In the summer of 1998, the hardcore band I was singing for played a show in a friend's basement on Cary St, opening for two touring bands from DC. After we played and loaded out our equipment, we headed back down into the basement to see the first of the two touring bands, a group called De Nada. As soon as they started, all of our jaws dropped. They were loud, fast, and heavy, with powerful breakdowns and an intense, energetic stage presence. The guitarist was particularly impressive, throwing himself around the tiny basement room so frantically that the entire audience was backed up to the walls. After the set, though, he was friendly and outgoing--a total change from his onstage behavior. I ended up talking to him for a while after the show. That was how I got to know Dave Nada.
Of course, Nada isn't his real last name--it says Villegas on his birth certificate. But the punk rock tendency to rename people after their bands, and the fact that Dave Nada rhymed with De Nada, made the nickname impossible to resist. It stuck even after De Nada broke up in 2001 and Dave moved on to play in several other DC-area bands (Super Chinchilla Rescue Mission, Medic, and Bison, among others). Our bands played together several more times during the late 90s and early 2000s, but the last time one of my bands played with Medic, in early 2006, Dave wasn’t in the band anymore. When I asked what had happened, the other members of Medic told me that he’d quit to become a full-time DJ. I figured that was the last I’d hear of him.
Imagine my surprise when, a few years later, I started to encounter all sorts of references to a DJ named Dave Nada. Not only had he established a career as an electronic music artist, he'd invented an entire new genre called moombahton. This genre, created by slowing down European house music and setting it to a reggaeton beat, was taking dance clubs by storm and propelling Dave Nada into the upper echelons of the electronic music world. I had to find out what had happened over the past five years to transform him from hardcore guitarist to electronic music innovator. We reconnected over email, and I conducted this interview not long after his triumphant RVAlution gig at the Hat Factory this past summer.
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We met when you were playing in De Nada. Was that your first band?
Yeah, De Nada was my first band that ever had releases and toured outside of DC.
How old were you when you started playing guitar?
I was probably about 16, in my junior year in high school. Then in my senior year, I started doing pre-De Nada bands with some of the same members. Once I graduated, that's when we started playing shows and doing some tours.
Now, were you listening to electronic music at the time?
Yeah, actually, around that time I had just started going to the University Of Maryland, and Tem, who [ended up joining] De Nada, became one of my closest friends. He was from Yonkers, NY, and he put me onto all kinds of music that was outside of the usual hardcore/punk stuff. Besides that, my older brothers were really big into dance and electronic music. But Tem was pretty key, he got me into all kinds of hip-hop stuff, and electronic music in general. Stuff like Aphex Twin, more of the bugged-out ambient stuff. Around that same time, I started working at the [University Of Maryland] radio station, WMUC. I used to do a punk rock radio show. We would always kick it [at the station], me and Tem, and we started meeting people who did different radio shows. Basically, going to Maryland kind of opened it up for me. There was already electronic music [around me], with my family and my brothers listening to that stuff, but it wasn't really until I started going to college and hanging out with Tem.
Were you doing electronic music at the same time you were playing in hardcore and metal bands in the late 90s and early 2000s, or was that something that came later?
It was definitely something that I got into during Super Chinchilla Rescue Mission, and then going more towards Medic and Bison. I got really really big into classic funk, Fela [Kuti], afrobeat, and acid house, like late 80s Trax Records stuff. Around that time, my radio show started turning from a punk rock show into a freeform mix show. I would just bring in all kinds of records. But yeah, when I was doing Bison and Medic, I really started getting into electronic dance music. And then slowly but surely I started to gig out [as a DJ], and it came to a point where I was doing both Medic and Bison and I was DJing regularly on the weekends as well.
Medic circa 2005
Did the DJing interfere with your ability to play in bands? Because I remember you quit Medic.
Yeah. I just came to a point where I had to make a decision. I played in so many bands and did so many tours, and ...you know, I always say it now: "I miss playing in a band, but I don't miss doing a band." [laughs] You're dealing with so many personalities, and a lot of times everyone [wasn't] on the same page. Sometimes things wouldn't pan out, or big fights would break out at the end of a tour, and then things would kinda go sour. I had graduated from Maryland, and I was working full-time as a cancer research center manager. I was doing two bands, and then I was DJing every weekend. I was just wearing myself thin. I had started making decent money from DJing, and I felt comfortable quitting my day job. The bands wanted to tour, they wanted to practice every night and play on the weekends, and I just couldn't do it anymore. I decided that that's where my head and my heart were at--I wanted to become a really good DJ and start learning how to produce music. So I made the jump. I quit Bison, I quit Medic, and then I quit my job and moved to Baltimore.
Were you worn out with playing rock music in general?
Oh, not at all. It was such a good time, for Medic at least; Bison was a little bit tougher of an act to sell. But [Medic] were doing shows with Mastodon, Converge, Baroness, Darkest Hour--bands we looked up to and that we loved. I loved the music and it was great, but really, at the end of the day, my head was so deep into electronic music. I was listening to Danny Krivit records while waiting to finish doing merch at the show, and wanting to get back into the van and go through tunes. I found myself gravitating more towards club music. It wasn't like I was tired of [heavy music], but I was just like, "I've gotta follow my heart." It was tough, though, because we were writing tons of new music. But I was like, "This is what I want to do, and this is the direction I want to go. I want to see how far I can take it." The guys in the bands were some of my best friends, and they still are. They totally understood, and they kinda saw it coming. I did and still do miss playing, and miss the music. I didn't get soured on the music at all. It was a really tough decision.
I know that electronic music is more driven by remixes and things like that than original tracks. Do you see a big difference in the amount of original composition you do as an electronic artist versus when you were playing punk rock, and pretty much writing all of your own songs?
As far as remixes go, I feel like there's definitely a big difference, but I'm finding [that] working on original tracks with my buddy Matt Nordstrom, who I do Nadastrom with, totally reminds me of certain band practices. You're in a room with your bandmates, and someone has an idea. And then you build off of that. When I work on production now, it totally reminds me of that. I really love to create drum patterns and drum loops, and Matt's an engineer whiz, so he's the king of building synth melodies and arrangements, and mixing in general. So a lot of times he'll be like "I have this cool melody," and [it] sounds like it would go over this cool drum pattern that I built from scratch, or that I cut out from samples to give it either a raw edge or a more electronic sound or whatever. But it reminds me of that same [sort of thing], you know, "Oh, I've got this beat," and then, "Oh cool, well I've got this crazy riff." It's very similar because you're adding effects to things and you're automating stuff, and at the same time you're recording the session so you don't forget these ideas. I'm speaking as far as original productions. For remixes and remix culture, it's a little different. It's not a huge difference, but depending on what the people you're remixing want--they might have a lot of demands, or they might just be like, "Do your thing." But when it comes to original track work, it does remind me of writing music in bands. It's really similar.
Do you think you bring a lot of influence from your days playing heavy music into making electronic music?
Yeah, totally. I haven't picked up my guitar in ages, but like I said, I really enjoy creating drum patterns and drum loops, and beats and whatnot. When I make drum patterns, I definitely pull from a lot of my punk years, and my years playing in bands. I mean, man, if you heard any of my old Baltimore club records, they were really, really aggressive. They were really dirty and raw, but that was just because I didn't really know how to produce [laughs]. I would sample really shitty mp3s, and not know how to mix things, but at the same time I wanted everything to sound big, I wanted everything to sound heavy, I wanted to have that really really raw, heavy energy in the club. When I would go hear DJs play Baltimore club in Baltimore, through a huge system, it was just the most powerful sound. So I was like, "I wanna make tracks like that." And of course, in DJing as well, you want to bring it just as much as you would playing a live show. So having that pretty aggressive punk background, and playing in bands, and all that shit, I just put it all into production.
This is interesting, though, because you're talking about Baltimore club music and the thing that really made you famous is moombahton, which I feel like is very different from Baltimore club. Once moombahton became the big thing you were doing, do you feel like your style changed dramatically? How has that affected what you've done since?
I don't really think it has changed that much. My thing is this: I know moombahton doesn't translate as well [on record] as it does in the club. I just did a big festival with Bassnectar and he gave me a really flattering compliment, saying like, "It was cool how you play that music at such a slow tempo, but there's so much energy." The music just pumps way harder live than it does on record, I think, because of the production. People get misled, because they think, "Oh, it's at 110 BPM, it's not as fast-paced as your average club music," which is around 130 BPM. But the energy is definitely there. For me, that's been what's really appealing about moombahton. It can get really deep, it can be really aggressive--especially now, with a lot of dubstep influences. You have dubstep cats like Skrillex, Porter Robinson, Datsik, Dillon Francis, all these guys who are making really hard-edged moombahton stuff at 110 BPM. You go out to the club and hear it live, and it just cuts right through you. Moombahton for me really is an amalgamation of all the music that I've been making over the years. It isn't predetermined; it's just like, I'm gonna sound how I'm gonna sound, no matter what I'm making. So I'm not gonna beat myself up trying to worry about my sound. I'm always gonna sound like myself. Moombahton is just kind of a big-ass mix of all that, and also the music I grew up on, which is Latin music. It's almost full-circle. It's all of this music that was in my household growing up, and in my background. So it's been pretty crazy how well it's panned out.
Have you heard any of the commercial-crossover moombahton records that have been coming out lately, like pop singles that are using it?
I've heard a couple. I've only heard some of the bootleg ones that people are making online. Some of them are really bad, and some of them are really good. It boils down to the producer and their take on it. But I've heard tons of moombahton versions of mainstream songs that I'm not really into. [laughs]
Well, I was thinking of, for example, Nadia Oh's "Taking Over The Dancefloor." She's saying "moombahton" in that song, but it's totally a cheesy UK pop single.
[laughs] Yeah, well, there's always going to be a flooding of the market. It's like when Baltimore club got really popular at one point and then everyone would just slap a "Think" break over "Since U Been Gone" or whatever the fuck, and do a "Baltimore club edit." And that would be people's impression of [the genre], and they’d just write it off, like "Baltimore club sucks." Meanwhile, there's a catalog of Rod Lee and DJ Technics and KW Griff records that a lot of people will just miss. And that's the real shit. So people can get the wrong impression, and whenever someone approaches me, and they just write it off, I'm like, "What you should really do is go to the club and see someone play it." Because there are plenty of great DJs now that are pushing it, and doing it justice. It's fun, man. [laughs] It's just pure, unapologetic fun music.
Dave Nada at RVAlution; video by Todd Raviotta
Words by Andrew Necci
Images by Erik Fox