In "SOUND CHECK," we check in with some of our favorite musicians.
You know you’re killing it when Kendrick Lamar hits you up for a beat. Jason Chung, aka Nosaj Thing, has also worked with Chance the Rapper and his friend Toro Y Moi, as well as toured with James Blake. But for the laid-back LA producer, these things all happened very naturally. It is probably exactly this desire to make things organically that led to his production of very delicate and emotive songs—a rarity amongst beat-heavy electronic music. Ranging from sounding like an insomnia-fuelled drive down the I-10 late at night (“Fog”) to what it must feel like to be wrapped in complete peace (“Try”), his songs express an inexplicable oscillation between different moods. Last Thursday before his show at Output, Nosaj Thing told us about a rare Lauryn Hill encounter, becoming a DJ at age 12, and LA’s punk and experimental scene in the early 2000s.
Photos by Alexander Attar
Fill in the blanks: My name is ______ and my music sounds like ______.
You know you’re killing it when Kendrick Lamar hits you up for a beat. Jason Chung, aka Nosaj Thing, has also worked with Chance the Rapper and his friend Toro Y Moi, as well as toured with James Blake. But for the laid-back LA producer, these things all happened very naturally. It is probably exactly this desire to make things organically that led to his production of very delicate and emotive songs—a rarity amongst beat-heavy electronic music. Ranging from sounding like an insomnia-fuelled drive down the I-10 late at night (“Fog”) to what it must feel like to be wrapped in complete peace (“Try”), his songs express an inexplicable oscillation between different moods. Last Thursday before his show at Output, Nosaj Thing told us about a rare Lauryn Hill encounter, becoming a DJ at age 12, and LA’s punk and experimental scene in the early 2000s.
Photos by Alexander Attar
Fill in the blanks: My name is ______ and my music sounds like ______.
My name is Nosaj Thing and my music sounds like parallel worlds.
How has this tour been with FaltyDL and Prefuse 73?
The tour has been really good. It means a lot to me to be touring with Prefuse 73 because he’s a hero of mine, and I’ve been listening to his work since his early album Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives and One Word Extinguisher. So it’s like full circle for me, you know?
I think I read in an interview somewhere that when you were first buying analog equipment you wanted to buy the one Prefuse 73 used.
Oh yeah, it’s really weird, 'cause with the world I’m in and the type of music that I do, the tools change so fast and hardware is kind of becoming obsolete. But it’s cool 'cause everything is accessible and anyone can do it. But that’s for a lot of things these days, right?
You are very visually aware when it comes to complimenting your music. Can you talk about that?
I wanted to study design before music. I thought I was going to go to school for it. To me, there’s nothing interesting about someone just performing with a MIDI controller and laptop on stage. It’s just kinda boring to watch, right? I don’t want to tour and play shows in clubs, I’d rather create an experience, ideally a whole 360 experience where you just don’t know where you are. But if I don’t do a visual show, I actually ask them to turn off all the lights and just make it really loud. Just like one little light or whatever. If there’s no visual at all, I would rather have it be about the sound.
I read that you liked a lot of differen