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Music

We Spoke To Visionquest

And they sent for Skrillex!

Seth Troxler, Lee Curtiss, Shaun Reeves and Ryan Crosson are friends from their formative years in Detroit. All individually successful house and electro producers and DJs, they combined forces to set up their label Visionquest. This year sees the launch of the Visionquest13 series – 13 multi-sensory shows around the world and the only chance to catch them all playing together at the same party.

I met them with various hangovers and jet lag before they jetted off to WMC in Miami and a couple of days after Skrillex’s new online channel posted a short documentary about their home town.

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Noisey: How are you all?

Shaun: I just got here from Australia.

Ryan: The rest of us have just been in and out, just floating about.

Seth: I just got back from being on vacation for two months. Being on holiday for a long period of time and then going straight back into work, I think, almost elevates your stress level to a higher point than before.

Noisey: I interviewed JLS and they answered in order and they finished each others sentences. Can you do you do that?

Lee: Are we like a boy band?

Shaun: That's not gonna be us!

Ryan: We kinda just jump in there and when someone feels more comfortable answering –

Shaun: If it gets too bad then we'll have to bring out the talking stick.

It was weird, as soon as they pressed record they all sat up straight and went in order

Lee: (like a robot) Yes. We. Really. Appreciate. The opportunites. We've. Been. Given.

Ryan: Sorry, I'm not doing hand gestures and miming at you - I'm telling our manager behind you her computer's over there. I wasn't saying get the fuck away or anything.

Seth: It's not going to go down like a boy band.

Have you guys seen that Skrillex and friends documentary thing about techno and Detroit on their new channel, Potato?

All: WwwhhhAAAATT? No!

Ryan: I know that they were doing like an online music/media sort of thing, but… Skrillex doing a thing on Detroit?

Shaun: If Skrillex has anything to do with Detroit… we might have to move back there.

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Seth: Are you serious? There's like a documentary about Detroit?

Lee: Is this on the record or off? On the record, Skrillex, we're happy for your success –

Ryan: He's a nice guy, he's a nice guy.

Lee: I hear he's a wonderful person, but can you please just leave Detroit out of this one?

Seth: Can you leave the rest of electronic music out of this one, because what you do is shit.

Lee: Aaaaaaaah!

Seth: You're a nice guy, but the music's fucking horrible, and has nothing to do with our culture.

Shaun: I think he's smart enough to know.

Ryan: This guy we know made a good point, he said that when we were growing up there were all these teen angst bands and they don't have those any more. So who is the teen angst?

Seth: Skrillex. You know you need to find someone to be into to hate their dads, but don't bring that up on us. Don't bring that in on real cool and contemporary music.

Lee: So it strikes us as a bit odd, you could say.

Ryan: I wanna go watch that right away.

Do you hate it when people call EDM - "EDM" - or Electronic EDM?

Ryan: No, because hasn't it been electronic dance music for a long time? Why do you have to call it EDM now?

Seth: I think in a way it's kind of better in a positive sense for anything dancey and with a commercial view to be taken out of the Grammy's remix category. Like legitimised electronic music exists, but also it's like calling jazz and classical and EDM, and there's a lot of real musicianship going on. Like Al Walser who never made music and just filled his way into getting a Grammy nomination. That's how the entire world views our community and our musical heritage, which is a bit kinda gross in a way. It is how it is, but it's pretty shit that that's all that it is.

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Ryan: It's like when I go home for Christmas and maybe my cousin, who's like 16 or 17, thinks that's all that we do. I'm like, "Man, you haven't got a clue!"

Lee: This is where it affects us on a personal level when you come home to people who are completely oblivious to what's been happening in music in the last 10 years and it's either one of two things. They say, "can you DJ my daughter's wedding, because I heard you're really good"' Or they say, "I saw on TV what you do. Do you guys wear costumes? Like the guy with the mouse head?"

Ryan: Not exactly! I mean, Seth sometimes. Maybe all of us sometimes [wear costumes].

Seth: Not a rat head!

I guess we should talk about Visionquest 13.

Seth: I guess this series of events we're doing, we're trying to create a wider view of, of I've kinda lost myself here…

Ryan: A wider view of let's get away from the stage, the lighting, looking at the DJ and 20,000 people. What we're trying to bring back is what we experienced when we were growing up in music.

Lee: More concisely, as EDM has risen to the forefront of what a lot of people want to go out and see, they've applied the classic concert approach where you pack a venue, have a stage, a bunch of expensive lighting, maybe even fucking pyrotechnics at this point. WOOO! Save that shit for fucking Motley Crue, because they did it right. What we're doing in particular is purposely transforming the rest of the venue so as soon as you walk in, it's an experience, it's an immersive environment.

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Shaun: It's more than two guys standing on a stage trying to mix two records together to entertain 20,000 people in a stadium.

Don't you know 13's an unlucky number, what an earth are you thinking?

Shaun: Not in ancient cultures, actually.

Lee: My brother was born on the 13th and he's one of the best people in my entire life. His lucky number is 13 and so is mine kinda.

Shaun: 13 steps in the pyramids…

Ryan: It's also 2013.

That's easier.

Lee: That's the biggest one.

Ryan: And it's Detroit - the 313 area code…

Lee: Aside from our launch party, there's 12 months in the year, and we've got to space them out somewhat accordingly.

I was 13 once…

Lee: You were 13. That's when puberty started and that's kinda like us, we're at the puberty stage artistically.

Shaun: There was that whole 2012 Doomsday thing and now it's 2013 and we're still here. This is supposed to be the new age and this is the beginning of something new.

So this is basically you guys going through puberty then?

Ryan: YEAH!

Lee: But if I go through it again I don't know I'm gonna do. I don't think I could take another puberty.

Seth: The whole tour is actually a reunion tour to an album we're trying to make, which is a mix of Adam Sandler and Plastikman. Early Adam Sandler: the audio books.

Lee: With Elliot Smith stopping by with an armful of Perlon records. That's what we all put together. There's a little bit of all of us and one of us may represent something different.

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Seth: This is the adventure that inspires that album. It's like the mind, adventure playground that then will later be established and talked about in audio books, you know man?

I'm still laughing at puberty.

Ryan: We're saying that most bands have to make a bunch of albums before they can hate each other and break up and then the money and the fans get them back together for a reunion. We're not going for any of that. It's mostly for the fans and ourselves so we can hang out and make music again.

Seth: Like we did when we hit puberty.

What the fuck's happening in that video on your website? The worst bit is the weird spiders hatching out of an egg thing. It's well sciencey.

Seth: That's kind of our vibe.

Shaun: The opening scene to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Seth: Or, like, The Big Bang Theory. I don't think this is touched on enough in our so called press release. It is us going into spaces and altering them. We did a really big event in DC10 in Ibiza and made this really weird psychedelic freak out. We were really into David Lynch and this kind of eerie world in between. The events are meant to touch on that in an environment sense and also kind of touch on this paradigm evolutionary consciousness shift. Evolving consciousness shift.

I heard Seth, that your worst ever gig involved sleeping with a dog with skin disease in Philadelphia?

Seth: It was shedding all this hair. I walked in the house and it smelled like dying dog. There was a puke blanket. I was really hungover coming form New York and then we had to go to this party and they had a documentary playing of like, Buckminster Fuller and there were all these organic hippies and I had to go sleep on the floor of the studio room with just my jacket over me. Then they woke me up and I had to play to a room of bikers and neo-hippies. And then after that - and this was the funniest thing - after me was this little person and he kinda looked like the little person from Twin Peaks and he was the DJ after me and playing drum n bass. I was like, "I just need to get out and go home."

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Ryan: The worst thing for me was the promoter said that I had to sleep in his little daughter's room. I was like, "HUH?" She wasn't there, but I was sleeping on this mini bed and it had cartoon sheets and dolls and I was just like, "this is not right' you know?" I was coming back to this house all fucked up on pills and I'm sleeping in this little girl's bed. What if she comes home? I didn't have any dogs or puke, but that was uncomfortable for me.

Seth: I think any musician who's spent any amount of time on the road should go through that. It's been a long period of time, we've just started to become somewhat successful, but there have been so many years of being so broke and somewhat destitute.

Lee: My answer to that was I did three years of those fucking shows!

Seth: You really start to question if that's what you want to do. And just when you're about to quit, that's when you start to be able to buy food and somewhat survive. And actually be able to pay for the train.

Lee: Yeah that was a big moment for all of us.

But you can do other things can't you? Seth has a degree in design, Ryan's got one in marketing, Lee sold cars and Shaun's quite pretty. You could be a cutting edge New Media Agency if you wanted?

Seth: You know, maybe one day! Maybe one day. Lifestyle branding.

Youth synergy.

Seth: Yeaaah! I like that. I might take you up on that idea.

Are those things handy though for running your record label?

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Ryan: I've learned more from working with my father in about four years than I learnt with all the money in education and all that shit. Hands on work and training is infinitely better than book learning unless you're a doctor or a physicist or something. I think experience is the key.

Seth: I guess all the years I was in art school and having to go to galleries and stuff had some kind of lasting input on what I think is aesthetic, but overall it doesn't really mean anything. It's better just to go out and work than actually go to school. But it's lucky that we're all really smart in general. If you're an idiot and you went to school for a decade–

Shaun: I guess that would mean you have discipline.

Seth: Some people just love school.

Lee: We have a friend like that who now has a doctorate in philosophy and refuses to leave school.

Seth: And now he's a teacher. In school.

Lee: In school and he goes and does talks at Ivy League schools.

Ryan: He was one of the biggest partiers in history as well. He was a strong raver man.

And now you're off to WMC? Are you all going? Do you like it when you get to play together?

Ryan: Yeah this year we're gonna do a show there.

Seth: It's not one of the Visionquest13 events though.

Ryan: We're going to do a label showcase.

Shaun: Produced by other people but featuring our artists.

Seth: That's the thing with the 13 thing - it's the only time we'll all be playing together.

Ryan: Every time we've tried to do all four it's been too much. But when we've done combination of the four, it works well. Something like a tag team.

Seth: But we've been thinking how can we tag team and not just seem like four guys tag teaming? Maybe we make the parties look really cool and come up with some quasi science-fiction cultural scheme. A cultural relevance Ponzi scheme.

I think that's the best sentence to finish on. Thanks guys!