So I wanted to make the shit I would want to hear.” It’s like people who wash their hands until they bleed. “People are so fucking precious about techno, or dance music, or club music. “When I would go out I would see techno DJs, but it didn’t really speak to me, it was kind of boring,” he says.
Soon after, he joined Ghostly labelmates Shigeto and Heathered Pearls for an extensive European tour and found inspiration in the continent’s heady history of techno-but more by its lack than its abundance. Having produced 2015’s PARA full-length in the confines of his parents’ home in upstate New York, he moved to Brooklyn after its release and found himself in a basement studio, isolated from the influence of knowingness, wide-eyed once more.
Though his means of music-making have matured since then-on Amadeus he utilizes an arsenal of drum machines along with synthesizers and an Allen & Heath analog mixer slammed through for extra crunch-RAJA describes a deliberate return to youthful experimentation and immediacy, clearing the way for a “vista to his childhood.” What does a daydream sound like? Is it an audible confidence boost, a concentrated dose of caffeine shot straight into the bloodstream of dancing feet, a blue so overwhelmingly electric its field stretches as far as the eye can see? On Amadeus, the newest Ghostly effort from New York’s Lord RAJA, the shapeshifting producer answers his own question with a cunning, childlike purity not felt since he started tinkering with Fruity Loops aged six.