The Apoca-Label: Skrillex Makes FOAM a Mixtape

L.A. dubstep artist Skrillex unleashes the roster for the end of the world.

Sonny Moore is talking about rabbits. But it’s only because the 23-year-old DJ/producer known as Girls That Look Like Skrillex” Tumblr, offer clues about his musical past. He once fronted the emo band From First to Last, though he swears he was into e-music, and all kinds of other stuff, all along. That kind of open-mindedness carries over into his label managing philosophy. “I want to build something that’s forward-thinking, that expresses the fact that I like all sorts of music, not just any one style,” he says. Plus, he’d like to pass on the good will that Deadmau5’s stamp of approval won him. “I like taking someone that’s unknown, having faith in them and watching them hit it out of the park,” he says. “There’s no better feeling.” We got Skrill to tell us why the artists on OWSLA are awesome:

KOAN SOUND

HOME: Bristol, England
SOUND: the Prodigy swimming through syrup
Skrill says:
“They’re only 18, 19 years old and I look up to them in terms of production. A lot of dubstep and electro house is between 128 and 140 BPMs. They came out with the really funky, hip-hoppy, 100 BPM down-tempo sound, but it’s really aggressive and totally dancefloor. There’s nobody else doing that.”

ZEDD
Home: Kaiserslautern, Germany
Sound: the awesomest part of a European sports flick
Skrill says:
“Last year, I happened to check my Myspace the day Zedd emailed me. He was like ‘Yo I’m a fan, check out my stuff.’ I heard his stuff and it was so incredible so I had him remix ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,’ which did really well. He mixes big, anthemic hooks with very sophisticated electro production.”

KILL THE NOISE
HOME: Los Angeles, CA
SOUND: the apocalypse arrives, but the party don’t stop
Skrill says:
“He’s been doing this for ten years, but he’s never had a proper platform. Now his production has completely outdone everything he’s done before. It was perfect timing for the label. It’s a cool feeling.”

THE M MACHINE
HOME: San Francisco, CA
SOUND: Regina Spektor goes clubbing with Eurhythmics
Skrill says:
“The M Machine stuff is different from the other OWSLA releases because it’s a bit more indie geared. People are making a connection with them beyond the dance floor with songs, lyrics and melodies. One of them sings live. It’s very personal.”

PORTER ROBINSON
HOME: Chapel Hill, NC
SOUND: epic A.D.D. dance party
Skrill says:
“He’s someone that can play at [New York-via-Ibiza club] Pacha or hammer out some groovy-gnarly bass show. He’s so versatile. He can do any BPM, any genre. He’ll drop you off a cliff, and then bring you back to life. And he’s only 19 years old.“

SKREAM
HOME: London, England
SOUND: Kanye and La Roux conceiving a child in the VIP booth
Skrill says:
“He’s a legend. If it weren’t for Skream, I wouldn’t be making music. He actually hit me up though! He was like, ‘Hey do you want this song?’ It’s called ‘Anticipate.’ It’s about the birth of his first child. It’s just gorgeous.”

Electronic dance music hits a groove

Will 2012 be the year for electronic dance music?

With dubstep artist Skrillex nabbing five Grammy Award nominations and superstar DJ deadmau5 landing three, all indicators say yes.

“Skrillex is a purely electronic artist, and getting a best-new-artist nomination is Grammy’s way of acknowledging the rise of EDM (electronic dance music),” says Keith Caulfield, associate director of charts at Billboard. The awards “have overlooked EDM artists in the past, like David Guetta and Moby. Skrillex is the face of all EDM at the Grammys.”

Who is Skrillex? With his eerie, spine-tingling samples and grinding bass lines, 23-year-old Sonny Moore — a diminutive, bespectacled Los Angeles-based DJ and producer — is the undeniable leader of dubstep.

“What makes this an incredible achievement is that he has been so successful by being off the radar,” Caulfield says. “Sure, kids know who he is, dance fans know him.” But when the awards show rolls around Feb. 12, “your average music fan won’t have the foggiest idea who he is.”

EDM is having its moment, says electronica pioneer Moby, who broke through to mainstream audiences in 1999 with album Play, which sold 3 million copies.

“For pop stars, their main currency is youth and the record label. For rock stars, their currency is songwriting and their ability to play live,” Moby says. “Electronic music artists are only as good as the last record they played, and their ability to play other people’s records. Luckily, there are a lot of good records out there.”

Last summer yielded a bumper crop of electronic dance festivals, from Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, which pulled in 250,000 attendees, to Live Nation-backed IDentity, the first electronica touring festival, which made 20 stops. Dozens more such fests are slated for 2012.

“If you go to a rock concert, there are four people standing onstage playing songs that sound nice,” Moby says. “You go see Skrillex or deadmau5 live, and there’s a huge production value, the lights, the sound. It’s hard not to be impressed.”

The audience for such spectacles is almost certain to get bigger.

“Pop music has become so aggressively uptempo, when people go to search for more of this kind of music, they’re discovering this whole world that exists,” Caulfield says.

Why Does America Love Skrillex?

In 2004, a 16-year-old named Sonny Moore left Los Angeles to play guitar for a band called From First to Last. Somehow he wound up becoming its lead singer instead. The group recorded for Epitaph Records, played the Warped Tour, opened for Fall Out Boy. They were a “scene” band, part of that realm of black-and-pink, mess-headed emo and hardcore acts—a world that’s never entirely been embraced by the mainstream rock press. Magazines might put a big name like My Chemical Romance on the cover, for the copies it would sell; then they’d slink back to arm’s-length joking about studded belts, Hot Topics, bad haircuts, kid stuff, malls, commercial rock.

These days, Moore is a black-clad producer called Skrillex; vocal-cord problems helped steer him out of the singing game. He records electronic dance music, and is lately experiencing a pretty massive flush of notoriety—a storm of interest in his new EP, Bangarang, will surely extend. A month ago, he was nominated for five Grammys, including the one for Best New Artist. When Facebook counted the most-played pieces of music on the site in 2011, two of the top 10 were by Skrillex. Kanye West spent New Year’s Eve tweeting about him, including the allegation that his remix of Benny Benassi’s “Cinema” is “one of the greatest works of art ever made.” He draws massive crowds at festivals like the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, where the Lollapalooza-sized attendance numbers positively dwarf those of rock fests you read about more often. His asymmetrical side-cut hair inspires blogs and novelty songs. The guy is rapidly becoming the face of something: a big American groundswell of love for buzzy, populist dance music.

You only have to look at the Billboard charts to notice that Americans as a whole have taken to club sounds lately. As I type this, our number-two song, “We Found Love,” has Rihanna singing over a straight-up ecstatic house production by Calvin Harris. But there’s also a deeper boom going on, one you can trace down from hit producers like David Guetta and Swedish House Mafia to the huge rave-style events they play in this country; and from there to big-tent, pop-minded acts like Deadmau5, Aviici, and Kaskade; and from there to the way Skrillex can pack tour dates in places like Montana; and from there to peers like Bassnectar and 12th Planet. If these aren’t names that mean much to you, well, it’s a bit like that rock scene again. Those who are in the business of noticing what makes money move around the industry seem to have plenty of eyes on this stuff; notice the Grammy nods for Skrillex. Those who act as gatekeepers for musical artistry have been slightly more standoffish about it.

One reason for this is that the acts we’re talking about are not, generally speaking, interested in offering some refined or studious advancement on the long, rich, soulful history of electronic dance music. Skrillex’s work, in particular, is a lot more of a pile-up, as if someone’s picked all the most obviously, superficially cool and high-impact parts of a dozen different genres, dredged them in stimulants, and started mashing them against one another—the same way Quentin Tarantino can rifle through a dozen film genres and borrow all the best fight scenes. There’s Daft Punk’s insistent pop-dance; the blocky neon blips of electro; the melodic buzz of old video games; the gushy, sentimental melodies of trance; the high-speed skip and glitch of Aphex Twin; the glammy pop feel of L.A. party music—all things that are easy to like. And when you mush them all together into one clanging, high-octane stew, they become extremely easy to like, whether or not the listener has ever known or cared about electronic music before. Not elegant, deep, or moving, but very easy to get a thrill out of.

But the genre Skrillex milks the most is dubstep. If you wanted to pick any one trick from this London genre that is super-obviously cool, fresh, and head-turning, it would be the massive, grainy bass blurts that have spun out of it, revved up by English producers like Rusko—giant, wobbling shudders that go wubwubwub and activate the same part of the brain that makes 10-year-old get excited about explosions. You hear them everywhere now: in commercials for Transformers DVDs, behind TV footage of extreme sports, folded into the bridges of pop songs. The way Americans have made these basslines lately, they’re aggressive, vertiginous, and adrenaline-heavy, and they conjure up obviously cool images like being inside the gleaming metal torso of a planet-sized robot while it punches an even bigger robot, or Cookie Monster barfing up that liquid-metal Terminator from the sequel. They’re littered throughout a lot of the tracks masses of Americans are suddenly raving to. The cut that got Skrillex a Grammy nod for Best Dance Recording is called “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites”; it crashes casually back and forth between glowy video-game melodies and that big slobbery scenery-chewing dubstep grind. His remixes chew up original songs in the same way, making the source material glitch and wubwub around itself. If those big bass drops are the car-chase scene, you typically do not have to wait long for him to cut to it.

Keep in mind that Americans, and especially American males, have traditionally had some weird reservations about electronic dance music—at our worst, we’ve written the whole thing off as silly, trashy, soulless, effeminate, or “gay.” And there is clearly something about that gut-punch dubstep trick that can help certain Americans overcome those reservations. For one thing, it sounds essentially like hard rock or metal—a gnarly, monumental, distorted sound that tears through the middle of the frequency spectrum. (If you’d like to hear evidence of this, consult the nu-metal band Korn, who just released a “dubstep” album, complete with contributions from Skrillex himself; those blurts of bass slot easily into the space where the band would once have deployed guitars.) In Skrillex’s hands, you can hear an odd, clear continuity between the world of young hair-rock and emo acts and hyperactive dance music. One of his remixes, for the Scottish band Twin Atlantic, manages to swap out their instruments for a light-speed recreation of old rave music, complete with vacuum-cleaner whooshes, sound-the-alarm noises, and chewy wubwub. (There’s a slight kinship with hip-hop, too—the Bangarang EP features an L.A. party rapper called Sirah, and people dancing to Skrillex have a habit of moving their arms like they’re rapping to Linkin Park songs.) It’s another species of that rare and lucrative beast: A form of electronic dance music that does not threaten anyone’s masculinity. Sort of like the last time electronic music threatened a sales boom in the U.S., when one of the top successes was the Prodigy, whose 1997 single “Firestarter” felt as aggro as anything else on offer.

Hence the new insult pointed at some of this American music: “brostep.” The epithet comes complete with scary visions of amped-up meatheads stomping around to the stuff—even if the actual audience is as mixed-genre as any. You can probably guess how dubstep’s old English guard has reacted to the stuff. Rusko, one of the first producers to nudge the sound in this direction, has stepped back: “Brostep is sort of my fault,” he told the BBC, “but now I’m starting to hate it”—Americans, he said, were taking it too far, turning it into an arms race of heaviness, draining the music of richness and subtlety. James Blake, a highbrow British producer whose debut LP sounded more like an elegant singer-songwriter’s, told the Boston Phoenix that the American scene had “hit upon a sort of frat-boy market where there’s this macho-ism being reflected in the sounds.” (He suspected this would not appeal to women, which I think misunderstands certain things about how both dance music and gender work in America.) The word “soul” comes up a lot: This American sound is all big, sick, melt-your-face-off noises, and no soul.

One doesn’t hear a lot of soul in an act like Skrillex; that’s true. One doesn’t hear the long, sensual pacing of dance music, either—his tracks surely get all that Facebook play because they shoot straight for the three-minute flash and bang of a rock single, not the elegant build and release of tension. But some of electronic music’s biggest bursts of ideas have come from eras of populist face-melting. Take, for instance, the original, early-90s heyday of British raves, when thousands of kids—many of whom had never much cared about dance music before—would flock to empty fields in search of relentless, alarm-sounding music, and the process of trying to keep them excited kept leading to the invention of fascinating sounds. (Even the epithet “brostep” puts me in mind of a graceless, hard-pounding, and fairly lovable techno from that era—“gabber,” which comes from a Dutch term that means basically the same thing as “bro.”) When you have huge numbers of people flocking to one spot with the agenda of getting messed up and hearing something crushing and spectacular, the race to please them stands a chance of rushing out on limbs and creating new things. You don’t hear much of that in Skrillex, or among many of his peers; so far, there’s just a lot of collisions and amplifications of sounds we’ve already heard. But that’s what people said about our mess-headed emo and hardcore scenes at the start of the century, and they rapidly became their own weird world.

BBC Talk To Skrillex In LA

The Beeb head to Los Angeles to interview Sonny Moore aka Skrillex in his creative environment at home.

Electronic dance music hits its stride

Uptempo hits by the likes of Skrillex and deadmau5 make their mark on modern music

Will 2012 be the year for electronic dance music?

With dubstep artist Skrillex nabbing five Grammy Award nominations and superstar DJ deadmau5 landing three, all indicators say yes.

“Skrillex is a purely electronic artist, and getting a best-new-artist nomination is Grammy’s way of acknowledging the rise of EDM (electronic dance music),” says Keith Caulfield, associate director of charts at Billboard. The awards “have overlooked EDM artists in the past, like David Guetta and Moby. Skrillex is the face of all EDM at the Grammys.”

Who is Skrillex? With his eerie, spine-tingling samples and grinding bass lines, 23-year-old Sonny Moore — a diminutive, bespectacled Los Angeles-based DJ and producer — is the undeniable leader of dubstep.

“What makes this an incredible achievement is that he has been so successful by being off the radar,” Caulfield says. “Sure, kids know who he is, dance fans know him.” But when the awards show rolls around Feb. 12, “your average music fan won’t have the foggiest idea who he is.”

EDM is having its moment, says electronica pioneer Moby, who broke through to mainstream audiences in 1999 with album Play, which sold 3 million copies.

“For pop stars, their main currency is youth and the record label. For rock stars, their currency is songwriting and their ability to play live,” Moby says. “Electronic music artists are only as good as the last record they played, and their ability to play other people’s records. Luckily, there are a lot of good records out there.”

Last summer yielded a bumper crop of electronic dance festivals, from Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, which pulled in 250,000 attendees, to Live Nation-backed IDentity, the first electronica touring festival, which made 20 stops. Dozens more such fests are slated for 2012.

“If you go to a rock concert, there are four people standing onstage playing songs that sound nice,” Moby says. “You go see Skrillex or deadmau5 live, and there’s a huge production value, the lights, the sound. It’s hard not to be impressed.”

The audience for such spectacles is almost certain to get bigger.

“Pop music has become so aggressively uptempo, when people go to search for more of this kind of music, they’re discovering this whole world that exists,” Caulfield says.

They beat L.A.

As a rule, player introductions at Sacramento Kings games generally suck. The lights fizz out, some cheesy video featuring Donte Greene’s only fast-break dunk ever projects on Joe Maloof’s bed sheets, and a Rob Zombie song abusively crunches over the arena’s busted speakers, sounding like Cookie Monster with emphysema.

So, when the house lights darkened on opening night and some 17,000 fans whipped out purple glowsticks, it was pretty damn cool. Something from a Los Angeles rave scene, but without rampant methylenedioxymethamphetamine use. Or Skrillex.

Sure, there was Metallica—this night’s intro song was “Blackened,” the classic opening track from 1988’s And Justice For All …—but, hey, this is Sacramento, not Anaheim. Nickelback rules, remember?

Anyway, kudos to the Maloof Sports and Entertainment organization for nailing opening night. And kudos to the team for its win—scratch that, triumph—over the much-despised Los Angeles Lakers. If the first game of the year, which many fans praised as the best Kings game they’d ever attended, bore indication of things to come in 2012, then perhaps things will be all right for Sacramento NBA fans.

Because if there was any love lost for the Kings, it certainly melted away late in the fourth quarter, when 21-year-old center DeMarcus “Boogie” Cousins withstood a brutish charge from Reviled One Kobe Bryant. It was a stand-up moment for the young squad, one that showed fans that while they’re barely older, they’re finally smart enough not to choke.

They can beat L.A.

Interestingly, this was the first Laker game at “Arco Arena” I’d attended that did not feature occasional chants of “Let’s go Lakers.” And, unlike the final game of last season—what was thought to be the last Kings game ever in Sacramento—local fans far outnumbered Kobe fans.

Maybe it’s true: Los Angeles has gone Clippers?

Regardless, for the first time since 2002, the Kings aren’t boring. The offense gets the ball rolling early in possessions and doesn’t make too many dumb mistakes. Guard Marcus Thornton is cold-blooded. Tyreke Evans appears reborn with a jumper that’d make Pete “Coachie” Carril proud. “Boogie” Cousins is yoked and slimmed-down and never once reverted to 6-year-old potty tantrums during opening night.

And new guys such as J.J. Hickson, Jimmer Fredette, Travis Outlaw and Isaiah Thomas showed hustle the venue formerly known as Arco Arena hasn’t seen since, well, it was actually named Arco Arena.

Really, though, opening night was a tipping point. Mayor Kevin Johnson, who sat courtside with wife Michelle Rhee, accepted a personalized jersey from Joe and Gavin Maloof. No love lost there, either, it seems. And their newfound rapport, whether facade or sincere, and the Kings big win had most in attendance believing.

It was as if we all could see the future: “Yeah, you know, the Kings are here to stay. They’re gonna build that damn arena—even if the city goes broke doing it.”

Skrillex Copycat

Skrillex Copycat 

2012 Skrillex Tickets: New Year’s Eve, NYC & L.A.

Coming of a year in which he exploded onto the electronic music scene, Skrillex will attempt to take is stardom to new heights in 2012. He has already announced two multi-night runs in both New York and Los Angeles that will see him performing at a different venue each night out. The Grammy Award-winning DJ will also be throwing a New Year’s Eve party in Milwaukee at the Eagles Ballroom on December 31, 2011. Anyone who has ever attended a Skrillex Concert will tell you that the show is like nothing they have ever experienced, which is one of the main reasons for his surge in popularity: the live performance. If you plan on seeing Sonny John Moore (that’s his real name) producing beats in-person in 2012, you can get your Skrillex Tickets for every show currently schedule right here at BroadRippleTickets.com.

Sonny Moore was formerly the frontman for the emo band From First to Last, which he left in 2007 to pursue his solo electronic music project. Now known as Skrillex, Moore has seen a steady rise in popularity in the past five years, and totally exploded into the mainstream in 2011. His album Scary Monster and Nice Sprites earned him five Grammy Award nominations, and with each live performance his audience grew, to the point he was selling out venues in a matter of minutes. 2012 doesn’t figure to be any different, and in fact Skrillex may even reach Deadmau5 level of popularity if he continues cranking out hit songs in the new year. If you want to see him perform on NYE, or in New York or Los Angeles (or anywhere else Moore may be DJing), get your Skrillex Concert Tickets as soon as possible, as these will be some of the most in demand Concert Tickets of 2012.

Skrillex: New EP, Intimate Live Dates

BANGARANG EP ARRIVES TOMORROW

Skrillex is releasing his Bangarang EP on OWSLA/Big Beat/Atlantic December 23rd via Beatport. The release will be commercially available on iTunes and all other digital retailers shortly thereafter. Bangarang features collaborations with The Doors, Ellie Goulding, Wolfgang Gartner, 12th Planet, Kill The Noise, and Sirah.

Skrillex will be releasing the Tony Truant-directed official video for "Ruff Neck (Full Flex)" off of his last EP, More Monsters and Sprites, on December 24th. You can see it here starting Saturday.

Skrillex has also announced two bi-coastal, multi-venue takeovers of Los Angeles and New York in January and February respectively. Each show will boast a different lineup at a different venue each night and many will feature performances from special guests. Dates and details below.

Bangarang EP TRACKLISTING

1. Right In
2. Bangarang (feat. Sirah)
3. Breakn' A Sweat (Skrillex & The Doors)
4. The Devil's Den (Skrillex & Wolfgang Gartner)
5. Right On Time (Skrillex, 12th Planet & Kill The Noise)
6. Kyoto (feat. Sirah)
7. Summit (feat. Ellie Goulding)

Mothership Takeover Tour Dates

Los Angeles

Tuesday, January 24 - Dim Mak Tuesday at Cinespace (Skrillex, Alvin Risk, KOAN Sound)
Wednesday, January 25 - Echoplex (Skrillex vs. 12th Planet, Diplo, Check Yo Ponytail)
Thursday, January 26 - Exchange (Skrillex, Zedd)
Friday, January 27 - Avalon (Skrillex, Huoratron, KIll the Noise)
Saturday, January 28 - The Palladium (Skrillex, AraabMUZIK, KOAN Sound, Munchi)
Sunday, January 29 - L.A.Live Event Deck (Skrillex, Benga, Nadastrom, Special Guest TBA)

New York

Tuesday, January 31 - Webster Hall (Skillex, AC Slater)
Wednesday, February 1 - Pacha (Skrillex, Zedd, Sazon Booya)
Friday, February 3 - Roseland Ballroom (Skrillex, Zane Lowe, Spank Rock, Special Guest TBA)
Saturday, February 4 - Terminal 5 (Skream & Benga, KOAN Sound, Tokimonsta)

Exclusive: Skrillex Confirms Intimate L.A., NYC Dates

Noticed a hole in recent SPIN cover star Skrillex's upcoming tour dates? Allow us to fill in the details: dubstep darling Sonny Moore will be bringing his one-of-a-kind live experience to Los Angeles and New York the last week of January and first week of February with an impressive roster of guests.

Diplo will join for January 25's L.A. show at Echoplex and Spank Rock will hit the stage February 3 at NYC's Roseland Ballroom. The tour also highlights Skrillex's OWSLA signees KOAN Sound, Kill the Noise, and Zedd, who told SPIN in October, "Skrillex is not just a DJ or a producer, he's in the first place a musician and that is why I love working with him. He 'understands' music, feels what I feel when I hear things."

Have you seen SPIN's 20 Best Dance Albums of 2011? Better do that.

Los Angeles

Tuesday, January 24 @ Dim Mak Tuesday at Cinespace (Skrillex, Alvin Risk, KOAN Sound)
Wednesday, January 25 @ Echoplex (Skrillex vs. 12th Planet, Diplo, Check Yo Ponytail)
Thursday, January 26 @ Exchange (Skrillex, Zedd)
Friday, January 27 @ Avalon (Skrillex, Huoratron, KIll the Noise)
Saturday, January 28 @ The Palladium (Skrillex, AraabMUZIK, KOAN Sound, Munchi)
Sunday, January 29 @ L.A.Live Event Deck (Skrillex, Benga, Nadastrom, Special Guest TBA)

New York

Tuesday, January 31 @ Webster Hall (Skillex, AC Slater)
Wednesday, February 1 @ Pacha (Skrillex, Zedd, Sazon Booya)
Friday, February 3 @ Roseland Ballroom (Skrillex, Zane Lowe, Spank Rock, Special Guest TBA)
Saturday, February 4 @ Terminal 5 (Skream & Benga, KOAN Sound, Tokimonsta)

The Dubstep Era is upon us.

Just as the '80s spawned movements like hair metal and synthpop, the '90s gave way to grunge rock and hip hop’s-golden age, and the first decade of the 2000s birthed house music and autotune, our current generation will undeniably go down in history as giving rise to the phenomenon that is dubstep.

As this music culture begun by experimental producers in the underground scene of early-millennium London continues to evolve and transform into myriad subgenres and styles, the general public that’s not privy to frequenting raves and light shows remains in the dark, and the music fest regulars remain divided about what exactly is going on underneath all the womps and scratches.

One of the biggest names and most divisive figures in this equation is Sonny Moore, also known as the five-time Grammy-nominated electronic DJ, Skrillex, whose sold-out performance at The Moon in Tallahassee on Monday, Dec. 12, as part of his Mothership Tour still has the town’s ears ringing.


After reinventing himself into Skrillex about three years ago, the Los Angeles native and former lead screamer of From First to Last has taken the traditional wobbly bass of dubstep and basically thrown it into a hyperactive hadron collider and then cranked it until it sounds like pulsing vomit from the mouth of Satan himself. He’s selected the most extreme and energetic nuances out of traditional dubstep, combined them with an epilepsy-inducing spectacle of light, and amplified everything to the highest gauge the average concert-goer’s senses can realistically process.


By injecting this style into his own versatile beats along with remixes of some of the most popular acts in the pop world including La Roux, Lady Gaga and Benny Benassi, Skrillex has heralded dubstep’s transition into the mainstream by making the perfect music for the current demographic of American college thrill-seekers.
As a result, opinions on his public reputation are somewhat polarized.


Whereas some praise his eccentricity and originality, others lambast him for spitting out the opiate of an idiotic mass while portentously mourning the loss of the subtleties of dubstep past. If the performance at the Moon is any indication, however, audiences don’t seem to mind about the latter group’s opinions.

That distinction is crucial to understanding what Skrillex, and dubstep in general, is and is doing in this generation.

The music is less interested in impressing critics and music aficionados than it is in driving hordes of people together with synthesized, synchronized and syncopated impulses. On Monday night, the Moon was host to all walks of life: constant ravers sporting electronic toys in their mouths and rainbow Pomeranians on their boots, frat boys caught in a continuum of fist bumps, hip-hop enthusiasts, MDMA-riddled dancers, artists seeking inspiration in the sheer spectacle of it all, PLUR-obsessed “Kandy Kids,” wide-eyed newcomers and seasoned veterans alike. In that moment when Skrillex screams through the music for everyone to jump to the beat together and dance, though, it’s impossible to not feel connected to the hundreds of people whose brains are being massaged in unison by dozens of stage-dominating speakers, regardless of any previous division.

When cannons of confetti blast out over you and every individual piece changes color with the rhythmic pattern of dizzying lights, a feeling of elation is unavoidable. It’s no wonder there were guys handing out Capri Suns and “Good Vibe Tribe” arm bracelets free of charge near the front of the stage; the love in all that madness is undeniable.


Even so, the music is like a f***ing religious experience the first time you hear it live.

All these elements showcase how an artist like Skrillex can still sell out during a recession when the average ticket price is so extreme. For example, if you weren’t lucky enough to get involved in one of the Tallahassee-based contests like local clothing company Top Notch Era’s free ticket promotion a few months back, the average price ended up upwards of $120.


While it was previously dismissed as an inevitable fad that would just fade away quietly, it’s now clear that dubstep is here to stay. With the rise of artists like opening acts Foreign Beggars and Two Fresh and Skrillex’s cementation in music history with the first-ever Grammy nominations for an electronic artist, it’s easy to see that dubstep is a powerball that’s ready to roll full steam ahead.


Hopefully the post-modern hippies of the dubstep movement will pave the way for a more tolerant world. Every generation does have its soundtrack to freedom and love, after all. Ours just happens to involve raging.

Skrillex · Breathe - Melodic dubstep? No fuckin' way.

Now I’ve seen everything, or heard it. Skrillex has shocked the hell out of me with a melodic dubstep track. Yep, no silly-sloppy drops in “Breathe.” Just a melodic tune-out tune that’s not half bad. Only thing I’m not sure of are the vocals, reminds me of Owl City. Apparently, Skrillex wrote the lyrics for them, so that’s pretty interesting. All in all, happy to see him test the waters in my favorite offshoot of dubstep.

Skrillex – Breathe

Skrillex

Genre: Electronic, Dubstep, Electro House
Name: Sonny Moore
Born: January 15, 1988
Origin: Los Angeles, California
Skrillex on: SoundCloud | Skrillex.com | Twitter | Facebook | Wikipedia

BoomBox Announces Winter Tour, Releases Video for "Me and My Baby"

As the electronic music scene moves more into the mainstream (five Grammy nominations for Skrillex . . . WHAT?), it's not uncommon to see up-and-coming acts trading live instrumentation and improvisation - two things that in earlier days defined the scene - for pre-recorded tracks and laptop deejaying. 

Such has not been the case for the producer-guitar player duo BoomBox. In fact, quite the contrary. With each new release, this group from Muscle Shoals, AL continues to push the envelope and add to their constantly evolving sound.

Yesterday, the group comprised of Zion Rock Godchaux (yes that Godchaux) and Russ Randolph announced a string of winter tour dates along the East and West Coasts, with stops in North and South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, Nevada and California with a strong supporting cast including Eliot Lipp, Govinda, ill-esha, Bitch Please and Chris B.

Along with their announcement, the boys released the previously unrecorded single "Me and My Baby" as well as a music video for the tune, filmed at their sold out Aggie Theatre show in Fort Collins, CO this past October. 



This track is a great representation of how far the band has come in defining their sound, which at its core is truly rock and roll. Godchaux's vocals cascade over the melodic and uplifting soundscapes - created with live synthesizers and electronic drums by both Godchaux and Randolph - as the pulsating bass and ever-present backbeat set the mood for the groove. 

By utilizing live guitar in addition to synths, drums and produced tracks, BoomBox combines psychedelic funk and untz-y house vibes to create the ultimate dance party. Download the track for free by clicking here.
Check out their tour dates below and visit their new website for updates on their new EP, "Lost Ya," and do yourself a favor and catch them in a city near you.

--
BoomBox Winter Tour Dates:

11/30 Blue Note Columbia, MO

12/1 Cain's Ballroom Tulsa, OK

12/2 Granada Lawrence, KS

12/3 Georges Majestic  Lounge Fayetteville, AR

1/19 Zydeco Birmingham, AL*

1/20 The Orange Peel Asheville, NC*

1/21 The Music Farm Charleston, SC*

1/22 The Soapbox Wilmington, NC*^

1/25 Greene Street Club Greensboro, NC*^

1/26 Rhythm & Brews Chattanooga, TN*

1/27 Valarium Knoxville, TN*^

1/28 Neighborhood Theatre Charlotte, NC*^

2/15 The Parish Austin, TX'

2/16 Trees Dallas, TX~

2/18 The Compound Phoenix, AZ"

2/19 Orpheum Theater Flagstaff, AZ"

2/21 Hard Rock Cafe Las Vegas, NV">

2/22 Belly Up Tavern Solana Beach, CA">

2/23 Key Club Los Angeles, CA">

2/24 Temple SF San Francisco, CA">

2/25 Cargo @ CommRow Reno, NV">

2/26 Red Fox Eureka, CA>

* w/ Eliot Lipp

" ill-esha

> ChrisB

^ w/ Bitch Please

' Govinda

~ ishi

Skrillex's Best New Artist nomination: One small step for dubstep, or one giant leap away from artistry?

When Skrillex, a 23 year-old dance-music producer from Los Angeles whose real name is Sonny Moore, nabbed the final Best New Artist slot at last night’s Grammy Nominations Concert, more than a few people balked:

Who is this Skill-rex person/band, and why has he/she/they taken away the nomination from my beloved (insert act here)?!

But other people were much more excited about his nomination (this is a real, if not strictly grammatical reaction from his official Facebook page):

Your  f–king amazing! I hope you win each and every one of those Grammy’s, you deserve it! F–k the haters that say otherwise, your dope as f–k!!!!!!

Truth is, if you aren’t still on the Party Rock circuit, you’ve likely never heard of Skrillex, the dubstep wunderkind whose trancey EPs blare at raves and festivals across the country and whose personal YouTube uploads have racked up over 190 million views. To the tech-savvy Gen-Zers, though, for whom thumping bass rumbles and beep-bop-boop remixes are commonplace, Skrillex is a god among DJs. (Somewhere, P!nk is totally confused by that line.)

Perhaps the Grammys were attempting to reach out to the youth demographic that every awards show so desperately desires by giving Skrillex a Best New Artist slot. Or perhaps they simply wanted to acknowledge the rise of dubstep/dance music by awarding him five nominations and giving deadmau5 three of his own. Or perhaps Grammy voters really just love Skrillex. (I mean, he clearly shares a lot of fans with last year’s Best New Artist winner, Esperanza Spalding, right?)

No matter what the reasoning, though, some people — you know, the kind who prefer guitars and pianos and lyrics (fogies!) –  just can’t consider Skrillex a legitimate music artist. They hear tracks like the one below and wonder, “Is this music or just noise?” (and also: “Get off my lawn!”):

Sir Mix-a-Lot: iPhone App Is 'Value-Based,' Skrillex Is 'Cool'

Sir Mix-a-Lot was king of the callipygian lyrical references well before Lil Wayne and Drake were telling women to pop their rotund derrieres. In 1992, he created 'Baby Got Back,' a double platinum-selling single off his third album, 'Mack Daddy,' and put mainstream America onto a slang term for backsides that deserved some special attention. Almost 12 years after the song's release, the Grammy Award-winning Seattle native is still reaping the benefits off rhyming about female anatomy with the debut of his 'Baby Got Back' iPhone app.

From a Mix Makeover photo lab -- users can manipulate aspects of a picture by blowing up and stretching assets -- to the Ba Dunka Dunk club game -- the object is to maneuver well-endowed women around obstacles and into the right pair of hot pants -- Sir Mix-a-Lot's app boosts his original song into a technological experience. There's a slew of other features and the 48-year-old hip-hop veteran had a hand in creating them all.

Read on as the wide brim hat-wearing MC spits knowledge about his app, reveals why he has a fondness for dubstep and 2012 Grammy-nominated Best New Artist Skrillex and explains the true story of how 'Baby Got Back' was born.




What was the inspiration for 'Baby Got Back'?

We were watching the Super Bowl, I think it was Buffalo Bills -- one of those super bowls where they got slaughtered. We were watching the super bowl -- we being me and a girl I was dating back then named Amy. She was Puerto Rican and black, nice big ol' juicy booty with a little, tiny waist. I mean she had a body. We were watching a Budweiser commercial with the Spuds MacKenzie girls that was real hot back then. And they had all these real little skinny chicks. And there's nothing wrong with skinny chicks, but I'm like, "How come they're not really showing what men really like?" If you think I'm lying, you take a bunch of skinny chicks, put 'em in a room, take Dolly Parton's titties and put them on the other side of the room and watch where all the men's eyes go. So I said, "You know what? Let's do something kinda poking fun, tongue-in-cheek, at this stereotype that all women should look like heroin addicts."

It started with [Amy] doing the "Oh my god Becky' thing on a DAT recorder -- a little portable DAT machine I had just bought in New York, which was like new s--- back then. I started writing the lyrics and initially the song was slow. It was supposed to be somewhat offensive. I was trying to be as political as I could then it turned into a bunch of funny s---. And the rest is history.

What was the thought process behind the 'Baby Got Back' iPhone app?

We were working on this app two years ago. Dealing with the powers that be at Apple, we had to kinda water some things down to make 'em work. Initially it was something where you could get your instant gratification -- you can come in and play a quick game -- but it was also gonna be something you would constantly come back to 'cause we'd have various models that would rotate in and out every month. That was kinda the initial idea, like the instant gratification of doing something as silly as slapping clothes onto a girl and slap clothes off a girl. But that didn't work out too well.

Two years ago you started creating it. Was that when the idea first came to mind?

I thought of the idea before it was even doable, when apps were real simple. Then I started talking to Sony, and Sony got involved. Then I made sure I put up half of the money 'cause I wanted to maintain some control. That's how we did it.

Do you feel like this app will make more people aware of the song, for instance, kids who never heard it?

I have yet to meet a kid who never heard the song. You know why? Because kids love talking about booty, butt, farting. They don't listen to it the way we [adults] listen to it. They think it's funny, but when they turn 14, 15 they go, "Oh, yeah you mean butt like ass." I got lucky with that song that it really panned out into something a lot bigger than I ever imagined.

Overall, what do you want the user experience to be?

I want them to know you didn't just buy an app that was just something basic to do for 15 minutes and I took your dollar. I want you to really look at it and go, "God damn, look at all the s--- I get for 99 cents." There's a lot of stuff in this app. I want people to really enjoy it. I want people to understand that anything you get from Mix-a-Lot is gonna be value-based. You're gonna get a lot of bang for your buck. From this point forward, there will be more apps. This is just the first in a list of many.

Besides this app, what other music projects do you have in the works?

I'm gonna do one record next year. I say it's the last album, but it may not be. Basically it's to celebrate 'Baby Got Back,' but that does not mean I'm gonna have 100 remixes of 'Baby Got Back.' That would really suck.

I have a couple new acts I'm working with. I have a young lady named Tomeka Williams. Instead of doing a music video, we're gonna do a mini movie, like a 15-minute movie, in which three of her videos will be within the movie and interwoven as a story. Her music is a cross between R&B, soul and alternative. The album's called 'The Black Hood.'

So is she an artist signed to you?

Yes. Rhyme Cartel Records is my label. I've been working with her for like three years. We've been trying to hone in on a good sound and I think she has it. When I met her, she was 18 years old, singing in the Baptist church. She had power for days and she only weighed 110 pounds soaking wet. She sounded like a 300-pound fat chick with all that power. Now she's 29 and fine as hell.

You're a veteran in the game and have watched artists come and go. Are there any hip-hop artists' careers that you respect?

Definitely. Obviously my ability to stay around has something to do with the music but it has more to do with the things I do outside of music. So I'm able to take my brand and leverage it against something else, which usually parlays into more money. And it eliminates me having to scramble to try to monetize bulls--- content and allows me to do other things to make money. And when it comes to that kind of stuff, that's what I respect. And obviously I have to look at Jay-Z; he gets it. He's like Russell Simmons with a microphone. Diddy gets it. You can see other guys making moves -- 50 Cent, Eminem. Cats that are doing things outside of music.

What about on the music tip? Who do you listen to these days?

I really like Killer Mike. I love everything he does. He kinda has a weird style. I listen to a little bit of Slim Thug. You know who I'm really into now and not even hip-hop? Skrillex. Dubstep to me is the future of music, period. Every time I listen to him I want to kick someone's ass. The first time I heard ['Kill Everybody'] I was like, "This is cool." But the first time I head 'Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites' I was like , "Oh s---!" The sounds are so aggressive. When I saw people do mosh pits to dubstep, now, I'm like, "That's the music I wanna produce," 'cause I love challenges. What I like about it is it's the first type of music that truly uses synthesizers the way they were intended to be used.

Who is still on your dream collaboration list?

Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, James Brown, rest in peace. Prince, who I'd be totally intimidated by. Gary Numan. Devo. And oddly enough John Mayer. That song he has called 'Gravity,' that sounds like some blues my mama used to listen to. And he brings back that swanky kind of a southern crusaders jazz feel that I really miss in music today.