Tea with sg

Smriti @kesharis and I met at Sundance just before her film and experience The Bomb premiered. I thought of her over the last few days because her film, focused on nuclear arms, ends with the words "our silence is a form of consent." Given what's going on right now, I was excited to connect with her about where she sees these ideas evolving. We touch on her other films The Selfish Gene and The Goal, a Leonard Cohen piece released around his post-humous 2019 album. We connect deeply on the ideas of DJing as applied to other forms.

Robb @beatport is CEO of Beatport, who just pledged to donate 100% of Tuesday's music industry blackout day proceeds. Dance music is black music, and there's no way forward without acknowledging and taking direct actions to support that. Beatport is a platform for DJ's to download music. There was a time where corporate interests confused that, but Beatport is doing all the right things now since Robb took the reins with new investor backing. All the tech features are there, cloud storage DJ sets, livestreams during quar, stems, all supporting the core of independent and underground dance music labels and DJs. Beatport does only 5% volume from majors. Playlists are not a thing, it's handmade DJ charts. Nothing sits on their sales charts for long either, everything is fresh, and driven by the culture. As Robb says, nobody wants to play the same music as everyone else, so the ecosystem remains active and lean-in. It's a totally different kind of consumer behavior than what we criticize in the mainstream currently.

Kansas @kansasbowling first got on my radar via her appearance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Afterwards, I did some digging on all the Manson girls. They're all super cool. But she is the coolest. She's more obsessed with horror movies than I am. Not just horror movies, but as we talked about, really anything. She made her first film with her own money (not rich people money, like waited tables money) at 17 years old. She tracked down her dream distributor and convinced them to put it out. She tracked down QT and convinced him to put her in OUATIH. And her forthcoming second feature, I'm confident, will top both of those. We talk a lot about Neil Breen too. Do a dive. http://neilbreen-5films.com And watch all the music videos on Kansas' website. http://kansas-bowling.com/musicvideos/ Especially "The Resort Beyond the Resort."

Marshall Jefferson @marshall_jefferson is one of the foundational figures in House music. "Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem)" is actually universally accepted as the House music anthem. There's no other genre that actually has a universally accepted anthem. Marshall's big contribution to the story was those keys. His musicality. There were DJ's making stuff of the clubs, but he has always combined that energy with beautiful melodies and songwriting. Everything melodic in dance music at some point can be traced from those keys. We talk about lots of things, but I'm most excited for the new Ten City LP, Marshall's collab with Byron Stingily. 

Isabel @isabelvsandoval and I met at Venice Film Fest immediately following her Lingua Franca world premiere. It was fun diving into it, comparing her austerity and restraint within a topic so obviously exploited by so many pieces of 'content' over the last few years, I won't even say films. Isabel is so so smart. I love diving deep into our artistic connections, we're both major students of film. I'm honored to have worked with Isabel recently on a film of my own, that perhapsssss people will see sometime soon. I break from my edit session to write this intro, and the next email I expect in my inbox should be a link to picture lock. I held this episode a week because there's some announcements that are coming shortly before this will air, really exciting stuff. Isabel has been furiously touring the globe with Lingua Franca, at all of the most amazing festivals, and she's about to launch her next project, building an amazing support system of international partners. I'm very excited to see what's next, because it feels like the first fully free piece she will make. She goes into that a lot on this episode.

Jeff Weiss @passionweiss and I met a few years ago in Israel. I'm weird in groups so I don't think we talked much. Sounds like I'm kidding but I'm totally serious. I'm still very very uncomfortable with new groups of people, whether they know each other or not. So somehow with years of my reading Jeff's writing and actually knowing him for a while now, we'd never really chopped it up. So this convo went on for 2.5 hours apparently, but I felt like I was uncomfortably cutting us off when we ended. We could chat all day. Jeff started out as an LA rap music aficionado and has become this kinda go-to LA culture historian. Like he's the dude who wrote THE Kobe piece. There were lots. But the one everyone shared after the 60 point night, and his recent tragic death--Jeff put the words to what we felt. Recently he's put out a lot of good ones on Eminem, RZA, Kendrick, Los Angeles, Britney, check his feed for more. I was hyperlinking these posts for a while but realized it only works on Anchor and nobody really looks at that, so just go on Jeff's instagram and he links everything there. We talk about everything. This won't be his last visit I hope.

Ebony is the better half of Lost Under Heaven (LUH), where we had Ellery on last week. Ebony and Ellery are my favorite couple. They live a life I really marvel at, with love and creation all together and flowing one to the other fluidly. I have so much to learn from her. Spent much of this episode asking her questions about how to conduct energy, how to connect mine to that of others, reading theirs, funneling it all into my art. Ebony and Ellery are figuring out how to make art in the new world. We've talked a lot about lateral movement into different forms, and focusing on the micro fanbases, patronage, building our own ecosystems. Ebony has already evolved significantly and fast, where the original narrative of LUH was around her adding a visual component to Ellery's music, the second album featured her sharing equal vocal and songwriting duties. She's powerful. 20 episodes already!

Banoffee / Martha and I met a long time ago, like almost ten years ago I'd say, when I was cool. I was super cool for a minute, she acknowledges on the show. She's way cooler these days. I remember catching up with her in LA a few years ago and her sunbathing by my pool w her armpit hair and thinking oh she became really cool now. And so her debut album came out right before the rona on Cascine Records (featured on the previous Jeff Bratton episode). We talk about how it doesn't matter. Because something happened for Martha in the last few years, and she's in front now. Everyone she's friends with and working with are the most progressive creatives on earth. And her album is really really good pop music. So we're gonna look for music in the new world. And she's going to be making it.

Jeff @jeffbratton is founder of Cascine Records. I'm gonna call it New York's Cascine Records. Because in my mind, Cascine's ten years moving through and shaping NYC's independent music community will dictate their next chapter, even if it's in East LA where all the cool kids seem to be today. Jeff is part of what I'd consider the first kinda label collective. Not formal in any way. But we talk about it, there's a squad of indie labels that came out of NYC around the same time that all helped each other out. This wasn't a time marked by competition in signings, as he tells one story, it was actually the opposite, where labels would suggest projects for each other. These labels all just kinda have their flavor, and the infrastructure takes shape around that. And when you're in it, you understand that artists fit how they fit. It's very different from the music industry that people hear about. So this was a pleasure to go deep. Next episode is one of Jeff's artists also.