Wellness Culture and Canada Combine on DJ/Producer Jessy Lanza’s Latest Club-Facing Release
"I just always kind of felt like I was this dorky person that nobody wanted there, and I’ve kind of never stopped feeling that way," she told Jezebel
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Image: !K7 Records/Winston H. Case (via Motormouth Media)
Jessy Lanza, the Hamilton, Ontario, native who makes stunning, forward-thinking pop equally indebted to R&B and classic club music, recently released her entry in the beloved DJ-Kicks mix series. For years, DJ-Kicks has been offering electronic musicians a platform to compile typically dance-oriented tracks, which are then often blended into each other to create a continuous mix. Lanza’s finds her weaving her own vocals through a multivalent sampling of 26 tracks from jacking house to vintage Euro pop. The release features four new Lanza cuts, including two with collaborator Taraval that are among the most banging in Lanza’s catalog. Lanza, an especially thoughtful producer, said she selected her tracks to pay tribute to her Canadian youth and the time she spent in Detroit and Chicago as a kid. The cover art, directed by her frequent collaborator Winston H. Case, is a riff on wellness culture. The complete product is as idiosyncratic as we’ve come to expect from Lanza, who recently talked to Jezebel about the making of her mix. A condensed and edited transcript of that conversation is below.
JEZEBEL: You released your third album, All the Time, during quarantine 2020. How did that go for you? Do you think the album got to live a proper life?
JESSY LANZA: I mean, it definitely wasn’t ideal, but it seemed like people really liked it. I’m just happy that it got any air at all. In spite of what was going on, people still listened. It sucked not being able to play shows. I’ve [since] played one or two shows, and seeing people singing the words and stuff, I was so touched.
You have four new tracks on the DJ-Kicks. Were they recorded specifically for this mix?
“Seven 55” is a song that’s been floating around for a while, but I only finished it once I sent it to Loraine [James]. She brought that song back from the dead. The techno tracks I made in the summer when my friend Ryan Smith, who goes by the name Taraval. Those are newer and I did those special [for the mix].
How did the formulation of the actual mix go?
I think I had in the back of my head what deejaying meant to me as an adolescent. My dad had a P.A. rental company and I have a cousin who is quite older than me that always treated me like a narc or like I was just an annoying 12-year-old that he didn’t want around. I just always kind of felt like I was this dorky person that nobody wanted there, and I’ve kind of never stopped feeling that way, to be quite honest, with DJ culture in general.
I think I ended up looking back subconsciously. I put on a lot of tracks that made me think of Hamilton and where Hamilton is situated outside Toronto, kind of close to Detroit. I thought of Chicago, how much music has come out of Chicago that inspires me. You know, going on a band trip to Chicago when I was playing the clarinet when I was 14. There’s the Dee Jay Nehpets track, there’s a track from Secret Werewolf, who’s this guy Ollie from Hamilton, who was putting on those raves in Hamilton when I was a kid. I thought a lot about connections, for sure, even though they may sound abstract when I’m describing them to you now. But looking back on it, there is this kind of sentimental quality to a lot of the tracks I picked.