Patrick Holland on the Montreal Scene, Bridging the Genre Divide, and DJ'ing in His Pajamas

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Big fan of Vancouver-hailing musical multi-hyphenate Patrick Holland, who has produced incredible dance music both under his own name and as Project Pablo, alongside his work with fascinating acts like TOPS and newsletter alum Blue Hawaii. I especially loved his record Infra from this year, he just put out a very nice new EP with Physical Therapy, and he's got a new EP out September 4 as well. We recently hopped on the phone to talk through his impressive career thus far and his approach when it comes to honing his craft in guitar-based and electronic musical environs:

You've been doing writing and production for other people for a while, alongside making your own music. Talk to me about that balance.
I've been making music for other people's projects the whole time that I've been making music. I've never just focused on my own project. When it comes to "session work"—writing for other people—I've been thinking about it a bit more seriously, whereas before it was just happening without trying, I didn't really set aside enough time for it. I've always collaborated a lot, and I hadn't thought too much about it, but now, when it comes to writing in a pop music sphere, or something where there's an end goal, getting in that headspace for another person's project is interesting.

Tell me about the Montreal music scene from your perspective.
There's a lot of crossover between the dance music scene and the "band scene," for lack of a better term. The two blend, and historically in Montreal, it's always been a clash of the two. Since the pandemic, things have felt more disjointed because there's not as many DIY parties, which blended the scenes more through the 2010s. You'd have a band play earlier in the night, and then the DJ would play all night after. That caused a lot more of the blend where you heard certain figures work on different stuff. Now, it's more studio-related, or just jamming at each others' houses. It's definitely a small scene. It's not like New York, where it's very huge.

Do you think the concentrated nature of the Montreal scene affects the general sense of creativity at all?
When it comes to doing session stuff, Montreal, is pretty relaxed. It's not to say that no one's taking music seriously, because everyone is—even in their own little worlds. But it's not as business-driven. It's more open and fun creatively. I don't think anyone is like, "Let's do a session today to bang out a like verse, chorus, bridge song." It's a lot more relaxed—jamming with one another, playing in each other's bands or projects, or just going to someone's studio to listen to music. It's more casual overall. If you're in New York, there's people everywhere, from Mark Ronson to your underground techno producer, in the same city. Whereas, Montreal, not really the case.

You get a lot pretty cool, weird music—stuff that leans more pop but is usually maybe not the most streamable music at times, but definitely very creative. They're not like forcibly being weird, but there's always a bit of the quirk. If you look at Montreal disco from the '70s, that stuff was always a little rough and rugged in comparison to the more commercial disco at the time. There's a bit of an edge, and it could even be comedic at times, which is cool.

Tell me about how your career started—how you got to the point where you're doing this full-time now.
I haven't had a real job in 10 years, so I've been doing music full-time as of 2014—but I didn't start doing music until I was in my twenties. As a teenager, I took drum lessons, but I never played in a band. I taught myself guitar just from learning covers with tabs, but I never wrote anything or thought about pursuing music until I was in my twenties, when I discovered how to make electronic music with Ableton. I was living in Vancouver at the time, which is where I'm from, and I bounced around the scene there DJing a bunch.

I never really wanted to DJ, but I realized that was a great way of expanding knowledge and getting out there in a community in a much easier way, especially within electronic music. At first, I was just trying to play Ableton live sets at shows all the time, and I realized not everyone wants to hear weird electronic music. They'd probably prefer you to DJ if you're playing a party. So I started doing that, and it was a little less self-indulgent. From there, I met a lot of people through a physical community of going out, instead of being online.

I moved to Montreal in 2014, and at that time things took off from playing a lot of parties. I put out this record on 1080p called I Want to Believe, and that was the first thing that really seemed to catch more listeners globally. I was making so much music at the time, and over the next two or three years, touring and all that stuff kicked in.

It's interesting to hear you mention the difference between being online and interacting in IRL communities. A lot of the stuff you and your peers were involved in during the 2010s, I was consuming largely online, to the point where I and other critics arguably viewed it as an online phenomenon of sorts. Tell me more about that community and how it evolved.
There were definitely key figures in the early 2010s who helped everyone build an online presence—1080p, certain blogs. When it comes to physical interactions, it was all borne out of mutual interest in the types of music we loved—'90s house, techno and whatnot. It wasn't happening in a vacuum by any means. It was about the music, but also about these long-form DIY parties in which everyone was striving to be both the people dancing and the people DJing or organizing them. Everyone was a part of it. It wasn't just one small group of people trying to make something happen.

I was mostly spending time in like Vancouver, Montreal, and New York around that time, and it was all connected within that. People would be playing and jumping around at each other's parties within those scenes My buddy Cooper, who did this party called Far Away in L.A., was definitely a big part of all of that. And I'm mostly referencing like North America right now, just because this is just from my point of view, but obviously there's tons of stuff happening everywhere else too. Before I had started going to Europe, that was the world I was in.

Tell me about some of your formative experiences at the club early on with dance music.
I remember when Delroy Edwards put out his first couple of records on L.I.E.S., and he played in Vancouver at a festival called New Forms, which they used to do at this space called the Hangar in this area of East Vancouver. No one was really doing parties at this one building because it required festival access, so it was cool to see an underground DJ play heavy ghettotech in a really nice setting with good sound. I remember that being a formative experience. At that time, I'd already been making dance music or going to parties, but hearing it in that way hit a little hit different. Kassem Mosse did a live set too, it was so good.

As somebody who follows a lot of people on "DJ Twitter," I'm very familiar with the ups and downs of DJing these days. Let's hear some DJ horror stories.
It's funny, because I don't really tour much anymore. I still DJ here and there, but it's not a constant thing. It's very hard to remember specific scenarios from when it was a constant thing. It was all a blur, and that's kind of why I stopped doing it as much. A funny one was when I played Boiler Room in Australia in 2018 at this festival. I knew there would be people there, but I was playing earlier, so I didn't think much of it. I'd been up all night—I think I played in Sydney or something the night before. No, it was in Brisbane, and I played an afterparty and basically didn't sleep.

I got there early to the Boiler Room thing, and it was way bigger than anticipated. I was basically wearing pajamas—a Dave Matthews Band t-shirt track pants with a bathing suit underneath and sandals. I played the set, and now that's the biggest DJ set of mine on YouTube. I had thought about tracks I wanted to play, but I didn't think it would be a ripping party by that point. I was opening for Dan Shake, Honey Dijon, and Gerd Jansen, but it was already going by the time I showed up.

One thing that's interesting to me about your career is that you've proved yourself really adept at what could be considered two different aisles of music—electronic dance-y fare, and most guitar-based indie sounds. Tell me about that balance for you.
I'm trying my best to not think about them as being separate anymore. When I wrote You're the Boss, at that time I didn't make dance music at all for two years, except for working with my studio mate Francis, who goes by Priori. We did Jump Source together, but that was my only dance or electronic music outlet for those years. For my own stuff, I fully dove deep into guitars and live instruments to really figure it out. I knew how to play the instruments, but when it came to recording them, I hadn't quite got a handle on it. I wanted to make sure I wasn't being super naïve and just plugging into a sound card that being the sound.

The styles were was definitely separated then, and it was more just a huge learning experience. Recording that record, I learned probably the most I've ever learned in a condensed period of time about recording and writing. Had I not done that, I wouldn't be where I'm at now. Now I try to blend the two together and not think about them separately anymore, but I really had to get my chops up. It took a shitload of embarrassment trying to figure it out, which is all part of the fun. Now, when I'm writing demos, I flip-flop between the two a lot. In the early stages of writing something, there's a bit of a divide, and as I further produce or write something, I try and smush them together instead of having them so separated.

I thought Infra reflected that approach quite well. Tell me about putting that record together.
A lot of those songs are from 2016-2017 until now. They're a bunch of the electronic-leaning ones—I even played like one of them at that Boiler Room in 2018—that I mixed again and redid a lot of the parts. The early stages of a lot of those tracks were demos I'd tossed away from previous records, so I had a little help from my old self, having these demos sitting around to mix and produce a little bit further in my new context. The guitar stuff was definitely very recent—within the last year and in 2023. It helped combine the two really well, having all this kind of stuff sitting around that I could pick through.

I'm curious to hear you talk about your general experience in the music industry. When you're somebody who works with other people often, you sometimes get a broader sampling of the business side of things.
In the last couple of years, I've learned a ton more than when I was just in the DJ or electronic spheres, which were micro sides of the greater music industry as a whole. I didn't realize that streaming was actually a thing until 2018, but that's when most people actually adopted it, even though it did exist before then. That further monopolized the music industry, so leading up to then, I was in a nice "Ignorance is bliss" situation, existing totally separate from the rest of the world in this micro-underground electronic scene.

But now I feel we're all put up against each other—all sides, all genres, all professions. It's not even just streaming, it's everything that gets put into this monoculture. Since going through that, I've learned that the way you conduct yourself in the music industry as an artist is a part of the art itself. I used to have a manager, but I haven't for the last two years, which I've really enjoyed. The big thing I try and do is stay as personal as I can with people, instead of removing too much. Having personal relationships with my agents and people that book me, or people that i'm writing with—I don't see that as a bad thing. For me to go through this and enjoy it, I need to have a bit more personability, or else I'll feel like pretty lost.

Eventually, maybe I'll have a manager again, but for now I'm enjoying my current state. I don't mind doing emails or catching up with people. It's fine, it's not that hard, it's just the way that I choose to do things. I still manage to have time to make a lot of music too. I'm also very fortunate to have done the extensive touring that I've done in my past to know what's out there. Now I can flow through this industry in a way that I feel I have a bit more control over.

You're touching on something under-discussed, which is that you don't always need a publicist or manager. In a previous interview with Sadie Dupois, there was a joke about how it's never a good sign when you see the band's press photos before there's music available.
Yeah, that's a big one. The most underrated piece of advice I hear people give is "Figure out what works best for you." Don't do what you feel like you have to do. You don't need a manager if you have one EP out—but some people feel the need to do that, which is fine, because if you don't know how this whole game works, then maybe you need someone to help guide you through that for a bit. But I don't need to put a filter in front of that for now. Maybe I will, eventually—but, also, I'm not trying to become some pop star, so I don't see myself needing a filter in front of me to communicate with people for the foreseeable future.