cemetery vibes, Cloutier’s selection drew largely from ’90s house and its contemporary revivalists at labels like 100% Silk.

However, noise fans made up the majority of the partygoers at the Bunker’s birthday bash, so the back room stayed jam-packed throughout Vatican Shadow’s performance. The audience remained mainly unmoving, but jostled gamely throughout Silent Servant’s seriousfaced dub techno set. His set showcased the kind of trance-inducing, glumly psychedelic beats that one would expect from an ex-Sandwell District artist, like gummy Sigha beats. Simply put, the roster for the Bunker’s 10th anniversary wasn’t for the faint of heart. Instead, the celebration catered to the devoted fans who have remained ravenous for the party’s top-shelf lineups for the past decade.

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Julio Bashmore @ Le Poisson Rouge: December 13, 2012

Elissa Stolman — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 19:22:00 +0000

Julio Bashmore’s “Battle For Middle You” has a way of revealing itself the moment a DJ begins to mix it into another tune. It’s those scroggly spinback swipe noises that give it away immediately. Think of the way it comes out of Pearson Sound’s “Wad (Bonus Beats)” on his Fabriclive 56 mix: Those swift sounds arise from chunky percussive clangoring, and the dizzy oscillating synths slowly creep into the sonic foreground, and then the jangling tambourine-like beat on Bashmore’s song collapses down on “Wad.” It’s a song that lurks before it strikes.

Those swiping noises tipped off Bashmore’s audience at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge last night. At the first sign of “Battle For Middle You,” hands in the crowd flew into the air to hail it. Their enthusiasm illustrated Bashmore’s mystique among the members of his audience, who were apparently the sort of people who follow his career closely enough to recognize his tunes at the first sign of them.

But as far as dance music goes, Bashmore is a bit of a rock star, so perhaps it’s to be expected that people would be visibly stoked to hear his singles live. Although he hasn’t played in the U.S. since 2010, Bashmore has been garnering a devoted and keen following here and abroad based on the success of the slew of singles and EPs he’s put out since 2009. He’s got a hot name, the kind that drives traffic on music publications and blogs every time he drops a new tune. When Foals’ Edwin Congreave put “Battle For Middle You” on his !K7 Tapes mix, a DJ purist friend of mine dismissed it as a rinsed pick. Every party played that song the summer it came out, he told me. Bashmore is that kind of DJ.

Fittingly, he drew a crowd with a noticeable population of industry types, and he made sure to speckle his set with hits from the trendy UK scene, like “Ellipsis” by fellow buzzname producer Joy Orbison. His selection and attire—he was literally wearing a shirt emblazoned with the artwork from “Au Seve”—reflected his status as a rising icon, and it seems that so far he’s delivered on the hype.

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Omar S, Jackmaster, Benji B @ Brooklyn Electronic Music Fest

Elissa Stolman — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 23:09:16 +0000

Photo by Oliver Correa

The format of the Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival doesn’t suit the nature of DJ sets very well. To be fair, the same could be said for any multi-stage, DJ-oriented event. DJ sets are best enjoyed at length, and multi-venue festivals encourage partygoers to bounce from showcase to showcase. It’s hard to get immersed in a set when you know there are two or three other stellar artists going at it a few blocks away and you feel pressured to catch a bit of each one.

In a way, that’s a good problem to have—it means BEMF had stocked a stellar lineup. On the first night, festivalgoers were forced to choose among lingering around Public Assembly for Omar S, Jackmaster and Deadboy, dropping in on Photek and Gold Panda next door, heading down the block to witness several Fade To Mind representatives or popping in across the street to catch Brenmar, Braille, Metro Area and Mykki Blanco. I had plans to dart in and out of each but made the mistake of starting at Public Assembly, where Detroit house guru and FXHE label boss Omar S was churning out a lengthy set. The energy and music could be summed up in two fashion-related details: Omar was wearing a fedora, and some guy in the audience was wearing a Wild Oats shirt.

Jackmaster kept up the stream of gripping selections when he took over the decks, queuing up several MK tunes, a Todd Terje roller and Bicep’s deep house throwback-turned-2012-dancefloor-hit “Vision Of Love.” His was a mostly uptempo and disco-influenced set, as jacking and careening as one would hope, judging from his Fabriclive compilation. Disco reigned across the street at Cameo Gallery as well, where Metro Area conducted a densely packed audience lit up by pinpricks of laser lights.

The next night featured simultaneous sets by Pearson Sound, Shlohmo, and Nicolas Jaar (although I heard Nicolas Jaar was moved to a different set time to decrease the amount of competition). While L.A.’s bass darling ground out grumbling low end in Public Assembly’s hazy front room, the Hessle Audio label boss mixed chunky beats by the likes of Kowton and Somore across the way. His set followed a live appearance from BBC radio host Benji B and bubbling New York-based producer/DJ Falty DL. Falty had started up the night with deep, lush vibes—I remember him playing a Floating Points—and Benji B followed with a set much like his weekly radio show: hip-hop, bass-heavy bangers and the occasional vocal input from the jockey himself.

See more photos of the event here.

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Karriem Riggins – Alone Together

Elissa Stolman — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:46:54 +0000

For an artist with a career that spans several decades and genres, Karriem Riggins’s discography is remarkably spare. In fact, prior to the release of his debut LP, Alone Together (and the accompanying two-track 7″ record), Riggins had only a mixed CD, which included a handful of tracks produced by the artist himself, to his name. It seems almost as if Riggins has spent his whole career, from when he began as a jazz drummer in Betty Carter’s band at 19, stockpiling ideas and influences for his official debut. Now, nearly 20 years after he first launched his career as a jazz musician and producer, Riggins has let it all out—all 34 tracks of it.

To say that the album has 34 tracks is a bit misleading, because some cuts contain several micro-songs. Many of them—”Water,” “I Need Love” and “K Riffins” to name a few—contain skits and interludes or simply change gears entirely mid-song. “Because” starts as a sliced-up soulful funk bubbler but transitions into a wailing mash-up of crashing drums, manic piano chord stabs and a hair-whipping, arid guitar solo. The tracks change suddenly, jumping out of lively, sashaying jazz and into a cappella one-man folk songs, as on “F_ord Jingle.” No beat, no matter how seductive and hypnotizing it may be, is bound to last very long.

The scope of Riggins’s album is staggering, and it’s impressive that he was able to cover so much ground, from squelching Moog ditties (“Back In Brazil,” “Moogy Foog It”) to buoyant Dilla-like hip-hop (“Round The Outside,” “Bell Isle Reprise,” “OOOOOOOAAAAA,” etc.) to bleary jazz (“Live At Bert’s”) and beyond. But it also presents a real danger for the album in that the quick, unsubtle cuts are likely to completely disrupt the straight-through listening experience. You might be better off selecting the standouts from Alone Together‘s massive tracklist, like the angelic, easygoing hip-hop/jazz jumble “Tom Toms” and the swirling, gleeful, guitar-led number “K Riffins.”

The star of the bunch is “Summer Maddness S.A.,” a fleeting moment of a song that succeeds not only due to its infectious hook but because it marks the moment where Riggins’s jagged left turns work most strongly to the track’s advantage. It starts as a roll of drums that cascades into what sounds like woozy Latin jazz, but before the 30 second mark, it descends into ebullient hip-hop with a chorus backing the perky vocal sample. It’s the kind of beat that sticks in the brain and infects listeners with charging, determined joy, but of course, it doesn’t last long. After two minutes, it’s on to Riggins’s next idea: the muddy, fuzzy synthesizer march on “Back In Brazil.”

And that is the great tragedy of Alone Together. Some tracks are wildly successful on an individual basis, but they’re cut short or steamrolled right over as Riggins whips through what seems like every sonic concept he’s had in the last two decades. Moments of brilliance are gone too soon, and the dazzling ideas on the crowded tracklist tend to drown each other out and cut each other off.

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Panel Report: Behind The Digital Wall

Elissa Stolman — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:26:16 +0000

Moderator: Steven Corn, CEO of BFM Digital

Panelists: Jason Herskowitz – Head Of Platform Development, Official.FM
Brian Durant – Manager of Data Management, The Harry Fox Agency
Sujan Hong-Raphael – Director Of Label Relations, eMusic
Jason Rudolph – Artist Manager, Strong Management

The Big Question: What can you do as an artist, label, or distributor, to leverage metadata to maximize searchability and profit?

The Big Answer(s): “You have to think of these data sets as kind of like your Social Security Number—never lose it, never give it away, memorize it. The slightest variation is going to create a duplicate field when you search an artist on a database like eMusic.” -Sujan Hong-Raphael
“It starts with [the manager] and the artist making sure they have everything correct. Each level, from the artist to the distributor, has to do its homework to make sure everything is as uniform as possible.” -Jason Rudolph

The Bottom Line: Something as small as interchanging an ampersand and the word “and” can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties, because the money due to you gets rerouted to an account under a very slightly different way.

Stats:
# of times the phrase “ISRC” was said: at least 21
Sub-genres that were mentioned: “folktronica” “moombahcore” “crabcore”
# of ways there are to spell the band name Guns N Roses, according to Jason Herskowitz: 12

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Panel Report: Fireside Chat With Ted Cohen and Peter Kafka

Elissa Stolman — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:21:20 +0000

Moderator: Peter Kafka, All Things Digital

Panelists: Ted Cohen, TAG Strategic

The Big Question: Ted Cohen shared the knowledge he’s gleaned from decades of experience pioneering the intersection of digital technology and music. He spoke about where the industry is headed, what he would change and how cutting-edge technologies are transforming consumer practices.

The Big Answer(s): “The biggest risk in digital is not taking a risk. We really need to experiment. It’s not about big advances, it’s about trying a bunch of things, and it’s about not being afraid of evolution and really embracing it.” – Ted Cohen
“We’re trapped in this attention economy right now. The end game used to be getting your music into a store—that’s the beginning of the process now.” – Ted Cohen

Best Metaphor To Describe How People Will Start To Pay For Digital Music: “The free cheese era is going to end.” – Peter Falk

The Bottom Line: “Music has become more important to everybody, more a part of our lives. The most important thing in the future is going to be recommendation tools and personalization tools. At the end of this turmoil, I think people are going to pay to be entertained.” – Ted Cohen

Stats:
# of times Ted tried to do a technology demo: 2

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Panel Report: A Day In The Life Of A Successful Career DJ

Elissa Stolman — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 21:00:28 +0000

Moderator: Roi Hernandez, A&M/Octone Records

Panelists: Rob Principe, Scratch Music Group, co-founder of Scratch DJ Academy
Jamieson Hill, A Jamieson Hill Experience
Mia Moretti, DJ
William Tramontozzi, DJ JS-1 of the Rock Steady Crew, Ground Original

The Big Question: The panelists explored how to make a name and steady career out of being a DJ and what is expected of a working DJ.

The Big Answer(s): “You might not like whatever social media network that’s out there, but it’s so useful, and it’s something that you can do so easy. That is huge. It’s really, really important.” – Roi Hernandez
“The more relevant you keep yourselves online and offline the better.” – Rob Principe
“You have to physically be there—you have to be the crazy guy who’s there nonstop, 24/7. Everything I ever got was from me showing up and not sleeping. I haven’t slept since ’94.” – William Tramontozzi

The Bottom Line: “You have to do what DJs are meant to do, which is interpret music and distill it down to something meaningful, then add your creative flare to it. You’re a kind of filter.” – Rob Principe
“When you start to get people to show up just because you’re there, you’re the reason that people are coming to buy that ticket, that’s when everything changes. You can start making money at it, and you can start doing what you want and you feel. You just have to do what you feel.” – William Tramontozzi

Quotes that made DJ JS-1 raise his eyebrows disapprovingly: “I might not have the technical skills as JS-1 over here, but I could press a lot more buttons than him, and I have fun with it. I grew up in the video game age, and we sat and just pressed buttons all day, so pressing buttons is second nature by now. What’s wrong with that?” – Jamieson Hill
“It’s about audience expectations—as long as you’re being honest about [the techniques you use to DJ], it’s OK.” – Rob Principe
“It all comes down to experience and exposure to different forms of DJing. For button pushers, it takes hours of pre-preparation to make sure when you’re pushing a button, it does what you want.” – Jamieson Hill

Best Zingers: “A Rock Steady DJ doesn’t play the Ellen show in a dress.” – William Tramontozzi
“There’s a reason A-Track stopped DJing for Kanye—’cause DJs don’t want to be a stage prop.” – William Tramontozzi
“Please don’t do the bulk download where you ask your friend for their harddrive and get a dump of 100-200 songs at once. Appreciate each piece of art that you have and try to get the most out of it that you can.” – Mia Moretti

Stats:
# of female panelists: 1
# of times trap was mentioned: 1
# of times dubstep was mentioned: At least 3

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CMJ 2012 Spotlight: 5 Producers And DJs You Have To See

Elissa Stolman — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:00:51 +0000

In an effort to help you navigate the many many choices you have at CMJ, we’ve gathered up a list of the best and brightest experimental producers and DJs this week has to offer. Whether they’re combining live instruments with the endless possibilities of Ableton, crafting progressive, vocal-driven alt-pop, or touring their West Coast-flavored trip-hop with Skrillex, these CMJ artists are exploring the trenches of various flavors of dance music and pushing the boundaries. If you’re looking for the best vibes on the dance floor, your search has ended—and if you’re not scouring the world for the perfect beat, you’re missing out.

Archie Pelago

The Brooklyn-based trio Archie Pelago has become something of a staple in New York, with regular gigs at local club nights like Mr. Saturday Night and Turrbotax. The group recently released an EP with Mr. Saturday Night, which showcased Archie’s inventive, string-based approach to the dance floor. The band combines the talents of a live programmer and two classically-trained musicians, one on the saxophone and one on the cello, which lends the trio’s productions an organic and hard-to-come-by personal flare.

Archie Pelago is playing the BEAM – Bristol to Brooklyn showcase at the Knitting Factory on Tuesday, October 16.

Maria Minerva

Maria Minerva’s songs might lean toward pop, but they’re far from conventional. Although the Estonian-born singer and producer started in 2011, she’s already caught the attention of lo-fi house outposts Not Not Fun and 100% Silk, joining the ranks of blossoming producers like Fort Romeau and Ital. She recently delivered a debut LP with Not Not Fun titled Will Happiness Find Me?, which finds Minerva exploring chunky beats, bubbling rhythms, otherworldly vocal performances and barren, experimental soundscapes.

Maria Minerva is playing the Panache showcase at Public Assembly on Wednesday, October 17 and the Underwater Peoples/New Images Limited showcase at the Delancey on Saturday, October 20.

Baauer

Dubstep is one of the most divisive genres, but the winds of change are blowing towards trap. Baauer is one of the artists at the forefront of the rising dance floor trend, which involves huge banging 808s and lots of snare rolls, much like in Baauer’s breakthrough single “Harlem Shake.” No matter how you feel about trap, Baauer is bound to deliver an energetic performance, and you can’t deny that he has his finger on the pulse of evolving club trends.

Baauer is playing the AM Only showcase at DROM on Wednesday October 17.

Tokimonsta

A few weeks ago, rising star Tokimonsta revealed to us some big news: She’ll be leaving Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label to release her sophomore album with Ultra, which means she’ll be joining the ranks of DJ heavyweights like Tiesto, Armin Van Buuren, and Kaskade. Although Tokimonsta’s sounds are quite a bit more left-field than her contemporaries at Ultra, the change should come as no surprise, as Lee has had big things in the works for the past few years. Since the explosion of the LA beat scene, Tokimonsta has been touring worldwide and regularly causing blogosphere starbursts when she casually drops remixes on her Soundcloud page. She recently returned from traversing Canada on Skrillex’s Full Flex Express tour with big names like Diplo, Pretty Lights, and Grimes. Despite her growing name and reputation, Lee has stayed true to her wonky, psychedelic niche of twisted boom-bap rhythms.

Tokimonsta is playing the Ultra showcase at CMJ Union on Thursday, October 18 and the AM Only/Elektro showcase at Webster Hall on Friday, October 19.

Jerome LOL

A few months ago, LA’s Jerome Potter announced the sad news that he and Markus Garcia would be putting their LOL Boys project on hiatus, but at least he had some good news to sweeten the pot. Jerome reappeared as Jerome LOL, and so far he’s unleashed a handful of solid, plink-plonking house numbers that tap into part of the youthful energy that drew crowds to the LOL Boys. If you see a guy walking around New York City in a brightly-colored, goofy shirt, and if he appears to be crafting a stream of silly Tweets, you’re probably looking at Jerome LOL.

Jerome LOL is playing the dubFrequency showcase at Tammany Hall on Friday, October 19 .

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Q&A: Robert Hood On Techno, Minimalism And Reviving Detroit

Elissa Stolman — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:18:26 +0000

Robert Hood is in Alabama, but his heart is still in Detroit. As a seminal minimal-techno producer, Hood’s work helped to shape the city’s much-mythologized history and had a profound impact on machine music. His most recent effort, Nighttime World 3, is the latest installment of a series he began in 1995, a year after he inaugurated his label, M-Plant.

The new LP, which was released September 25 on Music Man Records, finds Hood breathing new life into the stark soundscapes that have become embedded in Detroit’s techno lore, charging the mantra-like productions with a rare sonic richness. However, Nighttime World 3 isn’t just another remarkable addition to the beatmaker’s extensive catalog—it’s a concept album, one that was crafted in the hope of reviving Detroit. I called him at his current hometown in Alabama, where he spoke earnestly about the city he loves.

Nighttime World 3 was inspired by Requiem For Detroit?, a movie I haven’t seen. Can you tell me about the film?
Basically, it’s a documentary. It’s about black people, and how they migrated from the South and came to Detroit and started working in the automotive industry for Cadillac, Jeep, General Motors, Chrysler. My grandfather came from Georgia—and many others—looking for opportunity. The movie documents the decline of Detroit after racism in the ’60s and ’70s, and how it went through this slow-motion disaster over the years, and then how Detroit is going to rise up from this decay.

So the album is very hopeful?
My perspective is from a perspective of rising up from that urban decay and overcoming the diversity. There’s a scripture from the Bible that says, “Where there’s no dream, the people shall perish.” Hopefully, this album will inspire at least some of the upcoming new techno artists and visionaries to start to dream again and to hope again.

Techno really has been a source of inspiration for Detroit in the past few decades, hasn’t it?
Absolutely, absolutely, with artists like Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Carl Craig, and Jeff Mills and Underground Resistance, it has been, for me as a techno artist, a vehicle, a spaceship to escape—at least creatively, artistically—and build another world, another reality. I think that artists such as myself and others that I’ve mentioned were able to be catalysts in inspiring that kind of hope and carrying on the dreams and visions of Berry Gordy [the founder of Motown Records] and the automotive industry, and so many other artists and soul musicians from Detroit.

I’ve read about Detroit in books about DJ history that many of the artists you just named took inspiration from Detroit’s “post-industrial landscape.” Does that sound accurate to you?
Absolutely. Back in ’92, ’93, I sort of crafted this sound I liked to call “the grey area.” What that is is the atmosphere in Detroit from the factories that emit this smoky and grey climate, this atmosphere. It’s just like ash and dirt from the sewers that just come up from the car emissions, and it creates a grey haze over the city. That inspired me, and I kind of piggybacked off of what my contemporaries had created and rode along with that and interpreted my own Detroit sound from that.

That sound you’re talking about has been aligned with “minimalism,” which is interesting now because busy and maximalist productions are really in vogue. Do you have any insight into that shift?
Well, I mean, it’s still about the groove. It has and always will be about the groove, essentially. Now, people have decided, “OK, we’ve heard this stripped-down sound for so long, and it’ll still be there.” Minimalism will just get more and more stripped down and more and more futuristic. I’m hearing sounds now that are still harkening back to the experimental minimal sound but taking it still a step further. It’s just that, right now, this maximal sound is at the forefront. Things go in cycles, you know, and I feel the maximal, big, room-filling sounds, and at the same time, I like to sort of mix between the minimal stripped-down sound and the maximal sound, just sort of taking it up and down on a roller coaster. I think it all compliments one another. I think it goes hand in hand. You can’t always have complete minimalism throughout a two- or three-hour set—you gotta take ‘em on a ride.

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John Talabot, Pional, Blondes @ Le Poisson Rouge: Sept. 27

Elissa Stolman — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:40:12 +0000

I had some criticism in my notes for Blondes (a.k.a. Sam Haar and Zach Steinman), the Brooklyn-based DJ/production duo who played at New York’s Poisson Rouge last night. But halfway through one of the notes, I switched directions.

At first, I was a little bored to hear the material from Blondes’ debut self-titled LP rehashed in a live setting. The songs on the record are winding, aimless, dozy, slowly-unfurling house tracks that rarely coalesce into meaty hooks. When Blondes performs them live, Steinman and Haar deconstruct the tunes and use a soundboard of hardware to build them piece-by-piece, like a jam band, which makes the tracks even more abstract and wandering. The songs on Blondes surface throughout the set, familiar but indistinguishable. When they get into the thick of one of the darker ones, I know it’s probably “Wine” or “Hater,” but I can’t tell which—that happens every few minutes.

But even if I’m standing there wishing they would springboard away from the material they released in February and dive headfirst into improvised or fresh territory (which they eventually did), I’m probably the only one. Blondes’ sound palette is beautiful, and it maintains a buoyant energy even at its moodiest moments. It’s probably my fault if I’m standing in the back, taking notes on my phone and trying to trainspot which jangling, reverberating, shimmering house beat is which.

John Talabot’s performance maintained Blondes’ emphasis on producing tracks in real time. The Barcelona-based tunesmith took the stage with fellow Spainard Pional, and together they started recreating the songs from Talabot’s debut album, Fin. Talabot would poke melodies into a whatever device (couldn’t see exactly what kind—probably some type of MPC) while Pional tapped out beats on drum pads, both of them singing.

Talabot was quick to bring out tracks like “Depak Ine” and “Oro Y Sangre,” but he took his time before cracking out Fin‘s lead single, “Destiny.” Although billed as a DJ set, Talabot’s appearance in New York last night was far from it. On top of the fact that Talabot and Pional were conjuring the songs piece by piece, they usually paused between songs to catch a breath, seeming more like a band than a pair of DJs.

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CMJ 2012 Artist Q&A: Tokimonsta

Elissa Stolman — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:00:55 +0000

In 2010, Tokimonsta (aka Jennifer Lee) told Resident Advisor that she and her beatmaking contemporaries in Los Angeles were “just like another small home-knit group.” In the years that have passed, members of that tight community of Dilla-indebted hip-hop producers have garnered international attention for their psychedelic rhythms and low-end experimentation.

Tokimonsta in particular has been touring far and wide, spreading her brand of wonky, tripped-out and occasionally Korean-flavored rhythms as far as Japan and Australia. This year, she hopped on board with Skrillex‘s massive Full Flex Express tour, which featured a hodgepodge lineup that included rising stars like Grimes and Hundred Waters alongside heavyweights like Diplo.

Next month, Tokimonsta will be touching down in New York to play CMJ 2012, so we caught up with her to hear about the travails of the road and what she’s got up her sleeve. Spoiler alert: She’s got a new album in the works for 2013, and she’s decided to leave her home base at Flying Lotus‘s Brainfeeder label to release it.

What have you been up to? You’ve been pretty quiet in terms of releasing stuff. I’m guessing that means you’ve been touring a lot.
Yeah, not as much as some people, but I’ve been flying out on the weekends for a lot of shows. Going back to being quiet on the production side, I’ve always been working a lot on an album, so that’s the reason why—this time I’m purposefully trying to withhold content and compile some really good stuff. Every few months I’ll put out a remix I’ve done for fun on my Soundcloud so that people have something to listen to in the meantime.

When is the album coming out?
I would say late winter or early spring, but I’ll be dropping two or three singles before then, and they’ll have videos and all that stuff.

What can you tell me about the album?
There’s a lot of vocal work on the album. It’s actually going to be coming out on a label called Ultra.

Oh, wow. Same as MNDR and Tiësto.
Yeah, exactly. They do completely unrelated music to my own, but I think they’re making an active effort to be more than an EDM label and more of a well-rounded label. Obviously I wouldn’t have chosen to release on that label at all if they hadn’t given me the confidence that they really believe in the kind of sound I have, because I know it’s not like any of their other artists.

Your sounds were very at home on Brainfeeder. How is the album different from Midnight Menu?
It’s not something super drastic, or at least, that’s what I’m hoping. I think it’s really just a step forward, just different enough so that you know that you progressed but something that relates to the last album, so it’s still a step forward.

How has the proliferation of the L.A. beat scene changed things for you creatively, sonically or as an L.A. resident and artist?
Things are definitely really different. Two years ago, if you were going to a place like Low End Theory, which is the hangout for a lot of Brainfeeder guys, it would be cool. There would be some days when it was really crowded and some days when there were no people. Now when you go there, it’s like it doesn’t even matter who’s playing, there’s a line around the block because it’s so cool and hip. I’ve heard a few people complaining about how it’s different and how it’s changed and this and that, but I dunno.

I feel like people are still pretty good-natured, and I guess at a certain point, everyone wants their music heard. I think it’s an amazing thing because it’s like, “Oh you all blew up together. You’re all growing together.” I have nothing against it, but there’s always a fear of when you cross over, what’s going to happen. What I’m doing right now, I don’t know if it’s crossing over from being very niche, but I feel like that’s kind of what I’m doing—but I want to maintain my underground sound. It’s hard to explain.

I don’t think it would be conceited or inaccurate to say that you’re starting to cross over. Aren’t you playing with Rusko tonight?
I know that seems kind of random but yeah. I went on an entire tour with Skrillex.

How was the experience of playing to Skrillex’s crowds compared to the crowd at Low End Theory?
Oh god, it’s so different. The good thing about being around Skrillex is that he’s very open-minded about music. He’ll try anything; he wants to promote various kinds of music other than what he plays. But, obviously, the issue is that a lot of people that listen to his music only like what he plays, and they’re not very open-minded. They’re very straight-focused, “Where’s the drop?” kind of crowds. They’re not always like that, so when you’re playing for that crowd, you can’t win them all, but you can win a handful over, and they’ll be down. And you have some crossover listeners who will listen to my music in their downtime and his music when they’re going to a party. It kinda works out, but it kinda doesn’t. A Skrillex audience is a little more rave-y versus Low End Theory, which is a little more hipster.

It’s interesting that his tour was so diverse. When you see that bill, it’s a little baffling. How did it all work cohesively as a unit?
It was being promoted as a festival, and as a festival it’s meant to be unique. Instead of doing separate stages at the same time, he wanted everyone to play on the same stage, one after the other, so everyone has to look at everyone else’s set, depending on when they get there.

I think over all, we accomplished what he was trying to do, which was to present something really different and to go against the grain. People don’t like him, but he gets pigeonholed quite a lot into his genre of dubstep, and he’s more open-minded than that, and he was trying to present that. He basically curated it. I think it worked and it didn’t work for his audience because some of his audience probably didn’t want to hear howl-y indie rock or my weird brand of electronic hip-hop or Grimes’s singing style and whatnot. But there were definitely a lot of people who appreciated it and a lot of people who brought it home with them. It was a cool idea to get this really vast audience to try out something new. I really appreciate that.

How do you like trap? I would imagine you’d hear some of that at Skrillex’s shows.
I do play a portion of trap in my set, but the kind of trap I like is like, TNGHT, the Hudson Mohawke stuff. That kind of trap I find really interesting because it still has the big 808 drums, which have existed forever, but it has interesting sounds that are new to it.

It is kinda trendy—I’ve heard people say that it kinda has an expiration date. At a certain point, people are going to get sick of listening to trap and the hi-hats and whatnot. But there is an interesting group of people who are incorporating trap elements into their music, like Shlohmo. They kind of incorporate trap styles of things, but it’s not really trap because they’re doing indie vocals over it and things like that.

We’re really excited to have you at CMJ this year. When was the last time you were in New York?
I was in Brooklyn about a month ago. I can’t remember exactly. I have no way of understanding space and time—I never know what day it is. I never know what time of day it is. I want to just live in my own little window of time and space. It’s kind of trippy. What was I talking about again?

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Groundislava @ Glasslands: September 14, 2012

Elissa Stolman — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:45:20 +0000

DJ shows in New York are often pretty dude-heavy, unless you’re at a club in the Meatpacking District or a set by a Friends Of Friends artist. It’s been my observation that the label has a rare ability to draw a relatively high amount of girls to its live performances, and this past weekend, when LA-based FoF beatmaker Groundislava (a.k.a. Jasper Patterson) played at Glasslands in Brooklyn, NY, was no exception. A lot of these girls wore semi-ironic snapback hats emblazoned with cheeky phrases like “IRL” and “MIDI.”

Groundislava also likes funny hats. The producer, also known as Jasper Patterson, wore some goofy headgear to his set at the Boiler Room in Los Angeles last month, and perhaps the same floppy black hat to Glasslands in Brooklyn, NY last Friday.

Although Patterson kept his look consistent, he was less performative in Brooklyn than his native Los Angeles. He has this way of hovering over the controller, plucking knobs and rarely glancing up at his onlookers, absorbed in his work and maybe a little shy. While his Friends of Friends labelmates and Wedidit cohorts like Shlohmo, Jerome LOL and RL Grime tend to be performative DJs—and while he himself seemed to be getting lose in the Boiler Room—Groundislava was more coy. He didn’t cook or rap along or make faces, or at least not very often; instead, he rocked a little while queuing up an assortment of house tunes with synths as glossy as glass, cramped and bass-heavy burners, and melodies that reminded me of watching my brother play Zelda on a Nintendo 64.

The Sega Genesis brand of nostalgia that radiated from Groundislava’s set peaked during one of his own tunes, “TV Dream,” a shimmering and New Wave-leaning cut from his recently-released album Feel Me. He made sure to rep the rest of his crew at FoF (and judging by his Tweets later that night, he missed them) by unleashing a few tunes from labelmates like Tomas Barfod. In fact, he elicited one of the biggest crowd responses of the night when he dropped a remix of “Changes” by the now-defunct LOL Boys (RIP).

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Electric Zoo @ Randall’s Island Park: August 31-September 2

Elissa Stolman — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:59:00 +0000

Laidback Luke – Photo by David Velasquez

On Saturday at New York’s three-day dance music blowout Electric Zoo , a young woman wearing a shirt that is positively drenched in sweat down to the middle of her back is dancing like no one is watching. She’s right up against the barrier in front of the stage, pumping her arms, stomping and bobbing left to right, throwing her hands up and into the face of one of the security staff members stationed directly in front of her. He’s watching her flail about and perspire with an overtly judgmental look on his face, one eyebrow cocked in bemused disdain, but his disparaging gaze doesn’t deter her from getting her freak on even one iota. She’s dancing at him.

It seemed as if hers was the prevailing attitude at Electric Zoo, the annual festival hosted on Randall’s Island that brings together many of the biggest names in EDM for one long weekend. All the stereotypes of EDM culture are lived out and beaten to death at the Zoo, as if no one notices that they’re cliches, or as if they don’t care that they are. There are stocky college-aged boys in neon tank tops, scantily-clad women in fluorescent tutus and those furry leg warmers that have never looked good on anyone, twiggy high school girls chewing on light-up pacifiers, and a litany of shirts and sunglasses plastered with slogans like “SEX LOVE AND DUBSTEP” or “HAVE YOU SEEN MOLLY,” and it’s all soundtracked to the endless clamor of synths and drums blasting loud and proud. At Electric Zoo, these hallmarks of EDM are brought to life unabashedly and without reservation, which drives home the organizing principle in EDM culture: Ignorance is bliss.

Festivalgoers at Electric Zoo don’t seem mindful of the aspects of electronic music that tend to drive listeners away and attract the most criticism. They’re ignorant of the reasons other people might find EDM music and culture to be alienating (excessive drug use, insipid phrases splashed across apparel and megascreens, horrendous day-glo fashion choices, very loud and hyperenergetic music, etc) either because they don’t realize how stupid they might look to others, or because they don’t care. A lot of them are like a guy wearing a long-sleeved foliage camo shirt (not even army camo) on one of the hottest days of summer in New York City; he knows he looks stupid and that his shirt is impractical and inappropriate, but thats why he likes it.

Gleeful ignorance is the rule of the game. The screeching synths and skull-crushing midrange bass drops orchestrated by dubstep dons Flux Pavilion and Doctor P didn’t drive people away in search of prettier or more subtle sounds; In fact, the two producers attracted a riotous, crowd-surfing audience that filled the tent hosting the party.

The ironic twist was that, while Flux and Doctor P whipped up a frenzy with jarring hoover synths and remixes of Childish Gambino, the prolific Berlin-based producer and co-founder of the Shitkatapult label Apparat played to a tent where empty beer cups discarded onto the dance floor outnumbered bodies. It was clear that the interest in and awareness of Apparat’s realm of the electronic music world was low, which made his choice to drop “The Hope” by UK dubstep pioneer and Hotflush label boss Scuba all the more poignant.

Electric Zoo-goers were, in general, more enamored with the stadium-sized sounds pumping out of the most colossal festivals, from electronic-oriented ragers like Electric Daisy to all-in-one events like Coachella. Benga, who started as a dubstep producer and DJ at the legendary Forward club nights in London in the early 2000s, played at Lollapalooza earlier this summer before stopping off at Electric Zoo. His set at the Zoo eschewed the stripped-down darkness of his earlier work and focused instead on delivering the kind of “robot fart” noises that have become dubstep’s calling card.

Benga’s set was rife with EDM’s special brand of jubilant, excessive ignorance. As he built the swampy crowd into a humid fervor with all manner of grating, left-field sounds, a pixielike blonde cocked her arms back behind her head, ready to launch two empty water bottles into the mileu. At the peak of the build, Benga cut the track, and for a moment the girl stood with her arms slack, as if confused by the DJ’s choice to halt right on the cusp of an obliterating drop. Instead of the explosion of sound and energy she had anticipated, Benga unleashed the crackling beat and hooting opening notes of “Night,” one of his influential productions from 2008. The girl dropped her arms to her side, a bit deflated, but her disappointment was short-lived, as “Night” quickly morphed into a face-melting remix.

Most of the fans at Electric Zoo thirst for the transcendent power of the mightiest drops and melodies with enough energy to keep them moving and sweating all day long. They don’t particularly care if Benga plays “Night” (or a huge banger remix of “Night”) as long as they can get wild to it. If you pretend not to know that the tortured foghorn-like sounds coming out of the speakers are part of some souped-up version of a much moodier and deeper beat, there’s nothing to miss. And if you stop describing those sounds as “tortured foghorns”—if you stop thinking about what they sound like so much—you can start to feel them. The music is thrashing and obtuse, and the megascreens say cheesy things in huge letters like “CALL IT WHAT YOU WANT I’M A FUCKING ALCOHOLIC” and “WE OWN THE NIGHT,” but if you choose not to care or not to notice, you can rock to it a little, and maybe even enjoy it.

Think about the ignorance involved in fully engaging and delighting in a Skrillex set. The Electric Zoo headliner has become the face of dubstep, and his rise has inspired as much criticism as it has garnered adoration—”brostep” isn’t exactly an endearing term. If you were one of the many college-aged guys wearing a neon tank top, and if you had the gall to raise a fist in the air to pump it, you were pumping that fist in spite of snickering from blogs like Hipster Runoff, derision from underground elitists on Dubstepforum, the scorn of some seasoned producers and listeners, and anyone who is turned off by the overt weirdness of the music or the just-lose-it mentality it inspires.

The people in Skrillex’s crowd waved their arms in the air like they didn’t care, because they really didn’t, and that’s what makes it fun and liberating. All pretentiousness and self-conscious inhibitions go out the window the moment you step onto a dance floor and agree to accept whatever crazy and potentially unlistenable sounds a DJ is going to throw at you. EDM culture is made up of a lot of pills, most of which aren’t all that easy to swallow, but it’s unapologetic and straightforward about being exactly what its critics think it is—namely, hedonistic and at least a little tasteless. Every girl snapping a self-portrait on her iPhone with a pacifier in her mouth, and every guy with a shirt emblazoned with a slogan to the effect of “PARTY WITH SLUTS” embodies the idea that you don’t need an excuse or deeper reason to dress silly and wild out to loud, crazy music. Dance like no one is watching, and don’t give a fuck if they are.

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LV – Sebenza

Elissa Stolman — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:03:52 +0000

When South African MC Okmalumkoolkat makes a hook out of the phrase “Gotta check out my blog, I got so much shit to show you,” it’s hard to tell if he’s making fun of internet-obsessed social media addicts or if he’s shamelessly self-promoting the flashy blogs he maintains and contributes to. The man’s scatterbrained online presence and choppy, playful flow pack enough personality to earn him what is arguably the starring role on the sophomore full-length from South London production trio LV, Sebenza. Eight of the album’s 14 tracks feature Zwane’s breathless and lively rhymes, which find the rapper mostly chattering about fashion labels, girls and the internet with a nimble charm and an ear for how to nestle his rapid-fire words and decorative monosyllables among LV’s punchy beats.

The rest of the tracks on Sebenza feature the vocals of fellow South African emcees Ruffest (aka Andile “Max” Stemele of kwaito group Sello Mangwana) and Spoek Mathambo. LV’s productions were crafted to buoy vocal performances rather than stand alone as instrumental, although some of them could. The whirring and clicking production on “Work” makes very little room for Mathambo’s lines, opting to showcase the hooting wooziness of LV’s beat over the MC’s drawling vocals. But most of the tracks would seem lacking without Mathambo, Ruffest and Okmalumkoolkat. The U.K. funk-leaning production on album closer “Ultando Lwaka” recalls the squelchy synths put to use by artists like Funkineven and even the laid-back composure of Dam-Funk, but it has long stretches that cradle Ruffest’s verses with purposeful simplicity, preventing the music from overpowering or clashing with the speaker.

Even though every track on Sebenza is tailored to accommodate vocalists, LV’s production stands out. Whether it’s the eye-popping stomp of “Sebenza” or the glittering synth chords in “Thatha Lo” and “Limb,” LV’s beats remain entertaining and airtight. The trio’s work blends a medley of styles, from the kwaito bounce of tracks like “Animal Prints” to the growling, dark, low-end halftime clomp of dubstep on “Hustla” and “Spitting Cobra” to the bubbling U.K. funk on tracks like “Sebenza.” LV’s skill and savvy when it comes to crafting spotlight-gobbling beats presents the biggest drawback for the album in that it’s disappointing that there’s not one instrumental number on Sebenza.

Instead, we are left with an effort that marries uptempo, sputtering raps with crackling percussion and sticky rhythms. While artists like TNGHT, Brenmar and Baauer are making moves to unite clattering dance rhythms with hip-hop’s leaning boom-bap, LV has taken a less-traveled path that challenges the vocalists to keep up with the production. The hip-hop influences on Sebenza are hard to locate, mostly because the dance-inspired elements of the mix overpower the hip-hop stomp, like the lurching beat on “Nothing Like Us.” Instead of molding house-inspired influences around a flat-footed hip-hop beat, LV insists that the vocalists assimilate into its effervescent production.

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Best Of The Fest: Outside Lands

Elissa Stolman — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:38:12 +0000

Outside Lands was a cold festival. Perhaps that shouldn’t have been a surprise; Although the event took place in August, it was August in San Francisco, where it’s always 54 degrees somewhere. Nevertheless, the fog that poured into Golden Gate Park and the frigid winds that propelled it caught many attendees off guard on the festival’s opening day, August 10. “We’re from Atlanta, and we were imagining warm summer vibes,” explained Washed Out‘s Ernest Greene. “We’re fucking freezing.”

However, there was one spot in Golden Gate Park where festivalgoers could escape the nippy climate: the Heineken DJ Dome. From the outside, the structure looked like a few inflatable igloos joined together, and from the inside it looked like a rock festival had teamed up with a beer company to design a makeshift nightclub. The place was lit with green lights and housed a bar in one igloo and a dance floor space in the adjoining dome, where at 1:30 p.m. scraggly DJs played squelchy dubstep remixes of Beatles songs (so San Francisco).

By mid-afternoon each day of the festival, the line for the designated EDM hangout was at least 40 people long, as the space itself probably only held a few hundred. Perhaps the festival had underestimated the audience’s interest in dance music, or the Dome’s staff hoped to curate a Berghain-like wait. Maybe everyone just wanted to escape the cold. In any case, the wait did seem disproportionate to the lineup Outsidelands had booked for its DJ Dome, which largely consisted of unknown artists whose identities remain as mysterious as their unfindable Soundcloud pages. The biggest exception to the Dome’s rule of anonymity was Bay Area beatmaker and Dirty Bird labelhead Justin Martin, who unfortunately couldn’t make it to the festival due to a cancelled flight.

Outside of the festival’s assigned DJ turf, some of EDM’s biggest names performed for swelling crowds. On Friday, huge-time dance music outfits MSTRKRFT and Justice squared off against far more acoustic acts on rival stages. I wish I could tell you how the performances went, but my friends just had to see Andrew Bird whistle and strum a banjo, and then I agreed to follow them to watch Neil Old—excuse me, Neil Young—hump his guitar into a speaker (which was probably hot back in the 70s).

The next day, rising talent Tigran Mimosa took over the same stage MSTRKRFT and Justice played the night before. Although his set took place in the middle of the afternoon, outdoors, and in front of a colossal audience—basically, the opposite of most clubs settings—Mimosa was able to command his crowd with his gregarious attitude in front of an audience. It’s easy to see why a DJ like Mimosa has made it into the festival circuit as opposed to veterans of the underground: simply put, Mimosa is a performer. His set probably offended every purist DJ sensibility, starting with the fact that he didn’t seem to be manually mixing records, but it was certainly entertaining in a way that a more traditional DJ set is not.

For instance, toward the end of his set, Mimosa informed the beach ball-throwing crowd that his mother was among them, and then instructed his onlookers to chant his name. Standing in front of the booth with his arms spread wide, Mimosa asked his audience, “What’s my motherfucking name?” Over the gravelly belches of comically bro’ed out dubstep (maybe it was Burning Man-type dubstep—some people insist there’s a difference), his audience responded “MIM-OH-SAH!” The track switched on a dime to the kind of plodding R&B that would make any fan of the Weeknd light a candle and put roses on his bedspread, and then Mimosa jumped into the crowd and was gone.

Mimosa’s skills as a performer may cheapen his act in the eyes of vinyl-rocking trainspotters and vicious anti-trap Tweeters (much of his set was composed of hip-hop bangers and Flosstradamus beats, which is like the definition of #tarp tbh), but it certainly worked on a large crowd. A set like Tame Impala‘s inspired the crowd to wiggle a little, but mostly smoke weed and chat happily with friends; Mimosa’s set had even the churro stand employees twerking—and I do mean, like, twerking. That definitely counts for something.

Although Mimosa’s set was indeed very crunk, it was tame compared to the gratuitous drops offered up by electro house facepalm Wolfgang Gartner. The best that can be said for Gartner’s entirely tasteless set was that it bordered on being classified as noise. That is, his straight-to-the-drops dubstep set was so over-the-top, jarring, arhythmic, and uniformly random that it sounded like a maximalist rendering of noise music. A song or two away from the end of his set, the booming sounds of Skrillex’s opening number seduced about half his audience to split for the bigger stage, where the half-shaved electro-dubstep king was starting to play to a crowd two or three times the size of Mimosa’s.

The thing about Skrillex’s set is that it wasn’t that bad. It’s Skrillex, which means there are a lot of metallic, grating Hoover synth sounds and inartful “rage face” drops into midrange bass messes in effect, and that’s never very fun. But does he have a really cool light show? Yes. Are the beats loud enough to give listeners something to rock to (as opposed to Gartner’s set, in which the beats were drowned out by the terrible dying baby-like synth noises)? For sure. Does Skrillex have a really cool onstage setup that looks like he’s twisting around in some huge neon-lit spaceship? Yeah, and it’s really cool!

While ravers performed finger light shows to Skrillex’s remix of Avicii’s “Levels,” the rest of the festivalgoers had gathered to sway and bop around to a feel-good set by Stevie Wonder. His encore was a sweet kiss-off to a San Francisco music festival—after all, what is more San Francisco than thousands of people singing Beatles songs?

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