One morning in February, DJ Python sends a text message to confirm our interview that evening. “Wassup young pimp?” he asks. Though he doesn’t always talk this way in person, on social media and via text he has the lingo of an uber-friendly Tracy Morgan character. “I think if I ever have a child I wanna name them freedom. Beautoful name imo,” he tweeted recently, unbothered by the typo. On Instagram, such koans are occasionally accompanied by a shirtless selfie. A few hours before the interview, he checks in again. “Still good bebe?” Still good.
When I arrive at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Brooklyn later that night, he’s already chosen a table in the middle of the empty room. He wears thin, wire-rimmed glasses and an earring, and hunches over to puff discreetly from a Juul. He looks like the quirky data scientist he is; his day job is at electronics giant LG. Though he’d love to pursue music full-time, he professes no ill will towards his 9-5. In fact, he professes no ill will towards anyone or anything at all. Kindness is his primary modus operandi. He says he’d love to share a plate of beets.
Like other artists in his Ridgewood, Queens-centric community of heady electronic musicians, he takes his main influence from various spheres of rave culture. Before he was DJ Python, Brian Piñyero was DJ Wey, a fairly up-the-middle techno producer. Then he was DJ Xanax, who went for a funkier take on the basics. And then, shedding some of the grit of his early sounds, he refined his style as Luis (a pseudonym taken in tribute to his grandfather) with 2016’s sublime Dreamt Takes EP. The bubbly, buttery record marked Piñyero’s transition from an innovative producer of techno to an innovative producer, period.
In 2017, he released his debut album as DJ Python, Dulce Compañia. Piñyero has referred to that LP as “deep reggaeton,” a kind of half-joke. A first-generation American raised in Miami by South American parents, Piñyero learned the rhythms of Latin club music by osmosis, the inescapable sound of high school parties, and the radio. He says it was the first thing he tried very purposefully to create as a producer. It didn’t work. “I actually just wanted to make really clubby reggaeton music, but I couldn’t do it,” he says. “So it kind of became ambient reggaeton music.”
His sound is unique in its swing and bottomless depth of feeling. It’s like when the French artist Yves Klein made a new blue—yeah, maybe you’ve seen blue before, but this shade is just deeper. In Piñyero’s music, that deepness comes from the swell of a major chord, or from the brimful of life in the clatter of the drums.
Piñyero’s new album, Mas Amable, leans towards the ambient side of his influences. Mixed seamlessly and presented as one track, the album is all journey. First single “ADMSDP” includes a guided meditation, whispered by one of Piñyero’s friends, the poet Laura Warman, over an array of ping-ponging snares. “What would it mean to touch your body?” she whispers. “To feel how soft you are. How warm you are.” It’s not a huge stretch to imagine the album sold at the front desk of a yoga studio. When I ask Piñyero if he considers himself New Age he laughs but he doesn’t say no.
A few weeks after our dinner I reconnect with Piñyero over FaceTime; by then, the coronavirus had made another in-person conversation impossible. He’s sprawled lengthwise across his bed, propped on his elbows, looking like a teenager about to confess a crush. He is wearing a red shirt with a big drawing of a strawberry on it, and jeans with a Day-Glo sheen. Despite the fact that he’s looking straight into the camera, and that I can see everything he’s doing, he still vapes demurely. (He is less demure about picking the gunk from underneath his fingernails with the back of an earring.) He gives me a quick tour of his bedroom, pointing out the window and a desk neatly piled with musical equipment. His hair has grown even more, and he is successfully trying out a wet look.
The night before, Piñyero livestreamed a DJ set from his living room to help benefit the staff of the club Nowadays, a homebase for the Ridgewood scene. The set consisted of an extremely wide array of sounds with little in common other than their relative funkiness. One highlight was a lurching ’90s song that sounded like Enya with a backbeat and contained a sample of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—that it was called “Spiritual High Part III” by group named Mood Swings from their album Moodfood seemed almost too on the nose. In the background of the livestream, there was a large screen TV with clips of animals doing fun stuff, like capybaras relaxing in a hot tub. Beside Piñyero, his roommate and best friend Alex danced shirtless with a towel on his head while eating a banana.
Reflecting on the set the next day, though, Piñyero admits to feeling conflicted about it, and about his choice to be a musician in a time of crisis. “Right now, when things feel dire,” he says, “it feels silly not to be doing stuff that’s measurable.” Before, he’d expressed a desire to one day quit his job and make music full-time. Now, his new hope is to open a bulk foods store with low prices. I ask him if, in the wake of COVID-19, he considered pushing back the early April release date for his album. In a bashful tone he confesses that he had discussed it with his label, but he decided to stick to the date. He is donating all of the sales from Mas Amable to a friend of his who is HIV positive and now in need of money more than ever.
Piñyero seems almost disgusted by the idea of consumerism at this moment. “Sometimes it feels like people are really focused on their image and their brand, which is something that I hate,” he says. “Why do you want to be a brand? Why are we thinking of it in a way of saleability and consumability?” It’s the most worked up this gentle soul got during our conversations.
Back in the Middle Eastern restaurant, I’d asked Piñyero if his aggressive kindness thing was an act. He was flummoxed, as though I’d asked a leopard about the nature of his spots. The best he could come up with was that he really doesn’t like yelling. It was cold that evening, and he gave me a ride home.
DJ Python: Music is just moods to me. When I sit down and make music, I’m feeling something and then I just try to translate it into sounds. It’s like a conversation with the self. I like sounds that are a bit more whispery, or not as aggressively telling you exactly what to think or feel.
It’s part of my identity. I was raised listening to Latin music, and then a lot of the electronic music I got into first was Chilean, stuff like Villalobos. And I feel like it’s the only sound that I can do without getting called out on being appropriative, to be honest. I mean, I was raised by immigrant parents and by my grandparents on my mom’s side who are Ecuadorian, but I was born in the States. Some people think I look white and some people think I look Latin off the bat. I made a point of making things in Spanish because I wanted my music to be consumed by a Latin audience. But I also think anyone should consume anything.
Last year I was trying to figure out how to be a better person and thinking about friendship. I made a concerted effort to become closer to people. I’ve been trying to work on feeling comfortable with myself enough to be able to share that with other people, and let other people do that with me—just accepting each other and not judging and being there for each other in a selfless way. It’s just sweet to be sweet to people. I really like people, like, in general. I think they’re really interesting. I’ve always wanted to be kind to people because it feels like it’s natural. I believe in community. We all really need it. It’s really powerful. Feeling warm is nice. Maybe it’s cheating, but I think being kind to people is the quickest way to get that feeling with each other.
I think club music is a little bit focused on being effective in the club, and it’s missing out on the idea that clubs are meant to take you out of something. I don’t know if really good sound design and crazy percussion are doing that. I feel like a lot of it is just harsh to listen to. It’s just experimental music being done in a way that’s been done for forever. What’s experimental about it? I think there’s a lot of music that’s really easy to listen to and actually doing something new, pushing something forward.
I love that stuff. Huge fan.
One hundred percent. I think that’s sick. I love that genre.
Yeah. It’s just great. It’s just a nice little place on the internet. Do you go on that chat room ever? It’s like a bunch of students talking about the homework that they’re doing and how much they love the channel. It’s a really wholesome place.
I wanna do stuff that feels helpful in a very direct way to people. I really like making music, but sometimes it feels so abstracted that it feels selfish. When I was younger I felt really involved in scenes and stuff like that, but as I’ve gotten older I just have less energy to expend on going out all the time, and I feel a bit disconnected. So I haven’t been able to give as much time as I’d like to those scenes. I’ve also been thinking a lot about throwing a party again.
Dream party for me is probably 100 people who are really down to be there, with diverse DJs, which hopefully brings a really diverse, really kind crowd, a non-aggressive crowd. People just really focused on the music. I feel like a lot of the parties right now are focused on the experience. I don’t really like when parties feel like they’re more like safe spaces to just getting as fucked up as possible. I want people to get fucked up if they want to, but I don’t want it to feel like this is background noise to a person doing ecstasy and ketamine all night, you know?
I really like dreamy songs. When you’re listening to good music, and especially good DJ sets, you feel like you’re finding out a really deep secret—it’s like a curtain being pulled back a little bit and showing you what the truth is.
I don’t know. That’s for everyone to find out for themselves.
