Dynaudio Magazine | Our blog and collection of articles.

Chillin’ and Groovin’ with Shlohmo in LA

Written by Dynaudio EN | Jun 14, 2022 8:16:09 AM

As a kid, Shlohmo messed around with guitars, basses and drums so the general interest in music was always there. But when his uncle introduced him to Apple’s Garageband at the age of 14, he experienced the freedom to really experiment and mess around on his own with a creative tool at his fingertips. And soon he found himself locked up in his room for hours and hours, creating his very first beats and tracks.

It was also around this time that he discovered the Low End Parties in LA, pushing him further down the path of electronic music production. Eventually, Shlohmo found his voice in a lo-fi, psychedelic mix of abstract hip-hop, bouncy synth-funk and breezy trip-hop, creating tracks that are stuffed with dirty textures, strange sounds and obscure samples.

 

 

Experimenting and Listening


At first, Shlohmo was all into Hip Hop. He knew what sound he wanted, but didn’t really know the tools or how to produce Hip Hop music ‘properly’.“I didn’t know anything about the grid and the timeline in Garageband,”says Shlohmo.“I would just drag in samples and since I was also into DJ’ing I had a Numark CD turntable that I used for resampling myself scratching directly into Garageband without paying attention to the timeline or anything. It was really bad and, basically, I had no idea what I was doing at the time!”

 

Later, he added Propellerhead’s Reason software and started exploring a much broader variety of the electronic music spectrum. “Then I got into House and Electro. Reason was really cool for that. But I was also DJ’ing a lot and was into all kinds of electronic music. A great source for discovering new music and artists was skate videos. I would pause the video when the credit list was coming up and find out who created the music. I would find artist like DJ Shadow, Amon Tobin, M83, etc., not having a clue about who they were. And since I couldn’t just Google it, I would go to the record store and pick up some CDs. Today, I am more into Techno and Acid, but the entire back catalog of music I have listened to is there and was a big part of shaping me as an artist.”