Soundcheck with Wavedash

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Soundcheck is a new interview series from Elsewhere where we catch up with artists on the road. We talk all things touring, production, gear, green room essentials, and more.

For our first edition, we're checking in with Wavedash. The Austin-based trio has been taking their new mixtape Tempo across the US over the past two months. Following their debut album World Famous Tour, the group has been looking to capture the energy of the afters, pop-up sets, and spontaneous b2bs on their latest tour. Here's how they're doing it ↓

So we're sitting here during soundcheck… shouldn't you guys be rehearsing or warming up?

luke
We’re not rehearsing these shows and it's been incredible — It's the most fun we've ever had playing shows. For our first album World Famous Tour we really focused on an audio-visual live set concept where we were playing all the songs live and also doing visuals from stage. We made the visuals ourselves and put the show together with almost no help. When we started thinking about what to do after World Famous Tour, Tempo eventually formed around the idea of doing the opposite of everything we had just done on World Famous Tour. What's the opposite of playing live? DJing. What's the opposite of having the entire set be planned out? Having none of it planned out. What’s the opposite of these like really beautiful eye-grabbing visuals? No phones and a black and white camera feed.

Some artists create beautiful shows – Madeon has a beautiful show that requires your full attention. It's a stunning production and he's put so much work into the visuals. For this tour we'd actually prefer if people weren't looking at us to be honest with you. I don't think we're terribly important people and I would rather people meet someone new or come with your friends get drunk and have fun.

With nothing planned, are there any sporadic moments that stand out from the tour?

luke
At one of the first shows, somebody, it might have been Michael played Satisfaction by Benny Benassi – just the original, no edit. Then we mixed that into Astronomia by Tony Igy which is also a really old song, but they work so unbelievably well on top of each other. The first time we played that I feel like we all thought it was soooo crazy.

michael
Yeah Astronomia is honestly so good. Nobody spins that song. Maybe people think it's too early to be calling it like a classic or whatever. I don't know why it's not a bigger thing like Satisfaction. Every time we play it like the entire room is always doing the lead melody. The way that song is produced out, they have these really harsh reverb tails after the lead which is such a crazy sound. It’s been one of our favorites to play.

I'm glad you guys did something fresh with Satisfaction – I haven't been able to get away from the Baile Funk remix of that track. I gotta say – it does bang.

luke
That's Skrillex's fault. (laughs) We're just playing the OG man – the OG is too good to not just let it rip. A lot of what we had had in mind when making the mixtape, sort of inspiration creatively, was from artists like salute, Mall Grab and KETTAMA – and even DJ Something who's spinning with us tonight.

michael
jamesjamesjames, all these guys just make incredible house music.

luke
World Famous Tour spanned so many genres and ideas, but there was no there was no house music. We had never taken a stab at that. A lot of our production style is already very sample driven so it just made sense. I think our song Had2Go has been huge for us. It's one of those songs where if it never takes off I won't be upset, but it does feel like a huge song. I feel like eventually somebody's gonna play it’s just gonna go. It's so catchy. It's got the the frequency. Some songs just have the frequency.

michael
Who's gonna match my freq type shit.

How's the "no phones" idea been playing out?

luke
When we made that post and got the phone camera stickers made, we weren't really sure how it was gonna go over and we were fully prepared to stop it one or two shows into the tour. The first show it went over so well, everyone was so present and engaged. Not to be * old man yells at clouds * but the phone just gets in the way sometimes. I think people are sometimes more concerned with proving that they were somewhere rather than just actually being somewhere.

michael
We have a hard time imagining doing another headline show where there's phones to be honest. It makes that much of a difference.

luke
I'm really glad we're doing this interview because I've been wanting to say this for a while — it goes back to the connective tissue between World Famous Tour and Tempo:

The whole ethos of this show in general is trying to have as much fun as possible at any given moment. I think fun is an extremely underrated emotion. I think a lot of people view it as a sort of childlike thing to play pretend or, you know, have fun or whatever. I often find that in almost any scenario, picking or choosing any option that results in you having the most fun is always correct. When it came time to put together this show, fun was the number one objective in the same way that Porter Robinson is currently rolling out his next record.

Was that shared goal with Porter something that you all spoke about?

luke
We were in similar boats when World Famous Tour ended and Nurture ended. We were all kind of like "okay what do we do next?" Don't get me wrong, both of those albums were very fun, but we were creating stuff that was a little more serious at the time. Our debut album was a big deal to us. Nurture took seven years to make. We were all just very very honed in on doing something artistically powerful. Maybe thats not the right word – I think what we're doing now is also just really powerful, but in a different light.

It feels like World Famous Tour and Tempo are pretty antithetical. Do you guys see any through lines between the two shows at all? Is there anything that carries into every Wavedash show?

michael
Us. We're just consistently having the most fun in the room and I don't think that will ever really change. We spent a lot of time going to concerts and seeing DJs growing up. It was always a ginormous bummer when we would go see someone and they were not giving 110%. We always thought that if we ever got to DJ, we would have the most fun ever. That idea never really went away. It's the dumbest job in the world that we get to we get paid to play our music really loud. It's really stupid and I love it.

When I saw you all a couple years back, I remember Evangelion being a really clear visual motif in World Famous Tour. Was there any visual media that you drew inspiration from for this album? The Had2Go visualizer reminds me of early internet dot-com era stuff.

luke
Those were all done by this artist Isaac whose Instagram is @hysterical_melancholy. They make these "web trash" collages that are particularly stunning to me. I had never seen someone make that kind of art in a way that was not just trying to replicate old stuff but literally taking old archival stuff and putting it together visually. It’s extremely reminiscent of what we grew up with and how we remember the internet.

luke
World Famous Tour was deeply mood-boarded for a very long time – it was a lot of like Ray Gun Magazine and Chris Ashworth. The visual references with Tempo were not as clear. The only thing we had that was pretty set in stone was the character Tempo. Michael had had this idea a while back for us to like have a mascot be part of our band, which we all just loved as an idea and felt it fit really well with the playful nature of Tempo. When we put together the mood board for Tempo, the main inspiration we kept drawing on were the designs of Ko Takeuchi. He does all of the character designs for the video games Rhythm Heaven and WarioWare. At some point after mood boarding for a really long time we were kind of like – what if we just reach out to him and ask him if he would actually do it? So we sent out a really long email in both English and Japanese. I remember exhausting myself over it and really making sure it was perfect. We sent it to him and he didn't reply for like probably a month or two. When he finally gave me an email back, it was very sweet and something along the lines of "please give me a few more minutes." The next night we were all in Discord playing Minecraft and I looked at my phone to find an email from him. Lo and behold the character for Tempo was just done. He just did it. We didn't talk about like budget timeline like anything like he just took the reference and was like “okay here it is.”

There's been a clear sonic shift between World Famous Tour and Tempo. How's it been dabbling in house and more pop-forward tracks?

luke
The overarching ethos of Wavedash is that we kind of want to be able to do everything and have people be open to that. When a song like All Ur Luv gets put together, which was a demo that I had started on my couch at my parents' house on laptop speakers – I honestly thought there was a really decent chance that song could have just died on my computer. There's songs like that that we make all the time. They just never see the light of day. It just so happened to be this like super one-in-a-million magical thing where Chaz (Toro y Moi) and Hugo (Madeon) were excited about the song. Chaz had performed after us in Los Angeles at Porter Robinson's Nurture headline shows. He had watched us do a World Famous Tour. We had never met at that point and Porter introduced us to Chaz, who was like “that was amazing.” And I was kind of like, “really?” I didn't know at the time that he liked dance music. Towards the end of our interaction he was like, “if you ever need vocals, hit me up.” I was kind of like, “don't just say that because I actually will.”

luke
For like a year or two, like nothing felt right. We usually like to take months or years of friendship and then put that together towards having a track. So there was probably a year or two after that where we didn't even talk to Chaz. And then we had a song... the first thing we sent him was b With U. We thought that was the song, so we sent it to him and he was like, “This is great. I love it. I'll let you know.” Then some time passed and I had to put my ego aside and follow up with him several times — being such huge fans I didn’t want to be a bother but I really wanted this track to happen. At some point I sent him the demo for All Ur Luv just to give him another option. I was like, "Hey, if you're having trouble with the last one here's another one, just for fun." About a month or two later he sent back the vocals and we were like, "this is great." I was actually on the road at the time with our friend, James Ivy, who I love. Incredible artist. I was on the road with him just for fun. His tour manager had to drop off his tour early and he called me saying, "I need someone to drive around the country with me." And I was like, "I'll do it." But anyways, when we got the vocals I was on tour with him — we were in Wisconsin or something. We were in the middle of nowhere at like a crappy hotel and we were playing the vocals back. Jimmy was like, "oh, I have an idea." He took my laptop from me and cut Chaz's voice into the chorus phrase where he says, 'baby I know it won't be the same without–' That's a vocal chop. He never fully sang that.

michael
So we ended up with this disco-y demo with Toro Y Moi and we were like, "this is crazy." Then we were at Porter's wedding and Hugo was there. I had seen Hugo and I said, “Hey, we have this sort of French-touch-y thing that's a little more your world than ours." We just wanted some feedback on how to do it really well, so we asked him for his thoughts on how he would produce it out. He sent me back probably 12 text messages in a row. Really big text messages being like, "yeah EQ this frequency out of the kick and then like run it through this compressor, blah, blah, blah, blah." I think I stopped reading halfway through and asked him if he wanted the stems. He didn't want to impose but he wanted to work on the track. He was very, very sweet for lending us his time and his creativity for that song. He took it from being great to just like a total pop smash. He's also such a big fan of Chaz, so it was kind of a huge dream come true and a huge win for everybody involved. We grew up as Madeon fans and stuff. Sometimes some shit that you couldn't even plan for ends up happening. I think if you asked me to do it again, I don't think we could.

Is there anything thats absolutely essential for a Wavedash show? What's your rider looking like?

luke
We have some candy on the rider, which never gets eaten. We're really not sweets people anymore. We keep it on the rider as a callback to the younger us, who would have thought that that was the coolest thing in the world. We did this thing for a while where we would put a singular banana on the rider because more than one banana feels a little excessive. So there's one banana if anybody wants it.

michael
We're not really the type to have a pre-show ritual. We just like to show up and plug in. We do have a digital or disposable camera on our rider that we pass around in the crowd. Gonna be cute to see how those come out.

What's next for the Tempo era?

gavin
You'll know very soon. You'll see very soon. There is a very cut and clear plan for one for what Tempo is and you will see very soon.

🔊

interview by jai lemessurier