Skrillex Is Building a Warhol-Inspired Bass Factory in Los Angeles’ Chinatown
11,000-square-foot OWSLA nest will give “in-the-box” producers their wings
After living in hotels for the past decade, Skrillex seems to be settling into his newfound digs in Los Angeles quite nicely. He recently posted a Vine video documenting his recently completed home studio, but that’s just the beginning. In a conversation with Summit Series’ Jeff Rosenthal at last month’s IMS Engage conference in Los Angeles, Sonny Moore revealed that he recently purchased an 11,000-square-foot building in Chinatown where he is building a studio for “in-the-box producers” like himself — that is, traveling laptoppers who could benefit from a high-tech home base for plugging in and jamming out.
But, rather than constructing an industry hit factory, his vision sounds a lot more like Warhol’s Factory — a multi-disciplinary creative hub where collision and collaboration are at the root of everything. “There’s nothing in L.A. that’s like that for our generation,” said Skrillex. “We have our own team and our label’s going to be in there, building an actual physical infrastructure. Up until a couple months ago my team was all over the world, and everything was by email, but I think people tend to forget that when everyone’s in the same room, everything goes 50 times faster. Ideas keep pouring out, and you get a lot more done. So [I’m] building a home for our culture and our scene and a place to even document it and show people what it is. Because it’s more than what most media thinks of electronic music — there’s so much more behind why it’s there, why it came out of nowhere.”
Early in the conversation, the full video of which was posted to the IMS website last week, Moore talks about his years spent navigating the vagaries of major-label contracts, first with From First to Last and then as Sonny Moore; he attributes much of Skrillex’ success to a DIY-inspired philosophy you might call “DIO” — Do It Ourselves