Electric Feel

It’s a chaotic collision of noises that if played separately may not mean anything, but when put together and perfected create a swirl of sound that dips and dives, moving the listener with each change in beat.

That’s what it sounded like as Sapphire Adizes and Jimmy Quinn opened for The Chainsmokers a few weeks ago. Quinn played a track by Flume and Adizes came in on the saxophone, giving the classical instrument a new level of cool in a genre of music not known for its use of brass instruments. Adizes jammed out on the sax like he was shredding guitar in front of a sold out Madison Square Garden.

The New School is home to three electronic musicians and producers who are quickly forging their own path in the industry, getting recognized by big names like Gramatik and Ryan Hemsworth. Quinn, Adizes and fellow New School student Marshall McGee are using their musical talents not only to explore their love for making music, but also turn their hobbies into big-time careers.

 

Jimmy Quinn

 

Jimmy Quinn, a Lang Contemporary Music major who calls himself a DJ and a music producer, uses a mix of his own songs and those by other artists to play in live performances. Quinn started creating his own music at the age of 14.

“I would take different instrumentals and different acapellas and put those together,” Quinn said.

But like many young teens, his interest quickly evolved into something greater. As he got older, Quinn became more interested in producing music and bought the digital music program Logic as well as a small keyboard to teach himself to play piano. Quinn then attended Dubspot, an electronic music school in NYC.

“Since then I’ve just been putting out a lot of tracks and working my ass off and doing me,” he said.

For Quinn, “doing me” doesn’t mean messing around on his computer and posting tracks on Facebook. It means opening shows for Ryan Hemsworth and The Chainsmokers and performing at bars and college campuses. Quinn’s SoundCloud has almost 1,500 followers, a large number for a relatively small name.

“I’ve been really working on my online presence and getting my music out to the masses in America and across the world with Soundcloud and Facebook.”

For those who don’t understand the art of DJing, a live performance may just look like someone pressing the spacebar and telling you to put your hands up. It may not seem like the DJ is really doing anything but scrolling through his iTunes list for the hits that will make you jump. But as Quinn says, there’s a lot more to it than that. For live shows, Quinn puts together a playlist of 300-500 songs. That’s over 12,000 hours worth of music, definitely sufficient for one night’s set.

“I study and make sure that I know each and every song, when their intro comes in, when the bridge is, breaks—all of that,” Quinn said. He also said that there is a lot of research that goes into the songs he chooses to play.

“My process is putting together a massive playlist and studying each and every song and then going out there and playing them in the best way possible—the most fluid way possible.” Quinn tries to play three or four of his own original tracks at live shows. “I’m there as an artist too. I’m not just a DJ.”

Quinn collaborates with other New School students and says that there’s a lot of talent to be found not only at Lang, but also in the music community at Columbia University and NYU.

“The great thing about The New School is that at Eugene Lang you have a lot of producers and engineers and then there’s the Jazz school, so if I want to get live bass on my track or live guitar or maybe a great singer I can just go to the Jazz school and meet people. I think there’s a really good community for that.”

 

Sapphire Adizes

Quinn’s collaborations introduced him to fellow musician Sapphire Adizes, a student studying classical music at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.

Unlike Quinn, Adizes comes from a background of institutionalized and classical music, attending Interlochen Center for the Arts in High School. When asked how he would define himself, Adizes said with a dramatic flare, “I’m a creator of sounds to move people.”

But more specifically, Adizes is a singer/songwriter and saxophonist while also producing his own music.  While taking some time off of school, Adizes is working on his own project in which he is singing, playing sax and producing.

“It’ll be a classical composition piece, meets some dark Yeezus thing, with me singing and playing distorted saxophone solos,” Adizes said, entirely fixated on choosing the perfect words to describe his sound.

He emanates a passion for music not only through his online SoundCloud presence but also through the way he talks about his music.

“My idea was to make electronic music but literally no one is playing anything that isn’t live, so all the elements are live,” Adizes continued.

Adizes creates electronic music through the use of only live sounds, similar to major artists like James Blake, who is known in the biz for creating electronic music live.

“I think the future is bands that sounds produced but are live,” Adizes said. “Electronic music has gotten so complicated that you cannot do it live unless you make the kind of electronic music that you do live, like James Blake.”

This is where the difference between a DJ and an electronic music producer falls. While a DJ creates a flow of music that has been pre-recorded and perfected, certain electronic music producers similar to Adizes and James Blake create music through individual live sounds.

“Nobody can do a Skrillex track live because it’s too complicated,” he said. “That’s like telling someone, ‘Please play this Beethoven score by yourself.’”

Adizes’ education in classical music has taught him to see the similarities between electronic music and symphonies created by the big wigs over a hundred years ago. “If Skrillex gave me the stems to his whole DJ set, I could probably orchestrate it and get 80 people on a stage to perform his set.”

In the end, though, according to Adizes, the only difference between classical music and electronic music is that we now have the technology to put it all together and press play.

“Whats the difference between a producer and a composer? A producer is just a composer with an unlimited amount of sounds. The lines are blurred.”

Because of the fast-paced evolution of technology, the electronic music industry is always changing and expanding, reaching more and more artists each year.

“It’s the dawn of a new time in electronic music,” he said. “Acoustic music is limited. With electronic music you can do anything with acoustic and anything made with a computer.”

Adizes used Bon Iver as an example of a popular artists who has made a transition from purely acoustic music to a vibe more influenced by electronic sounds. “I wouldn’t call [Bon Iver] electronic music, but he uses auto-tune. He’s an electronic musician.”

Culturally, there’s been a resistance to electronic music from older generations, suggesting it’s not real music if it’s not being created by instruments. Yet, to Adizes, electronic music is only just getting started.

“Music is melody, harmony, rhythm, texture and atmosphere. With electronic music we’re still using melody, harmony and rhythm. We’ve just updated the texture and atmosphere.”

 

Marshall McGee

Another budding artist in the electronic music community at The New School is Marshal McGee, a freshman at Lang, who entered the music scene at the ripe age of 12 when he started playing the guitar.

“I had bands with my friends all through high school, just for fun. It was a good excuse to hang out with people and just talk,” McGee said. But his interests quickly moved from playing guitar and bass to producing, learning the tools needed to make his own music.

“It first started as a hobby just for fun, because I got bored of learning songs on guitar. I was thinking I could record guitar and then make a song. I realized I found more pleasure in writing music then playing it,” McGee continued, which brought him to New York.

“In New York there is so much to be inspired by,” McGee said. After starting to get more serious about his music production last December, McGee released his first EP “Funkdefied.”

Through an Ask Me Anything with Gramatik on Reddit, McGee caught the attention of the Brooklyn based DJ/producer by signing the question with a link to his SoundCloud.

“I posted a question and I had it on my phone from a week before. I even skipped the first 20 minutes of class to get a question in really early,” McGee said.

Gramatik wound up listening to his work, giving a big boost to the popularity of his page, which now has 3,055 followers.

“I opened up Facebook the next day and Gramatik had messaged me asking to be part of his record label,” said McGee.

Since then, McGee’s musical career has taken off. He is now working on a new EP that he will send to Gramatik once complete and has also booked his first live gig in Baltimore this summer.

“The end goal is making a living making music,” he said. “At the end of the day I want to make a soundtrack to somebody’s life. I want people to listen to my music and turn to my music for happiness or enjoyment.”

With reporting by: Jessica Villagomez & Sienna Fekete