A jam-packed episode of No Tags this week, but we had a lot to catch up on. Central Cee’s debut album Can’t Rush Greatness is out (02:56) and it’s UK drill’s biggest album to date, almost by default. Eusexua (10:07) might be the record that finally sells us on FKA twigs? And we talk about the grey zones of desire in Babygirl over in film corner (18:32).
But then onto the main event: we’re joined this week by NYC DJ and virtual pop architect umru (30:09). A key member of SoundCloud’s class of the mid-2010s, umru officially graduated to the hyperpop top tier in 2017 with his work on Charli XCX’s game-changing Pop 2 mixtape.
He’s since worked with the likes of Hannah Diamond, Tommy Cash, Hyd, Dorian Electra and more while releasing his own music on PC Music and, this year, LuckyMe. He’s also one of our favourite DJs, with an anything-goes approach that feels firmly in the legacy of faves like Total Freedom, Evian Christ and Ryan Hemsworth. We also talked about his past life running parties on Minecraft, leak culture, pop’s Splice era, and the link between PC Music and Pirates of the Caribbean.
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CR: umru, welcome to No Tags. I wondered if you might be the youngest ever No Tags guest. Would you like to reveal how old you are?
U: I am 25.
CR: I first came across you as a producer with your credit on Charli XCX's Pop 2 [on ‘I Got It’] in 2017. You’ve released a lot of music since then, but it seems to me like DJing is where you're putting quite a lot of your energy now?
U: Yeah, recently especially. Since the pandemic era I've been doing more of that than anything else. Not especially intentionally, it's just sort of happened. People keep wanting me to DJ.
CR: Could you introduce what your DJ style is about? Because it's a very active, involved approach.
U: I've become known for this very hectic [style], very quickly transitioning to the next song, going across every possible genre. I'm trying to do less of that now, but I definitely became known for this very fast-paced DJing style. I think that came from the fact that the earliest sets I was doing were shows with huge amounts of people on the lineup, or these internet shows where your set was 10 minutes and you had to do something crazy, you know, to impress everyone in a short time period. Then I came out of that into doing more regular sets in clubs. I guess it reflects just what I'm actually listening to, which is a really wide range of stuff. I get bored playing just one track into a very similar track.
TL: I’m going to work under the presumption that DJing for a chat room is drastically different to a real room in terms of the reactions you're trying to get, right? When you can’t see the crowd you can’t have that assurance that if you keep something going for long enough, people will dance and come from the bar, like a slow flow.
CR: Yeah, but people are smashing those emojis, aren't they?
TL: That’s what I mean though, it's like a very different type of reaction. I guess it's almost more tangible in the sense that you are seeing written reactions in the chat room, you are seeing a very instant, readable feedback loop.
U: Yeah. Over the pandemic we were doing a lot of stuff like that, where it was like a live DJ set in a Zoom call. But Open Pit, the Minecraft events, were actually completely pre-recorded sets. We were just enjoying them alongside the chat, because we didn't really have the technology to broadcast anything live. With those we would make the sets in Ableton. We would record voiceovers. It was a whole other genre or category of what a set could be. But it's definitely had a big influence on the way I DJ now, because I would think about it so much – what would be the funniest or the most crazy or shocking combination of songs, or what layering of three or four songs I could possibly do.
TL: Who were your key inspirations as a DJ?
U: In terms of just playing disparate genres against each other, I think Total Freedom [now known as Bobby Beethoven] and Evian Christ. They were some of the essential people who I saw where it was like, oh, you can do that – and people will book you to play a set like that, where you don't have to play songs that are the same BPM into each other and seamlessly mix.
CR: There's something very Year Zero about Total Freedom, I think. He's so frequently invoked, and it’s an influence that we're still only starting to properly process, because a lot of people who might've been influenced by him would have been teenagers at the time. There's a certain aesthetic sensibility that I think you can hear much more broadly in all kinds of club music and pop music too.
U: Yeah, definitely. And I wasn’t going to clubs and seeing these sets. I was hearing SoundCloud recordings, or seeing videos of people going to Trance Party. A lot of my consumption of that stuff was totally online, but I was getting glimpses into it.
CR: Have you been to a Trance Party?
U: Yeah, two. I played one in in 2021, and I went to one in 2019, maybe 2018. I can’t remember what the full line-up was, but I was just a fan of the whole, I don’t know, the branding and design of it, and just the fact that it was called Trance Party and they were playing all sorts of stuff.
CR: Yeah, it's a gesamtkunstwerk, as they say, isn't it? It has many, many layers.
TL: At this point it’s also one of the longest-running alternative club nights in the UK. It's been going for over a decade, which seems crazy. Similar to Total Freedom, I think Trance Party is going to become one of those things over the next decade that just gets referenced more and more.
U: People never believe me that there was a [Trance Party] lineup where Travis Scott played with SOPHIE. I wasn't there or anything, but I remember seeing that because I was someone who listened to both SOPHIE and Travis Scott at that time, before Travis Scott was the biggest artist in the world. And that was just so insane that was happening at the time.
TL: Something I had noted down – and feel free to shoot this down – but when listen to your mixes I often think of Ryan Hemsworth.
U: Oh, definitely. Yeah.
TL: I’m aware it's slightly different because his mixes – or certainly the early mixes that I'm thinking of – were on Ableton, and what you're doing at the moment is on CDJs.
U: Yeah, but I was doing a lot of Ableton mixes back then. For that whole Minecraft show scene that we were doing online, it was all Ableton. Ryan Hemsworth and all those [defunct video chat app] TinyChat shows were obviously super influential.
TL: Yeah, there's just something about it constantly being on a pendulum between rap and pop music and dance stuff, but it is just so fluid and everything just falls together into this cohesive whole. This is why I drew the comparison with Ryan’s mixes – it just feels like there's so much attention paid to where everything sits, even when it feels on the fly.
U: Yeah, definitely. And Ryan is so good at that stuff. I think a lot of the music that he was doing at the time also aged better than a lot of the SoundCloud, ‘future bass’ kind of scene. If you go back and listen to all the old Ryan Hemsworth stuff it still hits. It doesn't feel limited to that time period.
TL: There’s been this stream of discourse over the last couple of years about dance DJs playing pop edits. The framing is often that DJs are deploying pop edits as a cheap trick to win crowds over, or create moments that prioritise Instagram over the actual room. I think what you're doing with your sets is very different. Pop edits, pop music, rap music – it’s the throughline of your sets in many ways. So what’s your take on this debate?
U: I come more from the pop music world than the DJ world. I still feel I'm an outsider to real club-goer, heads dance music. The people coming to my sets know that I'm playing pop music and I'm playing music with lyrics. But I get it. There's a lot of edits of songs that I just don't like. Sometimes the most impactful thing you can possibly do is just play the original song rather than trying to weasel one style of music into another. I have lots of edits of songs on my USBs and sometimes I'll just see the edit in my list of tracks and be like, ‘Why don't I just check if I have the original song if it's really what I want to play?’
CR: Do you have an example of a pop song that you love to play in its original naked glory?
U: I have ‘Replay’ by Zendaya on my USB, just the original. I have an edit of it that I've played as well too. I'm often downloading original songs and trying to work them in, which is more challenging, obviously, than playing an edit that was made for DJing. But sometimes it's more impactful or more shocking, especially if it's a totally different rhythm. I love playing Future and Young Thug out of music that’s double time in tempo – you get way cooler combinations within the instrumental, rather than putting a well-known vocal over a danceable beat. It's more fun to mix together stuff that's half or double as fast. But I definitely do both.
CR: I was just catching up with your most recent NTS show, and I noticed that you rarely end up with a horrific key clash, which is my pet hate. I hate when people are really lazy with long blends of clashing keys! And even when there is a clash, you're usually messing around with filters and effects to make it a bit more concordant where you can. But is that the result of a lot of planning and practising blends, or do you prefer to choose stuff on the fly?
U: I definitely have more fun picking stuff on the fly. For sets where I'm playing somewhere I've never played before, and I know people haven't heard me play, sometimes I'm doing the same little runs of songs that I remember work together. But if I'm playing anywhere like in New York, or even my NTS show too, I'm always trying to play stuff I haven't played before
CR: OK, so give us a clue into how you're able to do that. What systems do you have in order to improvise like that? Do you just have one folder with everything in?
U: I mean, this is a whole other DJ discourse, whether you're supposed to use the harmonic mixing features of CDJs. I have everything tagged with the key. If you're using linked CDJs, you can see what key everything is and it'll tell you which ones will match, or match closely enough. But I try not to live by that always, because the most exciting thing is if you find something that you don't think is going to work and then you check and it's like, oh, that just sounds good. And obviously for a lot of tracks where the intro or outro is just drums, it's easy.
But it's an addictive feeling when you’re like, I just figured out that these two things that shouldn't work just work. And I think the crowd can also feel when you get excited about something like that. So I'm trying to not look too closely at the key, just in case there's something that's totally unexpected and it works anyway. But I definitely make use of that stuff. You have to know the music, you can't just play a track with a chord progression on top of a different song with a chord progression.
CR: Tell us what the young umru was like.
U: I was born in the States, in New York State. But my mom is Estonian. I lived there when I was seven for a year for first grade in Estonia, but otherwise I lived in New York. I was definitely [an] internet user. My earliest music interests mostly came from SoundCloud. It's so obvious, but I loved mashups. I loved [online in-jokey mashup scene] SoundClown. I was just so into the internet style of combining every possible song at the time.
TL: Was SoundCloud your own Year Zero then?
U: I think so, yeah. And my dad is is a musician. He plays clarinet and has done all these nature music projects working with whale sounds and stuff like that, birdsong. So I had a lot of music in the house with my upbringing. I had Ableton on my dad's old laptop pretty early. I was doing mash-ups on that, but I wasn’t good at them. I wasn’t posting them.
TL: How young are we talking here?
U: Probably 10 or something.
CR: Were there people around you who were into similar stuff, or did you find it yourself on the internet?
U: Some of my friends were. I was in a small town in New York State. I wasn't in the city, but I wasn't far from it either, so in high school I started being able to go to some shows. But my earliest exposure to electronic music was just discovering everything online, on YouTube and SoundCloud. By the time I was in high school I was already spending a lot of time going to the city to hang out with SoundCloud producers that I met online. I would go see them play, and eventually I would be playing sets in these little venues in Williamsburg. The scene that I was a part of then was more centered around [artist collective] Soulection and these future beats scenes. Ryan Hemsworth was definitely a figure in that world too.
TL: Were these all-ages shows?
U: The ones I could get into usually were, or I knew someone playing. I got a fake ID at some point, but there's endless stories of people my age trying to play a show and the venue not letting them in, so they’re stranded in New York and having to just hang out. That was a classic story of the time, I felt.
CR: What else should we know about your online upbringing? I get the impression that it's quite crucial to the musical networks that you're in now and your broader aesthetic.
U: I was playing the classic games like Minecraft. I had a computer but I didn't have video game consoles. My artsy parents would be like, ‘You can have a computer, but you can't have something that's just for playing video games.’
TL: You can build stuff but you can't shoot people.
U: In middle school I had a Minecraft server I was in charge of where all my friends from school could play on it. And I was the admin, or one of the people in charge of it. I was collecting money to pay for the hosting from different kids in middle school.
CR: Wow, OK. Quite entrepreneurial.
U: It can be, yeah. I wasn't even especially good at it. I wasn't doing anything crazy. The scale of the Minecraft events that we did later was so much bigger than anything I was doing as a kid in that game. That was a whole other era when I was in college and everyone rediscovered how fun Minecraft was. And then we just decided to do that [Minecraft show], sort of out of nowhere.
CR: I’m curious about what your first real rave or clubnight experiences were, because even once you'd started producing, you weren't technically able to get into clubs.
U: I did go and play lots of shows with producer friends of mine, but it was always these sort of experimental, DIY spaces. It would always be very centred around the music. Some people were playing live, some people were DJing on their laptops or various gear. Usually the only place I would go is where I was playing, or someone I knew was playing. That scene at the time was much smaller.
Once I had worked on the Charli XCX project I was playing all these parties that were the afterparties for her shows. Those weren’t necessarily at clubs either, but in New York there were a couple of shows at Public Hotel, which had this club in the basement. I was the main local DJ that was playing before she would do a mini live set. But I didn't really know how to DJ for this crowd. I was figuring that out while I was up there, because I was so well-versed in this internet experimental bass music but I didn't really know what all these Charli fans would want to hear or dance to. I had to figure that out as I went.
One of the main crossovers I found was everything that Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones and Fractal Fantasy put out. That was bridging the gap between the PC Music pop stuff that I had become known for working on. and club music. They really understood club music in a way that I didn't because I really hadn't been playing in clubs.
I actually had my computer stolen after a show right before the pandemic. I was so scared because I thought it was a fan who was going to get all the music off my computer, but it was just a random person. But at that point I was like, ‘I’m never going to play on my computer in a club again. I'm going to learn CDJs. Finally, I'm going to get a USB.’ And then immediately after that, everything shut down.
CR: Was having your computer stolen a big setback in terms of what was lost?
U: It was surprisingly OK in terms of files, because I stored stuff on Dropbox. The thing I was most scared of was stuff getting leaked, because that point was when I had the most crazy fans of an artist [Charli XCX] after me all the time. People literally posted pictures of me playing being like, ‘Why doesn't someone just take that computer?’ People were threatening that all the time, so I really thought that's what had happened, and it turned out it was just stolen.
TL: I remember speaking to a friend years back who worked for XL and he said that the XL servers were essentially under permanent threat of attack from people on Atease, the Radiohead fan forum.
U: PC Music had a whole string of crazy... Someone got a hold of SOPHIE’s brother's email and they emailed me, and it wasn't real. They were asking me to send files. I thought it was SOPHIE’s brother, and it was not. It was just a fake. I don't know. There's all kinds of stuff that happened like that with the Charli fans as well. There's all these leaks that happened.
TL: It's obviously crazy, and it's a complete violation in so many ways. But I do also have that side of me where if I was an artist, I’d love to look back in 20 years and know there’s this undergrowth of leaked music, and if people really want to dig for it, they can get it.
U: Yeah. I think PC Music and everyone around it… there were so many opportunities or moments where they did stuff like that, where they would put out music that was only on a website, or extra versions of stuff that were only in this mix or whatever. It definitely helped create a culture around the music where if you’re really obsessed with it, you can find more of it.
But that was different to when people were actually just hacking people's emails. With Charli, there was a rollout for one of her albums where a fan account was posting music on her forum that she later revealed was just her. It was the marketing plan or something. She's definitely played with that.
I always put stuff out that’s not released on streaming, or where you only get it in a [specific] way. I’ve done birthday parties where we put out lots of little edits and DJ tools on a USB which people could only get at my party. I don't think you have to release all the music you make in the traditional sense.
TL: Yeah, and streaming has created a hard dividing line where 99% of people consume music through Spotify or Apple. It’s not just that those platforms don’t include leaked music or YouTube uploads – there’s often just music missing, where the rights have expired or there's territorial disputes. And I think that DSPs becoming the go-to way that the vast majority of people consume music makes the leaks more interesting, because it creates a divide between this very official DSP thing over here, and the wild west over there.
U: I love the energy that you get around [those kind of] fan bases, they really have to care a lot about something if they're going to go after it. There's so much music already available in the easiest possible way that if you're going to start digging for stuff, it means you really care about it. That’s something that Iglooghost is obviously really good at, especially his recent rollout. He was just putting out so much music under endless different names. I love that stuff.
CR: We have to ask about Rebecca Black, who is on your 2022 EP Comfort Noise. For those who don't remember, Rebecca Black was about 13 when she released a song and a video called ‘Friday’ in 2011, which was picked up as this amazing piece of so-bad-it’s-good online folk art. It naturally attracted a cult following – there was a remix from Dylan Brady a few years ago. Meanwhile she's released loads of music and has become a pretty genuine-seeming artist. So tell us about working with Rebecca Black.
U: Yeah, that was great. Our song was completely done online. It was over the pandemic and it was after that period where she'd re-emerged and had done a bunch of stuff with people like Dorian Electra and Dylan Brady. I remember there was a moment where she came [back] online – I think she'd not been online for a few years, and she posted this thing about how difficult it had been to be the most hated, or the most ironically loved artist ever, when she was a literal child, you know?
I can't remember exactly what the post said, but it was pretty sad. A friend of mine replied to it saying, ‘Listen, there's this whole scene of people that are doing shows in Minecraft and are un-ironically playing edits of ‘Friday’ in their sets, and they love it.’ And she was immediately interested in this. It was actually a few years before she had released any of this [new] music. Because of that message, me and Laura Les from 100 gecs were making beats for her. We were trying to work on music with her for a long time.
CR: But none of the other stuff that you've that you made for her has come out?
U: No, though since then we’ve done some sessions in person. time.
CR: I went back and listened to ‘Friday’. It’s hard to imagine the lineage that brings us to Hannah Diamond without a Rebecca Black, I think?
U: Yeah, the biggest thing I would say is it's just not that crazy.
CR: The response back then seems so overblown – it’s not that dissimilar to ‘Party in the USA’ by Miley Cyrus or something. It's stupid and repetitive and that's what makes it good.
U: Yeah, if you were to hear a song like that today you just wouldn't be that shocked by it – even if you're the most conservative, the most hateful possible music listener. It just sounds relatively normal. It is wild to think about the response that song had at the time.
TL: We should talk about the Open Pit collective and the era of Minecraft parties you were involved in. For people that aren't familiar, could you outline what Open Pit was?
U: It was a pretty loose collective of friends online, in a Discord server. This was before the pandemic, before the average person was stuck online at home on the computer. it was just music producers with friends all over the world who were stuck online at home.
A friend of mine, Max Schramp, who made music under SLEEPYCATT, it was his birthday party. He was just like, ‘I'm going to have a Minecraft birthday party.’ It was sort of a joke, he started inviting people to the party without thinking about what it would be, giving people the IP address. We spent a week building things for it and booking DJs for the lineup. That was, I think, 2018.
After that we did a few more events that just got bigger and bigger in scope. There was one called Coalchella. There was one called Mine Gala, and also Fire Festival. These were all before the pandemic, and we just upped the scale of it each time. The systems that we used completely broke because the game is not designed to have hundreds of attendees watching live music. It would break every single time and we'd try and figure out a different way to do it each time. It was really very democratic. People would just volunteer their skills and time to help build attractions or make a set. Everyone was using their connections to attract different or slightly bigger artists.
TL: Who was the first real ‘holy shit, we've got them’ artist?
U: Anamanaguchi was already a pretty big band at the time. They had a song with [virtual pop star] Hatsune Miku. They were obviously such a classic fit because their fans were all gamers. We had Y2K, who was a pretty big producer in the scene that I was in – the trap music, wave music world. He's produced lots of Doja Cat songs and the BBNO$ song that was huge on TikTok in 2019.
And then 100 gecs played both of our shows. They weren't very well known at the time. Dylan Brady was pretty well known as a producer for Night Lovell and some pretty big SoundCloud rappers, and I loved both of their music, but they played both of the early events and that was the first time I think they were billed as 100 gecs on anything. A lot of their first album they made [specifically for the event] – you can hear the demos on both of their sets for, I think, Coalchella and Fire Festival. We gave them a deadline to finish that music and that formed the core of that album. That was part of the whole culture of it, I think – people trying to make original stuff rather than just play some existing songs because they had to make something exciting.
TL: At the same time as Open Pit there were also these big Fortnite online concerts with Travis Scott and Marshmello. To my eyes, those seemed very brand-driven. There were big hype campaigns around them, with press releases after each one about whatever record it had broken for attendees. And Open Pit seemed to me, as an outsider to it, to be the opposite of that. I'm right saying a lot of the profits went to charity, right?
U: Yeah. Every event, even before the pandemic, we were doing charity-driven events. That made it feel more worth it for everyone to work for free. And obviously most of the artists or all the artists made sets for free as well.
TL: Is that a fair distinction I'm drawing there?
U: Totally. The main thing with Fortnite is those were official events put on by the game. Whereas this had nothing to do with Minecraft. We did try to reach out to them in some capacity. I think their blog wrote about it at some point. But Minecraft is well known for stuff like that. One of the main things is anyone can make their own server and world.
At some point, Minecraft got concerned that we were breaking their terms of service because we were selling items in-game. But you're allowed to do that kind of thing as long as it doesn't give you a gameplay advantage. And in this case, the gameplay was just watching someone play music. You could get a shirt for your character to wear if you donated, and then the proceeds of that stuff went to charity.
We did work with brands. We did the 100 gecs event with Atlantic Records or Warner. They produced a shirt and stuff like that. And the final event, which was called Lavapalooza, we had Pioneer DJ sponsor it. We had speakers and CDJs set up in the game to have the Pioneer logo. But we didn't do anything beyond very small partnerships. We didn't really make any money from it. It was just there was a giveaway for fans. They could find a little DDJ controller in the world. But it was definitely a totally different thing from what Fortnite was doing at the time. They still do that.
At the time we were very annoyed by it because most of the articles and press about it would compare the two of them as if they were the same thing. And they would literally list the numbers from the press release from Fortnite of how many people went to the Travis Scott concert. But the thing with Fortnite – and this is so silly to care about now, but at the time we were so annoyed – is that the Fortnite concert was mandatory. If you were logged into Fortnite, it happened to everyone.
TL: Oh, so you couldn't opt out?
U: It happened while you were playing the game. It would just appear in the sky and everyone would have to listen to Travis Scott.
CR: It's like getting a U2 album on your iPod!
TL: Am I right in saying that when Twitter was officially rebranded as X, they used a sound from your Splice pack?
U: No, someone just made that up.
TL: You're kidding!
U: It was very funny, but yeah, someone took a screen recording of it and replaced the audio. Someone just lied about that.
CR: That's really good stuff.
U: Yeah. I like that kind of chaotic rumour mill. Splice posted about it and I had to tell them it wasn't real. The Splice social account was like, ‘That’s crazy. We're going to post that!’ It’s not even my sound.
CR: What about your previous claim to have been a steampunk teenager? Was that real?
U: I was totally a steampunk teenager. I was very uncool.
CR: I wonder if Minecraft has brought steampunk to a younger generation somehow. It sort of taps into the same urge.
U: Yeah, yeah. I was definitely building airships in Minecraft and stuff in middle school. It all kind of fit. That is true.
CR: And Splice is your day job, right?
U: Yeah, I have a label that I curate, a sample label called Moment. So I'm basically commissioning packs from all the talented sound designers I know. Me and one other person, Cody, run this label together. It's a curated page that's part of Splice.
CR: I am not a producer and only know very little about this, so it would be useful to have a brief explanation of what Splice is. Do you use Splice packs in your own productions? Does Splice fit into the way that you work as a producer?
U: Definitely, to some extent. There's so much amazing stuff on there, it’s almost overwhelming. Spice is just a marketplace for sample packs that's subscription-based instead of the way you used to buy sample packs – on a CD, or you would buy a downloadable folder and get the whole pack. On Splice you can just search for stuff and pick individual sounds, and you pay per month like a Netflix subscription or something.
I do use it. I wasn't a subscriber to it when I got the job there – I started out as an intern when I was in college, because I had to get an internship in some sort of audio engineering field. But I had already put out sample packs under my own name on there. The first one I did was when I was still in high school, or right after. Which was very lucky, because for a while that was a big part of how I was able to survive as a musician. My packs just did very well on there because I got in a bit early, before everyone had a pack on there.
CR: Have you heard your own sounds in other people's tracks?
U: Yeah, and that's the classic trade-off. It's royalty-free samples, so someone can win a Grammy with your sample. That’s what happened with [Sabrina Carpenter’s] ‘Espresso’ this year. The whole melodic idea of that song is all loops from Power Tools Sample Pack III by Oliver, which is a super popular pack. He's produced lots of big songs himself as well. But it definitely happens. It's a trade-off because you get paid every time someone uses or someone purchases the samples, but you don't get songwriting royalties on any of that stuff.
I haven't actually dropped a pack myself in a few years now. My last pack under my name was from before I started the label. I've worked on some of the label’s packs with people like DJ Fuck or with Lil Data or people that aren't necessarily sound designers, but they make music in some cool way that we want to showcase. For Lil Data, I provided a lot of source audio sounds and he did his live coding thing with them, but I haven't directly made a new sample pack of my own sounds because it's daunting. And also because the stuff we've been putting out on the label is so good. These people are infinitely more talented than I am at making new sounds from scratch. It's always so impressive.
I definitely use sounds from those packs myself a lot of the time and also just from other stuff on Splice. It's especially useful in the session workflow where you're trying to get to something really fast. Even if you're going to replace it later, if you want something that fits a certain style really quickly, you can just pull up whatever. And for producers that are less worried about their signature sound… I’m always worried about, how do I make it sound like me? Whereas if you're a proper pop producer, you're just working in the service of whatever the song needs. And then Splice is so useful.
But yeah, I have heard my own samples in lots of stuff. Most recently the Squid Game outro, the credits music of one of the episodes, it's my loop. It's from my song ‘Sticky’ with Ravenna Golden. Back then I just was putting everything into my Splice pack, I didn't think about the fact that I was putting my released song stems into a pack that people would get royalty-free.
TL: I thought it could be good to end on a big picture question about communities. There is a pretty constant dialogue at the moment about how fractured scenes are, and how hard it is to build and sustain creative communities. That could be because of real-life issues, like event spaces closing, or online issues like the splintering of social media.
But you've been a part of some really successful communities and scenes in recent years, and they’ve translated to both online and offline events. When you see people talk about it being harder than ever to sustain and build creative communities, what's your reaction?
U: I think I totally agree. There are lots of reasons why it is increasingly challenging. Even all the stuff I've talked about in this podcast, I feel like a lot of it [happened] a few years ago. A lot of the things that I did at those points I don't have the energy or the time – mostly the energy – to [do] now. Maybe building the actual community of the Minecraft events wasn't the hard part, but still there's a very real sense of, ‘Oh, we don't do that anymore’. There are a lot of people I've lost touch with. It's hard to sustain the same excitement.
I live in New York, which is one of the rare places in the US where it's comparatively easy to put on your own show. There's still a wealth of clubs. But places are closing all the time and it's definitely not getting easier. If I think about the rest of this country, there are truly so few cities that have that energy of New York, where you can walk down the street and go see some other music that's totally different from what you were just at, and it's relatively easy to get in.
I definitely feel the challenges everyone faces trying to sustain these things. And I do think that ultimately, the stuff I've talked about is all stuff I was doing for fun, because I had the luxury of having the time to work on something like that. And it gets harder and harder.
CR: Final question: as always, what film would you recommend to us?
U: What film? Good question... I always love to recommend the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie to people.
CR: Whoa, okay. I'm listening.
U: It's a cop-out answer maybe, but I genuinely love that movie. It follows in the footsteps of very few blockbusters… it’s literally a Disney movie based on a rollercoaster that is just so weird and absurd. Half of it takes place in the afterlife when Captain Jack Sparrow dies and goes to Davy Jones' locker and they have to revive him from the afterlife. I don't know, it's just a fun movie. It's part of a series, but that one has a special weirdness to it that I'm obsessed with.
CR: Most expensive movie ever made at the time, right?
U: Yeah, I think I remember that. It blows out of the water any blockbuster movie right now. Any Marvel movie, they look so bad compared to it. It's got a lot of CGI, but it somehow has a look to it that's disappeared from modern blockbuster movies, which I generally hate. But this is one of my favourites ever.
TL: I was listening to a podcast recently where they brought up Pirates of the Caribbean and I had completely forgotten that it's based on a rollercoaster.
U: That's one of the most incredible things about it. It’s very PC Music somehow, I’d love a pop star based on a rollercoaster.
CR: Simulations everywhere.
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