s a young journalist attempts to prepare for an interview with a group of musical maestros, he or she tries to plan for every scenario but in the end an impression is made by the artists and the core of the story becomes an illustrated reflection of that sentiment. This was exactly the case when I ventured to interview The Glitch Mob at North Coast 2015. This group made up of; Edward Ma, Justin Boreta, and Josh Mayer were infamous to me at the time but I didn't know much about them except for their incredible music. They would go on to thrill me with explanations of their futuristic sounds.
Josh: I think it really just comes from the love of electronic music and experimenting, and trying new things. It\’s finding our own voice in electronic music, something that we all resonate with to put on the most epic dance party.
Edward: I think our greatest inspiration is the thousands of people out there that help create the Glitch Mob experience, they’re our biggest inspiration and were merely trying to help tell our greater collective story, the collective story of all the people that are out there. What serves as our biggest influence and inspiration are the stories that people tell us of how our music has impacted them and we just pour all that back into the music itself.
Although all three members of the group have independent side projects, they see The Glitch Mob as their true medium which the other projects feed into.
Josh: The Glitch Mob is the main thing that we do. If we never made any music outside of The Glitch Mob ever again, that would be fine for us. To us our common vision and sound and what we create as the three of us, as brothers is the pinnacle of what we do. And what we do as the three of us will always outrank anything we’ll do on our own, not that it’s better or worse, it’s just this collective thing and it’s just really strong. The side projects are just there when you need to make a tune on your own or try something that we haven’t done as the Glitch Mob but in the same breath a lot of the things we’ve written on our own has a lot of times turned into Glitch Mob music because we brought them to the table and we all connected with them and pushed them forward as a Glitch Mob song.
This expertly curated sound has brought The Glitch Mob all over the world and allowed them to experience the music scene in ways that most people can't. The one thing they would change in the music scene today is the extremely lacking information on drugs and alcohol.
Josh: I would say the non-informed, non-educational aspect of partying in a sense, people don’t always know what they’re limits are, people aren’t taught what they’re limits are when it comes to drinking and drugs and things like that. It’s just because people don’t know. It’s not taught necessarily in schools, kids aren’t getting information about experimenting with drugs or alcohol and if there was something we could change it would be a better education system towards that because no matter what- people are going to want to try things, experiment, party and have a good time but if people are more informed, maybe it would be a safer environment to you know.. throw down
Yeah, it’s so sad to see someone die at a festival..
Josh: Of course but it happens everywhere, it’s not just electronic music, it’s in every music scene, it’s in every aspect of life, music or not, people die all the time from drug overdoses or drinking. Electronic music just seems to get the attention from what happens in this scene. That’s the way it is right now but more education needs to happen when it comes to that stuff.
The Glitch Mob is a very conscious group and they have used their music as a vehicle for underprivileged people in Haiti and Africa.
Justin: I had the opportunity of going to Africa and doing some musical work with Charity: Water there and it really changed my life, just getting to go there and I only went there for a week and there’s people who spend their whole lives doing that so coming back I thought, I really want to bring these guys to Ethiopia with that project or if there’s some other way to actually see how the music can carry messages and actually get to physically experience it and I think that’s really the power of music at the end of the day. It can carry a message louder, further and wider and sometimes it doesn’t even have to say it explicitly and people listen too. With electronic music, we see a lot of young kids that come to these shows and it’s crazy to think that we might be the only people that a 13-year-old would listen to if they don’t listen to their parents, so we take what we do very seriously...
