I grouped up with Chapel Sound, a Vancouver-based collective, early into my production span. With very little buzz going on and hybrid promoter/dj’s opening every show in town. When I first started making electronic music (about a year and a half ago) Vancouver actually seemed quite dead. What’s the creative community like there? Now you’ve been based in Vancouver–a place that’s been home to some really up-and-coming electronic stuff in the past few years. I think my favorite experience was visiting coastal England on the way to Brighton and exploring a small city and the coast and caves surrounding it. It’s so hard to pinpoint one particular experience in one place out of the hundreds I’ve visited. I suppose I just “lived abroad” in general, about six months a year.Īny specific tourist experiences stand out? In that time we toured North America about eight times, and the UK twice. I’ve never lived abroad, but I’ve toured in a band for a total of about four years. A couple nights I went back to the Academy after shows to work on music with others 'til the sun came up. Clubs in Tokyo stay open late, so most nights I ended up sleeping around 4AM or 5AM, and then waking up at 10 the next morning. Every night there was a concert in the city, usually with a headliner and two-three of the participants opening up.
#DRAKE KNOW YOURSELF EKALI REMIX FREE#
So during our free time we were almost always working on music together or watching our peers make music. Between lectures we were free to use any of the studios downstairs… I think there were eight or nine of them. Catered breakfast started at 11, and our first lecture was at 12PM (There were two lectures every day, at 12PM and 4PM). The amount of creativity in every single person at the academy was just insane the amount of songs that got finished quickly like that was staggering.Įvery morning I would wake up at the hotel in Shibuya and walk 10 minutes to the Academy. So we took the tune to the main studio and Om’Mas and Oliver laid down some auto-tune vox, and the tune was done. Om’Mas Keith (Producer for Frank Ocean, Vic Mensa, etc.) walked by the studio I was arranging in and dug the tune, and asked me if he could sing on it. I had started a drum loop by myself in the RBMA studios that I was pretty happy with, but couldn’t figure out chords that worked, so I asked one of the studio staff members Oliver (aka Dorian Concept) to lay down some keys. Is there a story you can share that you think is representative of the experience? And everybody I met was super respectful and welcoming, regardless that I didn’t speak their native language. You could probably eat sushi off the pavement and that would be completely safe. I think what shocked me most was how unbelievably clean Tokyo city was, and how polite people are in comparison to North America. What was the biggest culture shock about moving from Canada to Japan? Blew every preconception I had about good sushi out of the water. Going into Japan I was a little bit jaded about sushi because I’m from Vancouver, which has the best sushi restaurants I had ever visited (they’re also dirt cheap compared to other cities.) But yeah, the sushi was unbelievable. So you were apart of this year’s Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo, how was the sushi? This is one I’ve been looking forward to for a few months and Ekali 100% delivered. Following his stint at this year’s edition in Tokyo, Japan, Ekali took the time out to answer some of our questions and put together a special mix for our DAD Series. That’s right, the guy behind some of the smoothest R&B-infused futuristic bass music you’ve heard all summer– that Tinashe remix and his own original “Unfaith” for starters–can now rightly call himself amongst the same company of such highly esteemed names as alumni of the RBMA. What do Sinjin Hawke, DJ Slow, Evian Christ, Flying Lotus, Flava D, and Jackmaster all have in common? They’ve all been participants in the prestigious Red Bull Music Academy.