Feed Me: "I'm Trying To Make Theater"

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Photos by Julian Cassady

Straight up, nobody keeps the energy of electro alive more fervently than Feed Me. The London-based producer, DJ, and visual artist, born Jon Gooch, has been on the artsier edge of up-front dance music since taking on the moniker around the turn of the decade with releases onMau5trap and his own Sotto Voce. Over the past few years, he's been developing his Feed Me With Teeth live show to unheard of levels of awesome, with the iconic stage design that bares the semblance of his toothy avatar bringing ever-progressing levels of depth to his multi-sensory live performances.

"It's a projection of myself," Gooch says of the little monster within him. "I don't know what he is, though. It was just a shape that I liked drawing. He's just a face with arms and legs." But don't let the sharp teeth scare you, "He's not evil, he's just mischievous!"

This mischief comes with a manifesto, though: "My principle interest was always art and graphic design. To have the opportunity to do something truly theatrical and audio/visual is much more interesting to me. The generic 'EDM-y' experience is great, in its own way, but it presents a very flat and constant visual experience, which is basically covering everything in loads of LED's and turning it on all the time," Gooch laughs. "If you're gonna do a show now, you have to create a three dimensional space and use it artistically instead of all guns blazing all day. That doesn't work anymore. I'm trying to make theater."

Gooch's perspective runs against trends in experiential and visual performance in dance music. "At the moment, a lot of these visuals guys are getting carried away in thinking that because you can do something means you should," he says. "We drove past the main stage ata big festival last week and it was just nonsense! It was like every light on at once, every color. There was no theme, no narrative, and there was no reward. As soon as you stood in front of it, five minutes later, you've seen everything you possibly can. It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't think thats the ethic. We're supposed to be telling a story. There's nothing wrong with turning it all off for a bit."

This over-reliance on maximalism and a habituation towards perpetual rage mode is equally evident in the music at festival main stages. It's all part of the same process Feed Me is rallying against. Gooch explains: "There's nothing wrong with taking your time. Just because the crowd isn't fist-pumping or throwing drinks at each other or punching each other in the face and going nuts every second, doesn't mean that you're not doing a great job."

On the other hand, Gooch is totally aware that he was part of the wave of in-your-face tunage that led to this need to crank it to 11, but it's his appreciation for subtlety that separates him from the crowd. "I play some hard hitting music, yeah, but doing all the visceral, dynamic mixing and stuff is all second nature to me," he says. "Doing something cerebral and trying to take people out of their normal headspace is much more rewarding. You go to a main stage at any festival, and it's so difficult to find a moment of clarity and unity. To me a lot of it's mindless. It doesn't reward me. I watch and try to take in because I'm interested in other eyes, but the style of performing is totally boring to me right now, on a whole."

So how does With Teeth develop beyond these over-worn tropes of experiential design? Gooch explains: "Each track is assigned to a visual. It all coordinates perfectly. If I slow the track down, speed it up, then every light on stage now reacts. Everything is totally running off of Ableton. On top of that, I have a separate channel that's just for visuals. If I wanna add colors, change colors, filter them, I can do it manually."

The project's live iteration has become such a part of the Feed Me identity that it's changed the way Gooch writes tunes. "The point of the last EP I did was to make tracks that had visuals specifically in mind," he explains. "They take a little longer to progress, and i make sure they have dynamic moments throughout, that I could imagine particular visuals happening for. It does affect my writing. We tend to assign particular color palates to a particular tune."

With all the high falutin' conceptual stuff going on, there must be a problem once in a while, right? "Yeah," Gooch laughs. "It's gone wrong on stage, but you recover! The show must go on, right? There are backups in place, we have ways of rebooting. We have some tentative ways of making sure that we're never totally balls-up. In that sense, I come from quite an old-school mentality. I've had speakers catch fire, decks fall of stage, someone pull out a plug, I've had fire marshals attack me while playing, I've been chased off the stage by dogs. There's nothing I haven't seen at this stage. So if the laptop stops working, I'm not gonna shit myself!"

And hey, as long as you're here, check out the brand new Feed Me mix for Pete Tong:

Click here to buy tickets to Feed Me's Psychedelic Journey.

Jemayel Khawaja wrote this - @JemayelK

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