Into the Void with 100 Gecs

100 Gecs’ Dylan Brady makes music in a one-room studio in a squarish brick building in L.A.’s Fashion District, just south of Pico Boulevard. “Handbag factory,” Brady says, when asked what the studio building used to be. “I think like mid-tier purses. Like your JC Penney type of purse.”

He’s been here for “six months-ish”—before that, he was in a bigger place, but all the other tenants were drummers. “So this one is good,” he says. “Smaller but better.”

To reach Brady’s room you walk up a flight of stairs, then down another flight of stairs. As a first-time visitor you arrive disoriented by the brief journey from street level, suddenly unsure which floor you’re on. It’s an ideal headspace in which to meet Brady and his 100 Gecs partner, Laura Les, whose gleefully attention-disordered electronic music can shred, in seconds, your sense of where you are.

The breakneck collages of disreputable genres like dubstep, thrash, and chiptune on the Gecs’ 2019 debut album, 1000 Gecs, have no real antecedent except for other end-of-music musics, like Mike Patton’s porno-ska-thrash outfit Mr. Bungle (a non-influence about which the Gecs are weary of being asked) and Naked City, a hyperkinetic jazz-noise cut-up outfit founded in the late ’80s by John Zorn (who they seem to think is okay). The first time I heard a song from 1000 Gecs—it was “Money Machine,” just under two minutes of surreal schoolyard taunting, spray-cheese metal guitar, hydraulic drum fills, fraught vocals pitched Chipmunks-high and hosed down with AutoTune—I assumed I was being punked. I seek out this feeling wherever I can get it. I like being made to feel old and confused and hostile by new music, like the people making it cannot possibly be serious. I like music that makes me feel like whatever music comes after this music will not even sound like music to me. (Bring me Werther’s in the old folks’ home and I’ll tell you about getting that feeling from Girl Talk and Odd Future.)

1000 Gecs ended up on more than a few critics’ year-end top-10 lists; the fact that it’ll go down in history as the New York Times’ 10th-favorite album of 2019 may constitute some kind of failure to more thoroughly alienate reasonable adults. On the other hand, of course it did—the more you listen to it, the more this unserious but impassioned record sounds like a tonic for a dissociative era, a giant cartoon axe for the frozen sea inside us all.

Which of course means the Gecs are right on time for 2020 too—as we sit home struggling to process an unprocessable reality scattered across dozens of browser tabs, we are all Laura Les wailing at helium-huffing pitch about wanting to throw her phone in a river.

This is not something Les or Brady articulated when we met. Articulating some concrete link to the zeitgeist, you get the sense, would be extremely un-Gec, as would categorizing sounds, styles, or philosophies as Gec and un-Gec—another extremely appealing thing about this music is that the people behind it don’t seem like they’re angling to take what they’re about and bottle it as a lifestyle brand.

The truth is, they don’t seem like they’re angling at all. Les, 25, and Brady, 26, grew up in the golden age of YouTube and file-sharing. They met as teens in the St. Louis suburbs, where they lived about five miles apart, but by the time they started making Gecs music together in earnest, Les was living in Chicago and Brady was in L.A. trying to make it as an artist and producer. (His 2018 solo LP, Peace and Love, was released by Mad Decent, the label cofounded by producer/omnipresence Diplo; in December, Diplo tweeted a photo of original Blue’s Clues host Steve Burns with the caption “I only listen to 100 Gecs.”)

Their breakout gig was a DJ set at Fire Festival, a multistage music fest that took place entirely within the PC game Minecraft, and they made their debut album by passing Logic Pro files back and forth over the internet. In a post-COVID-19 world, the Gecs’ extremely online way of making and promoting their music is looking more and more like the future of record-making, for everybody. But when we talked in early March, Brady and Les were both still getting used to the idea that music like this, made under these circumstances, would take them this far. As such they have a self-protectively facetious way of talking about what they do, as if defining their intentions or pondering next steps might kill it. They can’t even tell me what they imagined they might achieve with the album when they finished it.

“I liked the album—it was good enough,” Brady says. “I like listening to it. That was enough for me.”

“We were done when we were like, ‘This sounds perfect. Best album. Nobody’s topping that. Except for us,’ ” Les says.

“I was, like, not totally sure it was done,” Brady says, “and then it was out, and I was like, ‘It’s done, I guess.’ ”

Les laughs. “When it’s out, it’s definitely done,” she says.

In person, they’re visually similar—pale skin, lots of bitchin’ blond hair—but Les (on a couch, in a zipped-up black hoodie) is expansive and emphatic where Brady (in a swivel chair, facing away from the mixing desk) is tight-lipped and a little cagey.

At one point, the conversation turns to music discovery. Brady volunteers that these days he mostly listens to the radio in the car—pop, classic rock, “NPR shit.” Then they’re off.

“Radio is sick,” Les says.

“It’s everywhere,” Brady says.

“It’s right here.”

“There’s music in the air right now.”

“If you had an antenna you could pick up a radio signal.”

“So many of them.”

“Also,” Les says, “the best advertisements are on radio. Hard-sell car ads are, like, so good. I like the local car ads where they throw a million effects on the voice to emphasize one word—they’re like, New!, with a ton of chorus, and then they’re like, Low prices, but that has a huge echo. I’m loving that so much.”

Will the next Gecs album sound like a hard-sell car ad, then?

“It’s actually just gonna be a jazz-rock fusion album,” Les says.

“It’s just all jazz. Ten songs. Trio, no vocals,” Brady says.

“Six minutes each. Lots of scatting.”

They always seem like they’d be more comfortable just talking to each other. Their answers don’t shed much light, but their back-and-forth illuminates something about the way they work.

“Dylan’s a nice person who likes assholes, and I’m an asshole, so it works perfectly,” Les says. “The duality is how it works. Positive negative. Negative positive. I make sure the songs aren’t too good.”

Brady studied audio engineering in college; Les studied acoustical engineering, a different discipline more focused on sound itself. “And then I was recording [music] in my dorm,” she says, “and I was like, ‘I don’t even want to fuckin’ study this anymore. I’m just gonna do it, and study something else.’ I switched to an engineering degree.”

You can still find some of Les’s non-Gecs recordings—“finding-my-voice type shit,” some of which she made under the pseudonym Osno1—on her Bandcamp page. Although the Gecs aesthetic is ostensibly a creative mind-meld between her and Brady, the division of labor becomes easier to understand when you hear her solo albums. Despite the presence of programmed drumbeats and the occasional airhorn blast, 2016’s hello kitty skates to the fuckin CEMATARY and 2017’s I Just Don’t Wanna Name It Anything with “Beach” in the Title are lo-fi and personal, reminiscent of the quiet moments that punctuate a Gecs song before it shoves you back into a warp zone. As on the Gecs album, she recorded many of the vocals in her bedroom closet.

“Not till I was working with Dylan did I realize that I wanted to sing,” Les says. “When we did the first 100 Gecs EP”—self-titled and self-released, from 2017—“I was really unsure of my singing. And then we did that, and I was like, ‘Actually, I fucking love this so much. Words are so cool.’ Before I worked with Dylan, I would put words in text-to-speech and put them in songs, or I would just remix other songs that I thought had relevant lyrical content. And then Dylan’s like, ‘Actually, singing is really cool.’ ”

“Best instrument,” Brady says.

“I’d always been a holistic music maker, and now I’m like, ‘I’m actually a singer!’ ” Les says. “I’m loving it. It's way less stressful. I’m just going to let Dylan take the brunt of the work. And I can just chill out and buy sunglasses.”

Before 1000 Gecs, Brady made records under his own name and produced artists like the Canadian rapper Night Lovell and the emo-trap singer-songwriter Ravenna Golden; last year he co-produced the song “Click” for Charli XCX, who was captured on Instagram Live bopping to a new Brady-produced beat in April. I ask if, given the opportunities increasingly available to him, there’s something he gets from the 100 Gecs experience creatively that’s made him want to focus on it. He shrugs the question off.

“People like it more than anything else I’ve ever done,” he says. “People want us to play Coachella. GQ wants to interview us.”

“He has bangers coming out left and right. Shitting out bangers,” Les says. “I’m happy to be part of the banger-shitting-out factory, for sure. A cog in the Dylan Brady machine, if you will. I am happy with my overlord. Dylan Brady is the Apple of music.”

Is that a goal? Total, global domination?

“I want a Ferrari F40,” Brady says. “It’s hard to justify it at this stage of my life. Four-million-dollar car. Five-million-dollar car. It’s never the right thing to spend five million dollars on.”

“You could write a great line in a song about it, though,” Les says.

They’re always precisely half-bullshitting. They are most likely being serious when they say that the best thing about meeting Gecs fans out in the non-virtual world is having people tell them they wanted to make their own music after hearing 1000 Gecs. (“The Velvet Underground only had a couple shows, but everyone who went to the shows wanted to make music after they saw them,” Les says. “That would be such a sick vibe to have.”)

They are possibly serious when they say they’re looking to hire interns soon, and that those interns should be able to build an easy-to-use website that sorts all the Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles by instrumentation, key, BPM, and lyrical theme. Brady says he’s not necessarily looking to boil this information down to a winning formula. “I’m just interested in the world of number ones,” he says. “Like, thousands and thousands of people have Grammys and shit. But only like 1,100 songs have gone to number one. There’s 140,000 songs coming out every Friday. And yet only like 1,100 have gone to number one, in like 87 years.”

Les is possibly joking when she says, “For the record, on the record, we were snubbed as fuck—we deserved a Grammy and we didn’t get one. Next year, we’re definitely getting one.” They are most likely joking when they say they want to play stadiums—possibly accompanied by a giant spider-robot like the one U2 took on tour a decade ago—and that they dream, in Les’s words, of being “Justin Bieber big—bigger even.” They are probably joking when they say Bieber and Celine Dion are on the short list of potential collaborators “we’re looking at for the next album.” They are maybe not joking when they say that prog-thrash legend Les Claypool from Primus is on that list. (“Insane musician,” Brady says.)

For the moment, they’re finishing up a remix album due out in July, 1000 Gecs and the Tree of Clues; alongside contributions from pros, it’ll feature two of the countless Gecs remixes that popped up on SoundCloud after they released the instrumentals, acapellas, and other production elements from the first album in May. The actual follow-up to 1000 Gecs is still taking shape: “We have ideas we’re fucking around with,” Les says, and Brady adds, “It’s pretty young still.”

“I think a lot of people have side projects because they feel limited in their main projects, seemingly,” Les says. “For us—we’re both completely open to doing whatever, and our fans are completely open to hearing whatever, and anything we wanna do we can do. It’s whatever we make the world to be. The only limit is—there is none.”

They are probably not joking, either, about their success having afforded them the chance to spend some time doing not a whole lot.

“Chilling is fire,” Brady says.

“Chilling is so fun,” Les agrees. Then she says to Brady, “Why don’t you come out and buy sunglasses with me, then?”

“I have sunglasses,” Brady says.

“I mean, I do too now,” Les says. “We have to find something else to go buy today.”

Brady says, “Ferraris.”

About a week after this studio visit, Los Angeles (and many other parts of the world) went into lockdown. Six weeks later, I watched 100 Gecs headline a festival called Square Garden, which took place in Minecraft, in a giant torchlit treehouse. I don’t know the first thing about Minecraft or how to access it directly from my laptop—it might as well be Pandora to me—so I pulled up a YouTube stream, and there was a blockheaded Charli XCX avatar, hopping up and down onstage while playing a bunch of then-unreleased material for an audience of excited little cube-headed weebles, while avatars of Les and Brady hovered in the wings.

In the offline world of my home office, I was joined by one of my quarantine partners, who is 10 years old and the biggest Minecraft enthusiast I know. She found the actual concept of the festival—real people playing a show inside Minecraft for other real people—somewhat underwhelming, and was distracted by what she perceived to be the setting’s inherent risks. She worried that someone in the crowd could kill everyone by unleashing zombies, or perhaps The Wither, a thing I was told is worse than zombies.

The Gecs took the stage and played a brain-shredding set that included a poignant new song about shopping (“When’s the next time we’ll go to the mall?/I wanna buy you some Hot Topic Invader Zim merch/We can get Auntie Anne’s, I think that sounds cool”). And after a few minutes of studying the screen, my associate decided that Square Garden and its attendees were not actually at risk of zombie attack, because they were in something called “Creative Mode.”

“You can’t get hurt in Creative Mode,” she explained, “unless you fall into the void.”

And with that, having articulated the Gec ethos better than I ever could, she went outside to jump on a trampoline.

Alex Pappademas is a writer based in Los Angeles.

Music

After years of making cultish records under pseudonyms like Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Palace Brothers, Louisville songwriter Will Oldham is releasing an album and a book under his own name. Which doesn't mean he's gotten less elusive. Oldham says he might not release—or even record—his next album at all.

Originally Appeared on GQ