Vancouver Based DJ & Producer Nostalgix is a rapidly rising star in the International Electronic Music community. At only 22 years old, she has multiple releases out on a number of various labels and is just coming off of her first tour in Europe in promotion of her new release “Og Sins”, out on AC Slater‘s Night Bass Records. I caught up with her this past Sunday to have a chat about her skyrocketing career, her tours, her releases, an ongoing mix series, and just how she came to be where she is today.
After immigrating from Iran with her family when she was 7, Nostalgix was raised in North Vancouver, and through most of her youth was heavily involved in her schoolwork, head in the books. It wasn’t until her high school graduation year in 2015 that a friend asked her to attend her first event, which featured Hardwell at Pacific Coliseum. “It was my first time seeing anything even remotely like that, and being a part of it, just woke something up inside of me. After being someone who was always just working and studying, getting to experience being a part of such a cool culture and open community of people from so many different backgrounds was just sort of instantly life-changing.” From there, she quickly immersed herself in the music of the whole underground scene, and once she had the music, it was a quick transition into Djing.
“Once I discovered Electronic Music, and especially once I discovered House, it was all I listened to. I think one of the first shows that really did it for me was Dr. Fresch, he was playing this sick G-House set, and you could see how much fun he was having, and I was just really drawn into that brand of music and started researching labels and artists. I found a lot of music on stations like DeepObelisk, and one of my immediately favourite labels was Confession.” Little did she know at the time, that just 3 years later, she would have her own releases coming out on the Paris-based super-label, Confession. In 2016 during her first year at UBC Film Studies, she picked up a Pioneer DDJ Serato Controller and began playing and practicing in her dorm. Not long afterwards, opportunity struck.
“There was just a Student Event at one of the pubs in town, and one of the DJs had called in sick and wasn’t able to perform, so I got a phone call asking if I could go on in 10 minutes. I ran back to my Dorm room, grabbed my mixer and went straight back and got on stage. From there, one thing led to another in quick succession, and it seemed like every show I went to, people would like my set and I would get invitations to play at other events. Before I knew it, I was playing for all of the clubs I wanted to be playing at, and opening for the big acts, which was cool, but I wanted to contribute more. I wanted to be creating and playing my own music.” A natural progression followed with Nostalgix teaching herself how to produce her own tracks. The next year or so involved her sitting in coffee shops for up to 8 hours at a time, learning how to use Ableton & FL Studio and watching youtube videos on production techniques.
“It was a lot… like a lot of coffee. So Much coffee,” she laughs, “I would complete song after song but wouldn’t put anything out. I wasn’t quite there yet. But after the first year or so, I started getting a lot more comfortable with the music I was making and actually liking the tracks. I ended up taking some online lessons through Cosmic Academy, an online production school. Taking the course kind of just reaffirmed for me that the way I was doing things was being done correctly, I learned some new techniques and improved upon what I already knew, and I ended up putting out my first couple of tracks.”
In 2018 Nostalgix released 3 tracks, and so far in 2019 has put out 8 more on such prestigious labels as Ghetto Ghetto, Uprising, Opulence, and not one but two tracks with her original favourite label, Confession. It was at that point that she felt she had really made it. Having a sound that has been described as “Light-hearted” but featuring crafty design, driving Bass and gorgeous vocals, her brand of Bass House definitely has an overall original attitude. “I think teaching myself was a big part of how I developed my own unique and original style. I always had my inspirations but I never tried to follow or emulate anybody’s sound, I always kind of just try to do my own thing… Playing with the sounds that I like and what I’ve been exposed to, and with music production having such a never-ending learning curve, it just feels like the more you’re exposed to, the more you learn, and the better the music gets.”
Her latest offering came out on Night Bass Records on Oct 18th, 2019. The 3 track EP includes “Heist”, “Bad for Me” and the title track, “OG Sins”. “OG Sins was a special one for me. I had created a list of things I wanted to accomplish in my music career in 2019, and one of the last things I had to check off was I wanted to Rap on one of my own songs. For the whole year, I just practiced and practiced freestyling and when I started producing OG Sins, I knew this was the track that was going to make it happen. It just kind of happened naturally. The first recording of the verse that I took was the one I ended up using on the track.”
When I asked about how she got connected to Night Bass, she tells me about how she met AC Slater while attending Movement Festival in Detroit. “The crew from Golf Clap was holding a warehouse party for their label Country Club Disco, and he was playing at it and we were introduced, and just got along really well. He’s someone that has been very supportive of my ideas and my music and what I was creating. It’s really incredible what he has done with Night Bass and the community he has created around it. There are so many awesome artists on the label, and he has just kind of created a space for producers who think outside of the box.”
Ahead of the new release, Nostalgix headed out on her first excursion to play music across the pond in Europe. She toured through Germany, The Netherlands and France, playing at some pretty next-level events. “It was crazy, I landed in Europe and two days later I was in Halberstadt (Germany) playing music in this giant cave. This particular event called Rennaisance takes place only once or twice a year, so it was a really big event. It was an actual underground cave, not something that was man-made, just insane, and there were 4 different stages in there.”
She followed up Renaissance with a performance at Amsterdam Dance Event for Noir Sur Blanc & Fraudulent Records, which just happened to be the day after her release came out, and rounded out the tour with a performance in Nice, France. I asked her what’s next for her now that she is back in Canada just a couple weeks off of the release and the tour. “I plan on spending the next couple of months in the studio and just working hard on creating more music. I’m not in the coffee shops anymore.” She says over a laugh. “I actually have access to 3 different studios in Vancouver now, so it’s really nice to just be able to focus and get down to work.”
On top of everything else, Nostalgix (alongside fellow artist StoryTime) also runs “Invaders Mix Sessions”, a bi-monthly podcast that features and showcases some of their favourite producers’ mixes, including Sebastian Knight, Type3, Average Gypsy, Rumpus, Nicky Genesis and many more. To date, the pair has put out 19 mixes.
Speaking to Nostalgix throughout the interview was humbling, her personality is quite endearing and magnetic, and she somehow manages to come off as both shy and ultra-confident at the same time. The details surrounding her rise from attending her first event to becoming an internationally recognized artist in just 5 years is pretty inspiring for anyone who aspires to pursue a career as a DJ or Producer.
