Juliana Huxtable takes what some might call an intense approach to DJing. She’s known to use four decks, allowing her to mix and match components from up to four different tracks at once. But last year, when Huxtable dropped deBasement’s “F.F.F.T.DJ” during her set at Honcho, a campout electronic music festival in the wilderness outside Pittsburgh, she cut out almost all the noise and, for over a minute, just let it ride. In purely practical terms, this was prudent. A rework of an earlier single called “FTDJ (Thank God),” “F.F.F.T.DJ” is a dancefloor apex predator, liable to gobble up all the other frequencies in the mix.
When did deBasement melt your brain? If you don’t have an answer to that question, close this window, go throw on their new EP HARDBODY (it’ll only take 23 minutes) and then come back here. It happened to me last month, at Primavera Sound in Barcelona. There, at three in the morning on one of the festival’s side stages, I watched Alli Logout morph into a ballroom emcee-cum-revolutionary firebrand-cum-feral cat, hissing and yowling and dangling their microphone from their crotch. Behind them, manning the decks, was Margo XS, unflappable in her wraparound shades. I remember stumbling back towards my hotel, drunk—mostly, though not exclusively—off that mind-liquefying bass.
“It’s loud, that’s for sure,” Margo demurs to me a few weeks later, taking our video call from her sun-dappled home studio in Los Angeles’ Elysian Heights neighborhood. “On dance music, you can really have something that is massive, one sound that is bigger than anything else because it’s the only sound.” I picture what the waveform of HARDBODY’s title track must look like when the beat drops—imposing, to say the least—as Logout comes out swinging, “I could-I could-I could-I could give a fuck about the feds, give a fuck about the cops.”
“With deBasement, we wanted to bring more energy to the club space which has been becoming increasingly more stale over the years,” Logout tells me via email. “By coming back to the drawing board and exploring the dynamic between selector and MC, we saw a great need for that energy to come back to the club but have done so in a very hyper and dramatic way.”
Margo’s leftist politics and her taste for synths that sound like air raid sirens might seem at odds with her day job: making hits for pop stars. Over the past year, the Michigan-born producer has had a hand in several of the genre’s pacesetting albums, working on both the original and remixed versions of Zara Larsson’s Grammy-nominated Midnight Sun, as well as executive producing Kim Petras’ Detour. (That tidbit from a New York Times profile about Zara listening to Arca in the studio—Margo’s doing.) She prides herself on being a rogue element in the capitalist machine, wielding dopamine-laced hooks to convert every listener into a potential sleeper agent.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Pitchfork: “deBasement, the hottest band in the whole UK right now,” and yet you and Alli are both based in L.A. How’s that work?
Margo XS: It’s an inside joke that’s become a tag now. Alli and I went to Mexico to write the first EP, and Alli was there working on a movie with her amazing friend Isabelle. She’s British and has a very thick, posh British accent. We were having her say stuff on top of the track [“NO THOughTS”], and then we kept recycling that tag. It’s also a bit of an homage to our love for the history of rave music in the UK.
On the new EP, you’re covering a lot of ground. There’s UKG, there’s 2-step, but also trap and dubstep and electro and hardcore techno—sometimes all in the same track. I assume you don’t consider yourself any sort of genre purist?
No, I’m just so obsessed with dance music and its history and how it’s constantly referencing itself. That’s something that Alli and I really bonded over when we started deBasement. We try so many different versions of the songs; we have so many different edits, and we started to combine all of them together.
How did you and Alli first cross paths?
We have a running joke that we’re an industry plant, because we were introduced by our publisher. I’d been in L.A. for maybe half a year, and Alli had just moved to LA and it was their second session ever. We met and made “FRONT LEFT SPEAKER,” a different version of it that was more acid techno, more punk. We both came from very DIY places, and we’re here in L.A. in this very commercial environment all of a sudden trying to figure out where we fit. It felt lovely to make something that was gritty and authentic, and we had a lot of shared interests in dance music and rave culture, which can be a bit hard to find in L.A.
“FRONT LEFT SPEAKER” definitely feels like an early bellwether in this electroclash revival we’re currently in the midst of. Why do you think people are gravitating towards those sounds right now?
I can’t speak for everybody, but it seems like a collective inability to imagine an aesthetic future. In such political and environmental uncertainty, we’re looking back quicker and quicker. Things that happened not so long ago are being recycled faster than I have been them be recycled in my lifetime. And I think that there is a certain yearning for the perceived freedom of the earlier internet, early social media, a time when everything wasn’t documented. I do hope that in the future, we—myself included—start to make music that feels more like a future and less like a reinterpretation of the near past.
Something that does feel forward-facing about deBasement, to my mind, is how the whole project is grounded in this radical, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist politic.
That is something that Alli and I hold true to the band and to ourselves, and existing in a commercial space makes me feel even more certain in my beliefs. Our approach to being a live act first and focusing on the present and the physical is very much part of our anti-fascist and anti-capitalist practice, because I do think that the more we engage with these three or four corporations that are essentially controlling our digital existence, the deeper we get into fascism.
So I imagine it’s not a concern of yours, getting shut off from certain opportunities in your production work because you put a line like “I could give a fuck about the feds,” as the opening lyric on your album.
You know, they’re probably not gonna want me and I’m probably not gonna want them. I’m very blessed that all of the artists I get to work with share similar sentiments and politics to me regardless of their level of success.
One thing you’ve touched on in previous interviews is that dance and pop music are really well positioned to work as both programming and counterprogramming, because of their broad reach but also their formal qualities.
You really nailed why I do what I do. I think that what we put out and who makes it and how it’s made—I’m not interested in being super preachy, but I think that intrinsically it is progressive, and it’s so cool the reach that Western pop music has. It’s played all around the world, and if the right voices are making it, it can be a real method of progress and unity.
How much do you see your job as a producer, especially when you’re working with pop artists, extend beyond the boards into a tastemaker or even creative director role?
I was very blessed to be able to come in and share a lot of my favorite music with Zara when we first started working together. I sent her a playlist of everything that is important to me, and that definitely includes the first two Stretch EPs by Arca, which are a bit of a Bible for my production style.
It all starts with the music. It’s music and it’s a lot of circumstance, just having the right people around you as a pop star. I’m very visual in the way that I make music, and every single project I work on has my own very deep and personal visual world associated with it. With Zara, it really made sense when it started to become this euphoric drum ’n’ bass environment, very ethereal and lots of beautiful, hazy shades of blues and oranges.
And pop takes that to the extreme.
Definitely. It’s kind of hyper-confrontational, and way more strange and experimental than we give it credit for.
How do you go about building a rapport when you’re working with an artist for the first time?
For me, it’s important for the artist to know that it’s a space to be a freak. I love to hear what an artist is listening to or what they’re watching or what they’re looking at—going through as many different things as we can to find a similar thread between us and then play off of that. It’s different every time, and some people connect to me more than others, or want a certain thing from me, but I’m always interested in pushing myself and what I can do.
Your two top-of-the-resume production credits to date are probably Midnight Sun, which we’ve talked about a bit, and then Detour. Where did the experiences of working on those two albums diverge?
They were different processes because Zara and Kim are two incredible individual artists, but ultimately, both of them were about each artist getting out of their comfort zone and experimenting. Being forward-thinking is always, or almost always, the right direction, and people can feel that excitement and that energy.
Kim, it was a lot of late nights and Zara, it was a lot of daytime. Lots of Midnight Sun was made in London, and I was going out and listening to a lot of dubstep and jungle and drum ‘n’ bass, whereas Detour was primarily written at Kim’s old house in Laurel Canyon, and that definitely influenced the nature of the record.
There’s also the elephant in the room: in one case the label, I assume, responded very positively to what you had made, and in the other, it seems maybe less so.
I think that what went wrong with Detour and [Republic] was not the way the record sounded. This is a problem with anything that gets into that weird private equity, conglomerate zone. Even if a lot of very important and cool people in the room responded well to the record, there are so many other factors on the back end that I can’t really speak on and I’m not fully privy to. But I think that’s when the music dies, when financial interest prioritizes something that’s safe over something that’s interesting.
Everybody that worked on that record holds Kim to such a high regard as an artist and as a songwriter. I do see this narrative of her “arriving” with Detour, but for me, Kim has arrived consistently and, for the majority of her career, been a unique voice. It just made sense to keep going, to push it one step further.
Is there a song from Detour that stands out to you as either your favorite song you made with Kim, or the moment you felt the album coming into itself?
My favorite song is “Jeep.” When Porches and [nightfeelings’ Nick Weiss] and Kim showed that to me, I was blown away. Another moment that was really special was getting to finish SOPHIE’s production on “Basketball.”
I was hesitant to bring SOPHIE into the conversation because it’s almost too easy to lump the two of you together, as transfemme producers with these pop bona fides as well as more esoteric leanings. I was like, “Is that so obvious?” but of course she’s in there.
She is the blueprint for modern pop experimentation, and I’m so thankful that I got to experience her and her music at the time that I did—and also the community that it created. But I also think SOPHIE is part of a long lineage of trans artists bridging the gap between the experimental and the commercial. Wendy Carlos did that extensively. Switched on Bach was a major record. Genesis P-Orridge from Throbbing Gristle is a big influence on me, as someone who pushed for transhumanism as art and the body as an endless performance. And then Arca has produced on Yeezus and made an amazing amount of pop music alongside some really incredible experimental records. We see the world in a very beautiful and different perspective from a lot of other people, and I think that creates some amazing art and is gonna continue to do so.
Should we expect a Margo XS solo album at any point?
It’s in the works! I’m interested in the physical and the real right now. I want to put this record out without having social media and by doing alternative methods of press and distribution, and show that there is a way to exist and to thrive as an artist outside of these frameworks we’re stuck in right now. Currently I’ve been listening to a lot of late ’80s and early ’90s rave music—the early ecstasy generation—and taking some influence from the sonics, but more influence from the ethos, looking at times when the future felt bright and vivid and forever.
You worked with Demi Lovato recently, on a song from the deluxe version of her new album. How do those conversations typically start between you and an artist’s team?
Well, Demi loved Midnight Sun and “Polo” and “Freak It.” I guess I’m the thread between all of those, and she also works really closely with Zhone, who did a lot of Midnight Sun with me, and is another lovely human being and an amazingly talented producer. Demi’s album had already been out and they were doing deluxe sessions. I was so jet-lagged—I’d just played Berghain the weekend before and had flown into L.A. and pretty much got off the plane and went to that session. We made a couple songs and one of them got picked, and hopefully I’ll work with her again.
Are there any other artists who’ve called you up lately?
My primary goal right now is my own record and to continue working with Kim and Zara. I think Zara deserves and will be and should be the biggest pop star in the world, because we need more people like Zara and less people like Taylor Swift. [laughs]
I’ll flip the question around, then: what’s the dream call?
I’m a huge Bieber fan. When he’s ready to get the dolls involved, he knows who to call.