Kate Lesta is a community-minded culture & arts organizer, curator, manager & producer.

More mixes on my website.

Walker Barnard grew up on an ashram outside the American mainstream, listening to Balinese monkey chants, classical Indian music and The Beatles White Album. His first experience of the funk came early on when his father, who was making music videos for Motown, brought him to hang on the set of the shoot for Rick James's Super Freak video.
In the early nineties, Walker started playing bass in a funk-rock band called Mobius Trip. The band recorded in Los Angeles with the Dust Brothers of Paul’s Boutique fame and then with Beastie Boys keyboardist Mark Nishita. Walker threw down on a range of projects —Including a Lemmy remix, and Vince Neil's solo record. From there Walker's journeys led him to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he continued to hone his bass playing and recording chops. It was there that Walker had his warehouse party dance floor awakening-- and at that moment he began to transpose his live music experience onto the grids of house and techno.
Not long after the awakening, while living in a teepee outside Santa Fe, Walker got a call from a friend in NYC who was looking for a producer/engineer to come work at a downtown hip hop studio. He thought that sounded pretty good, so with fifty dollars in his pocket, he boarded a plane bound for New York. Walker spent the next two years at the epicenter of underground hip hop, working with a long list of artists such as Company Flow, Saul Williams, Mike Ladd, Rob Sonic, Mos Def, Cannibal Ox and countless others.
During this time, Walker also worked closely with producer and engineer Mike "Tweakin" Rogers, who engineered Deee-Lite's first record, as well as countless classic Chicago and New York house releases. He collaborated on a string of releases with Jaymz Nylon for labels such as Nitegrooves and Dirty Loop/3 to 5, and produced a track for Saul Williams' Big Dada release, "1972." And when he wasn't in the studio, he was playing bass and live electronics in lofts parties, warehouses, bars and clubs all over the New York and the East Coast.
However, by 2000 Walker began seriously longing for the open skies and high mountains of New Mexico and so moved back to Santa Fe, where he began the serious study of recording and mixing music. In 2003 he designed and opened his own studio to facilitate the production philosophy he had developed through his previous decade of experience and during the next five years he produced and engineered numerous records, including the 2006 Grammy winning album "Sacred Ground".
Walker’s studio also became the home base for the small but incredibly fertile dance music scene in Santa Fe. Along with his partner, Sylvie Forêt and a family of like-minded musicos, Walker threw epic open air parties in exotic locations, inviting artists such as Bruno Pronsato, Bodycode aka Portable, Lee Curtiss, and Mikael Stavöstrand.
Walker has been a valued member of the Berlin scene since 2008 - his regular appearances around venues such as Club der Visionäre, Watergate, Wilde Renate, Chalet or Katerholzig soon winning him a reputation as a mastermind of the dancefloor. Nowadays, you can increasingly find Walker slinking around various musical extravaganzas worldwide. Look for his tunes on labels like Private Gold, Vakant, Serialism, Dumb Unit, and Jack Off.

Communikey (CMKY) is a Boulder-based interdisciplinary organization dedicated to social, cultural and ecological innovation through creative process. We facilitate forward thinking cultural experiences that emphasize the intersection of sound, design and technology in artistic forms that are under-represented. Communikey forges a creative exchange across cultures, backgrounds, and mediums while fostering the development of the local arts community.

Mission/Vision/History

Founded in 2001, High Mayhem Emerging Arts is a not-for-profit emerging arts facility, record label and multimedia production collective based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We challenge the homogenizing effect of pop-culture groupthink by providing opportunities for and fostering collaborations with underrepresented “experimental” artists.

High Mayhem curates performances and organizes workshops year-round with musicians and performance artists who come from near and far. We seek out other brave explorers (and welcome those who have discovered us) to join us in producing innovative and thought-provoking experiences for our communities. Further, we encourage and organize collaborative experiments across disciplines; new forms emerge from mutated traditions and pure invention.

We provide a venue and voice for creative tinkerers who challenge our notions of aesthetics in music and art, especially those who employ cross-media synthesis, improvisational techniques and the unorthodox…the often indescribable.

The group’s members, volunteers and constituents have created a live/work space which allows them to explore their varied interests, commune with one another and experiment with sound, vision, movement…you know, creative adaptive systems.

Beyond merely organizing, promoting and producing cutting-edge programming, High Mayhem collaborates with like-minded individuals and organizations.

Sylvie has been reorganizing sound and silence for bodies since the late 20th century. Her sets are psychedelic, sexy, love-filled explorations of the foundations of house and techno. She was born and raised in New York City but has deep roots in her other homes of Berlin and Detroit. She now resides in Mexico City, where she runs Perla alongside her bestie, Tommy Hart.

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