Lava Lamps, Ludachrist and the Ageless Artwork of Kill Safari

On a stormy spring night in Austin, Texas, the ice cube in a perfectly crafted old fashioned clattered as I entered the lava lamp lair that Nick Weiller, better known as Bro Safari, calls home.

“Bourbon, right?” he asked. Then, another voice: Jake Stanczak, the producer behind Kill The Noise.

As we sat down for an intimate interview about their collaborative Kill Safari project, the storm outside intensified, the perfect metaphor for their shapeshifting music and our conversation alike.

“I reached out to him. He was on my radar before I was on his,” Stanczak recalls of how he initially heard about Weiller. “At the time, I was living in Rochester, New York, so to be sending music to someone who was living in Atlanta, it changed my life, for real. I hit him up on AIM! (AOL Instant Messenger).”

At the time, Weiller was with Evol Intent Recordings, who released the first Kill The Noise EP. It served as the true jumping-off point for what would be decades of seminal collaboration.

“In the process of all of this, Jake came to Atlanta to hang out,” Weiller recalls. “We became actual friends outside of the music.”

Kill The Noise (L) and Bro Safari (R).Credit: Greg Fulks for EDM.com

While most know Stanczak and Weiller for their solo projects and Kill Safari, this particular weekend they were working on another project that, too, has been in the works for years.

“It’s funny, that’s actually what Jake is in town to do. We’re working on Ludachrist, not Kill Safari, this entire weekend,” Weiller explains. “Which is the most fun thing to do ever. The most fun I’ve ever had working on music is Ludachrist.”

Ludachrist, for the uninitiated, is a playful mashup fusion of hip-hop, rock, electro and essentially anything that traditionally shouldn’t work, but does.

“Ludachrist started as just fucking around in the living room, like this,” Weiller recalls. “I sent Jake three minutes of just nonsense, and we just decided that it needs to be a thing.”

Stanczak chimed in: “The entire time he and I have been working, it’s just been a run-on tangent. We will start working on a drum & bass thing and then be like, wouldn’t it be funny if we did this?”

Ludachrist serves as a home for creations that may not “fit” into their solo projects. The source of their success and inspiration can be rooted in that feeling: unhinged, uninhibited and living in the creative comfort of doing what feels and sounds good in the moment. In their world, genre is a fluid ideology, not a boundary.

“We have come to the realization: just do what sounds good to us, what makes us smile in the studio, laugh and have a good time. That’s really all that is necessary,” Weiller explains. “I’ve always come to that conclusion working on music for the last 25 to 30 years.”

Credit: Ludachrist/SoundCloud

In the same vein, Both Stanczak and Weiller understand the value of spending time on the road to keep things fresh and sharp. It’s the connections they make mixed with living in the moment that drives their passion to stay constant.

“Touring itself and playing shows really keeps the wheels turning,” Weiller explains. “The act of touring and meeting new people, younger people, it keeps things interesting. “In the process of doing that, that’s when new songs happen. We will be making more original music.”

“Yeah, you’re a testament, right? It’s like, turn up to the gig, maybe have a couple cocktails and start talking about music.” Jake adds. “You’re camera A, I’m camera B, he’s camera C. It’s almost like Swiss cheese and you start to see things that are true and what other people are thinking.” One of the great things about us going on tour doing the Kill Safari thing is that we hadn’t been on tour together in so long,” he explains. “It’s like the ultimate lie detector on shit we are working on or that we like.”

If you haven’t seen Kill Safari live, the experience could best be described as two OG beat slingers smiling and feeding off the visceral connection between music and festival-goers.

They ground their future musical curations through a simple concept: continuing to tour.

“Since we have been in this over a couple of decades now, when we show up and play a show, I’m grateful to be there,” Weiller says. “We’re both older guys. To still be involved, accepted, appreciated and influencing people, it’s hard not to enjoy. I started Bro Safari when I was 30, and between 30 and 40 I had a lot of ups and downs and couldn’t live in the moment as much. So now that we are doing this at this age, it’s fun, man.”

For Stanczak, the come-up isn’t nearly as fulfilling as the journey.

“Being on the path is what life is about,” he explains. “Everyone is celebrating the come up, but to maintain your idealistic qualities, like when you were a kid, the idea is to keep doing that forever. It’s not about trying to be the biggest guys. It’s about being part of the conversation, talking about music.”

That conversation, however, has mutated into an enormous elephant in the room that can’t be ignored. Today, music production often stirs up uncomfortable conversations due to the advent and mass-adoption of AI, which many bemoan for bastardizing the art of music creation. Mikey Shulman, the co-founder and CEO of the controversial AI music platform Suno, faced pervasive backlash last year after claiming in an interview that most people find the music creation process “not really enjoyable.”

Weiller and Stanczak believe generative AI essentially lobotomizes the joy behind the music creation process.

“The most fun is when we find two things that actually work together, that creates a memorable moment,” Weiller explains. “The fun in making music is the journey, and the journey involves discovery. When you’re using AI, it removes the fun.”

Stanczak jumps in: “The thing that makes making music important is this idea of going out to shows and seeing how people react to music, and then you come back home and play with the puzzle pieces. It can rob people of that process.”

This can be seen and felt directly through a creative process where every idea acts as the springboard for the next thing, leaving no stone unturned. It can be heard in its most pure form in their first Kill Safari EP, a self-titled five-track collection that encapsulates their chemistry perfectly.

“We really honed in on the identity of Kill Safari, which makes it easier for us to work on different things,” Stanczak said. “Now Kill The Noise has its own zone, Kill Safari has its own zone.”

Weiller adds: “I feel like this EP that we put out is an actual representation of what our sounds are like when they are mashed together. There’s elements of trap stuff, heavy dubstep and beyond that a lot of hip hop, that was very international.”

This isn’t a new concept or law by which they abide. It’s been rooted deeply in their DNA for years.

“That’s not like a new thing, we have always been into that. If you listen to old Evol Intent or Ludachrist, it’s always had this grimy hip-hop element, and it made sense. That was the missing link when we finally got this EP together,” Weiller explains. “It sounds like a coherent body of work. It’s a conscious effort to keep an eye on the overall sound of what our project is.”

But what about 10 years from now?

“Hopefully alive,” Stanczak says with a big laugh. “But doing what we are doing right now.”

Weiller adds: “Doing similar shit we are doing now, still on the journey, still discovering. Continue going, continue being creative, continuing surrounding myself with people who keep me young. It keeps my neurons firing and in touch.”

Credit: Greg Fulks for EDM.com

DJing past the age of 30 was an uncertain frontier for both artists, but they have found solace in the notion that their art isn’t tethered to any timeline.

“I got my big break when I was 30, working with Skrillex,” Stanczak recalls. “At the time, the concept of DJing past 30 was the cringiest thing I could think of. My dad is 75 and he’s making art. We are a product of our environment.”

“Every 45-year-old I know is divorced, listening to Creed, smoking a cigarette,” he continues. “They look like shit, waiting to die. We have to come up with a new vision. Hopefully 10 years from now I’ll still be doing the same shit, I’ll just look like shit all the way to the end. People will be trying to bury me and I’ll still be talking, making tunes.”

While both producers know what they don’t want to become, it’s hard to ignore the universe’s hand in bringing people together.

“Like Jake said earlier, we showed up, hung out, met you, now you’re here in my fucking house talking about art. That’s what it’s all about, man,” Weiller explains.

“You put the intention out there and start doing the work, and naturally things start coming together, people start coming together,” Stanczak adds. It’s just having the intention and doing the fucking work.”

For them, finding a sense of purpose is the key to living with fulfillment and energy, independent of what society or others might think. Stanczak points to David Lynch, the influnetial filmmaker and musician known for his dreamlike style, as inspiration.

“He started off as a fucking painter. Everyone knows him as a filmmaker, but along the way he became a filmmaker, an artist,” Stanczak says. “And he died doing what he loved most, which was smoking cigarettes. He followed his intuition about what felt good, what felt natural and he didn’t regret any of it. I feel like him smoking the cigarette is a symbolic aspect of his career.”

Kill Safari will be on the road in the months ahead, including a standout performance at Excision’s Bass Canyon festival at the Gorge in August, which they promise will be packed with new tracks and, of course, an occasional cigarette.

You can watch our full interview with Kill Safari below.