The ellipsis is intentional. ...weird is not a statement or a boast — it's an invitation to reconsider what electronic music needs to be, an opening rather than a declaration. Westminster-based and operating in OC's underground circuit, ...weird pushes against the polished, predictable side of electronic music with sets that embrace texture, disruption, and the productive discomfort of music that doesn't quite fit any obvious category. Electronic music has always had an experimental wing — from the earliest synthesizer composers through IDM, glitch, and every genre since that has prioritized the interesting over the accessible — and ...weird plants its flag firmly in that tradition while remaining rooted in the specific context of Orange County's rave scene. This isn't music made to challenge audiences for the sake of challenge; it's music made from a genuine conviction that the unconventional is where the most interesting things happen, where feeling lives that has no other way to get out. In a world of safe choices, weird is a commitment, and ...weird makes it look and sound like the only logical option.
"Weird isn't what you call something you don't understand. It's what you call something that makes you feel things you don't have words for."
THE STORY
Where does the name and identity of ...weird come from?
The name came from a refusal to pretend that fitting in was a goal. I was always drawn to the strange edges of music — the tracks that made people uncomfortable, the moments in sets where the DJ took an unexpected turn and you couldn't tell if it was going to pay off — and at some point it seemed more honest to make that the identity explicitly rather than trying to package it in something more palatable. The ellipsis at the front of the name is its own kind of statement: there's something before the weird, something that came before the word that gets cut off, which is maybe the expectation you bring to music before you encounter something that changes what you thought was possible. The name is meant to create a specific set of expectations and then do something with them.
What does "weird" mean to you as an artistic stance in underground music?
Weird as an artistic stance means a commitment to pursuing the most interesting version of something rather than the most comfortable version. In underground music specifically, there's always a tension between the experimental impulse that birthed the form and the social function of keeping a dance floor moving — and I'm interested in the music that holds both of those things in productive tension rather than resolving the tension by choosing one side. Weird also means being willing to fail publicly in pursuit of something that might work — a conventional set rarely fails badly, but it also rarely achieves something genuinely memorable. The weird sets, the ones that take real risks, are the ones that people talk about years later, and that's the territory I'm interested in occupying.
Tell us about Westminster as a home base — what is the OC scene like there?
Westminster is a city with a lot of layers — it's known for Little Saigon, for being one of the most Vietnamese-American communities in the country, and it has a cultural richness that feeds into the creative life of the people who live here in ways that are often invisible from outside. The scene in Westminster specifically is small and operates mostly through connections to the broader OC network rather than through its own infrastructure. Being from Westminster feels like being from a city that has a lot of hidden depth — there's more here than the surface suggests, and that resonates with what I'm trying to do musically. The weird lives in the overlooked corners of cities like Westminster, and that's where I'm most comfortable.
What first drew you into experimental and unconventional electronic music?
I had an early experience of hearing music that genuinely disturbed me — not in a negative sense, but in the sense of disturbing my settled sense of what music was supposed to do and feel like — and that experience was more powerful than anything I'd heard before that. Once you've felt that, the music that plays it safe starts to feel deficient by comparison. The artists who pushed me in that direction early on were doing things that didn't make immediate sense but that rewarded sustained listening, and that dynamic — music that gives you more the longer you stay with it — became the standard I hold everything I choose against. Accessible music doesn't require you to do anything; the music I love asks something of you, and the asking is part of the experience.
THE CRAFT
Which artists in the experimental electronic tradition have most shaped your approach — who are the reference points?
Aphex Twin is foundational — the way Richard James has spent decades expanding what electronic music can contain, from accessible ambient to genuinely disturbing rhythmic experimentation, is a model for what a career in weird music looks like at its fullest expression. Squarepusher's approach to complexity — where technical extremity is in service of emotional intensity rather than existing for its own sake — is something I think about a lot in my own curatorial and performance decisions. Crystal Castles showed me how experimental electronic music could exist in a live, visceral context that wasn't the cerebral listening-room format — their shows were physically overwhelming experiences that used the tools of extreme music to create genuine emotional catharsis. And Death Grips, though they're not strictly electronic, embody a commitment to maximum intensity and conceptual seriousness that I find deeply inspiring: they do not compromise, and the result is some of the most powerful music of the last decade.
How do you approach a set differently than a more conventional DJ?
I start from a different set of questions. A conventional DJ is asking "what does this crowd want to hear, and how do I deliver it in the most satisfying way?" — which is a legitimate and skilled approach. I'm asking "what does this crowd need to feel that they don't know they need, and how do I get there without losing them entirely?" That second question is harder to answer and riskier to pursue, because it means making choices the audience can't predict or confirm in advance. In practice this means my sets have more jarring transitions, more textural variety, more moments of deliberate uncertainty where the direction isn't clear — and then, ideally, moments of resolution that pay off the accumulated tension in a way that feels earned rather than just given. The curve is steeper and the payoff is higher.
How do you think about glitch and texture as musical tools in your sets?
Glitch and texture are ways of adding information density to music that rhythm and melody alone can't provide. When a track has surface imperfections — glitches, digital artifacts, sounds that seem to be malfunctioning rather than performing — it creates a quality of attention in the listener that smooth, well-produced music can't achieve. The listener's ear becomes more active, trying to understand what they're hearing and what it means, and that active listening mode is one where emotional impact is actually higher, not lower, than in passive listening. Texture creates depth — the sense that there's more in the music than you've heard yet — and that depth is what keeps music interesting across repeated listens and across the duration of a live set. I choose music that has textural richness specifically because I want to give the listener something to keep finding.
What technical challenges come with playing experimental music in a live underground setting?
The main challenge is that experimental music often breaks the conventions that make live DJing technically smooth — the BPMs are irregular, the structures are non-standard, the frequency content can be extreme in ways that stress sound systems. Playing this music live means developing techniques for transition and sequencing that don't depend on the normal tools, and it means knowing your sound system well enough to know what it can handle and how to push it without damaging anything. There's also the challenge of audience management — knowing how far you can push the weird before you lose people, and having material ready to pull people back if you've taken them somewhere too disorienting. That calibration is the most important live skill in experimental DJing, and it only develops through doing many sets in many different environments.
THE SCENE
What role do you think experimental music plays in the culture more broadly?
Experimental music is the research and development wing of the culture — it's where the new forms that become tomorrow's mainstream electronic music are being explored and developed today. Every genre that's now considered standard fare started out as the weird fringe of its era: techno, drum and bass, dubstep, ambient — all of these were experimental and challenging before they were established forms. The experimental wing of underground music keeps the whole culture from calcifying into self-referential repetition of forms that have already been fully developed. It's also the place where listeners who have grown bored with predictability find renewed engagement with music, and that renewal is what keeps long-term underground music fans committed rather than eventually moving on to something else entirely.
How does the OC underground respond to experimental and unconventional music?
Better than you might expect, and it's getting better. The OC community has been developing for long enough that there's a core of genuinely adventurous listeners who have heard a lot of conventional underground electronic music and are hungry for something that challenges them. Those listeners are the audience that makes what I do possible, and the fact that they exist in OC is one of the reasons I'm committed to this specific scene rather than relocating somewhere with a more established experimental music infrastructure. The mainstream of OC's underground is more conventional, but the margins are genuinely open to the kind of weird that ...weird represents, and I think those margins are growing as the scene matures and listeners develop broader musical vocabularies.
What do you want the ...weird project to contribute to OC's scene?
I want ...weird to be evidence that the OC underground is capacious enough to hold experimental and unconventional music alongside everything else — that this scene isn't just about one kind of electronic music but about a shared commitment to music that matters, whatever form that takes. On a more individual level, I want to create experiences for people that they genuinely couldn't have found anywhere else, that are specific to this moment and this community and couldn't be replicated by listening to a recorded set. The weird should be present and alive, not just conceptually interesting — and that's the standard I'm working toward with every set. If I can help even a few people in OC's underground discover that the stranger edges of electronic music have something profound to offer them, then the project is succeeding at what it's actually for.
ARTIST PROFILE
Westminster, California
Orange County
Underground Electronic
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