Classixx's Michael David on Learning to DJ, Bad Gigs, and the Art of the Remix

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it. Right now I'm offering a holiday sale on monthly subscriptions—50% off the first six months—and you can grab that here.

I've been a fan of Classixx since I reviewed their exquisite record Hanging Gardens back in 2013; if you're a paid subscriber, you've seen them pop up once or twice in the Baker's Dozen playlists too. Classixx's Michael David is one of those paid subscribers (plug plug) and we initially got in contact because my migration to Ghost meant fixing several subscription issues for people, him included; customer service led to some chat about him doing a proper interview for the newsletter, and what follows is the results. It was a great convo to have about the time in which Classixx came up in, as well as several always-nagging concerns regarding the shifting state of dance music. (And if you're in Miami on March 14, they've got a show on that date coming up, so you can hear the results of this perspective straight from the aural source.) Check it out:

Tell me about your early experiences with dance music.
Tyler and I went to high school together, and honestly, we were into mainstream indie rock. Then we got into Saddle Creek, which was an interesting sort of gateway because—I don't want to disparage the Faint or anything, it may not have aged in a way that I can still identify with, but their use of synthesizers was certainly novel and left an impression on us. Around the same time, we were also getting into New Order and the Astralwerks space. We graduated in the mid-2000s, and around that time projects like Air, early Phoenix, and the Beta Band were definitely on the playlist.

In Los Angeles, we threw a party in Tyler's basement apartment. We had no idea how to DJ, but we recognized that would be like the best way to learn. Also, around that time, we'd moved on to listening to, like, Mylo. But, truthfully, we learned a deep appreciation for dance music as we went along—the roots of house, techno, and even disco. We were just students, but it's not what we came up on. We had to seek that stuff out, and later on we found some people who would put us on to the good versions of those genres.

I want to talk about the Faint a little more. I think they were a formative influence for a lot of people in your age bracket who bridged the gap between indie and electronic music, but they always have stopped short of getting their proper due. What is it about the Faint that sparks that creative fire?
Honestly, I've talked to [music writer and A&R] David Drake, not about the Faint specifically, but about his theory that some of the more transformative and seminal music often comes from artists who are overlooked. For whatever reason, their music might not resonate with like with people until they get another look with some years in between. With the Faint, their association with artists that were on the label was an easy way to bridge the gap. I didn't listen a ton to bands like Cursive, but it was this entry point where you could come from guitar music and be like, "Oh, these guys' labelmates are doing synthesizer stuff." That was a big part of it.

Tyler and our friends were deep into skate culture, so there may have been some crossover there as well. Musically, I was just into their use of synthesizers, and their production. I remember seeing the Faint at the Glass House in Pomona while we were still in high school, and the bass player had a side project called Broken Spindles that was fully electronic and had a more industrial vibe, like Adult. There were a lot of influences that, growing up in the Valley, we weren't necessarily exposed to that a band like the Faint brought to our attention.

Tell me about your early experiences DJing. It's something that is harder to get a handle on than most people can really comprehend.
We were throwing these parties and starting to do remixes, so it was natural that we'd learn how to DJ. But, honestly, the first time we DJ'd, I pre-made a set in ProTools and played it. [Laughs] It did go well, but that just speaks to how we put stuff together in reverse. Tyler and I learned Serato, and we did that forever. I vividly remember our friend Dave P., a legendary party promoter in Philadelphia, seeing us set up Serato in his DJ booth and being like, "You guys have to learn how to use CDJs. This is embarrassing that you're bringing your laptop everywhere to do this." Musically, we understood production and how to blend songs together, and we played instruments. So in terms of timing and finding the top of a bar, we learned fairly quickly.

But as I've gotten older, I definitely love listening to seamless, fluid mixing, but I also recognize that some of the more transformative DJ sets that I've seen or heard have been all about selection and sequencing. Clunky mixing doesn't really get in the way of that. So, technically, I think we've gotten pretty good, but we'll still do a set where I feel like I didn't really connect with people, and that's its own thing.

I don't know, DJ'ing is very confusing. Every now and then, people are like, "Everyone's a DJ now," and I think that's true—but, people who are excellent and spend their lives finding music and DJ'ing all the time, it's a totally different thing.

Any horror stories with regards to DJ'ing that stand out?
Honestly, the most horrific thing I can think of was just us actually doing a live thing. We were putting our live set together, which was kind of mellow. It was definitely dance-y in some parts, just because we have songs that favor the dancefloor, but we had the same booking agent as Zedd, so we were booked to open for him at these two massive shows—one in New York, and one in Chicago. We were playing our live set, and the crowd was so upset that we were there. [Laughs] When it started, it was like, "Oh, I get the sense that this isn't going very well." Halfway into our set, the murmurs from the crowd were so loud that it was all you could hear. It wasn't, like, booing—but I think there were a bunch of kids peaking on ecstasy who were so confused about what we were doing there. So that was really bad, and then we had to do it again two nights later. That was probably the worst musical experience I've had.

That's really rough. That's like the DJ equivalent of a stand-up comedian bombing with a really shitty audience.
Yes, but with 7,000 people. We were bombing for sure.

One thing you guys are known for are really killer remixes. Everyone tries their hand at remixing, but very few understand how to do it, as well as what makes the art of remixing special. Tell me about how you guys approach remixing on your end.
One thing we try to avoid is, if a song is perfect, you want to avoid remixing it.
I remember DJ Harvey was talking about when Todd Terje put out "Inspector Norse," and he was like, "No one should remix this, because it's a perfect specimen." That's not to say that the songs we're remixing leave stuff to be desired, but there's room for another approach that might be worth exploring. If there's a good vocal, we could adjust the tempo and do something interesting.

But, honestly, we'd just really obsess over remixes and spend months on them. Any time we got an offer that was like, "Hey, can you send us a remix in two weeks?" We'd be like, "There's just no way that it could happen." Being really obsessive and doing hundreds of different versions is usually how we get to a decent remix. They take us forever. We're also aware of what works well on the dancefloor in a utilitarian way. We're mindful of that.

It's so funny to hear you talk about being careful and intentional when it comes to remixing, because—and this is gonna sound like a knock against some of your early-to-mid-2010s contemporaries, which it definitely is—I feel like there was not a lot of intent behind a lot of remixes from that time. You could really tell who was cranking them out and taking every opportunity they could. Were there any opportunities in general from that time where you guys would be like, "Something stinks about this, I don't think we should go forward with it?"
We did a Lana Del Rey remix. You can probably find it. It's just not very good. But they were like, "Would you be interested in remixing this?" We were like, "No," and then they were like, "There's a decent budget, and Larry Heard is doing a remix too," and we were like, "Wait, what? Okay." So we did it. There were definitely some remixes just didn't come together too.

Yeah, I remember when everybody was remixing Lana. It was a big wave of everybody giving it a shot. "Summertime Sadness" basically became an EDM staple.
Oh, for sure. It's so crazy.

There is something to you guys being asked to remix someone like Lana, though. One thing that you guys have always been really good at is bridging the gap between dance music and more indie-situated sounds. Even when you've collabed with artists like Local Natives or Family of the Year recently, it's sounded very natural. Talk to me about the risks and rewards when it comes to those types of collaboration.
The risk in collaborating with someone who's clearly got a massive profile is that they'll send you a verse and chorus and that's it. It's not really collaborative. You often get often a lazy attempt at putting a song together for a feature. I've always
been opposed to super-cool, feature-heavy moments, because they they often suck for that reason. It's really about finding a collaborator who's actually interested in sitting in a room together and working stuff out. For Family of the Year and Local Natives, those are just friends of ours who live around here, so those have worked out well for that reason. A lot of our collaborations have gone that way: We're friends, and we get in a room and hang out.

With Nancy Whang, we kept on bugging her to get a vocal. Eventually, I was like, "Tyler, I think we need to just show up at her partner's house." So we trapped her in a room, and that's the only way that happened—because she was like, "These guys are slightly annoying." There's so many instances where people just are like, "Yeah, I'll email you the track." These days, I feel like it makes a difference when there's flesh-and-blood collaborating going on.

Tell me about the financial realities of what you guys are doing in the 2020s versus the 2010s.
Surprisingly, DJ fees are still kind of generous. Transparently, I started doing different things to make money over a decade ago, so fortunately I haven't had to make Classixx churn out money to survive.

I don't pay attention too much to the economy of of the music industry, because it's so bleak. But I will say that some of the people that are putting out the most pure stuff are a teacher on the side, so that they don't have to rely solely on touring or endless lame production work to get by. But, I also live in Los Angeles, and a lot of people just are focused on only keeping their project as their entire income source. And it's a struggle. You can see it's not that easy. So it is a little grim. There's no way to deny it.

From your perspective, what have some of the shifting electronic and dance trends that you've witnessed over the last decade?
There have been some phases that I've witnessed where, at least on the dancefloor, there was a sort of lo-fi movement for a moment. Then people were doing stuff with a trance influence and '90s deep trance got another look, which I'm really fond of. I'm hearing a lot of late '90s house influences now.

In terms of the landscape, generally people are getting so good at engineering. It's kind of wild. Like, I am not a good engineer, and we got by early on—specifically with some of our remixes and productions—because the ideas or sonic textures were good. We were talking about the utility of a remix before—it has to just sound good in a room, and people are getting so good at making polished-sounding stuff. It probably exists already, but I'd imagine there'll be kind of some kind of response to that where things will get a little bit more sloppy again, which could be cool.

I've witnessed a lot of grousing from people our age about how trance and high-BPM stuff came back into view, and I always feel like a like a kid when people complain about that stuff. This stuff is fun! Don't you guys like to have a good time when you go out?
I totally agree. Trance was not acceptable or cool when we were in our early 20s. I recently listened to Young Marco's Essential Mix, and it is so fucking good—very euphoric trance, and it goes in a lot of different directions. He's really wrapped his arms around the genre, and it's possible he's moved on subsequently, but there's so much good material there. There's a YouTube account that I follow that constantly puts up old deep trance records that are so beautiful and also tasteful. People who can't just be like, "Maybe there's some good stuff here," I don't really get that at all.