The number of producers in Denton who are well-versed in the hardware Live PA format could fit comfortably in the small seating section at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios. The number of such producers who also closely follow changes and trends in current rap and dance pop make up an even smaller percentage.
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In fact, there might only be a single representative of that small cross-section: Aaron Mollet. With his year-old Juve (pronounced yu-vay) project, Mollet combines his background in live electronic music with his unironic love and knowledge of ultra-current pop into a hybrid Live PA/DJ set that screws, remixes and recontextualizes current songs and samples them into novel and original works.
"It's like some weird mix of DJing and not DJing," Mollet says.
Through his band Florene and other electronic music endeavors over the past decade, Mollet has amassed quite a bit of experience with sequencers, samplers, synthesizers and other such gear. His understanding of software digital audio workstations such as Ableton Live is another story.
"I'm learning more about Ableton, but I was always kind of hardware first," Mollet says. "I didn't even have a functional computer for music for most of the time me and Gavin [Guthrie] played together [in Florene]."
Now, though, his mixture of hardware and software, which often leads to live remixing, gives his audience something to relate to immediately.
"Sometimes I just hear a song and have a real, legitimate want to change the music," Mollet says, explaining the impetus behind his recent remix of a Ke$ha song. "Like 'I really love this synth, but it's too fast,' or 'Now that it's slow, the drums seem kind of sparse.'"
Mostly, he adds drums and live synth lines or basslines on top of a track. But, at other times, he rearranges and warps songs, sampling them to the point of creating something completely new.
"I want to add something that's especially mine as opposed to just chopping and screwing a song," he says, estimating that his ratio of original tracks to remixes is about 50/50 at this point.
"A track that's my own, that's all original, can take me a month with recording, mastering, producing, so it's really hard to play much of it live," he says.
As a result, most of the content of his live sets tends to be of the remix variety. But his recorded material will contain much more of his original tracks upon its eventual release, he says. Until that time, Mollet says he's happy to split his time between original tracks, live remixes and ones commissioned by other artists, such as a remix he created for Pink Priest's "Epic Lean."
