When you get mysterious emails from an artist you’ve never heard of it makes you wonder at first if it’s just spam but when they offer you a listen to an EP and you find that the songs on the EP are more than just a little professionally put together you begin to take a lot of notice. The first song gains your attention and your foot begins to tap, the second takes you further into it and you suddenly realize you’re listening to someone who really knows what they’re doing. By the final song you’re dancing in your house and shouting out #WhoIsEF-E-X. Hard to define the actual genre here apart from perhaps combining it into chill-dub-trap kind of feel that just makes you want more. When I emailed back to find out more about this mystery artist it took days before he replied but below is his story and an Exclusive premiere of the EP which I thank him for.
First, would you mind telling us about yourself, I understand the anonymity, but is there anything you can offer to our readers?
Well I can say I come straight up from Michigan and while Michigan I know has its fair share of places where DJs and all that come out to do their thing, you don’t get that a lot around the area I am from. A lot of it is Hip Hop down there, which makes it harder to garner that sort of interest in the area. However, I managed to get myself out there putting in work for a few NL names, and indirectly led me to some great people who led me to the people I work with now. I took a vacation, then I got inspired to make music again, and decided to go under an alias.
How did you get your start producing electronic music?
It’s funny how that turned out actually. I was producing Rap stuff for a short period of time (I think I was like 17 at the time) and some of the stuff I was doing at the time was more like say the Cataracts or Guetta when he was doing tunes for Flo Rida and all them. I got a tip from a friend that I should stick to that sort of thing, so I messed around with it a lot and I looked into Guetta more to realize there is this whole group of artists and songs that belong in that. I started doing more stuff like the artists I was hearing, you know the usual Deadmau5, Swedish House Mafia, and I just preferred that over being the next big trap name.
- 2099 is sort of the Sadness [in reference to the track by Enigma] of this EP in the sense that it literally throws in whatever works into quite literally a harmonic crash course. Vengeance samples featuring outdated synths? Sure. Trap drums? Sure. Trance melodies and gated vox? Let’s do that too!
- Afterthought is a very old track I kept looking back on and making changes to time and time again. It started with having a dubstep drop that sounded solid, then I worked out the melody, then when I launched EF-E-X I redid the melody sounds, changed the key, and worked out the trap drums.
- Sun Goes Down fills the role of the commercial track of the bunch. Like Afterthought, it was an old track I had that I worked on before that I wasn’t totally satisfied with for the longest time. The original version also sounded a little too close to some of the tracks that inspired it, such as Capsule’s Hero and David Gravell’s Fire Away. Again after launching EF-E-X I looked back on it and spent a full day messing around with it with at least 5 different versions.
- Run That Beat was made right after EF-E-X launched as sort of a demo to work with the idea of my new sound along with another track. I ended up liking it so much that I decided it was fitting as a solid addition to the EP.