FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Stream the Exclusive Premiere of Fox Stevenson’s Blockbuster New EP ‘Throwdown’

The man formerly known as Stan SB wants to make big room house—and he’s not afraid to say it.

Fox Stevenson calls me on Skype and immediately starts apologizing.

"I'm so sorry I'm late. I'm actually really embarrassed," he says, repeating himself for the third time and convincing me that he might actually mean it, even though it's just barely 10 minutes past our scheduled interview time.

His excuse: The previous night, at four in the morning he got caught up in a fit of inspiration and was obsessively working on perfecting a song. "I was like, oh shit, I've got to work on this right now." He then woke up to re-imagine the beat with a drum set and was knocking around on that straight through our planned interview time. He says this sort of spurt of inspiration is common—"at least three times a week."

Advertisement

The moments mostly come when Stevenson's browsing his old catalogue of beats and unfinished songs that he's been collecting in droves basically "since the turn of the millennium," when he was just seven years old and began producing on the Playstation game Music 2000. The archives are organized by year on his computer and the beat that caused today's delay was a melody from his 2011-2012 folder. At this point, at 21, he has 14 years of backlog.

A 2-year-old track Stevenson already wants to re-work.

Stevenson moved on from video game beat-making to Logik in 2007, at 14, and started an artist profile on the online artist community Newgrounds racking up thousands of hits with mostly "chill drum n' bass" tracks. He started uploading songs to YouTube when the medium was just opening up for artists and almost immediately began gaining visibility. His Newgrounds hits when from thousands of listens to tens and hundreds of thousands once people started noticing him on YouTube. At 18, there was even talk with some major record labels about a deal.

All of this happened when Stevenson was still going by Stan SB. The major labels brought up the idea of a name change. He wasn't ready. The deal eventually fell through.

He realizes now that there were problems with "Stan SB" though, "It gave people this idea that I was just a drum n' bass guy," he says. "I've never been that. I've always wanted to do other stuff."

Advertisement

He made his first vocal track in 2009 and now sings on all of his songs.

The first track on which Stevenson sang.

This year, before the release of his newest EP Throwdown premiering here today and officially released tomorrow off of Datsik's label Firepower Records, he decided to make the change. "Now I can make the body of work that I really want to make."

That body of work is 128 BPM big-room, big-festival blockbuster sounding tracks. The Transformers of EDM music. "I try to get more hype into it. That's such a powerful tempo to make an audience go crazy."

His ideal version of this sound right now is "High Five," the first song off Throwdown. It's a melodic radio-ready cut that explodes into a big-room EDM drop with bleepy-bloop accents. It's a bit like Disclosure's deep, layered sound if they chose to make festival EDM instead of staying closer to the much hipper UK garage.

Stevenson says he's been playing "High Five" at shows and festivals for the past year and it's the only track to which he can guarantee all the dubstep, house and drum n' bass fans will lose their shit. "I'm curious to explore if that's something that can materialize further into something that I can put my stamp on," he says, dreaming of cross-genre megastardom. "I think a new movement in dance music is necessary because the big room world and the bass music world are so separate. I'd love to have something that bridges that gap."

Advertisement

That might be hard to manage. The French social scientist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu argues that taste is a form of cultural currency. What you choose to like unites you with the group of people you want to join and relate to, while the sounds you dislike is actually an effort to move away from the people who do like them. Taste is subconsciously determined by social status over musical preference. It's an aversion to big room EDM bros that somewhat defines a drum n' bass fan and a blasé temperament towards the underground drum n' bass nerds that defines a pop-EDM fan.

Stevenson kind of understands that but he's open to the possibility of failure. "If I can pull it off in the right way, I'm really interested in doing it. If not, I'll try something else," he says. After disappearing record deals and a name change, he's open to the potential pitfalls and triumphs of reivention.

He just wants as many people as possible to pay attention. "The big room thing is something that interests me. I'm not afraid of being mainstream," he says, calling himself "pretty pop-conscious."

"I'd rather cater to the masses, if possible."

Lauren is on Twitter - @LaurSchwar

Keep reading and watching…
Lunice's 'Can't Wait To' Has Got Us Hyped For His Post-TNGHT Vision
How Skrillex Won Bonnaroo 
Bass God: Bassnectar is not a DJ. He's a Movement