ill.Gates and his Mission to Un-F*ck the Whole System of EDM [Exclusive Interview]

ill.Gates is a different breed of producer, a beacon of hope for this genre, and one of the few people in the business with the integrity to speak the truth on the tough topics that EDM’s button pusher heroes will surely never touch. Before anyone even listened to his music, he swore that he would eject himself from the system if he ever became, in his own words, a “fucking arrogant d*ckhead.”

Music saved my life. Music reached into my heart, opened me up, and helped me to understand this world emotionally, not just rationally, and to find my place in it. Without it I would be dead.

In an extremely passionate and heartfelt interview, Dylan shared with WRR his enlightening thoughts on water restrictions at festivals, net neutrality, plug-in based DJs, and how he can help you discover your production genius no matter what your circumstances may be.

I might get some shit for this, but to be honest a lot of these companies make decisions that are based on the bottom dollar of their investors. I personally can’t wait for the “EDM bubble” to collapse because that will allow us to operate free from these capitalistic influences that are merely there to constrain us in the name of profit.

If you were really thinking about drug death prevention the number one cause of drug deaths ever is dehydration. If someone constrains your access to Camelbaks, then you don’t need to support that festival. By supporting that festival you are supporting entities who are not music festival attendees, and they do not give a fuck about your experience or the music. They are there to make money, want you to buy more bullshit at the concessions, and cough up your front row seat that you worked hard and showed up early to get, so that they can make a buck.

That is horrible bullshit that is going to ultimately result in more fatalities. Get them out of the way and let the real promoters who actually care about this music and the impact of the healing that this music can produce inside of individuals. The life-changing effects of this music, these people don’t understand that.

They’re ruining your experience and adding to the dead raver total that cuts our scene down and helps the attackers how say that our scene is just about drug use. Water is a human right, and if you want your scene to thrive fuck anyone who curtails your access to water.

Calls to action for net neutrality have been circulating via artists such as ill.Gates and Bassnectar, and if there’s any cause that our generation needs to be supporting it’s this one. So put your ice buckets down for a moment because you’ll be shocked to learn what’s really going on with today’s world wide web.

Let’s just be straight about the internet, it was first invented by the military though a program called DARPA that also finances things like those robots on YouTube that are ready to chase you down and cap your ass. I don’t think they really realized how deep the threat of “hackerism” runs within the freedom loving people of the world.

It’s a horrible synchrony between the military/government invasion of privacy and the corporate need for statistics that will drive psychological profiles. In the name of the war on terror they collect our information and use it to fuel psychological profiles of individuals that they then sell to marketers and statistics, and there’s a lot of information that they would rather us not exchange in a very severe way. By creating a “fast lane” for high paying entities they create a slow lane for every other piece of internet traffic, throttling some pieces of internet traffic entirely. So really to preserve net neutrality is to preserve the actual potential of the internet, rather than to squash it and use it as a surveillance tool.

Net neutrality preserves the public interest, the free exchange of information, and the ability for the right person with the right idea to reach everybody. That’s the potential they don’t want. While many of my friends and family have been affected by disease that I want to support the research of, this is our go to cause. Our right to network and communicate freely with each other without restriction and to really say what is important without restriction, without paranoia, without them cataloging of these statistics to raise a red flag on your entry in their account system, that is real freedom in the modern era. If you could distill and boil it down to the crack cocaine of freedom you would have net neutrality. Don’t let them take it from us. If you ever see an email asking you to vote for net neutrality please do it. We need net neutrality to communicate and protect ourselves from this horrendous onslaught that is not even a conspiracy theory, it’s a conspiracy fact. Net neutrality is our buffer zone, and if there’s one issue that you take action about, it should be this.

Dylan has a dream, a dream for talented producers around the world to be able to quit working dead-end jobs because they can realistically make a living with their music. If you can figure out how to put your skills into a digital format, ill.Gates wants to help you sell that.

The ill.Methodology was the testing ground of a new system that I’m creating that I envisioned as a vehicle to help artists who were not born in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, to monetize their skills such that they can see being an artist as a reasonably logical pursuit for their life. I grew up where the gigs would not pay my bills, so I created a system of tutorial videos and selling sample packs.

I’ve been making music for a long time, and when it’s been a minute you start to think, what can I do generatively? How can I help other people? This new website we are creating is going help producers make a living at their craft while they work at their dream of being successful. This is how I’ve decided to give back.

There’s a final stage of gathering investors, but it’s going to be launching before the end of the year. It’s been my dream for a long time. I just want to help artists to get paid not just from gigs, but from being a legitimate teaching, loving, human being that helps other through this fucking crazy thing we call life. That’s why we’re here, to love and learn, teach and help each other through this crazy thing. I just wanted to make a place where that was possible. I hope it will help the artists that you love stop working shitty jobs they hate, and make art all the time.

You can check out a performance on his latest sound pack installment, the ill.Octopus Trap pack, a fully playable 1GB Trap library + instrument with ill.Gates’ custom Infinite Rack Engine and thousands of Trap kit combos, now available for download at smarturl.it/iLLOctopusTrap.

Dylan’s finger drumming is pretty mesmerizing to watch, and even as observers knowing little about production techniques, there’s a live element here that can only be a product of true artist integrity, hard work, and practice that can’t be achieved by just anyone.

So she just asked me how does finger drumming interact with my whole philosophy of music, and why should we care? Why should other artists care? There are fantastic plug-ins that are right there, whereby you can simply hit a key and recreate Martin Garrix’ “Animals” inside a nexus with a preset called “Animals,” unsurprisingly. What does that mean, if you can just hit a button and achieve this genre sound in whatever genre you want? In my opinion that means that plug-in based legitimacy becomes questionable.

When you use plug-ins that can achieve results that have made people famous, made entire careers, what then? Eventually people are going to clue in. What’s really next is what you can’t download, and what you can’t download is practice. I strongly feel that the real next level of the music scene is to appreciate actual, skilled, live musicians. That is the way that these people are going to be able to trump the mass amount of plug-ins that these hot, hungry kids have. They’re going to be able to trump that by being skilled, by being actual musicians, by being able to do something real on-stage that you can look at, see, hear, feel, and be impressed by. The rest is just math. What is it that separates humanity from math? That’s the question to ask. And that question is asked by live music.

Maybe someday there will a plug-in that creates a spontaneous live performance based on human emotion, but I think we are very far from making a computer understand what it is to experience the color red or be in love with something. That’s the edge we have as artists. We can do this thing that no computer can do, and that thing is to experience, and to love, and really have something to say based on your life, based on what you love and where your heart is. That’s what’s going to give the musicians of the future the edge, not, “I downloaded this plug-in before you,” but, “I was able to express myself more completely in a more live environment.”

Whether you’re an aspiring producer, an avid protester for net neutrality, or just a regular kandi kid, we can all find inspiration in Dylan’s final words as he closed out this no-holds-barred interview.

Get in touch with who you are and what you have to say because that’s your edge. You are the only expert on your own experience. Maximize that expertise. Feel it, love it, wind it up, and fucking rinse it out.

Connect with ill.Gates:
https://www.facebook.com/illGatesMusic
https://twitter.com/illGatesMusic
https://soundcloud.com/ill-gates

Photo Credit: www.zacfoto.com

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