Excision is playing Coachella 2013 on Sunday. (Contributed Image)
I just posted part of the Q&A with Canadian dubstep producer Excision, who is bringing his intense, 420-square foot stage “The Executioner” with him to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this weekend and next.
Check out the first part of the interview with Excision.
RELATED: Full Coachella 2013 coverage
Here are a couple of other questions he answered that didn’t make it into print.
What’s your first musical memory? At what point did you know that electronic music was
the path for you?
The first electronic music I heard that stood out to me was the Prodigy’s “The Fat of the Land.”
I loved it, but couldn’t find anything else even close to it. It wasn’t until 2005 that I discovered
drum ‘n’ bass and the Vex’d album “Degenerate,” which showed me the extent of what dubstep
and all electronic music is capable of.
I started producing and DJing at the time, dropped out of the business degree program I was
taking at the University of British Columbia and decided that this was what I needed to do. My
parents weren’t too impressed, but they had some level of faith when they saw I was putting in
12 hours a day to get better. Living in Kelowna, I didn’t know a single other DJ for over a year
and didn’t meet any other producers until I was touring in 2007. It was 2005 when I started and
although the Internet had a few places you could read up on various techniques, it definitely
wasn’t like today where there is a YouTube tutorial for everything. Learning how to produce the
sounds of your imagination is a long, arduous process that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone
who isn’t willing to sacrifice a big chunk of their life.
How do you protect your eardrums from 100,000 watts of sound?
How loud a sound system is depends on how close you are to it, and how big the room is. Our
100,000-watt PK system is really dialed in for dubstep with 40 subwoofers putting out pure
bass. It can do serious damage to venues, especially the smaller ones. The bass in small
venues bounces off the back wall and double the bass in some places. On many occasions on
a Monday or Tuesday night, we would explode thousands of dollars of alcohol bottles. Venues
also don’t like it when huge chunks of drywall fall from their ceiling at every drop, or when all
their light bulbs explode.
Excision and The Executioner stage will appear on Sunday at 9:05 p.m. in the Sahara Tent.
As we get ready to cover the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this year, we’ll be using the #PECoachella hashtag on Twitter and Instagram. If you want to send us photos, musings and more, we’ll give you some love here in the Audio File blog. Just use the hashtag!
For more Coachella news, photos, interviews and information, visit the iGuide Coachella page. If you want to follow me on social media, I’m at @vanessafranko on Twitter, the Audio File on Facebook and on Google+.