Mochipet on Assembly Line Collective____

Written By: Gabriel Guerrero

The vastness of electronic music will never be fully grasped, exhausted innovatively, or entirely explored within the technologic ears of our generation or even those to come.  Within the contemporary artistic impulse, the evolution of electronic music has manifested itself throughout the digital empire of musical happenings.  Post-millennium electronic music emerges as the product of a generation whose musical underpinnings and experiences have been encapsulated by the sounds of the 80’s and 90’s- everything from trance, drum and bass, hip-hop, post punk, electro, and what have you.  Supplemented with the lightning speed accessibility of the historical archives of music’s past via the internet- new aesthetics in the nebulous web of electronic production have off-shooted toward their own personalized Mecca of electronic wizardry.  An exemplar of this musical mind set is Mochipet also known as David Y.  Wang who has been ambitiously recontextualizing the barriers of electronic music, dressing up in a purple dinosaur outfit, and starting up his own label.

A mosaic of musical motifs, Mochipet has been producing a slew of electronic music and with every album he creates he implements an amalgam of sounds from all over the globe.  He has worked with copious artists including Daedelus, Edit (Glitch Mob), Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers), and many others.  Analogous to his musical aesthetic, his record label is dedicated to searching for and upholding adventurous musical projects that synthesize reworked electronic ideas with cultures from around the world.  Mochipet has also included a humorous aspect to his projects by remixing or maintaining a juxtaposition of rich pop culture material (i.e. making a song that revolves around R. Kelly’s pseudo-drama series Trapped In the Closet).  It is also not uncommon to catch a Mochipet show with David dressed up in a purple Dinosaur suit dancing and bouncing around stage.

Just when one has found them self listening to stagnant electronic music that seem to drag on way too long without much variations except for maybe a predictable synth melody, Mochipet and his cohorts at Daly City Records are awaiting for your ears to stumble upon a new found direction of electronic production.

G:  When did you start making music.

I started making music when I was fifteen.  Playing guitar and piano.  I started taking both but then I dropped piano pretty fast.  I played a lot of metal when I was younger and go to metal shows like that band Death Angel, they are from Daly City, among other bands that were more thrash and punk, really messy.  So that is how I started, I was playing in a bunch of metal bands and then I started listening to jazz.  Then I did a jazz radio show at my community college in San Mateo.  I played a lot more weird jazz like Art Bears and Ornette Coleman and stuff like that.  After I graduated I recorded an album at A&M and soon after that I started a label in Daly City called Daly City Records, started releasing stuff and touring more and just doing more music.

G:  It seems you are pretty electronically savvy guy to be creating such dynamic electronic music.

M:  Yeah well I got a computer in college and that is when I started writing my own electronic music and from there I continued doing more and more electronic music.  I think it is because there are no limitations for electronic music, which is good and bad I guess.

G:  if you could, how would you describe your music.

The music I do is just my music.  For me every album I have done so far is different from the one before it.  The first album I did as Mochipet was very IDM, called Rambient Works.  And then the one after that I was like Rambient but I used a lot more ethnic samples and instruments- Greek instruments to Flamenco guitar.

G:  and these were sampled from all the different types of music you were listening to?

M:  Yeah, I mean I really artists like Paco de Lucia.   I like lot of different types of music and I think when Mochipet started out, I was trying to incorporate all those different kinds of music and make it electronic which I don’t think many people were doing.  It was very different and some people liked it and others didn’t, cause it didn’t fit into just one category of electronic music or scene.  Then I mellowed out and with my third album, it was more techno and I was doing it for the label Bpitch control in Germany.  Then the next album I did was more breakcore- which is kind of like hardcore with breaks in it.  After that I did an album that was a compilation of hip-hop stuff called Microphone pet.  It was all my hip-hop beats I had been doing since 2002 and then I had the idea to have MCs on it.  Then the latest one was Master P on Atari and it’s more like Glitch-hop 8-bit Dubstep thing with big bass lines.

G:  So were you ever a part of the hyphy scene in San Francisco?

M:  I wasn’t really into that scene.  I mean I like the music and I think a lot of people pulled from it.  But I also kind of just blew itself out.  It became really big really fast and that was E-40s doing, he had been doing it for a long time and he knew how he could blow it up.  I think the problem was that he didn’t nourish it or he didn’t get enough people involved on the cultural and even the musical aspect of it.  Whereas a lot of people were just copying it and not really adding to it, they were like “whoa this shit is hot.  I am just going to make a beat just like this”.  Then you end up having just a bunch of beats that are the same and after a while you don’t even know who is who anymore.  I feel sad that it couldn’t really sustain itself but I think something more will come out of it.  In America, and when you travel to other cities you will notice this a lot, that basically hip-hop and rock controls a huge landscape of America, which if you go to Europe it is all electronic.

G:  yeah, electronic city.

M:  And I think the kids that are making hip-hop now, because hip-hop has such a big influence in America, they grew up listening to video games, 80’s music, house music, and drum and bass – so they are just sticking that stuff into the hip-hop and making it whatever they want.  It still has that hip-hop feel and the beat, but the sounds are different.  They don’t use the old soul 45’s stuff cause you know back in the day all the hip-hop stuff was soul and funk- that’s what they sampled and that’s what they were listening to growing up.

G:  So let’s talk about the dinosaur suit.  What inspired you to perform with a dinosaur suit on?

M:  Haha.  Well the dinosaur suit idea was from the first compilation we did on Daly City Records called Baby Godzilla.  And it had Edit from Glitch Mob, Machinedrum, Micah9 and others.  That was actually one of the first things we released on Daly City and for the record release party I was over at my friends house and she said “Well I got this dinosaur suit that I think you should wear”.  And I was like “Cool”.

G:  Yeah I was half-expecting to just walk into the room and see you just chilling in the dinosaur suit drinking coffee.

M:  A lot of people get disappointed sometimes when I don’t have it on.  They are like “Where is it?” That is how is started.  Then I took on tour to Europe because I wanted this visual component in my shows with the audience because so many times you go to an electronic show or see a DJ or a producer on their laptop.  And most of the time they are just standing there.

G:  Totally, I mean they don’t have guitars or have live drums to play.  They made their music electronically (mostly on computer).  And it is hard to perform that music.

M:  Yeah and I didn’t want to be that guy just simply playing my music.  I am going to wear this suit and bring more of a punk rock element in it.  And at that time I was doing a lot of breakcore shows in Europe so it went over really well.  All these breakcore kids are just watching this guy in a suit jumping around having fun.  That is another thing too, I just want people to have fun at shows.  I don’t really want my shows to be so serious.  Music doesn’t have to be serious all the time.  It is kind of like how some dubstep producers reacted to this Michael Jackson Thriller song I did.  It was just like a joke, I mean dubstep was so big so I was like “see, you can even make Michael Jackson into dubstep”.  It was funny in that way.  And some of those dubstep producers just really didn’t get it and they were like “this is awful.  You have ruined dubstep”.  I am thinking “WOW, it is just a Michael Jackson song thrown over a dubstep beat I made in like an hour”.  It is a joke! Can’t you just have a sense of humor?

G:  Haha.  Yeah I also heard that song on your myspace “R.Kelly is out of the Closet”.  HIL-arious.

Article and interview written by Gabriel Guerrero