Human Algorithm | 04.26.23
HA Takeover with DJ Express 🎵
Apologies for the delay! Went from 2 days of Coachella to a red eye flight to London so playing a bit of life catch-up.
First things first - weekend 2 of Coachella continues to be the best weekend to go - shout out to my Coachella crew. Also, having inflatable animal totem poles will make finding your friends in the crowd so much easier.
Second, I am excited to share that I was recently featured in VoyageLa as part of their Daily Inspiration series which you can check out here. Thank you member Ethan for nominating me!
Last but not least, please welcome DJ Express (Matthew Owchar) who is a music entrepreneur that I met while visiting Vancouver last year. He’s a booker at Blueprint Live, co-founder of record label Specials Worldwide, co-created a music community called The UV and run a members-only space Paradise which was recently spotlighted by Resident Advisor.
HA Takeover with DJ Express
How did this all start? What was your motivation behind all of these music communities?
Hey, thank you for including me & thanks for noticing! Yah I've really lived and breathed the music business out here for going on 17 years now? Things really started out naturally with my keen interest in DJing and nightlife. From there I sorta stuck around while some of my colleagues either aged out of the nightlife scene or moved away, so I began concentrating my efforts on the business side of things - learning how to book artists, learning the financials, imagining new events and different I.P. that would eventually lead to me creating things like the record label, UV as a platform that my wife and I use to incubate any new ideas we have, Paradise as a new type of venue experience in the market, etc. I've also been lucky enough to have been given a ladder up by some amazing mentors over the years (especially at Blueprint), and learning from them has really been the key to my success. Identify those types of people when you're on the come up and do your best to get close to them so you can really soak up all of their knowledge and experience.
What's next? What are you focusing on for this year?
Post pandemic life has been a mix of non-stop events and lots of travelling to get back out into the world and seek inspiration and connection. I feel like I've gotten a lot of the travel bug out of my system as of late, so I think slowing that down to plan bigger life moves is really the focus now. I really have my hands full with Paradise and figuring out the long term there as we all know DIY spaces are inherently fleeting things. I'd also like to carve out time to focus more on just purely creating things for the sake of it. Give a hand at music production again - something I used to dabble in more when I was younger and not as business focused. I personally believe wearing the creative cap with some consistency is really key to longevity and authenticity in the music game, or at least it helps keep you motivated / interested.
What's the Vancouver music scene like? Any artists coming out of there you recommend?
I always say the Vancouver music scene is a bit of a global diaspora. Over the years, people have asked me some form of this question and I can say it's had its ups and downs. Ultimately, it's a super expensive city to live in & doesn't create favourable conditions for artists to stick around and develop scenes. It's some what geographically isolated & also a small (big) city so there's a ceiling here. I think the heyday for music scenes sorta ended around 2010. But what I will say is that many talented people came from Vancouver and fostered a lot of their ideas about culture in the various scenes here. My homey Patrick runs XL Recordings in North America, for instance, and he's from here. One of my longtime best buds and a mentor of mine over the years, Paul Devro, was instrumental in shaping the dance music scene here back around 2004-2009 and he went on to found Mad Decent Records with Diplo. The Emergency Room punk scene birthed a ton of successful bands and musicians including White Lung & Orville Peck among others. Random artists like Grimes are from here & her step-brother Jay Worthy is a respected rapper who's been putting in work for years. Crack Cloud is another cool band & artist collective that's popped up in recent years. There's a long list of diverse musicians and behind-the-scenes people representing Vancouver in some form or fashion, but I just don't think there's a big narrative around that. In recent years, the underground / niche electronic music scene has really been what's put Vancouver on the map with labels like Mood Hut & Pacific Rhythm making timeless and globally celebrated records. The label I co-founded, Specials, is basically a part of that lineage.
Can you share more about the inspiration behind the mix you made?
Specials took on our first management client almost 2 years ago - a young singer/songwriter/producer/talent by the name of Sophia Stel, and her evolving creative process and growth as an artist has been a source of inspiration to me as of late. We recently went to New York City together on a trip to seek some inspo and creative collaboration, and got both in droves, so a lot of songs on this mix were ones we discovered together or bonded over while there. I feel like I'm also actively seeking out some weirder, female vocal driven pop records to better contextualize and reference her music with, so the mix is basically all those types of songs. Lots of breakbeats, ethereal vocals and dreamy vibes to be found. I can say Sophia's next record is really something special and is definitely pushing the envelope sonically. Likewise, my wife's recent journey with musical curation also takes up a large amount of the tracklisting. She's definitely got the ear & selection part of being a DJ down (without being a DJ herself), so awhile back I handed over the UV playlist to her and said "hey, you should take this on and let this be your platform for musical curation". She's got excellent taste, and picked a bunch of these obscure gems that I probably wouldn't find myself, so I've definitely been inspired by her!
DJ Express x Music Club Mix
Catch-Up on Music Club
This mix is the perfect summer vibes. Thanks for shedding some much needed shine out here in Vancity