Essential Mix

Good grief savage cosmos—there he goes again. Some kind of strange audio beast crawling through the digital underbrush with a head full of acid and a suitcase full of vinyl. Fifteen years this sonic deviant has been terrorizing dance floors from Ibiza to the alkali flats of Black Rock City with his peculiar brand of audio hallucination they call "techno."

I first encountered this rhythm junkie in the back room of Amnesia, where Sven Väth was conducting some kind of Germanic tribal ceremony for 2,000 Spanish teenagers and a handful of British tourists who looked like they'd been awake since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Our subject was there, of course—eyes like silver dollars, hands moving across the equipment like a man defusing a bomb while simultaneously conducting an invisible orchestra.

The man is EVERYWHERE. Like some kind of rogue cultural anthropologist with a pathological addiction to bass frequencies. One weekend he's serving dark, hypnotic soundscapes to the leather-clad deviants at Panorama Bar alongside Gerry Reed, the next he's in Brazil, standing next to Sasha and Renato Ratier at Warung Beach while 500 beautiful mutants writhe in the sand like creatures from some Jacques Cousteau nightmare about the future of human evolution.

And then there's Burning Man—SWEET SAVAGE INFINITY—where he's become a fixture at the Mayan Warrior, that rolling monument to technological excess and questionable decision-making. There he stands, this audio desperado, conducting a symphony of synthetic noises for dust-covered freaks whose perception of reality has been chemically adjusted to the point where they believe they're receiving transmissions from another dimension. AND MAYBE THEY ARE.

His production style is the audio equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting—intricate, terrifying, and somehow beautiful in its depraved complexity. Underground to the bone. The kind of sounds that make record executives break out in hives and reach for their heart medication. But to the night people—those strange nocturnal creatures who live for the moment when the kick drum aligns with their heartbeat—it's a siren call they cannot resist.

This is not a man playing records. This is a shaman conducting mass exorcisms through frequency manipulation. A sonic psychiatrist treating collective trauma with carefully calibrated vibrations. A renegade physicist exploring the relationship between sound waves and human consciousness.

He continues his relentless global crusade, expanding his discography with the fervor of a man who knows that somewhere, in some sweaty basement club or desert festival or abandoned warehouse, there are people waiting to have their neural pathways permanently rewired by his particular brand of audio alchemy.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro," I once wrote in a moment of clarity between bourbon shots. Well, this professional weird-turner has made a career of navigating the strange edges of club culture, transforming darkened rooms into temporary autonomous zones where time dissolves and only the rhythm remains.

By all cosmic forces. He shows no signs of stopping.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“ Hunter S Thompson AI on KidIsLive “

Worldwide: James Blonde james@sweatlodgeagency.com North & South America (exc Brazil): andrew@liaisonartists.com

Essential Mix

Mano Le Tough