MC: You have more stage antics than most EDM artists––such as crowd surfing atop a raft––but what’s up with the cake throwing thing?
Aoki: 2009 was my second time at Coachella and I wanted to make it a spectacle. I wanted to do some crazy shit and make everyone remember something, and that’s when I introduced the raft idea. I’ve got two rafts ready to go for tonight’s San Jose show. These are all tools to make people feel something.
The cake was introduced in 2011 after we had a success with a video for “Turn Up the Volume” by Autoerotique, which had all these cakes exploding in people’s faces. It went viral, and I just had this feeling that people coming to the show would have seen that video and they would make that connection. And I did that for six months and then put a video of me caking someone on my YouTube channel––once again using my own social media to really help spread the word––and that went viral. Then a few months later it started happening: we’d see signs coming in the front row [saying “Cake Me!”]. That was in 2011. You multiply that by 250 shows around the world every year and it just becomes a phenomenon.
MC: What’s your studio and live-gear setup?
Aoki: For my apartment, it’s pretty simple. For monitors I got Neumann’s KH 310s, and then for the MIDI keyboard I’ve got a Korg Triton. It’s a great setup for anyone who is not trying to spend a lot of money. When I’m on the road, I don’t even use the keyboard, I just paint in there on my computer. You just need a good set of monitors that you can train your ears on. I record into a MacBook Pro and used all the stock plug-ins from Abelton for Neon Future I. I spent my 10 grand on the Waves plug-in, and there’s so much shit in there I don’t really know how to use, to be honest with you. But it’s nice to have because a lot of producers end up using Waves.
MC: Can you demystify what you do onstage as an EDM musician?
Aoki: Generally, when I’m putting together my set there is an emotional narrative that is happening with the song. So I think of how the crowd is going to react to the song in accordance with the song before it, to the song after it, and I want to take the crowd on this journey. I am giving a Steve Aoki musical experience with all these songs mixed together: and in some cases I’ll hit sample banks, I’m looping a cappellas or edits I’ve made beforehand. If I’m preparing a set, I make what I like to call “VIP edits,” that are exclusive edits of my tracks that no one else has, to make it special for my set and to use it later on as well. I’ll do more of the experimentation of the technical tricks in the clubs where I’m testing ideas, but I treat festivals more like the final paper. That’s more like the “greatest hits” and I don’t want to fuck with the mojo of the hits so much unless it’s going to complement and make it bigger.
MC: What’s the connection between Neon Future I and your interest in funding and researching brains?
Aoki: I’m interviewing different writers, philosophers, scientists and talking to them about the future, and a lot of them are scientists who are working on the human brain. So at the same time I’m raising money, I want to raise the awareness. The idea of sharing information is the same thing as being a DJ. I’m sharing the music that makes me happier, the music that I’ve created for all these people. Music is a tool to really boost your feelings or mood, it’s what makes people happy, it’s what makes people feel something. This information [about the brain] does the same thing. To learn about all these things about the future that we can strive for makes you feel something, it makes you get excited, and inspired. Even from Dim Mak’s standpoint when I was developing artists. I was a crusader. It was a religion for me to go and introduce people to block parties and it’s the same concept with producing music and sharing information.
Contact Alexandra Greenberg, MSO PR, http://msopr.com
For more about the artist, seehttp://steveaoki.com andTwitter @steveaoki
