Really nice article about me in the San Francisco Chronicle today. An excerpt:

In my embarrassingly juvenile notion of the profession, musicians sit under trees with guitars and cigarettes, scratching hard-won truths into coffee-stained notepads. Periodically a car drives past blaring the latest treacly pop confection, or a passer-by hums the mindless melody from a hot dog commercial. The musician pulls on his Marlboro superiorly; there’s music and then there’s the crap made for money. Hey, another hard-won truth!

My sense of musicianship is obsolete and naive, a teenager’s. Music itself, meanwhile — though marketed to a younger and younger audience — appears to have largely outgrown adolescence. Its creators, its business and its culture increasingly bear the grown-up qualities of pragmatism and savvy commercial sense these days. Bands are market-tested, singers date TV stars in shrewd cross-promotions, and in the case of Blake Robin, sophisticated young musicians who might once have eschewed the mainstream now find it’s the path to both financial solvency and their own creative expression.

You can read the whole thing here. I stopped reading the comments when the all-too-predictable flame war started getting silly. But you may enjoy reading them if you’re interested in understanding why San Francisco is viewed by the rest of the world as a bunch of aggressively mediocre, aging hippies.

Hey DJ!
Hey…you!

Name: Baron von Luxxury is my fake name.

Club night: DiscoWorkout.com

Style of music you spin: Italo disco (Giorgio Moroder, Glass Candy), French touch (Daft Punk, Alan Braxe), bloghouse bangers (Justice, Midnight Juggernauts), and vintage synthpop (Trans-X, late period ABBA).
Name of a track you can’t get out of your head: Marianne Faithfull’s 1979 new wave/disco classic “Broken English”, which I just remixed. If I’m working on a track for a week it tends to take at least 2 more weeks for it to stop looping endlessly in my head.

Dream DJ partner: I recently started writing and producing songs with other artists. It started with some remixes I did, including one for Glass Candy that just came out on RCRDLBL.com (and which the dude from HEALTH just called his favorite track of the year in Pitchfork.com). For my next album I’m collaborating on songs with my local homies in Sugar and Gold, Scissors for Lefty and The Blacks. Meanwhile the internet is bringing me together with Little Boots and Robots in Disguise in London, Jacques Renault and Devin Dirt in NYC,and many more. It’s been exciting make music together with my peers.

** Read the rest of the SFWeekly interview with Baron von Luxxury

Quoth John from HEALTH on Pitchfork:

John Famiglietti: Glass Candy: "I Always Say Yes (Baron Von Luxxury Remix Parts II & III)"
Hearing so aesthetically perfect as Glass Candy remixed, and Ida cut up and rebounding all over this track is a total emotional mix up/mindfuck of all the wistful feelings of the Jewelniverse, plus this “stranger” of computer manipulation reminding you how modern the music actually is. It’s really exhilarating to hear Glass Candy in this context, I gotta hear Part I.”

Get the track now at RCRD LBL.

This amazing envelope came in the mail the other day:

It contained a copy of an interview I gave a few months ago to the USF student newspaper, The Foghorn. I’d completely forgotten what I had said that night to the very clever Lulu Mcallister, and OMG I was a bit of a fucking pompous blowhard at times. BUT. It makes for an amusing read, and the title may just be the best thing I’ve ever said.

(Slight nitpick/correction: I actually said that I was inspired by Sisters of Mercy front man Andrew Eldritch’s fake names - and not that these were fake names that I have used for myself. Onward.)

Pretentious? Moi?

(Thank you Lulu!)

- Baron von Luxxury is my fake name

Wow! Thanks Mr. Lowe…

Marianne Faithfull: “Broken English (Baron von Luxxury Light Touch Remix)”
Began December 2007. Procrastinated a lot. Completed April 2008.

* Click to download the MP3 at Headphone Sex
* Click to download the MP3 at Breidholt
* Click to download the MP3 at Silence is A Rhythm Too
* Click to download the MP3 at Disco Workout

Glass Candy (Baron von Luxxury Remix) in The Fader magazine

Tracklisting

Lil Boosie “Don’t I Act a Donkey”
Bohagon “Bucket”
Telepathe, “Chrome’s On It”
Get Em Mamis “Cold Summer”
Hercules & Love Affair “Hercules Theme”
Estelle f. Kanye West “American Boy”
Child Ballads “Cheekbone Hollows”
Lykke Li “Complaints Department”
Glass Candy “I Always Say Yes (Baron Von Luxxury Remix)”
Ladyhawk “I Don’t Always Know What You’re Saying”
Demarco “Fallen Soldier”
Ricky Blaze “Cut Dem Off”
The Foals “Balloons”
Abe Vigoda “Animal Ghosts”

Download MP3 now

This is the first official remix of a Glass Candy song, “I Always Say Yes (Baron von Luxxury Remix).” This is actually Parts II and III of what turned into a 19 minute remix of the song, in five different parts. Here’s how it happened.

Since last April I’ve been working on the remix and meeting up with Johnny Jewel after Glass Candy and Chromatics shows in San Francisco, Brooklyn and LA. We’d discuss the latest mix, and then a few days later I’d get text messages and emails with suggestions. “Ida likes her vocals in this part.” “Try using more repetition.” Then we’d both get busy with other things (I was remixing Scissors for Lefty, CSS, Sunny Day Sets Fire, Robots in Disguise AND Ms. Hilary Duff, as well as signing a publishing deal; he’s running Italians Do It Better and writing/producing/touring with all the amazing bands on that label) and time would pass. Until somehow nine months went by, and the remix became 19 minutes long!

Finally, late this past November I met Mr. Jewel in the parking lot of a Best Western in LA after Glass Candy’s show at the Troubadour. I gave him a CDR, we talked, and the next week I got a txt from him saying: “congratulations, the saga is over!” And so it is; and here are Parts II and III of the remix. (The rest is coming soon.)

MP3: Glass Candy - “I Always Say Yes (Baron von Luxxury Remix Parts II & III)”

A FEW MUSICAL THOUGHTS THAT WENT INTO THIS REMIX, I.E. WHY IT TOOK ME 9 MONTHS TO MAKE:

The original song “I Always Say Yes” is an icy disco masterpiece. I didn’t want to give it a “typical” remix treatment i.e. bump up the BPM, add slammin’ kick, distorted bass, compress like hell. I just felt that Glass Candy is the antithesis of the bloghouse banger aesthetic, and the track deserved something different. I focused on the fact that the original song has an unusual structure: there’s no chorus. There are plenty of hooks, to be sure, but no real refrain. So I decided to make something of a *reverse* remix.

I chopped up Ida No’s original vocal into dozens of individual phonemes, and rearranged each one to create an entirely new melody for the verse. Then I added all new music underneath - an entirely new song, really - to showcase the sound and retain the mystery and enigma of her incredible voice in a new context. Finally, I found a line from the original vocal, added a second vocal track and pitched it up to create a harmony, and thus was born the chorus. All the original vocal parts are retained, but completely re-ordered. The result is a blend of Schoenberg’s serialism meets the Cocteau Twins via Crystal Castles. At the end of the day I think I did the original justice, without doing it Justice.

Part III (also included in this Mp3) extends the same re-modelling idea to the original music, with the addition of silence as a new element. By contrast with part II, there is no vocal in this section, and I only added light percussion in parts. The absence of sound as a compositional element was inspired by Miles Davis’ famous line about the importance of “knowing when *not* to play.”

Anyway, that’s my pretentious explication.

Thanks for listening, hope you like the music.

MP3: Glass Candy - “I Always Say Yes (Baron von Luxxury Remix Parts II & III)”

Sincerely,
Baron von Luxxury is my Fake Name

P.S. All my remixes are in the “BvL Remixes” section.

Now it can be told! In advance of a full length expected later this Spring, London’s Sunny Day Sets Fire are releasing a remix EP on February 26th. The EP features “Stranger” the first single off of the full length, as well as remixes of SDSF songs by CSS , The Cool Kids, XXXChange from Spank Rock, Mad Decent/Diplo and some kid from San Francisco named Baron von Luxxury.

Sunny Day Sets Fire: “Stranger / Remix EP”:

01. Stranger

MP3: “Stranger” - Sunny Day Sets Fire</a

02. Stranger (The Slips Remix)
03. Wilderness (CSS Remix) - MySpace stream
04. Adrenaline (XXXChange Remix) - MySpace stream
05. Stranger (The Cool Kids Remix)
06. Brainless (Baron von Luxxury Remix) - MySpace stream
07. Brainless (Mad Decent Remix)
08. Stranger (Radio Edit)

You can pre-order the EP at Iamsound Records Web site and listen to three the remixes by CSS, XXXChange and moi, Baron von Luxxury, at SDSF’s remix MySpace.

xx,
Baron von Luxxury

P.S This was originally posted at Discoworkout.

P.P.S Big ups toPandaToes for the flattering review!

“Weird lil’ tidbit - I think the Baron von Luxxury rework might be my favorite. Never thought I’d take that (no knock on B.V.L., obviously) over C.S.S., Spank Rock, the Cool Kids, and Mad Decent, but it just might’ve happened.”

P.P.P.S. All my remixes are in the “BvL Remixes” section.

Hi!!!

Luxxury’s song “Sweet and Vicious” was on MTV’s “The Hills” last week! You can hear the song play prominently as the drama unfolds between this one vapid blonde chick and this other slightly-more-vapid blonde chick with bigger boobs here (from 1:38-1:50 in the first segment after the intro/titles):

http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?id=1574755&vid=191255

Also!!!

We are proud to announce that Luxxury are joining Justice, Simian Mobile Disco, Cut Copy, Spank Rock and many more of the planet’s best electro acts at RCRDLBL.com, the new label offshoot of Downtown Records (Gnarls Barkley, Art Brut, Eagles of Death Metal).

Luxxury is today’s featured artist, go download the exclusive MP3 now:
RCRDLBL.com