Nick León on Clubbing, DJ Fatigue, and Working with Erika de Casier

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Hey, guess what? As I write this little intro I just saw Nick León DJ last freakin' night. Among other things the Broward County-hailing producer played his Erika De Casier collab "Bikini," which is probably one of the best pop songs of the year if we're being real...I've been very into the various sounds Nick's been putting forth over the last few years, and we recently connected over the phone to talk about all aspects of his career, including his forthcoming debut album. Check it out:

Tell me about how you got into dance music in general.
My same crew of skating homies were the first ones that started getting into Tiësto or Laidback Luke. I have a cousin in Colombia who's a jazz drummer, and I remember he showed me a couple mixes of old trance Tiësto vibes when I was visiting him uh after my grandma died. I remember being like, "This sounds futuristic. What are these sounds?" I've always loved those anthem-type melodies—cheesy but sad, or euphoric.

It was a pretty big part of my teenage years, getting into that culture—but it was always kind of about doing ecstasy, which I guess is everywhere. In the beginning, it wasn't necessarily about taste. It was kind of about the music, but the music was almost secondary to the setting. All of this stuff is happening from 2009-2011—a specific type of Ultra Music Festival, pre-EDM vibe,

My first memorable club experience was at this place called Club Cinema, which was closer to where I grew up. It was pretty infamous for letting underage people in, so that's where we would all go. Laidback Luke was playing, and that was the first time I took molly. It was very foreign, because there were so many people, and I was like, "How do all you people know about this?" Those parties were packed. It would be stuff like that and, like, Infected Mushroom.

One thing I think about all the time is how our age group is probably the last one that was able to really dip into the powders and pills without thinking about whether or not it's fentanyl.
Yeah, I mean, I was just trusting everything—maybe naively. It had never even crossed my mind. [Worrying about fentanyl] was only if you were doing, like, heroin or something. I'm not trying to overemphasize [molly's relation to clubbing] or anything, but if I'm trying to be honest, at least with the club side of things, that's definitely the intro.

From a production level, I was really into Timbaland when I was growing up, and he was using a lot of those techno-ish sounds at the time with Britney Spears' shit, Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, all that stuff. So I'd try to find patches that would sound like those songs. But I didn't really go to good raves until way later, outside of Florida. I definitely missed out on a lot. I have friends who talk about Ultra, or these renegade parties that were in the swamp or something, and I didn't share those experiences unfortunately.

When it comes to "good raves," I'm always kind of wondering if it's just part of the culture to generate this constant sense of FOMO. Now, when I go out, no matter what it is, I'm like, "That was a great time," but I don't place too much importance on it. But when I was younger sometimes I'd go to things and be like, "I'm here, but is it really happening here?" Now, I know that it's usually happening everywhere and nowhere all at once—but I sometimes wonder what that does to club culture.
When it comes to placing more value in those experiences earlier on, I feel like, on one level, you want to, because you're gonna be remembering this. But once you're going out a lot, especially if you're a DJ, the index is huge. It all blurs together and shifts in meaning.

Tell me about when you realized you wanted to start making music.
It was pretty early on. Music was a part of my household on a base level. My dad played guitar, my mom liked a lot of like old Beatles stuff, old salsa, and Colombian records. My brother was also very much into music, so from all three of them I was getting different tastes to start. My dad started to teach me how to play guitar, and then my brother ended up having FL Studio on his computer for some reason, so when I was in middle school he showed it to my mom and was describing it as a game. I was eavesdropping and somehow got it, my family saw me doing it and and heard what I was doing it, and they were encouraging.

It's weird, I was thinking about this recently. I'm 31 now, and this is very much my life at the moment, and it has been for as long as I can remember. I was like, "What was that moment?" I could barely remember it. I know the story because I've told the story, but why did I choose to get really obsessed with this one thing? It's kind of crazy where it leads you. I was getting pretty loose on the family computer, learning how to play guitar, and getting really into rap producers—the Neptunes, Dr. Dre, Timbaland. Also, in that time, Rick Ross and Pitbull started coming out, and when reggaeton got into the States, that coincided with me getting really into Frooty Loops and finding out that music was made on it. There was a radio station in South Florida that started playing reggaeton, and that was a very new sound for me.

Tell me about how your sound evolved as you continued to make music.
Talking about it now, you already see me jumping all over. In Florida, even though it feels bare, there are a bunch of different pockets of music that all coincide with each other. That definitely informed me, because I used to think I didn't have a sound because it was always changing, and I'm a little more at peace with that. I feel like I see the throughline.

How do you feel like Miami itself has worked its way into your sound?
I used to live close to the beach, and it always felt tropical or swampy. It has these environments where you're always hearing weird sounds, and it leaks into the music somehow. I feel like a lot of my stuff is more about spaces than a narrative. I remember Flying Lotus talking about how Los Angeles sounds like what L.A. looks like, and that stuck with me. I was feeling that way already, but hearing somebody else talk about it, I was like, "Oh, this is maybe a way I can explore what my style could be."

What you're talking about there makes me think about your collaborations with Coral Morphologic. Tell me about working with them.
I first met them six years ago. There used to be this film production company called Borscht Corp in Miami. They were famous for, like, producing Moonlight. They were pretty kooky people. It was sick, but unfortunately, some stuff happened, and it doesn't exist anymore. At the time, they were doing film festivals every year with performances. They had Animal Collective doing a performance with Coral Morph where they just jammed over these visuals for an hour. I remember getting really into what they were doing, visually as well as in terms of what they represented.

Maybe they'd found some ambient music that I did under a different name, because we started talking about that and had some crossover in that regard. At the time, I was also trying to do a label with Miami-only artists, and I'd tapped them for a track on this compilation that I was putting together. We always got along really well and kept in touch.

They're who I look at when I want information on how the Earth is actually doing. They're paying attention. They're as close as you can get to the source of the information. They're watching how hot Biscayne Bay is, and how that's affecting the coral in the bay. I've always found that kind of thing really valuable and important, so I'm really happy we found a way to work together, because it just felt like it would eventually happen at some point anyway.

Do you find collaborating with others easier than working alone?
It's something that's always been natural for me. I really like collaborating. I got into music to be more of a producer, where you work with all these different artists and find what they, are into and help them do that to the best of their ability. You can contribute a side to it, but it's less about having a distinct sound—like Quincy Jones or Alan Parsons. My dad was really into Pink Floyd, and I remember getting into that and Alan Parsons and sampling that for rap beats and stuff—but I was also really into what he was doing with effects.

Making music has also always been a social thing for me, since I started doing it so early on. In high school, I was making beats as a freshman for seniors, and that was how I was not bullied. It just goes hand-in-hand for me. Also, I'm still searching for what my own solo stuff would be. With everyone else, it's easy to just visit their world and contribute.

Let's talk about working with Erika de Casier on "Bikini." Amazing song.
Work on the song started really simply, a year ago. I was in New York visiting, playing a show, and hanging out with a friend of mine who also worked on the record, in his basement where he had his studio set up. We spent the whole day getting super stoned and making beats. He had this old toy keyboard that has just four or five sounds, and I really liked the guitar sound, so we laid down the melody that would eventually become "Bikini." The beat was a little different, but we just had to just speed it up to super-fast 150 BPM. Then we switched the drums out one more time to a more dembow vibe, and I fell in love with the beat.

I was just gonna put it out as a club tool, and then Erika came into the picture. I've been starting to work on what will be my album, and I'd done some stuff with her before and asked if she wanted to do something for mine, and she was open to it. I'd originally sent her something very different that she got on, but she never sent it back because she was just not feeling it. She'd asked me to send one more idea, but I was really bent on her singing what I originally sent over, so I only sent one—and it was the beat that would be the "Bikini" beat. I was like, "Maybe she'll get on this, but I hope not." [Laughs]

Some time goes by, and she hits me up like, "Hey, I have a demo." She sends it over and I hit play, and the first thing I hear is those strings. I was like, "Oh shit, wait, it's over this." I proceeded to be blown away by what she sent. Erika is such a good songwriter—her sense of melody is infectious. I remember being there with my ex and her hearing it with me, and then just having it stuck in her head.

We never worked on it in person, but we took our time with it. We'd send it back and forth, and once she sent me that back I started reworking the beat a bit more and she'd rewrite some parts. It all crescendoed into Primavera this year—she was performing a Boiler Room and asked if she could play it, so I sent over the stems for it super last-minute too. I'd sent something apparently wrong, and the day of the show I had to send it again—I was already hungover from the day before. [Laughs] It was just in time, and she performed it and it got this crazy reaction. I was there with Sammy and we saw the whole thing happen and were like, "Oh fuck, we have to finish this, like, now." So we went back to London and finished it there over the next week.

We were like, "Hey, this needs to come out ASAP. How can we make this happen?" It was literally some Uncut Gems shit, between Primavera and when we had to turn the song in. It was nonstop—finding the mixing engineer, getting the mastering, approving it, doing the artwork just so it would be able to come out before summer was over. Just her performing it at Primavera accelerated the whole process.

Tell me more about how your album is coming together.
It's good. It's taken a while. I'm just starting it, basically. Since I started touring consistently two years ago, it's all been in the space of the moments in between, because I have trouble making music on the road. A lot of the music is two or three years old that's been reworked over and over again. I don't know if I'll do something like this for the next one, but it just felt like I couldn't let some of these ideas go. Originally it was going to be more of like an IDM, trip-hop-y, Miami record, but now it's a bit more pop and melodic.

I was really anti-drums because I feel anti-club in a way, just from playing so much. I didn't want to make tools anymore, and I wasn't listening to that kind of stuff at all anyway. So, being a bit conflicted and confused about it, I was finding solace in exploring. As we talked about before, I've never stuck to one thing, so sticking to club things for so long messed with my head a bit. I had to dial it back and find a cool middle ground. Now, there's a lot more vocals and features, which I've never really done for my stuff, alongside plotting my escape out of club world. A lot of people got on board at a specific time and are maybe expecting more of that, and I think it's important to not do that pretty early on. I don't want to establish any kind of norm, I guess.

Any recent DJ horror stories? It seems rough out there, man.
It's definitely comical. There should definitely be a DJ support group. There's nothing worse than talking about it to people who aren't doing it, because you just sound like a douchebag. For example, this July I'd agreed to this really insane routing situation where I did MoMa PS1 one weekend, that Monday I flew back to Europe and played in Croatia and Romania, flew to Tokyo for two days, and then flew back to Amsterdam to Dekmantel—all in the span of, like, seven-to-ten days. That kind of broke my brain a bit—but, also, I was trying to reprogram myself to be like, "That's actually sick. It's a quick shopping spree in Japan for a day before going back to work." But it's brutal.

Something that I've had to do since touring so much lately is that I've stopped drinking alcohol. It wasn't that I felt like it was an issue or anything before, but it was more like about being sleep-deprived, and then being sleep-deprived and hungover, which are actually two entirely different things. I feel like I can manage just being sleep-deprived a bit more. But the DJ stuff, it's tricky, and I hear different stories from so many other people. Agents sometimes do their best, but sometimes they don't really do their best with making sure you're comfortable. The three-day weekends and little windows of no sleep thing, it's brutal, man.

What's the money like?
When I first started touring—specifically in Europe—it wasn't necessarily just for a financial sake, but more as an experiment for myself to test my boundaries. I'd just agreed to everything to see what that would be like, because my agent had a lot a lot of gigs lined up—not necessarily great ones, but a lot of across Europe. I've definitely been the type to just want to do things to make as much as possible, but after having done that for two years, it feels like, regardless of the pay, unless there's some radical shift in the amount I'm getting paid, it's definitely not worth the stress on the body. But I've also been fortunate in being able to find other
means of making money through score work, production for artists, and remixes. It's not as consistent as DJ'ing but it's definitely giving me a bit more of a cushion
to say no to stuff.

I try to live as modestly as I did before, anyway. I'm not really spending money in a crazy way. I'm just grateful that I can just do this at the moment. It doesn't feel like there's any security, you know? So, I'm not going to pretend like there is. I already made the insane decision of doing music for a living, so I should be a little more cautious with the rest that follows.