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UFO!
Location : NYC, NY, USA
Affiliations: Phunckateck, Phracktal, Groundscore, Violence, Sanguine, Payback's A Bitch!, Cargo, P51.
Style: Future electro. Techno. Synth rock. Blade runner jungle.. |
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Producing and performing for nearly two decades, UFO! continues to edge
forward, staking a position on the outward perimeter of music. Inertia
is something this artist has had little use for in the past. Though
widely regarded as one of the US's pioneering drum 'n bass artists and
DJs, UFO! is poised to reinvent himself as a musician yet again, rising
from the miasma of an ever-mutating underground music scene.
A San Francisco native, UFO!—born Ed Garro—was musically baptized
by hip hop in the late '80s and early '90s. Mixing and scratching
alongside fellow DJs QBert, Shortcut, Quest, and D-Stylz, UFO! quickly
ascended to the ranks of battle DJ, learning the skills and exercising
them every chance he had. From his youthful days in hip hop, Ed found
himself enthralled with the new urban sounds of London: hardcore,
jungle, and drum 'n bass. In it he saw a portal into the future, wider
than any before. He stepped through, and soon after formed San
Francisco's Phunckateck crew in 1996, performing alongside frontrunners
such as Goldie, Dieselboy, Photek, and Roni Size at the collective's
seminal weekly events. Since then, he has released more than two dozen
singles on labels such as Thermal, Position Chrome, Phylum, Vortex,
Commercial Suicide, Green, and Phunckateck Communications. He also
released his first album, The Future is Listening, on Thermal in 2001,
one of the first full-length albums produced by an American drum 'n
bass artist.
A move to New York in 2000 brought UFO! to new musical terrains.
Not content to rest on his past sterling rep in drum 'n bass, and
dissatisfied with what he perceived as the genre's stagnation, he began
to delve into the city's skyrocketing dance rock and electroclash
scenes, dabbling as much with playing live bass as with the 808. During
his time on the east coast, UFO! saw several of his productions
featured in new media forums, including on MTV and the hit TV series,
CSI:NY.
UFO!'s forthcoming album on Sanguine Recordings, Logic Is Lunacy,
finds him turning even further down a new artistic corner—making him
the perfect first artist to sign with the future-gazing label. The
album is UFO's most dance floor-ready output to date, and his first
venture into the 4/4 format. While retaining his signature love of
hard, loud distortion and meticulous sound design, the album traces an
arc that incorporates a myriad of new forms and styles. From low-end
techno to shattered electro-ballads to hook-laden synth rock, UFO!
deconstructs and re-fabricates various genre influences in the forge of
his imagination. Logic Is Lunacy may also be UFO!'s most personally
intimate release, featuring the artist in the role of vocalist for the
first time. Ribbons of darkness weave through his lyrics, glittering
dimly against his tracks' pop melodies with emotional musings on loves
and loss reconciled.
True to form, UFO's DJing—and his concept of what performance
means, in general—has evolved. Seldom appearing without a laptop now,
he incorporates live digital processes into his sets, seamlessly
switching from vinyl to live pieces. Even if his sets appear unsettling
or unpredictable, his facility for creating larger contexts out of the
music makes it work. To Ed, the computer is a whole instrument, not
merely a sequencer or emulator of existing sounds. Not content to
exploit software as a mere tool, Ed's music embodies the very notion of
the human-computer interface, tapping into the essence of the machine,
which in turn reflects the vision of the man.
UFO!'s world is one where music, painting, graffiti, photography,
and DJing are not easily separated. Championing an idiosyncratic form
of urban futurism, his work in all forms is defiantly rooted in the
industrial shadows of San Francisco bridges and New York high rises,
honed by the warrens of London's Tube and the mechanistic biology of
Los Angeles' concrete arteries and veins, while envisioning places
where the grid of city blocks gives way to the grid of nanotechnology.
UFO!'s art rides these intersections with committed abandon, joyriding
through the crumbling detritus of an industrialized society colonized
by data and information—a place where the man is no longer easily
distinct from the machine.
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