Beats that beat the cold
Why tropical house might be the hottest sound of the winter
It was the dead of winter in the oceanside city of Trondheim, Norway, and Tom Stræte Lagergren was dreaming of beach parties.
“I started remixing tropical beats with hip hop and pop music in like February, March, before it got warm, just to prepare my friends and myself for summer,” he says over the phone from New York.
“Old Thing Back,” his take on Notorious B.I.G.’s 2007 posthumous track “Want That Old Thing Back,” reimagined the menacing hip-hop anthem as a seaside party jam, complete with saxophone riffs and beats that sound like they were tapped out on a digitized marimba (a wooden xylophone).
The remix was a platinum hit in Norway and Sweden last summer and minted Lagergren a festival mainstay under the DJ alias Matoma.
“Try Me,” a song he produced for Jason Derulo and Jennifer Lopez, was released as a single last month. This Saturday, he plays Toronto’s Sound Academy with the Chainsmokers.
The burgeoning style, tropical house, which is marked by slowed-down house rhythms, horns, strummed guitars and island beats such as steel drums and bongos, has been influencing the sounds of big-room dance events and Top 40 radio alike.
German DJ Robin Schulz spun a hit out of Mr. Probz’s spare single “Waves” by adding beats to the mellow guitar melody.
Another German DJ, Felix Jaehn, created a ubiquitous summer smash by adding horns and hand drums to OMI’s “Cheerleader.”
Justin Bieber’s current chart dominance with “What Do You Mean?” and “Sorry” owe a debt to dance music’s tropical beach-party craze.
“Tastes within the dance music community in general have been changing and shifting over the last year or two,” says Ryan Kruger, who has run dance events in Toronto through his Destiny Events label since 1993.
“You have this huge generation of electronic music fans that came through the gateway of EDM or dubstep, and are now getting a little older and developing their tastes more deeply, and are getting into these deeper, more underground styles,” he adds.
Matoma feels that dance music is experiencing a backlash against the predictable build-to-a-beat-drop sound.
“With tropical music, you have saxophones, you have piano, you have all these live instruments that give that warmness. I think dance music will be inspired by more acoustic music,” he says
Take Klingande, a French DJ whose sax-sampling 2013 tropical house hit “Jubel” has125 million views on YouTube and was a No.1hit in10 European countries.
At a New York event, he shared the stage with an eight-piece band and during a recent set at the Liberty Grand in Toronto, he spun alongside a live saxophonist.
Tep No, a tropical house producer and vocalist based in Hamilton, Ont., points to the success of “Cheerleader” as an example of those changing tastes.
“With tropical music, you have saxophones, you have piano, you have all these live instruments that give that warmness. I think dance music will be inspired by more acoustic music.” MATOMA NORWEGEN DJ
“It’s very vocal-oriented,” he says. “This is why I think tropical house right now is popular, because it’s softer music, which I find gives more space to the vocals.”
His own single “Swear Like a Sailor,” a laidback beat-driven track built around a soft acoustic guitar strum, hit No. 1on the music blog aggregator Hype Machine.
The song was recorded while visiting family on the coast of Greece, and the romanticism of sand and surf continues to inspire him, even as temperatures outside hit single digits
He’s not alone in blending the sounds of crashing waves and hand drums while frost forms on the windows.
Tropical house’s biggest champions hail from northern hemisphere homelands such as Norway, Germany and, yes, Canada. When asked about composing tropical house tunes in a climate such as Norway’s, Matoma gushes about the summers. “We have proper summer where we can swim in the ocean and lay on the beach,” he says.
“But in the winter, it’s really cold. It’s really dark. You have so few hours with sun. You have that huge diversity from summer and winter,” he explains.
By spinning tropical house, Matoma has created his own soundtrack for endless summer.