Dance
Page: 56
Tiga‘s Turbo Recordings has delivered fresh, inventive music reflecting the darkly alluring world of techno for 25 years, which is a pretty long time.
Today (Nov. 17), the Montreal-based producer and the label are celebrating this quarter century of existence with a 25-track compilation album, composed of music by a globe-spanning collection of artists including Seth Troxler, Spanish producer Adrian Marth, Chilean-German artist Matias Aguayo, Germany-based Biesmans and a 2manyDJs edit of Tiga’s own “Woke.” There’s also a flurry of other productions that exist in a place that’s simultaneously tough, cerebral and transcendent.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
In other words, the compilation is made for the club, which has been the producer’s home away from home since he started releasing music in the late ’90s. Over time, Tiga has become a hero of the electronic realm with smart, consistent releases that hit emotional buttons without ever veering into cheesiness.
The Turbo 25 project comes amid new work from Tiga’s LMZ project, a collaboration with Hudson Mohawke that’s delivered resonant collaborations with Channel Tres and most recently, Jesse Boykins III. Here, Tiga reflects on the compilation, 25 years of Turbo, and how — while he’s occasionally considered throwing in the towel on the label — he’s “never considered quitting” music.
[embedded content]
1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?
Amsterdam. I’ve been staring out my window like a house cat. Looks very alive.
2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?
With my own money: the first Duran Duran album. On cassette, bootleg Indian edition, at a hotel lobby giftshop in Bombay. 1981 or 82.
3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid, and what do or did they think of what you do for a living now?
My mother was a full-time mom, she took very good care of me and was always there for me. My dad was a stock trader. They were both extremely supportive from step one, even when I dropped out of school at 18. They knew their son, and knew how serious and passionate I was, and they supported me completely with zero judgment.
4. What’s the first non-gear thing you bought for yourself when you started making money as an artist?
Good question. A pair of Yamamoto boots.
5. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into electronic music, what would you give them?
Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works.
6. What’s the last song you listened to?
Leonard Cohen, “It’s Torn.”
7. You spent the early years of your life in Goa, India. What are your strongest memories of that time? Did it set you up to be a producer?
I don’t think it set me up as a producer, but as a person I got used to being around wild people and got used to the idea it was okay to be different and strange. I also grew up around a lot of hippies and weirdos, so I always wanted to work hard to end up “successful.”
8. Goa trance, love it or leave it?
When it’s done well, I like it. But what I really love is just good trance that happens to be played in Goa.
9. How were the 25 tracks on the compilation collected and selected? What was the criteria for what made it on? Is there anyone you’re particularly excited about having on the compilation?
It was a collection of our existing family of artists and new artists that we have had an eye on. We sent out invite letters to everybody and then just had some back and forth with them. It is always quite informal. I was very happy to work with Matias Aguayo, because he’s one of my favorites and he delivered something really special.
[embedded content]
10. What does this compilation say about the past/present/future of Turbo?
That we still do what we do.
11. The compilation’s album’s fine print that it was “made possible in part by the Government of Canada.” What did the Canadian government bestow upon the album?
We get some grant money for certain projects from the Canadian arts endowment. They support Canadian artists. Its tax money well spent.
12. Does Turbo have a brick-and-mortar headquarters? If so, paint us a picture of that space. If not, what’s your fantasy HQ?
We had a gorgeous office from about 2012 to 2018. It had a studio, a giant wall of fame with every single physical release mounted in order. We closed it pre-pandemic, and now it’s all laptops and remote control. But it’s my plan to open a new HQ in the next few years, on a mountain top in the countryside.
13. Twenty-five years is a respectable amount of time for any artistic endeavor. Was there ever a time in your career when you considered quitting? Do you see yourself making music and traveling the world in perpetuity?
I never considered quitting personally. Never. I obviously go in and out of the love affair with travel and touring, but generally it’s still an almost unbeatable occupation. As for the label: Yes. There were a few times over the years when I almost threw in the towel.
14. If you could time travel to any era of dance music, to when would you go and why?
I would have liked to go to a few legit early acid house parties: early 80’s Ibiza, late ’80s U.K. I also would have loved to have been to some serious Belgian industrial/new beat clubs at inception. I would love to have been at a club like the Hacienda the first time Blue Monday played.
15. In the sprawling ecosystem of dance music, what niche does Turbo fill?
I like to think we make dignified bangers.
[embedded content]
16. Dance music is obviously intended to make people… dance, but are there any dance songs that reliably make you cry?
I don’t think I’ve ever actually shed a tear to a dance song. There are a few Aphex tracks like “Polynomial/C” and “Every Day” that make me very emotional, but not actual tears.
17. What’s the proudest moment of your career thus far?
I was proud of the first time I did a live show, in Berlin, in 2015. Singing in front of an audience, etc. Also, my first real shows in Berlin back in 2001.jamb
18. What’s the best business decision you’ve ever made?
Never having a boss.
19. Who’s been your greatest mentor, and what’s the best advice they gave you?
I don’t really have a mentor, and I would love to have one. It’s healthy. But my dad told me when I was about one, “Just find something you love to do, and do it.” And that was great advice.
20. One piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?
Get paid in Bitcoin for a few years, 2015-2016, and be generous with the people around you.
The dance industry’s biggest conference, ADE, happened in Amsterdam Oct. 18-21, with loads of business happening by day and the industry flexing what it does best with even more parties by night. Ranging from intimate shows to stadium-sized spectacles, parties took place in more than 100 clubs and event spaces throughout the city during the […]
Imagine worrying that you’d reached your creative songwriting peak before you could even legally order a beer. That’s the existential dread Billie Eilish said she suffered before Barbie director Greta Gerwig came knocking with an assignment.
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
“I honestly was concerned that it was over for me. We’d been trying and it wasn’t doing what it usually would do in me. I was honestly like, ‘Damn, maybe I hit my peak and I don’t know how to write anymore?,’” Eilish told The Hollywood Reporter for its Hit Squad songwriter roundtable, where she talked about inspiration, frustration, first songs and cringe-y lyrics with fellow songwriters/singers Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo, Jon Batiste, Cynthia Erivo and Julia Michaels.
Eilish, 21, said she was struggling to find fresh inspiration before the call came from Gerwig in January with the Barbie soundtrack assignment. The result, of course, was Eilish’s haunting ballad “What Was I Made For?,” which not only hit Nov. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, but also garnered the seven-time Grammy Award winner another five nominations for the 2024 Grammys.
“Greta saved me, really, honestly,” Eilish said of the track she wrote with songwriting partner brother Finneas. “It brought us out of it and immediately we were inspired and wrote so much more after that.” And though we have not year heard what else they cooked up for Eilish as-yet-untitled third album, the story of struggle opened the door for Eilish to describe the making of the song in greater detail.
Eilish said she and Finneas were in the studio on a rainy January day the day after they first saw the movie — whose soundtrack garnered 11 Grammy nominations overall — at a time when they were super-stuck. “It was just a day of nothing. It was just idea after idea after idea of just no ideas. Nothing was happening. It was the least creative,” she said of the unproductive six-hour session.
Then Finneas suggested they try to write the Barbie assignment, which Billie was not psyched to take on after such a frustrating day. “I was like, ‘What? You think after the day of garbage we’ve just made, we’re going to make a perfect song for something that needs something really good?,’” she asked. “I was like, ‘I don’t even have that in me.’”
Though the siblings had struck Oscar gold before with their James Bond theme “No Time to Die,” Eilish didn’t think she had “something astounding” in her. But once Finneas began playing the piano, Eilish — sitting on a couch with a handheld mic — started singing as the brother and sister talked about the “floating elegance of [Barbie] and her ability to be so smooth and beautiful and perfect all the time. And then the juxtaposition of her suddenly falling and [she] can’t do everything perfectly.”
That inspired the line “I used to float, now I just fall down,” which led to the song’s title and a breakthrough. “Then we were both asking the question after that and we did that in probably five minutes. It was like it was God. It was just the most perfect example to me of true inspiration and connection,” she said. “It was living in me that whole day, but it wasn’t coming out of me. We didn’t go into it knowing at all what we were going to make or if we were going to make anything. And it was just so clear that we needed to.”
Rodrigo, 20, weighed in on how writing the song “Can’t Catch Me Now” for the new Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes prequel took her out of her comfort zone in the best way. “It was so much fun. Most of my songs are very diaristic in nature and kind of about my life. It was such a fun challenge to watch this movie through the eyes of this character and try to capture herperience through my words and my voice,” she said. “There’s so much inspiration in restricting yourself sometimes.”
Lipa said her experience writing the Barbie song “Dance the Night” was, from the beginning, “the most fun experience. It was something that I hadn’t done before.” She said soundtrack producer Mark Ronson DM’d her on Instagram saying the script was hilarious and he wanted her to write a song for its iconic dance sequence.
“I was like, ‘This is an absolute no-brainer. One thousand percent yes,’” she said. “It’s so much about stereotypical Barbie having an existential crisis and finding out what it’s like to experience the human condition and the way that we are as people and the emotions that we feel. And constantly striving for perfection but not quite reaching it, striving for something deeper in a way. Greta was saying how inspired by disco she was. I just thought about disco and the community it brings, and the way it brings people together. It was always a genre of music that was such a release when things weren’t going well in the world.”
The discussion also had Erivo dissecting the first lyric she wrote at 16 for a South African girl group and Rodrigo’s first effort, a “feminist anthem” called “Superman” she wrote at 14 about how she didn’t need a Superman to come and save her. Dua Lipa remembered a song she wrote at 4 or 5 in her native Albanian she’d sing around the house with lyrics about wanting to be just like her mom.
As you might expect, Eilish’s first attempt, at 8, featured some typically dark lyrics: “I’m going down, down, down into the black hole, sweeping up your soul today …”
Marshmello tells Billboard all about his five favorite Latin things. Marshmello:Yo, what’s up? This is Marshmello, and here are five of my favorite Latin things. My favorite Latin word I actually learned from working with Manuel. The word is “chimba.” And chimba means like, “that’s fire” or like, they use it a lot in the […]
This week in dance music: We went behind the scenes at nightlife advocacy agency VibeLab and spoke with East Forest about his new album. Dua Lipa released her new dance-centric track, The Living Tombstones debuted on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, Skrillex, Fred again.. and James Blake led the 2024 dance/electronic Grammy nominations and Aluna launched a label focused on Black female and LGBTQ+ artists, Noir Black.
We’ve also got more! These are the best new dance tracks of the week.
Peggy Gou, Lenny Kravitz, “I Believe In Love Again”
[embedded content]
The Label: XL Recordings
The Spiel: Peggy Gou appears to be swinging for the fences with her debut album, set for release next year. The LP’s lead single “Nanana (It Goes Like)” became a viral hit (“My song was never on a chart before,” Gou recently told Billboard. “In the beginning I wasn’t sure what [charting] meant exactly”), and the album’s second single is a simmering collaboration with the bonafide legend Lenny Kravitz. Together, the pair are predictably cooler than cool, with Kravitz employee the higher-pitched side of his range for vocals that ride Gou’s ’90s throwback production.
The Artist Says: “The ’90s have had such a huge influence on my music” Gou says. “People know about my love of the dance/house/rave scene from that time, but I’ve always been a big R&B fan, and also a huge fan of Lenny. I listened endlessly to his 1998 album 5 – my personal favorite – but his whole discography is great, totally timeless. He came into the studio and transformed the guide vocal into magic, writing new lyrics and creating that incredible guitar riff. ‘I Believe In Love Again’ is a strong message of positivity and hope, and we hope everyone feels that when they hear the song.”
Yaeji, “easy breezy”
[embedded content]
The Label: XL Recordings
The Spiel: There’s a neat trick to Yaeji’s latest track, with the lyrics focused on how certain things are not so easy breezy over a track that very much contains that laidback vibe. Skittering d’n’b percussion swells with synth, fun bossa nova touches and the occasional acoustic guitar, for a song that does indeed feel like a warm breeze. The release comes in tandem with the European leg of the artist’s With A Hammer tour, which includes a headlining slot at Pitchfork London festival this weekend.
The Artist Says: “Sonically, the song connects a thread between me now and me back in middle school —when I discovered bossa nova, drum and bass, and house through Korean and Japanese pop electronica,” Yaeji says. “‘easy breezy’ is a thread, a tribute, a recollection of memories, and an encouraging push for us to bring forth change with courage and laughter. We hold the power in our hands, and we should never doubt that. Change is now.”
Keys N Krates & Ciara, “Fantasy”
[embedded content]
The Label: Last Gang Records
The Spiel: The Keys N Krates crew links with Ms. Automatic Supersonic, Hipnotic Funkyfresh herself, Ciara, for “Fantasy.” Out of the trio’s third studio album IN:TENSION, the song is a positively buoyant house cut built from feel-good piano stabs, strings, cooking percussion and vocals from Ciara that bounce between rapidfire spoken word and mellifluous singing.
The Artist Says: “After vibing with ‘Fantasy’ for the first time, I had good feels all over,” says Ciara. “I felt an infectious energy that made me want to dance, and I could envision myself living my best life to this song all over the world. This is the perfect party song for my collaboration with Keys N Krates. House is a space I’ve really been wanting to get involved in, so I’m excited for the world to hear it.”
Logic1000, “Self To Blame”
[embedded content]
The Label: Therapy
The Spiel: Logic1000 has had a steady rise since her 2019 debut, releasing remixes for Fever Ray, Glass Animals, Christine and the Queens, Flume, Orbital in addition to her own productions. All this work had led to the tk artist’s just announced debut album, Mother, set for release in March. The album’s lead single is the sinewy, gently rising “Self To Blame,” marrying Y2K R&B and and house music featuring the velvet-voiced Kayla Blackmon.
The Artist Says: “I haven’t been posting anything personal since this unfathomable situation continued to unfold,” the artist wrote on Instagram regarding the Israel-Hamas war, “and I have been very confused about whether to make this post about my new music. I’m riddled with grief. Anxiety too. But I have also always believed that music has special healing powers. It is a way to escape, to decompress and it is in service to the community of people who connect to it. I hope that my new song – “Self To Blame” featuring the wonderful Kayla Blackmon brings you some much needed comfort and healing. I also want to use this time to announce that this is in fact the single from my debut album Mother. Big Ever and I have put our hearts and souls into creating this in the hopes of connecting you all through our music. I will continue to scream and shout about the injustice that is being inflicted upon the people of Palestine, all the while continuing to give you the music from the depths of our hearts. Please take care of yourselves.”
Ninajirachi, “Wayside”
[embedded content]
The Label: NLV Records
The Spiel: Australian producer Ninajirachi is back with a five-track EP, 4×4, that highlights her mastery of productions that balance effervescence, bounce, heft and style. The fast-paced “Wayside” is a highlight of a project that’s altogether futuristic yet accessible, bright yet weighty and playful throughout. 4×4 includes Ninajirachi’s own vocals, along with collaborations with Ravenna Golden and Kota Banks.
The Artist Says: “Making music hasn’t felt this fun and effortless for me since pre-pandemic,” says the producer. “All of these songs were made in the last few months with my good friends and they were made very quickly, mostly in under a day, they’re not that serious or deep, they felt fulfilling and easy to write and produce! On this release (and others to come) I’ve been pulling more and more inspiration from the dance music that changed my life as a child and getting closer to becoming the producer I dreamed of being when I first heard it.”
Aluna is one of the dance world’s strongest voices for the representation of Black artists, and this week she’s continuing the mission with the launch of her own label, Noir Fever.
Launched in partnership with Empire, Noir Fever will be a home for dance music created by Black artists, with a focus on Black women and LGBTQ+ artists.
“I started Noir Fever records as a key component to my 360-degree strategy of making sustainable and effective change to the future of Black dance music, an idea which was birthed as a response to my own letter to the Dance music industry in 2020,” Aluna said in a statement.
“Investment in the recording side is essential to fostering emerging talent, and by focusing on black women and the queer community I can ensure that everyone is being uplifted,” the statement continues. “This label will work in tandem with my events company so that those who I am opening doors for are not simply walking into another closed door, I’m trying to create a path not an opportunity to slip through a crack.”
The label’s first release is “Pain & Pleasure,” a vibey jam from Moonshine, a Montreal collective of musicians, DJs, dancers and visual artists. The track features the Juno Award-nominated, Somali-Canadian artist Amaal Nuux, Portuguese-Angolese artist Vanyfox and Aluna herself. Listen to it below.
Noir Fever has also appointed Adam Cooper as creative director. Cooper is a strategist, creative director and DJ based in Los Angeles, born in Trinidad & Tobago and raised in Caracas/Venezuelaas well as Brooklyn.
Of the launch, EMPIRE Dance’s director of operations/A&R Deron Delgado said in a statement: “Beyond her extraordinary achievements and remarkable talent, Aluna has consistently championed diversity and inclusion in the music industry, principles that have been ingrained in the very fabric of EMPIRE since our inception over a decade ago. Our shared values and objectives align seamlessly, making this collaboration a natural synergy that promises to elevate music, events, and art to a broader global audience. We are truly excited to be part of showcasing the exceptional talent that Noir Fever is bringing to the masses.”
The label launch follows the release of Aluna’s second solo album, MYCELiUM, released this past July via Mad Decent.
[embedded content]
2024 Grammy nominations were announced Friday (Nov. 10), with a star-studded collection of dance artists representing in the dance/electronic and pop dance categories. The most nominated dance artists this year include Skillex, who received a pair of nominations for his unstoppable “Rumble” and the album Quest for Fire, from whence it came. Fred Again.. also […]
Three years ago, Dua Lipa gifted us with one of the strongest dance-pop albums of the past decade at the precise moment we were all stuck inside. Future Nostalgia, the U.K. pop star’s sophomore album, arrived in March 2020 just as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world it was entering, offering sleek escapism during […]
The Living Tombstone’s “Five Nights at Freddy’s” rides the release of the new film of the same name to a debut on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart dated Nov. 11, bowing at No. 4. In the Oct. 27-Nov. 2 tracking week, the song earned 4.2 million official U.S. streams, a 439% surge from 770,000 the […]
Last winter in Boise, Idaho, East Forest was considering making a new album.
He’d just released Headwaters — recorded live in one evening in a remote region of Utah for a group of friends — and was ready to make something in the studio. A singer interested in collaborating with him had reached out on Instagram, and East Forest contemplated how they could work together. In the meantime, she just showed up in Boise one day.
“She came to town and got a hotel and came to the studio, and I was like, ‘OK. I guess I’ll start writing some songs.’”
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
Wanting the new album to incorporate more drums and bass than his previous studio LP, 2022’s Still Possible, he needed an ace drummer. “Boise’s not much of an industry town, so I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know where I’m gonna find the drummer I need.’”
But again, he didn’t have to look further than his own neighborhood. Attending a jazz show one night in Boise, he realized the drummer was Jens Kuross, a singer/songwriter who’s toured with Bonobo, performs with electronic-psych band The Acid, and had just moved back to his native Boise from L.A.
“I was like, ‘Would you like come to a studio?’ And it turned out he lived two blocks away.”
With the pieces coming together, East Forest — born Trevor Oswalt — settled down in the studio with his collaborators. The music that emerged over time was, like most everything East Forest has produced during his 15-plus-year career, emotive, cerebral and often lush, fusing live instruments and electronics with musings about life and death and what it all means. Themes of the new songs reflected the uncertainty and anxiety of the time in which we currently exist, and also the idea that while humanity is in what often feels like a freefall, something new might be emerging as well.
East Forest thus called the album Music for the Deck of the Titanic, a nod to the string quartet that played as the ship went down and the beauty of that act. The singer who’d shown up in Boise, Senegalese vocalist Marieme, appears on three tracks. Duncan Trussell muses about music and aliens on the nine-minute “So What?” Techno producer ANNA delivers a sunrise-at-Burning Man vibe on “Currents.” The album cover is a portrait of East Forest standing with a peacock in the driveway at Diplo‘s house. Released via Bright Antenna Music last week, East Forest and Marieme will perform selections from the album tonight (Nov. 7) at Pico Union Project in Los Angeles.
East Forest’s career arc always been somewhat out of the box, with his heady, spiritually-leaning productions infused with the wisdom of teachers like Ram Dass (with whom East Forest collaborated with on his 2019 album, Ram Dass) and often made for psychedelic experiences. In 2019, he released Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For the Psychedelic Practitioner, a five-hour album designed to accompany a psilocybin trip. He recently received a letter from a man, who in the midst of a bad mushroom trip, remembered that the album existed, managed to put it on, and felt his experience shift into something much more uplifting.
As electronic music, and culture in general, becomes increasingly receptive to psychedelics and the consciousness-centric thinking that often comes in tandem, the box seems to be reconfiguring to be more in line with East Forest’s output. Here, he talks about his new album, being a circle in a square-shaped industry, and the advice he gave to Aaron Rodgers.
[embedded content]
How have you seen psychedelics affect the electronic music community in over the last five or 10 years?
I guess I’ve seen a few more friends and artists getting into the space, but it’s just a few. I’m thinking of when Jon Hopkins and I crossed paths and, and then we did a track together, then that became part of an album he then decided to call Music For Psychedelic Therapy. I thought that was a big deal. Because it was so forthright, just like when I was doing Music For Mushrooms. You’re telling people what this is for.
And something about yourself that’s perhaps vulnerable.
Absolutely. Even though it’s more mainstream, there’s a lot of judgment around it still. For better or worse, when I started doing this project it was overtly purpose-driven and spiritual. That was not like, cool. I still get pushback on that from agents, industry people, not getting representation, because they’re like, “well, everything’s there on paper, the demand or whatever.” But then they’re like, “yeah, but I don’t know.” It’s the vulnerability thing I guess… That’s a thing that bothers me, because people put [my work] in a category where it’s yoga music or something. But if you took away the definitions, I work really hard on the music to stand on its own. You don’t have to know anything about [where it’s coming from.] It’s like any music; you click with it, or you don’t.
The music industry isn’t necessarily the most vulnerable place.
No! That’s what I’m saying. In lot of ways, I’m like a circle going into a square. And every time I try to fit into that and knock on the front door, it’s usually been difficult. Every time I’m doing it on my own, it’s worked way better.
Are you are you trying to be more traditional, in that industry way?
You have to use certain apparatus of the music industry at a certain level, because in many respects there’s no other way. It’s incredibly extractive, which is what all artists deal with. I think I read that the average artist makes 12% of every dollar. It’s just hard. So in some ways, doing things on your own can be easier, because you can control more of those aspects. So we’ve been trying to produce a lot of our own shows. I did a tour last fall where people lie down, it’s called a Ceremony Concert tour, and it was awesome. But the economics were really hard. I mean our expenses were like, $300,000 for 15 shows.
That’s a lot.
It’s very difficult when you’re not selling alcohol. Some venues won’t even work with you, because that’s how they make their money. I’m not anti-alcohol, it’s just a different kind of show. It’s hard to find partners out there that are cool with that.
Right. You can’t sell mushrooms at the bar.
Not yet. [laughs]
[embedded content]
As your new album was coming together, did you feel like there were themes presenting themselves? It doesn’t sound like you knew what it was going to be when you started.
It’s true. Sometimes I feel like this is the Titanic, and I’m playing music for it. But then I also started to realize that something’s dying. And I felt like well, maybe I’m more like a death doula. But something’s being born too. Same thing [with the string quartet playing] on the Titanic — it was a way of assuaging fears, and there’s beauty to that, but it’s also helping with grieving. But it’s also a celebration about something new emerging that perhaps will be over generations. I do feel like we’re in a very poignant time, where this is like, going to get harder, and so it’s a lot about inner fortitude and grieving. Those are the themes. On all the songs it’s either a mixture of hope, of something emerging, or letting go of something and the sort of in betweens of that.
What do you see emerging?
Well, it’s of course speculation. It’s sort of like, what’s emerging in our hearts, or anyone’s heart. We get wrapped up as the protagonists of our own stories, so we get very hyper focused on our story, but I have a feeling that my story is probably similar to a lot of stories. We’re all having the same story in our own language. It just seems like it’s about letting go of old ways and allowing something new to come through that’s a lot less about control and maybe growth in the economy of scale, and more about how like, petting a cat is just as important as going to Mars. My heart tells me that’s true, but the world says that’s absurd.
I just very much believe that the change we need in the world always happens from the inside out, always has, always will. So it’s more about people working away from this information sickness and distraction, and learning the very basics about “Who am I?” and taking a few breaths and learning what they know already? It’s surprising how much we’ve forgotten, and how much noise is going on.
That’s interesting term, information sickness. How would you define it?
The economy of attention is what drives the world. So it’s also a recognition that your attention is very, very valuable and powerful. That’s not like hippie mojo, it’s about like, “how many seconds can we keep you on the platform, even if we kill the entire world doing it for the shareholders for the stock to go up.” We’ve used the best minds in the world to do that at any cost. Early AI, that’s a whole other side of it. But we’re manipulating our own selves, for the sake of the dollar that way. We’re hacking our minds that way. So it’s very much about clearing away the noise.
How?
You can only do that through elements of choice — you choose to do it, and it’s very simple and there’s many myriad ways to do it. But it is up to the individual. So this is actually not a victim story as much as an empowering story of, you can do this, but you have to decide, and you have to chart your own path. And it is hard, but it’s not complicated. So I think music is a very powerful way to latch on to very easily with your attention and let it take you into emotional places and [foster] self discovery.
[embedded content]
I understand you advised Aaron Rodgers on his darkness retreat before he did it last February. How did that happen?
He knows some people I know, Aubrey, Marcus and a few people, so it was kind of a couple of degrees away. I did that same darkness retreat in January, which was really powerful for me. When I came out, it was in the news, like “Aaron Rodgers is going on a darkness retreat!” And I was like, “there’s only one. It’s got to be the same place.” I didn’t have his number or anything.
I didn’t know how to get in touch with him, and I wasn’t really that concerned about it, but I remembered he’d liked a tweet of mine years ago. I don’t even use Twitter, but I fired up Twitter. It was like “@AaronRodgers I just came back from there if you want to talk.” Two minutes later, he wrote me. It was like, 11 at night. We were talking on Twitter. And I was like, “Look, man, here’s my phone number. Let’s talk tomorrow.”
Then we FaceTimed for an hour and a half and just talked. It was the same place so, I gave him tips and we talked about the process and doing some stuff where he’s interested in bringing psychedelic therapy into the sports world.
Right.
I’m not that interested in just doing things for the [psychedelic community.] I’m very interested in how you build bridges. I thought, well that could be an interesting place to work. So we started talking about doing something together, ceremonies and projects, but that was months ago, and now he’s not retiring and back at work. [Editors note: this interview was completed before Aaron Rodgers suffered a torn achilles tendon during his opening game with the New York Jets during week one of the 2023 NFL season.]
What was the darkness retreat like?
You’re in a [fairly small] room, and it’s somewhat underground, so it’s totally quiet. It’s 30 minutes in the back country, outside Ashland, Oregon. There’s no cell service, no power, no outlets or anything. There’s a bathroom with no door, and a bed and then a little table that they can pass food through the wall without light. And a yoga mat…. You’re just left with you.
I found myself to be incredibly emotional at times. And all this stuff just starts coming up. All these memories about certain things, like, “man, I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to think about that.” But it just keeps coming up, and I’m just crying. When I knew Aaron was going there and people were slagging him, I was like, “you try it.” It’s actually amazingly honorable. If you want to make decisions, this is the richest way to really sit with something.
Is there anything you’d like to say?
I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I’m not. I’m super grateful. And I don’t want to sound like I’m just complaining about things in the industry. That’s not it at all. It’s more that I’m amazed. I’ll play songs that are really not different than what I played 15 years ago at my friend’s farm for my 20 friends on mushrooms. I never ever thought that that would somehow translate into anything that could be commercialized or performed in a theater. I thought that was impossible.