KASKADE THANKS FATIGUE FOR EDM’S RISE >>>
In the last five years, Kaskade 2 has garnered six Grammy nominations, single-handedly sold out 20,000-person-capacity venues, and made Forbes’s list of the highest-paid DJS in the world. Record-breaking spots at Coachella and repeat bookings at Electric Daisy Carnival are footnotes on his résumé. Mention achievements like those in 2005 when Ryan Raddon first took on the Kaskade moniker, however, and he would have said it was impossible. So what changed?
Learning to spin records in his hometown of Chicago before landing a residency in San Francisco, the performer always wanted to push the envelope. Coming up in “grimy little 200-person clubs”, he enjoyed the freedom of long set times at underground parties, which allowed him room to write melodic deep house that soon landed him a deal with Om Records. A few years later, as the EDM boom started gathering momentum, Raddon found himself leading the charge with hits like “I Remember” with Deadmau5, and becoming the first electronic-music DJ to secure a residency in Las Vegas. Modest about his achievements, the performer ascribes much of his success to the changing musical landscape.
“I think a big catalyst for the commercial rise of dance music was fatigue,” he tells the Straight on the line from his Los Angeles home. “That urban sound, hip-hop and rock ’n’ roll, was just rinsed. People were looking for something new, and dance music had been bubbling in the underground for decades, literally, since disco died. Dance music really wasn’t on the radio for a really long time. I think pop stars emulated what was going on in the clubs, like Madonna and Deee-lite, but you didn’t have producers who were focused on the underground breaking through, like Chainsmokers or David Guetta. Now all the lines are blurred.”
As EDM’S profile grew, so did the venues and production, largely eclipsing the genre’s grassroots origins. For Raddon, a man proud to be “all about the music”, that obscured one of the most important aspects of Djing: the ability to play without boundaries. In response, he’s decided to step back from the megacapacity shows. Releasing Redux EP 001 in 2014, and following it up last month with Redux EP 002, the performer wanted to revisit the scene’s genesis, and the start of his own story.
“So much of dance music is considered pop music now,” he says, “Don’t get me wrong—i love that music too, but I think a lot of young kids discovering dance music think that’s what it is. They’re not aware of Carl Cox and Richie Hawtin and these guys that have been around for decades doing it. That sound is a part of my life.
“When I came up with the Redux idea in 2014 it was a bit of a shock,” he continues, “but I feel like a lot more people have followed that trend in
the last couple of years. I think people realize that nightclub music in a nightclub is not a bad thing. It’s still really fun. For me it was about exercising that muscle, and still staking the claim that I’m here and I’ve always been here, and I’m still doing this thing. I’ve written a lot of more melodic stuff over the years, and a lot of people know me for that, but really and truly I came up through the clubs, and it’s important to celebrate it.”
Trading drops and upbeat chords for the more downtempo, repetitive bars of deeper house music, Redux EP 002 sees Raddon collaborating with long-time associates Late Night Alumni and up-and-comer Lokii, an artist who has, as the DJ puts it, “a fresh take on what’s happening in the club world”. Between the grimy classic house of “Show of Hands” and the smooth, vocal-driven lead single “Nobody Like You”, the result is a varied, heartfelt record stripped of the fashionable sounds that boost the big buildups of EDM singles. Putting the seven-track EP out on his own label, Arkade, afforded Raddon the freedom to release the record without worrying about marketing, and to tour the songs in intimate venues.
“In Vancouver, I’m playing Celebrities,” he says. “I’ve performed in the city more times than I can count, but it’s one of the very few rooms I haven’t played before. Vancouver is such a forward-thinking place, it was one of the first spots in North America where I started playing hard-ticket venues. I jumped from performing in these tiny clubs right to the Commodore, and I sold out two nights there, which I was told was a really big deal. I skipped right over Celebrities, and I don’t know how that happened. Everyone I sit and talk to says that I’m going to love it because it’s exactly what I’m going for on this tour.”
> KATE WILSON
Kaskade plays Celebrities next Thursday (November 2).
Schneider probes life in our weird wired world
The next-generation jazz musicians 2 in Capilano University’s “A” Band and Nitecap choir will be pushed to the limit this week, when Maria Schneider drills them before leading them on-stage for a Blueshore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts concert. But working with students, Schneider says, isn’t really that much different from collaborating with pros like saxophonist Donny Mccaslin, soprano Dawn Upshaw, and the late rock legend David Bowie, all of whom have performed with the five-time Grammy winner.
“I really try to push them beyond their expectation of what they think they can play, and usually I manage to reach that,” Schneider says on the line from her Manhattan home, speaking specifically about her work as a jazz educator but also giving some insight into her musical philosophy. “So it’s fun when the students, at the end, feel surprised by what they’ve done.”
During her visit to Cap U, Schneider plans to cover a few key topics. “For composition students, I talk about how to make something that’s compelling and that reaches an audience—and about the creative process, which is very complex and difficult,” she says. “A lot of students think that any great music that they hear just appears, so I try to be really honest about how difficult it is to write music and describe my process, so that they understand that hard work is necessary, and that they’re not alone in that if that’s how they’re feeling.
“I also work with ensembles on playing in an effective way, and about musicality in the jazz ensemble… There’s just a thousand different subjects,” she adds.
It’s likely, though, that the most important lesson Schneider hopes to impart has less to do with music than with life, especially life in our stressedout, wired, and eternally on-call times. American theatre teacher Linda Putnam likes to talk about the creative cycle being made up of four elements— research, production, presentation, and fallow time, with the last being criminally overlooked—and that’s something Schneider also endorses.
“I talk about that a lot, actually, because I’m from southwest Minnesota, where it’s agriculture country,” Schneider explains. “It’s prairie and farms, and anybody who has worked around farms knows that if a field is constantly put into production, the soil can’t keep up. The soil has to go fallow. Things have to lay there; they have to decay and die a little bit to give the soil new energy.”
The moral, she continues, is that everyone needs to give themselves some space in their lives, even if that means taking a break from social media.
“You have to be diligent, you have to practise, you have to work,” she says. “But if you don’t also give yourself time to do other things, things outside of music, then what does the music have to speak about?
“You know how they say ‘You are what you eat?’ Well, your music is what you fill your time with. And if people are just constantly filling their time with text messaging and this and that, then what do they have to say? What questions does that put in their minds?”
Admittedly, Schneider doesn’t always practise what she preaches. While her most recent Maria Schneider Orchestra album, 2015’s gloriously golden The Thompson Fields, was inspired by time spent in the country and her memories of long Minnesota summers, she’s more recently devoted her off-hours to campaigning against the way Big Data is impoverishing musicians through omnipresent copyright violations. That’s not exactly taking a break—and, unsurprisingly, her efforts are spilling over into the music she’s writing now.
Sample titles? “Datalords” and
“Don’t Be Evil”.
“I think the next chapter is going to be a little different,” Schneider allows. “And there was also an influence in working with David Bowie [on the track “Sue (Or Nothing Has Changed)”, from the singer’s 2014 compilation Nothing Has Changed]. He was really attracted to my more dark and intense music, and as we were working together, I was kind of tapping into that part of myself, too. And I was like, ‘You know what? This is fun!’ I kind of like the dark—and it’s time to unleash holy hell.”
> ALEXANDER VARTY
Maria Schneider plays the Blueshore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts on Friday (October 27).
The Glorious Sons are bonded by brotherhood
Sibling rivalry might have pushed 2
Brett and Jay Emmons, singer and guitarist in the Glorious Sons, to pursue different musical opportunities at first, but it was the bond of brotherhood that brought them back together.
“Before I joined the group, I was doing music by myself out east in Halifax,” Brett tells the Straight on the line from Toronto. “It wasn’t really working out. I came home to Kingston for Christmas and went to one of Jay’s band’s shows, and realized, ‘Holy shit, these guys are really good.’ They’d been asking me for a little while to join the band, but I stubbornly wanted to do it my own way. Honestly, I didn’t actually know they were that impressive. So I went back out east for a month and a half longer, and when shit really hit the fan for me, I called Jay and asked if his offer still stood. He said, ‘Yeah’. I booked a flight home, and I joined the group.”
Playing heartfelt, high-energy rock ’n’ roll, the six-piece soon found itself one of the genre’s most in-demand bands in Canada. Selling out shows coast to coast, picking up a Juno Award nomination for its first album, The Union, and securing its status as the most-played artists on Canadian rock radio in 2015, the group set out to prove that—despite what commercial radio might lead listeners to believe—the rock-music scene is thriving in this country.
Now with the release of its second album, Young Beauties and Fools, the band has offered up a batch of new tracks for heavy rotation on Canada’s stations. Adopting a more contemporary approach to the genre by mixing its anthemic singles with the occasional subtle string synth line or brass stab, the group wants to be at the forefront of rock’s evolution.
“It was so important to me when we were in the studio that we didn’t lose the heart and soul of what we do, which is music derived from guitars and vocals,” Emmons says. “But we also wanted to expand on that and create something a little more modern than what we had done before. Part of the problem is that people think that rock ’n’ roll nowadays has to sound like a band from the 1960s. I think that is such backward thinking. If people think that rock is ever going to be relevant again, it’s not going to be a band that sounds like Lynyrd Skynyrd. It’s going to be a band that can encapsulate and represent modern times. And that was a very important thing to us writing the album.”
First and foremost, he says, the band is a blue-collar group of performers who encompass the spirit of rock. Selling out three of their shows in Toronto on this tour—two on consecutive dates—the Glorious Sons know what the fans have come to expect: a rough-and-ready but tightly drilled set from a group whose members are no strangers to hard partying.
“I think that people are genuinely entertained by six guys going out there and smiling and sweating and having fun,” Emmons says. “It’s hard to explain what we do differently to other people to make us popular, but I know that when we’re on-stage we’re all being ourselves. I think that there’s a certain vibe that we have with the people we’re performing to, and I think that’s the main thing that’s propelled our career forward, because we’ve spent a lot of time on the road.
“I think that Jay and I have always had a certain belief in the band, and in ourselves,” he continues. “We’ve had a lot of help along the way, and caught a lot of breaks, but we’ve also worked hard for our opportunities. It’s really paid off for us.”
> KATE WILSON
The Glorious Sons play the Vogue Theatre on Friday (October 27).