There's more to this producer than ambient reggaeton, as Max Pearl learns when they meet up in Queens.
"That night I played the acapella from 'Suicidal Thoughts' by Biggie Smalls," he says—a bitter, nihilistic song that ends with Biggie taking his own life—"and I remember the impact it had on the room. The crowd was just looking at me, like, 'Why are you playing this in the club? And why is it an acapella?'"
So you could say Duran's approach to performing came about by accident. When he plays he stands completely still behind his laptop—no MIDI controller, not even a mouse, just the trackpad—pairing loops to make on-the-fly ambient edits of the Caribbean music he grew up with. It's incredibly moving, the way the vocals take on a new energy with the shift in context, and though it may it sound like a gimmick, it clicks so comfortably that they don't even sound like edits. By submerging dancehall and reggaeton in a warm bubble bath of ambient tones, he highlights the resonances between two musical modes that can be tough to reconcile: party music and the transcendent.
"I started making reggaeton because I missed New York," says Duran, who's been living on-and-off in Los Angeles for nearly a decade, bouncing between teaching jobs, graduate schools and art residencies, where he makes experimental films. Born in the Dominican Republic, in the lush, isolated village of La Ermita, he immigrated to live with his mom in Manhattan at age five. "I used to wander by myself for miles back in the DR," he tells me, spending days jumping in rivers and rolling around in the mud, totally unsupervised. His family lived so deep into the island that, when he came home one afternoon with a skin-eating staph infection, they had trouble finding a nurse who could treat it.
They moved to 163rd Street and Broadway in Washington Heights, a Dominican neighborhood north of Harlem, in the late '80s. It was a tough time for New York—the tail-end of a crack epidemic that hit especially hard in the Heights and Harlem. "It was a warzone," Duran says. "I remember fights in the streets, police breaking down doors. It was shocking, coming from the countryside, from this beautiful place where I didn't even know about poverty."
He got into LaGuardia High School (which the musical Fame is based on), an ultra-competitive, fully funded public school for the arts, where gifted kids from all backgrounds get groomed for the spotlight. Nicki Minaj was in his graduating class. "She was a theater kid," he laughs. "Everybody knew she was gonna be famous."
Reggaeton is one of the major musical food groups in Washington Heights. It pumps through the neighborhood's arteries, spilling into the street via cars, clubs and bodegas. "For me, it all started with DJ Playero. That's how I got into all this," Duran says, speaking in a gentle mumble that my recording device barely registers over the sound of silverware clinking and cooks yelling at waiters. DJ Playero, the Puerto Rican DJ and producer widely regarded as reggaeton's progenitor, is known for his self-titled mixtape series, which blended hardcore rap, dancehall rhythms and Spanish-language lyrics at a time when the term "reggaeton" didn't even exist. Daddy Yankee, for reference, made his debut on the mixtape Playero 34, which was recorded with zero budget in a San Juan apartment.
"I remember getting a copy of Playero 36," Duran tells me. "I would run to my friend's place to listen to it. Those were our party tapes—we just used to let that rock."
Everything about those tapes is raw and in-your-face, from the production to the rapping to the way it's all mixed together. They're full of uncleared samples and unauthorized Spanish-language versions of Jamaican dancehall tracks. Duran's aesthetic is way more relaxed, but the tapes still inspired his approach, of appropriating ideas from everywhere without asking for permission. "My music is totally illegal," he says, "though I've never had anything taken down. That's also why I put out so much music so fast—because it's how DJ Playero did it. I want to go back to putting out tapes."
Duran's second album, 13th Month, is coming out this month on Apocalipsis, the label run by Brooklyn DJ Riobamba. It sees him fine-tuning his minimalist cut-and-paste method, transposing it into an expanded format that makes for dramatic narrative sweeps and inflections. The first two tracks on it are 11 and 14 minutes long, respectively, and they're each divided into three distinct movements, kind of like miniature DJ mixes. He's liked classical music ever since he was forced into studying upright bass in high school, and part of what he set out do here was "take dancehall and put it into a classical format."
He also challenged himself to step away from his own overused tropes. "I've literally been playing those same two chords for the last few years," he says. "For the synth I use this recording of a church choir I found, from Denmark, that's in a minor key I really loved. I sampled it and looped it so it sounds different but it's still always the same two chords." You'll hear lots of this choir on the album, but he also included a number of raw drum tracks with no melodies to speak of.
People like to throw around the term "ambient reggaeton" to describe what Duran does. As much as it's grown on him, part of his decision to try something new is so he can stay one step ahead of it. "When I went out to Europe, people were telling me, 'Man it's really interesting what you do: ambient reggaeton.' And I'm thinking, that sounds like a dangerous category."
He gets comments from fans saying they never took reggaeton seriously until they heard it taken apart and reassembled in this new context. "This guy from a club in Colombia wrote to me saying, 'Never did I think that electronic music could go with reggaeton,'" he says.
We've been talking for an hour and our plates are clean so I grab the waiter, who rips our bill off his green and white notepad. Duran is supposed to perform in a couple hours, across the street at the MoMA PS1 museum, for their weekly party series Warm Up, which is why we picked the Court Square Diner. They're still doing sound check with the headliner, but the museum galleries are open and there's a couple of exhibitions we both want to see, so we pay our bill and cross the street, under the rusted-out subway and walk past security into PS1's vast cement courtyard.
We enter one of the downstairs galleries, full of kinetic sculptures that jerk like they're half broken. In the middle of the room there's a horse made of colorful trash, lying on its side, hooked up to fishing line and a motor that makes its neck crane in a pitiful dying gesture. I ask Duran if there are any connections between his electronic music and the experimental films he's been making at art school. It's a question people ask him all the time. "I definitely edit films the same way I do music," he says after a pause. "Apart from that, I haven't really figured it out."
His video art, like his music, is slow-moving and quietly intense. He's six years into a long-term project called To The North, which has seen him return over and over to film at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It inspired the name of his album, a reference to the lunar calendar used by some Native American tribes, which divides the year into a 13-month lunar cycle. The film, which follows Pine Ridge residents as they go about their day-to-day, is a mix of journalism, ethnography and more formal video art. Duran describes it as his way of "figuring out how to make movies again" after graduate school, which he says stunted his growth with its elitist attitude and strictly enforced methodologies.
"Art school really calcified me," he says. "It made me really academic and really distanced and emotionless, and took the poetry out of a lot of things."
The second-to-last track on 13th Month, "Gravity Waves," opens with the disembodied voice of Biggie Smalls on "Suicidal Thoughts"—"I swear to God I want to just slit my wrists and end this bullshit." As the choral synths begin to gather steam, it gives way to an interview sound bite from To The North, in which we bear witness to the abjection and abandonment of life on the Indian reservation. "The suicide rate in Pine Ridge is the highest of any nationality in the United States," the narrator tells us. "The teen suicide happening today is astounding. And it's because there's nothing here for our youth. There's really nothing here."
I ask him about his decision to place these audio clips side-by-side. The idea, he explains, was to tie together the problems of inner-city poverty with the many social ills of the reservation, one of the hardest and most desolate places in the United States. For all their innumerable differences, both places inflict a psychic violence that can leave you feeling like there's nothing left to live for.
For Duran, music is an antidote to the calcifying effect that elite art schools have had on his creative process. "I'm always surprised by how much a song can mean to someone," he tells me as we pass into one of the airy, well-lit galleries on the third floor. "Music is such a personal language that"—unlike art—"it's really hard to ask someone for their motivations. A lot of this stuff is private for DJs. We don't go around talking to each other about the concepts we're working with. When people ask me, 'How do you do this? How do you do that?' Like, I don't know. I just sit in my room and do drugs."
The Los Angeles party where he's now a resident, Rail Up, is also a cathartic outlet. The roving club night, run by DJs Muñeka and Foreign, started because, unlike New York or Miami, "there was no Afro-Caribbean community in Los Angeles," Duran explains. Since their first party in 2015, they've managed to cultivate an extremely up-for-it, mostly queer crowd who dance like crazy. "One of my friends says that grinding is like a handshake in the Caribbean," he says. "We just wanted that kind of vibe."
The other thing about the Rail Up crowd is they stick with him when he goes off piste. "I'll play a 20-minute ambient section," Duran says. "And I think if I wasn't a resident, I wouldn't take that risk. Often it's with acapellas that people already know, so I get away with it, but I'll also use speeches." At one party in 2016, after the Dominican Republic announced new immigration laws, he worked in a speech about the forced deportation of Haitians from the DR. "It's nice to make people dance," he continues, "but I wanted to do something like Fade To Mind did, for instance. They created a culture around what they do. And Rail Up, somehow, has created that."
Though he gets nostalgic about New York's inimitable cultural mix, he finds Los Angeles invigorating. I ask him why and he starts talking about space, about the long lines of sight and the free-flowing sense of movement. It's easier to breathe when you can see the whole horizon spread out in front of you, especially compared to the cooped-up energy of Upper Manhattan.
"When you wake up in the hood in New York," he tells me, "the first thing you see is bricks. In Los Angeles you can see into the distance. You know, when you go out into the desert, it's really kind of wild how far you can see. Obviously this dictates your artistic process and your output. It dictates how you view time and the kinds of sounds that come out of you. In New York the loops are short, but here they can travel faster, and farther."
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