Egyptrixx's Dance Music Comes With Built-In 'Flaws'

Posted on Mar 25th 2011 11:00AM by Dave Morris
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Night Slugs

Like a lot of dance music producers these days, Egyptrixx doesn't confine his music to any one subgenre. His debut album, 'Bible Eyes,' -- the first full-length released by the new yet already widely praised UK label Night Slugs -- is electronic dance music, sure, but aside from that, David Psutka tells Spinner over coffee in his native Toronto, "I don't think of music in these categories."

It would be a mistake, though, to assume that Egyptrixx's isn't made with a great deal of focus and attention to detail -- so much that he even admits to deliberately cultivating a certain degree of chaos.
"Basically, I just spent the first month designing a sound palette," Psutka says regarding the wobbly, mind-melting synthesizer and drum sounds that carry the album's unusually hypnotic melodies. "I had a couple of digital synth patches that I wrote and a couple of keyboards, and that was, I guess, just a signature I just started using."

He also loosened the reins on some of his equipment's higher functions, giving an imperfect but more human feel to the house- and dubstep-like rhythmic engines of tracks like 'Naples.'

"The little mistakes are sometimes the best part. A lot of the records that I grew up loving, I think the flaws were what I was into, so I just artificially created some."

Watch Egyptrixx's Video for 'Naples'

Egyptrixx's original take on the disparate sounds of the last couple of years fit neatly into the mandate of Night Slugs, with whom he's already had a long association. Though his 2010 EP, 'The Only Way Up,' was Night Slugs' second release, Egyptrixx and the label's co-founders Bok Bok and L-Vis had "hooked up over Myspace and traded music" long before the business deal.

"The whole label was created basically to release music that they liked, and that wasn't really going into the other channels. Alex [Bok Bok] has amazing, amazing curatorial intuition, and he found this music that existed and no one was really picking up on it, that I think is great music. So we decided in the summertime to do the full-length ['Bible Eyes'] together."

Even with the Internet having rendered physical distance almost irrelevant, some will inevitably question why a Toronto artist would link up with a UK crew when numerous local electronic acts are finding success at home. Egyptrixx is effusive in his praise of local acts from the emerging -- like TRUST, who appear on two tracks on 'Bible Eyes'; he also cites Art Department and XI ("he's amazing") -- to established acts like MSTRKRFT and Deadmau5, and seems mildly baffled that there isn't more of a local community to embrace them.

"People ask about the scene in Toronto, and I don't know," he says, then pauses. "In other cities, there's always like an apparatus like a scene or a club night or a record shop or a promoter. In London, everyone's influenced by the FWD>> nights at Plastic People ... it's the same with Berghain in Berlin, etc.. We don't really have that central piece in Toronto, we don't really have that venue or night; there's no real infrastructure."

Psutka says this in a manner that's more wistful than frustrated, admitting with a hint of resignation that he's performed far more often outside his home city than in it. But as he observes, even with little support for local electronic acts from Canada's indie-focused press and bottom-line-oriented club promoters, he's busier than he's ever been.

"It's just business. I understand that; I don't like it, but it's a big planet."

And Egyptrixx does see at least one fringe benefit to Toronto's scattered scene. "The fact that there isn't that one central piece is probably the reason why everyone doesn't sound alike. So while it sucks that [dance] artists can't make a lot of money in Toronto or can't use Toronto as a jump-off point, it's nice that they don't all sound the same."

Full Junos Coverage

Watch Egyptrixx's Video for 'Bible Eyes'

Egyptrixx perform alongside Holy F---, Poirier, Bonjay and Denise Benson at Spinner's JunoFest Dance Party March 26 at Wrongbar in Toronto.