If you have not heard of Grey, you have definitely heard their music. Their track with Hailee Steinfeld, “Starving”, featuring Zedd, has racked up over half a billion plays on Spotify. And their remixes of Kaskade, Mike Posner, and Zedd have been gracing the sets of DJs big and small for the last two years. Top 40 radio is currently saturated with their sound – alongside that of innumerable knockoffs trying to capture their unique and exciting flavor. The wave of copycats chasing a singular talent might sound a little depressing, but I am actually delighted to see that their fresh approach to music has inspired so many other songwriters and fans. It’s a rare act that’s able to shift the sound of the mainstream charts so completely in another direction.
What makes the music of these two brothers so compelling? First of all – and this is coming from a blog with “EDM” in the name – it’s the acoustic elements. For the last ten years or so, pop radio has mostly stuck to a safe formula of four-on-the floor beats and derivative, EDM-laced hits. Grey’s music comes from an entirely different direction. The first thing you’ll notice on a Grey track is an acoustic guitar, typically plucking out a sexy Spanish-style melody. Compared with the compressed-to-death kick drums and synths that have made up the basis of pop music in recent years, their sound pops right out of the speakers, inviting us to savor the particular sound of human fingers strumming on taut copper strings.
The second element that makes Grey songs unique in 2017 is their incredibly rhythms. They unapologetically eschew repetitive four-to-the-floor beats in favor of syncopated rhythms that crackle with a wild energy. Their songs are typically based on a drum-and-bass style kick groove peppered with percussive elements that seem to come from all directions. Their precise, crystal-clear mixing makes it feel as if they are in the room with you, rapping out a beat on a cowbell or shaking a marimba. Their use of a wide palate of timbres in every song is reminiscent of complextro – but is perhaps more compelling due to the realistic samples they employ.
Despite being pretty new to the scene – their first official releases are only two years old! – these Grey has already made an enormous impact on contemporary pop music. Clearly, these two have a long career ahead of them. I’m eagerly looking forward to seeing what they come up with. For now, check out their new Chameleon EP, featuring collabs with talented vocalists like Avril Lavigne, Skott, and Stephen.
When Mat Zo unleashed his sophomore album on March 25th, 2016, I thought I had the thing figured out after the first few listens. Self-Assemble is pretty clearly a career manifesto. After struggling with opportunistic labels who valued output over creative vision, and genre-obsessed fans who demanded he conform to a single sound, Mat Zo grew increasingly frustrated by the pressure of what people expected his art to conform to. In 2014, he launched his own label, Mad Zoo, which he used to release this album and show the world that he was versatile and ever-evolving producer. Self-Assemble tells the story of that journey, beginning with the title which hints at his hard-won independence.
What I have come to understand in the year since is that Self-Assemble is also a musical self-portrait. At turns cynical, uplifting, paranoid, self-effacing, and abstract, its facets reveal a picture of an artist who has never come to terms with his own image. For Mat, whose real name is Matan Zohar, this album is a coming out – his first confident introduction to the world. Since we’re coming up on the anniversary of the record’s release, it seems like an appropriate time to revisit this career-defining LP and understand the story we may have missed the first time.
Damaged, and in Control
As with life itself, the album kicks off with a Big Bang. “Order Out of Chaos” atomizes any sonic world the listener just came from, and rebuilds a new one in its place – Mat’s world, a melancholy place full of uncertainty and confusion. A lonely, delicate, theme emerges – perhaps the first radio waves of a new, intelligent civilization? Or else the gentle pulsations of a human heart as it stumbles through the bewildering process of formation and into self-awareness. Besides setting up the musical story, “Order Out of Chaos” serves another purpose by establishing Mat at the outset as more than a musician and producer – he can now claim to be a bona fide sound designer.
As “Chaos” recedes, the album resolves into the first proper song of the journey, “The Enemy,” featuring Sinead Egan. I think is the most telling track of the album in terms of understanding Mat’s paradoxical outlook on life. The narrator starts brightly: “Look at the sky and I think, we’re nowhere too.” But before she can take another breath, the thought curdles: “All I see is beauty, so why, why can’t you?” In other words, it’s not that we can’t recognize the inexpressible beauty of life; it’s just that our humanity tends to get in the way of our being able to appreciate it. We see this right away when she sings, “So live your life of judgment, stereotypical mankind!” I especially love the irony of the singer decrying a “judgmental” human race while at the same time dismissing the entire species as “stereotypical.” I’m not sure what Mat’s involvement with the lyrics was, or if he’s even aware of the irony in these opening lines, but I read the narrator’s instantaneous disillusionment as a metaphor for his own tendency to let his cynicism get in the way of his own happiness.
In “Smacked Up On Jack,” Mat most directly comments on his own mental health. Over a sluggish, dreamy background, a voice sings, “They said I got bipolar, I’m schizophrenia, and I suffer from… what do you call it? Paranoia! I am crazy. But I’m a nice crazy guy!” Although this sample comes from a homeless man, rather than the 26-year-old British producer, it speaks for the artist, who has been honest about his struggles with depression and bipolar disorder. What I like about this sample is that comes out not as an apology, but a statement of identity. Not everyone has all their screws in place, and that’s okay: It’s often the “crazy” ones who speak the greatest truths… and create the most beautiful art.
“Patterns Emerging” returns us to the story from the introduction. Somewhere in the void, a melody begins to emerge. It’s new to our ears, yet somehow familiar. This could be because the chord structure evokes some of Mat’s earliest and most beloved songs (particularly “Rush“). As an artist, Mat first found his voice on Anjunabeats, when he released a succession of trance songs whose bittersweet chords endeared him to thousands of fans. But that Mat was young, uncertain, and unrefined. Just as it took him several more years to find his voice (in this very album), the melody we first hear in “Patterns Emerging” takes some time to come into its own.
Eventually, that melody reemerges, fully formed and self-possessed at last, in the most important track on the album: “Stereo No Aware“. Beginning with the ghostly echoes of the Bing Bang from “Order Out of Chaos,” the soundscape soon resolves into the frail but hopeful tweeting of what I imagine is Wall-E on his deathbed. After the vignette is interrupted by a series of bass-powered explosions – a signature Mat Zo element I like to call “bass bombs” – the tempo and tension ratchet up, promising a monstrous release. In the final quiet moment, the warbling of the dying machine meets the grisly roars and glitchy squealing that have been threatening its peace. The whole thing culminates into in a classic-style trance anthem, before falling apart once again at the hands of one final, decimating bass bomb.
“Stereo No Aware” could stand alone as a self-contained story. Wordlessly, it tells a complex tale, zooming between sonic worlds like an intergalactic spaceship, from music concrete to electro to trance and beyond. But its crucial positioning at the heart of the album amplifies its message by delivering on the promise of “Order Out of Chaos” and “Patterns Emerging.” We understand it as the culmination of the story, as well as Mat’s personal and professional journey. In this piece, Mat demonstrates his mastery over the genres to which he was once bound. No longer a slave to trance music, he can now deconstruct its conventions and supersede them. When it suits him, he will make use of the elements that serve his purpose, like anthemic chord structures and a simple four-to-the-floor beat. But when it gets in the way of his vision, he can do away with the other genre fixtures that constrain his creativity, like dancefloor-ready song structures, or traditional trance-style kick drums. The music is his to mold.
For now, anyway. The title of the song is a pun on the Japanese term mono no aware, which very roughly translates as “a sensitivity to ephemera” – or an acute awareness that all things must pass. While the rich sound design speaks of a confident producer who knows exactly what he’s doing, the melody tells a different story. In it, we hear an uncertain voice teetering on the brink between hope and despair. Though it goes on for nearly six minutes through several distinct movements, the song never actually resolves; instead, it blows itself up in a suicidal spasm.
When the smoke clears, we hear a familiar voice on “Too Late,” as Sinead Egan picks up the story from where she left off on the second track. In a clear answer to the optimistic opening lines of “The Enemy,” she now sings: “Look out the window, all I see is rain. And I whisper, calling out her name.” Regretful and forlorn, the woman who accused “stereotypical mankind” of “living a life of judgment,” perhaps now realizes how her own prejudice prevented her from appreciating the beauty she once could see. Underscored by a rote, trap-influenced progression, she seems both resigned and defiant in her new identity. The climax is everything you could ask for at a mainstage festival performance, with operatic backing vocals that evoke apocalyptic images. Mat has seen his career blow up at least once, after waged a days-long twitter war against such figures as Diplo, Armin van Buuren, and Markus Schulz. I imagine this to be the soundtrack behind those moments when he has been forced to confront the consequences of his choices. “Is it too late? Am I too late? Why can’t forever last? Why can’t we change the past?” But Mat is not the type to pine for a world that could have been. It’s a rhetorical exercise, and one that only leads to greater resolve. “I know we can’t change the past,” Sinead concludes, as the song dissolves into the final track of the album, the somber and reflective “Last Transmission.”
At the end of the album, we’re left with a map of Mat’s career, tracing his formation from a budding producer to a skillful sound designer and genre-blending artist. But we’re also shown a portrait. Abstract, abrupt, and drawn from disparate elements like a Picasso piece, it is nevertheless more beautiful for its inconsistencies and imperfections. Mat Zo isn’t here to create for you the soothing images of a Bob Ross painting any more than the tired conventions of a trance song. He’s here to show you all the pieces of himself, whether you like it or not – now that he’s finally assembled.
In the last few months, a mysterious artist by the name of No Mana has started to make appearances on all of my favorite podcasts, including The Hot List with Aruna and Group Therapy with Above & Beyond. The polished, dark sound of his tracks caught my ear and led me to his recent Game Over EP, out on Mau5trap. Each song on the record is equally strong and strikingly different, from the deep, techno beats of “Ten” to the fragile atmosphere of “Frozen Fireworks.”
No Mana’s dark, throbbing, textured sound incorporates elements of techno, progressive house, and video game music. His style sits somewhere between Deadmau5, Matt Lange, and Jerome Isma-Ae, so it’s only natural that he’s been snapped up by Mau5trap records.
It turns out that No Mana has a solid size discography behind him, despite only recently bursting onto the scene. I’m looking forward to digging further into his catalog as this up-and-coming producer continues to make a name for himself in the dance music scene.
In Orlando, Florida, this weekend, hundreds of people went out to a local gay nightclub called Pulse. They did it for the same reasons we all do: to enjoy great music, to spend time with friends, to express themselves, to meet new people, to feel welcome, to find lovers, to laugh, to sing, to dance. And for those same reasons, dozens of these beautiful individuals were brutally maimed and murdered.
The queer community is beside itself in pain today. The electronic music community should be too.
The terrorist’s message is clear: We should be afraid and ashamed to express ourselves so freely with others. But our message is stronger: that there is no place in the world we should feel more safe and proud to be.
The Queens of Pulse Nightclub at Come Out With Pride 2013. Photo by Jeff Kern from Orlando. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
To my straight, cisgendered, sympathetic friends, who may not feel personally victimized by this violence, I want you to realize that the attack on Pulse was not just an attack on the gay community. It was an attack on the dance music community.
To be clear, many communities were targeted and devastated by this attack: Gays,
Boyfriends Juan Guerrero and Christopher Leinonen. Juan was killed at Pulse, and Christopher is unaccounted for. Christopher (Drew) is a member of the EDC Gays group on Facebook.
Hispanics , Floridians, young people, tourists, Americans, and more. The loss and pain of the many groups, many individuals, who have been psychologically wounded by this violence is real and worthy of empathy and compassion. As a gay raver, two communities that form the basis of my identity were targeted by this attack. As so many of my friends grieve and rage on social media, I want to use this space to address how we can process and overcome what was done to our brothers and sisters Orlando, and to our sense of safety and security in our public gatherings.
Raves are queer events.
First, let me say that our dance music community, our EDM community, is real. It is an identity. The motto of this blog is “One beat, much love.” Though we dance to many genres of music from trance to house to hardstyle to drum and bass, we are united by our respect for each other, our love of music, and our love of dancing with others. We believe in the power of music to make us happy and express our emotions. We believe in the right of everyone to express themselves, through speech, appearance, and action. We believe in Peace. In Love. In Unity. In Respect.
These values don’t come from nowhere. They come from the scene the music was born in. The queer scene. The sweaty warehouses of Chicago, Detroit, New York, where gay people, brown people, outcasts, and outsiders, gathered together in solidarity to celebrate life with each other. The same scene that lives on today in LGBTQ nightclubs, bars, and establishments across the country and world. The same scene that was pierced with bullets at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
This is why raves are inherently queer events. Just like pride festivals, they preach radical affirmation and acceptance of all. They say: Come as you are. Come as who you are. Come as who you need to be. We accept you. They are a political act of resistance to a culture that raises us to feel shame when we do not conform to arbitrary standards of what is proper and normal.
And dancing itself is a radical act. By coming together in public to move our bodies and embrace each other, we manifest our own values and create the world we wish to live in.
After Orlando, we are in pieces. We mourn. We grieve. We look for meaning. We ask, what do we do now? What can we do now?
As a community, there is one thing we can and must continue to do to resist and overcome the terrorism perpetrated against us in Orlando.
To dance is to celebrate life, sexuality, freedom, identity. I personally believe it is the literal purpose of life: To be present with friends, in a safe space, engaged, stimulated, loved, is all any of us can ever hope for.
The attack in Orlando was a truly horrific act of evil, on a scale we have hardly ever experienced. I do not mean to diminish what occurred.
But as we search for meaning from this event, I want us all to remember a few things. Our community is made of millions of loving, well-intentioned people, who enable us to be the most authentic versions of ourselves.
We pity the attacker, and those who would do us harm. While they may loom large in our minds, for a time, especially on a week like this one, we must remember that they are the ones who are afraid of the lives that we live. They are motivated by fear, by disgust. They are literally animated by the values that we reject when we come together in self-acceptance to display and enjoy our bodies together.
As we millions dance every night, we make the world a better place. As we bring others into our community, we spread and strengthen our values. As we continue to do this in the face of threats and attacks, we drown out the empty words of hate and overcome them with compassion.
We cannot prevent every attack on our community. But one terrible attack cannot and will not destroy our values of radical acceptance. It reminds us of the beautiful world we are building with each embrace, each kiss, each sway of our hips.
We will continue to live our truth out loud, together. Tonight, for Orlando, we dance.
Daft Punk performing with their pyramid stage in 2007. Photo credit: Minyoung Choi.
This weekend marks ten years since Daft Punk debuted their pyramid stage at Coachella music festival, according to Magnetic Mag. Many people believe this is one of the most important electronic music performances of all time, so I wanted to take a moment to recognize the impact of that show on the scene we know today.
(Watch this article as a Snapchat story:)
Back in 2006, electronic dance music was a primarily European phenomenon, Coachella was a rock festival, and Daft Punk were nowhere near the household names they are now. That year, they kicked off their Alive Tour with a single US date at Coachella’s Sahara stage – a tour that is regarded as one of the most influential dance music shows of all time. So what made it so outstanding?
Even by today’s standards, in which dance musical geniuses like Porter Robinson,Madeon, and Zedd have put together sensually stunning audio-visual tours, the incredible effort Daft Punk put in to their live show and their live rig to create such a unified theatrical experience stands out. (There’s a reason those artists invoke the robots in their own shows.) By 2006, Daft Punk had already released 3 studio albums and were well known among dance music fans. But what they did with their live show was to present something that transcended the music of their records. Using samplers, keyboards, and other tools, Daft Punk transformed their back catalog into remix fodder to create an entirely new catalog of music.
The new music was brought to life through the complex rig they had assembled, known as the pyramid. The pyramid included an intricate light setup that gradually evolved over the course of the set, starting out in black and white before expanding to include dazzling color. Unfortunately, because it was 2007, much of the video that survives of the tour today is relatively low quality, and no official recording of the performance was ever offered by the band. That being said, much of the power of the performances of that tour is evident even in the relatively low quality videos available. I recommend watching the embedded video at its original size, NOT fullscreen, for the best experience.
Daft punk’s performance is recorded on their Alive 2007 album. If you haven’t ever heard that album, I suggest taking an hour to listen to it start to finish, keeping in mind that much of what you hear was sampled in real time. In today’s world of “just push play” sets,” that stands out as an achievement in itself. It’s a marvel of a remix album, and one that retains its stunning freshness even a decade later.
Alive 2007 was and remains one of the most life-changing albums I’ve ever listened to, and Daft Punk’s efforts as recorded in these videos continues to set the bar for outstanding performances, even a decade after its debut. Make sure to watch the video below for a sense of the magic that went down way back in 2006.
With so many incredible artists playing simultaneously across seven stages, one person couldn’t possibly cover them all. What I can share with you is the experiences from last weekend that I will never forget. This is a list of the five most incredible sets I had the privilege to witness at Ultra 2016. I hope they hit you just as hard.
Eric Prydz‘s hypnotic, thrumming techno set at the A State of Trance stage on Sunday night was augmented by a typically exceptional light show that gave the music shape and color. It was an hour of pure energy and excitement, propelled by the beats of Eric and his alter egos, Prydaand Cirez D. The set consisted mostly of newer material, such as “Rebel XX,” and, of course, included a few IDs. It was such an absorbing performance that I couldn’t peel myself away from the experience even as friends texted me warning that I was going be late to Knife Party’s mainstage closing show. I just couldn’t imagine being any happier than I was basking in the repetitive beats and dazzling lights of Mr. Prydz as a cold, light rain fell on my skin. By the time “Opus” started nudging its way into the set toward the very end, I knew I had just witnessed the best set of Ultra 2016.
You can always count on a last minute twist or two at Ultra – and odds are that Deadmau5 will have something to do with it. This year, it took the form of an unexpected hat trick by Mr. Joel Zimmerman himself. Already scheduled to perform on Sunday at the A State of Trance stage (a shock in itself, as host Armin van Buuren alludes to in the recording of his set), Deadmau5 was called in to replace the Prodigy on Saturday at the last minute. Then on Sunday, the the Mau5 was briefly trotted out onto the mainstage by Pendulum when they played “Ghosts n Stuff.”
While I felt that his Live Stage set on Saturday night was disjointed (the highlight being when he dropped NOISIA‘s searing remix of the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up”), Deadmau5 rose to the challenge of Sunday’s performance in the ASOT megastructure. Like Eric Prdyz, Deadmau5 went deep for this set, crafting a delicious techno treat that shied away from his own extensive oeuvre in favor of a consistent, subterranean sound featuring artists like Maceo Plex and Jooris Voorn. (Of course, it wouldn’t be a Deadmau5 set without some conspicuous trolling. He kicked off his otherwise coherent set with a furious metal track, apparently a reference to a joke he’d made on Twitter. Feel free to skip the first two minutes of the recording. Beware also a NSFW rant about 40% through his set when his DJ equipment briefly gave out.)
On Sunday, dubstep titans NERO rocked the Live stage with an electrifying live set, amplified by drum pads, synths, and of course, the live vocals of singer Alana Watson. Despite the relatively simple stage setup (when juxtaposed with the overproduction of the Main Stage, Resistance Stage, and Megastructure), NERO managed to absolutely slay the audience with their signature bassy riffs. This was the rare live set that may even sound better recorded than it was live, as it is easier to tell where the songs were augmented from their studio counterparts.
Squirreled away on Stage 7 was one of the most potent weapons on Friday’s lineup: bass music duo Botnek. Their high-energy, vomitstep set was far the highlight of my Friday at Ultra. Filled with remixes of 90’s throwbacks and dirty, dirty drops, Botnek got the crowd thrashing around and dancing with a visceral fervor. It was one of those special sets where the music wordlessly brought me together with other dancers to rock out to one special song or another, whether it was Botnek’s definitive remix of The Chainsmokers‘ “Selfie,” or an edit of Rage Against the Machine‘s testosterone-tastic anthem “Testify.” At the end, I even heard one dancer wonder aloud that he couldn’t remember “the last time I danced that hard sober.”
SNBRN played the Worldwide stage on Saturday in the mid-afternoon Miami light, a perfect setting for the captain of the “sunset house” movement. The only daytime set on this list, this one is a marked contrast to the techno and bass-heavy sounds of the immersive minor-key experiences of Eric Prdyz, Deadmau5, NERO, and Botnek. I was pleasantly surprised by SNBRN’s feel-good set, which was a well-mixed serving of groovy melodic house songs with considerable trap and hip-hop influence, including his hits “Gangsta Walk,” “California,” and “Raindrops.” While the others on this list left me feeling exhausted and fulfilled, SNBRN’s set recharged me and left me feeling good.
This weekend I’m in Miami, Florida, for Ultra Music Festival 2016. After years of livestreaming the event, I’m excited to finally be here to experience it in person. Day 1 is already over, and it did not disappoint. I’ll be posting a review about the whole experience soon. In the meantime, make sure to follow me on Snapchat (username: theEDMist) for live stories straight from Bayfront Park!
But more importantly – if you spot me inside, be sure to come say hi! I’ve got 200 wristbands to give away and a whole bunch of stickers.
The EDMist wristbands say “E PLURibus Unum | One Beat. Much Love.”
The wristbands say “E PLURibus Unum | One beat. Much Love.” As a refresher, E pluribus unum is a Latin phrase on the United States seal that means “From many, one.” I like how the idea can apply to EDM – many genres united in one community. (As a bonus, it happens to have the word PLUR – short for the rave credo of Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect – baked into it, so it seemed too perfect not to use.) The second part – “One beat. Much love.” – gets at the same idea of electronic dance music sharing certain base elements like a 4/4 beat while encompassing a staggering diversity of musical styles (not to mention the fans!).
I’ve also got a whole bunch of stickers with the same phrase and my Snapcode printed on them. Look for these in the crowd and try to find me!
About to head into day 2 to see Nero. See you at Ultra!
A VIP mix is a special edit or remix of a song made to be played as part of a DJ set. VIP stands for “Very Important Person,” meaning it has been designed for DJs to use, not for fans to listen to at home.* Because of their nature, VIP mixes are usually not officially released for mass distribution online, and copies of these songs therefore may be only available as bootleg recordings. However, some VIP mixes do see official or semi-official releases. For instance, Valentino Khan gave away his VIP mix of“Deep Down Low” on SoundCloud “to celebrate the love [fans] have shown” for the song.
Explanation
VIP mixes are first and foremost a special treat for fans who come out to a live show. Plus, like any remix, they add new life to a song whose original mix may have gone stale.
*Source: Skrillex and Valentino Khan, OWSLA Radio, Episode 3, discussing the VIP mix of “Deep Down Low”. Skrillex: “This is the VIP mix, though. What does VIP mean?” Valentino Kahn: “That means Very Important Person.” Skrillex: “That means only DJs used to only be able to play this record. It’s a little bit different. It’s for the live ****. But he decided to put this out after the video dropped.”
Jayeson Andel has visions. A path lit by artificial fireflies. Oil slurping through veins of a human-machine hybrid. A colossal mech blazing a trail through a forest. A man walking the snowy streets of a moonlit metropolis, solitary as a monk.
Mastering engineer-turned-producer Jayeson Andel
These are vignettes from the world of Urban Monks, Jayeson’s debut album, released on Silk Music’s Arrival division in 2015. Urban Monks proved to be one of the best (and most overlooked) EDM albums of last year. It is a work of diverse genres, drawing from trance, chillout, dubstep, and glitch hop. In fact, Urban Monks reached the top 10 charts on Beatport in no less than five genres, according to bptoptracker.com. And yet in spite of their diversity, the songs feel cohesive and purposeful, grounded by powerful grooves, electrifying melodies, and exquisite sound design. Together, the songs provide glimpses into an unnamed world where humans, machines, and nature blend together.
Until now, we haven’t known much about that world beyond the tantalizing clues provided by the track titles, such as “We’ll Build It Here,” “Oil in the Veins,” and “Laughing Buddha.” That’s because this concept album doesn’t feature a single lyric.
So on Episode 4 of The EDMist Podcast, I ask Jayeson to let us in to the world behind the music. Over our 46-minute conversation, he reveals the concepts behind several tracks, the subtle sound design choices he made to bring his ideas to life, and the artists and films he drew on for inspiration.
About the eclectic sounds of Urban Monks Jayeson says, “The way I kind of describe it as a theme for everything is organic-infused cyberpunk.” (Don’t worry, I had to take a second to parse that too.) He explains: “I like the futuristic, high-tech, augmented reality world of cyberpunk, but it’s a little bit too noir for me. Like, you look, at say, Blade Runner, and it’s very dark and has that edge to it – which I like. But [Urban Monks] is this very organic, life-based world with trees and stones and everything there mixed with this futuristic tech side of things.”
Jayeson cites the films Elysium and Oblivion as specific points of inspiration, both of which explore worlds of marvelous technology and organic life through stunning imagery. While his medium is different, Jayeson clearly thinks of his music in cinematic terms, describing how he uses recurring themes in “We’ll Build It Here,” and “Awe” Parts I and II to recontextualize familiar motifs and “infuse the listener with this album.”
One of the aspects that sets Jayeson’s album apart is his incredible attention to detail in service of the greater narrative – for example, in the way he plants clues to his ideas deep in the sound design of each track. “I can’t even tell you how much I’ve actually sampled of different leaves and twigs and used that as part of my percussion layers,” Jayeson says. “I spent an entire session with a friend cutting up apples and just breaking them and twisting them and used that as a percussion element.”
In one fascinating moment, Jayeson reveals that he conceives of his tracks as three dimensional journeys. This is most apparent in the tracks whose titles suggest movement, “Follow the Firefly Lanterns” and “Walking with a Colossus.” After hearing the ideas behind these tracks, I asked Jayeson whether he sees his songs not only as progressions through time, but progressions through space. “Yes,” he answers, “Absolutely. And that goes right down to the sound design of everything. … ‘Walking With a Colossus,’ the intro of that track … I wanted to have these footsteps, but it had to feel like it was percussion as well. So there’s these big orchestral bass drum sounds that I put an incredible amount of reverb on and put them lower in the mix so that it felt like these giant steps were being taken.”
By now you may have guessed that Jayeson is not your stereotypical DJ-producer of the sort that cobbles together a career with one-off hits and passable production skills. This Edmonton-based artist has had turns as a classical violinist, mastering engineer, and record label A&R person. And while he no longer DJ’s live, he does produce a regular mix for Silk Music Showcase that he feels just as passionately about as his own album. Not a bad resume for a 25-year-old.
Jayeson’s broad background enabled him to take a vertical approach to producing Urban Monks. While most albums are a collaborative effort between many parties, including producers, engineers, designers, and more, Urban Monks was nearly a solo effort, in which Jayeson crafted everything from the samples to the album art. Even the label seems to have been happy to let Jayeson do most of the driving. I asked Jayeson how much the titular track “Urban Monks” changed since he submitted the first demo to Silk. “Not at all,” he says.
Jayeson’s influences in the music world are, unsurprisingly, varied. While he grew up on the sounds of trance and progressive house, these days he is drawn to visionary, genre-defying producers like Porter Robinson, whose album Worlds shares many thematic elements with Urban Monks. “For the album itself, I think the two people who really took hold were Andrew Bayer and Seven Lions.” Jayeson reveals that “Walking With a Colossus,” the only dubstep track on Urban Monks, was modeled on Seven Lions’ sound, while the downtempo beats of Andrew Bayer’s 2013 album If It Were You, We’d Never Leaveserved as inspiration for the grooves of many tracks.
Like any good fantasy world, Urban Monks leaves you wanting to explore it further. But while Jayeson claims he’s “still figuring [the world] out” himself, future visits to this sonic landscape are uncertain. “I have some incredibly terrible news in that I lost all of the project files for this album,” Jayeson admits to me. “So this is one hundred percent standalone work. … And of course, I designed the album to be so unique with the sound design that no one could ever recreate it, and unfortunately that also includes me. So, this is a perfect, beautiful, piece of uniqueness that will never, ever be recreated or remixed.”
The answer is: not much! Apart from some new material and some token trap beats thrown in here and there, the show sticks with pretty much the same live setup and feel as the Adventure Tour. This would be disappointing if I didn’t already think the Adventure Tour is one of the best EDM experiences you can spend your money on outside of a festival right now.
Because there’s no denying it: Madeon (a.k.a. Hugo Lerclercq) has not only created a dazzling, slick, powerful stage rig that leaves you feeling guilty every time you pick up your phone to take a picture; he has also developed a level of showmanship and verve worthy of a veteran rock star. (Oh, here’s your obligatory reminder that the kid is only 21 years old.)
The Venue
Emo’s is a large boxy space, something like a warehouse, located in the Riverside neighborhood of Austin. It was my first time there so I can’t compare the atmosphere to that of other EDM shows at this venue, although the people around me in the 20-minute line kept mumbling that this was the biggest turnout they’d ever seen for a show at Emo’s. That as may be, the space was big enough that, there was still plenty of space for shuffling in the back.
The diverse crowd was relaxed, with people wearing everything from collared shirts to sweatpants. I spent the first half of the night on one side of the room, where I gradually realized that the sound quality was impaired. After I moved to the back-center, the show sounded much clearer, and hit much harder.
Despite the new name, the Pixel Empire Tour is substantially similar to the Adventure Tour I saw last year. The stage is exactly the same, and since Madeon hasn’t actually released all that many songs, you’re guaranteed to hear all of his hits (“You’re On,” “The City,” “Finale“… you know the rest). That being said, Hugo dropped at least two new tracks for us, which while not particularly mind-blowing, at least held up to the standard of the rest of his oeuvre. (A Youtube tipster calls one of them “Albatross”.)
What makes the Pixel Empire/Adventure Tour stand out among the many EDM tours going on right now is the many live elements Madeon brings to it. At the heart of the show are the Novation samplers that made Madeon famous in the first place, which he uses to delay, stutter, rearrange, filter, and generally explode his songs into echoes of themselves. Hugo showcases his remixing skills in the live mashup of his first hit “Pop Culture,” which throws in 42 samples from well-known pop songs. The impressive act demonstrates his ability to turn even dry old material into juicy, exciting new flavors. I also noticed his presence on the keyboard much more prominently this time around (although whether there was actually more of it or whether I was just more aware of it I can’t say for sure). These kind of live elements make every night unique, and in a culture where DJ’s just “press play” even (and especially!) on the biggest stages in the world, seeing a musician perform live music and mashups over his own tracks is refreshing.
But the true soul of Madeon’s show is the man himself. Hugo is a small, skinny guy, but like Freddie Mercury, he turns his lithe, little body into an asset on stage. You can see the passion radiating from every inch of Madeon’s body as he jumps, spins, and reaches toward the ceiling. He is as in tune with his own music as computer with its CPU; as the music rises, drops, and bends, so does he, an avatar of his own sound. One tiny example of this was when the screen behind him quickly went to black, as if a curtain had been dropped over it, just as the music went quiet for a moment. As the light moved down the screen, so did Madeon’s hand in front of it, like he was going down with it, or even pushing it himself. It was an effect that lasted maybe half a second, but it’s the tiny, perfectly synchronized details like this that make his show so captivating.
I noticed an overarching story as the graphics evolved over the course of the show from large two-dimensional pixellated displays to ever-finer boxy images and eventually three-dimensional shapes, landscapes, and more traditional animations. The fantasy worlds depicted onstage very clearly resemble those of Porter Robinson‘s Worlds Tour, but this isn’t surprising given the duo’s close ties and perhaps decade-long association. His other biggest influence, Daft Punk, is equally as clear in the Pixel Empire tour, as samples of and homages to the robot duo’s electro-house backcatalog are scattered like easter eggs throughout the show.
If you’ve already seen the Adventure Tour, this show won’t be a surprise for you. But I personally think it’s good enough to see multiple times. We’ve all been to shows where DJ’s play the same sets you saw them play a few weeks or months ago, where you find yourself asking what you just paid for. With the audiovisual extravagance of the Pixel Empire and Adventure Tours, Madeon has given us a special, unforgettable experience that is worth revisiting for the energy and the details.
The EDMist 
