So, exactly how much of your DJing is just winging it?

It depends on the show. If I'm opening for somebody and I only have an hour set, for example, I'm probably going to plan it pretty extensively because I want to make sure that I make my point in that hour, compared to if I'm playing at Beacon and I have a +2 hours to play, I like to kind of just feel it out. 

You mentioned Beacon, and how Colorado has almost a grassroots electronic music feel - shows with the homies, smaller-scale opportunities, but also doing big things, so to speak. That was the first place I played. And for me, music all started last summer at a Sky Terrace show at Beacon, where I caught a good vibe and said, “Okay, I’m working with you now.”

Totally, yeah. Beacon is such an incubator for the entire scene, even outside of the worldly organic stuff that I do and Sky Terrace does. It’s even like that with bass music and Tech House. I feel like it’s kind of a hub for everybody. Not only folks that are just getting going in their career.

So, I love that aspect of it. I feel like Beacon definitely welcomes new DJ’s, but also has people who have made a huge career at the same time. It's just such a cool & supportive ecosystem. 

Going along that community line, you’ve shouted out Soundground. And at the Fort Greene Bar show this summer–that’s the first place I saw you play. Everybody there seemed very close-knit. It seems like to me in Denver there's a more collaborative aspect than what I expected. 

I mean, I think there is a really, really dope collaborative kind of vibe here. And I think one of the reasons for that is so many of us, I mean just out of Split Second, Sky Terrace, Zodiac Hause, New Something–let's say just those four crews, all of us, dj, all of us make music, all of us have some overlap as far as what we like to play and produce. 

But at our core, nobody's doing the exact same thing. Everybody has their own lane & unique style. I think all the collectives are really doing awesome stuff. But even in Zodiac Hause, they're all organic, but every DJ there has their own kind of vibe. And I think that plays into the growth of the scene. When some guy gets announced and you see the openers, I'm never looking at that poster like, “I should have been on that poster.” I see a bunch of homies on that poster, and think, “Yeah, that fits better for them.” I'll be happy that they got that, and there's going to be another gig that I'm going to get that makes more sense for me, and those homies will be stoked for me.

I don't look at it in the sense of I need to get to the top. It's more like, “If any of us go up, all of us go up.” And I really want to put Denver on the map. Getting Weir to pop would be great, but I want all of us to be really doing it and then all run into each other at a festival and be like, “Yo, what the fuck? We're all here.” That’s the real goal for me.

Your vibe is on the cerebral side. I think there’s a cinematic element to it. There's a whole atmosphere, an ecosystem as you said, where different details catch you in different ways. There's a saxophone in “Ender.” Did you play that yourself?

That's literally my biggest goal with all of my music is to make it cinematic and have elements where you can lay down and listen with headphones, but also have it work on the dance floor. That's the best music in the world, in my opinion. But for the saxophone stuff, my buddy Tanner Fruit that I used to live with up in Boulder, he lives in Montana doing firefighting every summer. We used to live together in Boulder before Covid, and he comes down and visits every once in a while and we'll do some recording. 

So I got him on that track, he was on the “Stoner House” EP with mxxnwatchers, he played on “Good Morning” and my “Innerbloom” cover, and I have a new EP coming out this summer that he's also on. I wish I could play sax! I feel like I've come to understand how much technique goes into it. So I tend to just rely on Tanner because he’s really good at what he does.