Premiere: Kill the Noise, ‘Kill the Noise (Part I)’
Before he gained notoriety as the dubstep phenom Kill the Noise, Jake Stanczak had been concocting dance-floor bangers for years. The experience has given him a sense of restlessness, even in the midst of his current success.
“I’m not sick of dubstep, but I spend a lot more time working on other stuff,” he told Rolling Stone when he called in from London during his European tour. “All those nasty bass sounds – I think the novelty of that has kind of worn off.”
Still, after years making drum-and-bass and taking a detour to electro and house, Stanczak’s return to the low-frequency fold has been a hit, garnering Kill the Noise a slot on Skrillex’s new label, OWSLA. His Kill Kill Kill EP was released last year and has become the second-highest seller of OWSLA’s releases, according to the label. Here, you can check out director Mike Diva’s video for its first track, “Kill the Noise.”
“Kill the Noise” is a mission statement of sorts for Stanczak: melodic, feathery synthesizers plummet into ninth-circle-of-the-inferno bass wobbles. Diva’s vision is a dystopian, zombie-filled future Los Angeles where gore and neon splatter the screen and a band of warriors embark on a video game-esque quest to kill the big bad guy – each of their blows in sync with the bass line.
Stanczak said that he reached out to Diva because he wanted to see how his music would inspire the director’s imagination, and the result was right in his wheelhouse. “I love video games,” he said. “That’s my guilty pleasure. If I ever do waste time, it’s playing video games.” However, Stanczak said he’s kicked the habit as he wraps up his forthcoming six-song EP, which he hopes will give listeners a full taste of his range.
“There’s still a lot of that stuff people might expect from me, but I’m trying to sneak a track or two in before the deadline that give me a little more chance to experiment,” he explained. “The way to build your audience is to approach things from a songwriting perspective, [to] try to write good songs that are memorable and have some emotion in them.”