With an intense take on dance music that combines a courageous blending of genre with immaculate production, LA-based Kill The Noise aka Jake Stanczak’s career is burgeoning, not least down to support from Sonny Moore aka Skrillex. His tunes have been released on some of dance music’s most prestigious labels including Deadmau5’s Mau5trap Recordings, and his own boutique imprint, Slow Roast Records, co-owned with turntablist DJ Craze, He’s also remixed some big tracks, including Noisia’s Diplodocus from last year’s groundbreaking Split The Atom.
Stanczak’s most recent offering, a seven-track EP entitled Black Magic, released on Moore’s own OWSLA imprint, channels a slightly less aggressive dubstep journey than previous outputs, seamlessly traversing varied tempos, incorporating less jolt and more melodic depth.
The video-clip for Kill The Noise Pt. 2, the second instalment to part one of the same title on his first EP Kill Kill Kill, recently dropped showcasing a delightfully twisted claymation from UK director Lee Hardcastle. The vid exhibits clay-dough figures sacrificing each other in black magic fashion. Gore ensues.
“He was already doing his thing in a big way but he’d never really gone across anyone’s radar,” Stanczak says of Hardcastle. “I just happened to stumble across his stuff when I was looking for somebody to do the video for that song. I just wanted to do something different because the video for part one was done so well that it ended up winning an award through MTV. I thought, ‘There’s never gonna be any chance of trying to top that one’.
“So instead of trying to top it, I thought I’d maybe just do something different. So I was like ‘perfect’ – I grew up in the ’90s with Three Little Pigs claymation videos and Radiohead. There’s kind of a nostalgic thing with claymation that’s kind of classic and timeless and bizarre and there’s so many people making videos these days that I think it’s important to stand out from the crowd.”
Standing out from the crowd is something Stanczak is good at, with his non-adherence to genre, but it may come as a surprise to Kill The Noise fans that he spent a former life solely producing drum and bass. His first foray into production was made under the moniker Ewun and included tech-step number 8 Bit Bitch collabed with Evol Intent, which rinsed many dancefloors during the mid 2000s.
“I think most people in the States don’t know that exists,” he explains. “I think the genre thing isn’t as important as it once was but I haven’t really ended the Ewun thing, although I haven’t released anything under that moniker for four or five years. I think it’s nostalgia that makes people connect with old projects like that but at the end of the day Ewun was Jake, Kill The Noise is Jake. I’m still the same guy and I’m still making drum and bass.
“The reason I ‘started over’ as Kill The Noise from the Ewun project was to start fresh with that prospective. I don’t want to just do drum and bass and just do things to cater just to that one audience. I’ll still do drum and bass, but I love house music and I love dubstep and hip hop and all kinds of stuff. I pigeon-holed myself so much in that one project that I was really pissing people off messing around with things that weren’t drum and bass. So I thought, ‘Well I’ll separate them and make everyone happy’.”
Stanczak’s friendship with Moore is well documented, with much of his current success being down to being aligned to his OWSLA label, recently enjoying a tour with his label buddies. But the two also enjoy a friendship outside of the studio.
“Part of the reason we’ve become such great friends is that there are really high highs when everything is going you’re way and then those low points when you need a friend that understands the stress and how hard it is to stay inspired. Sonny is an amazing person in that sense. He can kind of sense when someone is having a rough time and, go down to the beach and just not think about music, just talk. So that’s what we do.”
This partnership also led to Stanczak being instrumental in Korn’s experiment into dubstep on last year’s The Path of Totality, marking a massive change in direction for them. Stanczak worked on two tracks, Narcissistic Cannibal and Fuels The Comedy from that LP, a project he says came about when he met Jonathon Davis via Moore at Coachella 2011.
“And Jonathon turns out to be a really honest, great, awesome person who has a real passion for electronic music that stands outside of just dubstep; he’s into all kinds of stuff. We hit it off and I went down to the studio for about a week and that’s how Narcissistic Cannibal came about. He and Skrillex had already started that together and I came in and helped finish it with the rest of the band.
“I had just as much of a role as everyone else, I felt that it was a group project. There weren’t really a lot of rules. They were like, ‘Hey, let’s just vibe out and make something fun, and something that we can all sort of agree on as being cool’. You know, it was an experiment and obviously people have all different kinds of opinions about it but at the end of the day I felt like it was successful. It was fun and that was the most important thing.”
While this fun-loving attitude is in stark opposition to the image presented by the Kill The Noise terminator-inspired skull mascot, it’s obvious that Stanczak’s ability to merge seemingly ambiguous elements is part of his unique appeal. To quote the title name of Black Magic’s last track, the story of Kill The Noise is clearly To Be Continued.
BY JO CAMPBELL
