INTERVIEWS • PRINT

Living “Dangerous”: Interview with Big Data’s electronic mastermind Alan Wilkis

August 20, 2014
Latest posts by John Hocter (see all)
If you haven’t heard Big Data’s hit track “Dangerous (feat. Joywave)” this summer, then you haven’t been listening hard enough.
 
The addicitive single recently topped Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart, where it’s been holding strong since March of this year. The collaboration, featuring the electronic wizardry of Big Data’s “man behind the curtain” Alan Wilkis and the vocal stylings of Joywave’s Daniel Armbruster, is part of what Wilkis calls “a paranoid electronic music project from the Internet, formed out of a general distrust for technology and The Cloud (despite a growing dependence on them).”

Paranoid or not, Wilkis took the time to chat with GroundSounds about his surprising success, the follies of the digital age and the promise of new music from his pet project Big Data.

 

You’re an accomplished music producer and composer, with official remixes for The Who, Phantogram and many others among your credits. How did you get started in electronic music?

 
I got started making electronic music when I first bought recording software—I started with Reason and ProTools, and eventually settled in Ableton Live. I just sort of started experimenting until songs started to take shape. I’m self-taught as a producer, so it was a lot of trial and error until I began to figure out my sound. 
 
Your infectious single “Dangerous” is obviously a huge summer radio hit, having topped the U.S. Alternative Music charts where it’s been entrenched for more than 20 weeks. Are you surprised by its success?
 
Absolutely. I never in my wildest dreams could have imagined the song taking off the way that it has. Not a day goes by where I don’t appreciate that. 
 
I’m curious as to how the single came about. What was the writing/recording process like, and how did Joywave become involved?
 
Generally with Big Data, I like to write the instrumental parts of my songs first, with multiple sections and chord progressions. And once I have that, I team up with vocalists and we generally write the melodies and lyrics together. I collaborated with Dan from Joywave in the early days of Big Data, and we would generally sketch things out over email back and forth—I’d have an instrumental idea, and he’d demo some melody stuff over it, and then we’d plan writing and recording sessions at my studio based on his Joywave tour dates through NYC. We’d know, for example, that he was going to be in town in two weeks, so we’d try to have a melodic sketch in place before then, and then we’d hammer out the lyrics and record them when he was in town.  
 
The video for “Dangerous,” which strikes me as a sort of satire of corporate branding and modern marketing, is both hilarious and gruesome. How did you come up with the concept, and how much fun did you have making it? (And where can I get a pair of those shoes?)
 
It was extremely fun and rewarding, and also absolutely exhausting and crazy stressful. I had the idea originally to make a music video that was a sneaker commercial where the sneaker made you do something evil … but that was as far as I got. I then collaborated with the two directors, Ghost+Cow Films (Brandon LaGanke & John Carlucci) and we fleshed the story out together. They directed it, and I produced it. The process took about 11 months, start to finish. 
 
(And I’m working on producing the actual shoes, so YES, hopefully!)
 
On the band’s official site, Big Data is described as “a paranoid electronic music project from the Internet, formed out of a general distrust for technology and The Cloud.” Can you elaborate on the meaning behind this self-characterization and share some of your own personal thoughts on privacy and the digital world? 
 
The big idea is that I’m making electronic pop music, but all centered around these themes of paranoia in the digital age. The idea of being “from the internet” is a play on the idea that for most people, bands ARE from the internet. You may never get the chance to see a band perform in person, and it’s even more unlikely that you’d meet them in person, and yet you can know them fairly intimately via the internet. 
 
As far as my own thoughts about privacy and the problems of technology, what I find so interesting about it all is that our feelings are complicated on the issues. Technology improves the quality of our lives immensely and makes us more efficient, but the privacy trade-off is horrible, and it’s even more horrible that our data is being commoditized and monitored … And yet none of us are likely to abandon our iPhones … So we’re essentially complicit in the trade off, willful participants in the horror. 
 
On the heels of the release of “1.5” last year, an album consisting of eight different remixes of “Dangerous,” can fans expect a full-length offering from Big Data sometime soon?
 

Yes! I’m in the homestretch of writing and recording my first full-length Big Data album. I’m hoping to have it out by the fall. 

 

http://www.BigData.fm
http://twitter.com/BigDataBigData
http://instagram.com/BigDataBigData
http://soundcloud.com/BigDataBigData

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