INTERVIEW BY SAM FRIEDMAN
PHOTOS BY STEVE OWEN AND SATELLITE SYNDICATE
Walking up to Harrison Street Café on a Saturday morning in late August, I see the new faces of VCU freshman and their families flooding the dirty, street art-covered block of Grace Street. The sun is gleaming with heat rising off the pavement. I’m meeting up with SITTASINES, a young beat producer and record label founder. His music ranges from instrumental hip-hop to crackle-infused lo-fi funk to horn-laden electronic jazz. The talented producer’s real name is Jason Pevy. He is a tall, thin, hip-looking freethinker, who holds himself with a smile and warm vibrations. Rocking a Flying Lotus Until The Quiet Comes t-shirt, modish glasses, and skinny, tattered jeans, Pevy’s style reflects Richmond to the tee. Before making electronic music, he was a post-rock shoegaze guitarist. Now he is turning heads in the growing Richmond electronic music scene with his hypotonic, genre defying beat music.
How did you get into producing?
I got into producing after playing with a band for a couple years in high school. I’ve always been into recording songs, but I didn’t get super into the computer aspect until I began trying to do stuff on my own. I downloaded REAPER for free—the trial version—and I used that for most of my production career. I recently downloaded Ableton Live 9 a couple months ago, and it changed my world. I downloaded 7 for a couple months, but didn’t really understand it. 9, though, is basically like a really detailed SP. I feel like after learning the SP, I was better able to understand how Ableton worked.
Tell me about Satellite Syndicate and how that came about.
That was my buddy Jefferson (BSTFRND). I went to one of his shows last semester, and I met up with him, and we started talking about producing. He seemed really excited about it and was just as into it as I me. A couple weeks later, he had this idea to start a collective for similar producers in the area. We just felt like there wasn’t a huge crowd for it at the time. So, we decided to hit up a couple of people. We’ve got like five official members right now, and we’re trying to keep it around those numbers. It has been pretty successful so far. We’ve only been doing this for a couple months now, and we’ve already played a lot of shows, at least by our standards. We’re playing every other weekend at least.
I love the L.A. beat sound in your music, similar to MAHLION. There’s obviously a FLYING LOTUS influence—what attracted you to that particular sound?
Honestly, I got into beat music completely after hearing Madvillainy. I hadn’t really fucked with hip-hop or anything before, and I heard that record and was like, “Oh my god, this is fucking great.” So, that’s like around the same type of shit I have been listening to ever since. Got into that around four years ago I think.
Your music explores subgenres of electronic music—from future garage to jazz to hip hop. Is it important for you to have that type of diversity in your music?
Definitely. I listen to all types of music really. I’m always trying to pull influences from as many different places as possible to mix up the formula of electronic music. It’s overwhelming how many genres of electronic music there are these days.
When I interviewed Steve Owen, who is the founder of the Richmond Electronic Collective, he told me he put on your first show. How long had you been producing before you began to play live?
Around three or four years. I hadn’t thought about playing any shows up until that point. I just wanted to work on producing and making my sound as good as I could make it.
What was that transition like?
I had been to a couple of electronic shows—I didn’t have any expectations about it really. Learning how to do stuff live on the SP was a challenge, but eventually I got it to where I could transition fairly smoothly between tracks.
Tell me about Buddha Tapes Records.
It’s a cassette tape label that I started a year or two ago. I got really into the underground tape scene, and I was trying to press my own stuff to see what that experience was like. I hit up a couple artists and had a couple artists hit me up to do some releases. I’ve done three releases so far, including one of my albums. Our first release was my album. We went to thrift stores and picked up bulk tapes they had lying around: blank tapes and tapes that had already been recorded. We recorded over them and added a label.
Do the tapes come with a digital download as well?
Yeah, when you order it off Bandcamp, you get a digital download code.
Where do you see the Richmond electronic music scene going?
I would like to continue to see it get larger, get a bigger following, and have more producers start coming out and showing their stuff. There is a lot of potential here to become a big scene.
When is your next performance?
SITTASINES will perform live at The Camel as part of Richmond Electronic Collective’s Satellite Syndicate takeover on September 9.
