FCKDSKO Debuts Single “Totality” & Talks About Making Music On The Beaches And Mountains Of Latin America

What would you do if you had the desire for two life-changing experiences, yet one would traditionally get in the way of the other? In the case of FCKDSKO, a new producer out of Colorado, it was between traveling to Latin America on his own for the first time and finished releasing a track. To frolic around in the jungles and beaches during the frigid Colorado winter, while experiencing a completely different culture, or to build a music career that would hopefully pay him to frolic around on the beaches, and create culture?

To debut anything, the conventional wisdom is that you want to be in your local market in order to best harness the momentum that comes from the release. You want to harness your local fan base and create a groundswell of influence around your track playing shows, doing events, etc. You also want to have a full studio with solid acoustics and an easy to access setup for when creative inspiration strikes. Also, being in the dead cold of winter is a hell of a motivator, as there aren’t beautiful rainforests and crystal clear, warm beaches to distract you. However, as FCKDSKO puts it, “I’m a stubborn mother fucker. I didn’t want to just settle for one, so I decided to improvise. I made a setup that was portable for both DJing and producing, and fit it inside a 55L backpack that fits on the carryon of the plane, along with all of my clothes. I also figured that I’d find a studio down here to mix it in without doing much planning. I just really wanted to travel.”

Currently, he is residing in Medellin, Colombia, where he has finally finished what he set out to do, and that was to release a track. The other week he premiered the track “Totality” — a woozy, jazzy, wall of sound crescendo that he says reminds him of if early Amon Tobin listened to a lot of post-rock and shoegaze, along with a set that he made while on the beach in Las Lajas, Panama. While the song is experimental in nature, and probably equally as close to psychedelic rock as it is to electronica, this mix takes a more traditional club approach, mainly consisting of house, techno, disco, and breakbeats, but still with that psych-rock edge that comes from “Totality”. Artists featured on this mix include Underworld, Avalon Emerson, Ripperton, and Prins Thomas, among others.

“This was quite the experience,” FCKDSKO says. “I didn’t end up finding a studio, as I was in the middle of nowhere when I was most inspired. Whether that was on a dormant volcano in Panama, or on the beach with barely a WiFi signal, the opportunity to get to a studio just didn’t happen, so I had to improvise. I committed a cardinal sin, I mixed in headphones. Then I played the track through a 20 dollar portable speaker that sounds surprisingly good, got a more accurate mix, and used LANDR to master it. I emailed it to some friends whose opinion I trust and asked them to play it on good speaker systems, and they laughed at how well it turned out. If anything the makeshift, ghetto way of doing this gave it this lofi quality I didn’t expect that really adds to it.”

You can read more about FCKDSKO’s experience and methodology at www.fckdsko.net/blog-1/sonic-nomadism-pt-1. and listen to “Totality” either on SoundCloud or Spotify: