DJs were once edgy and aspirational, but social media has turned them into bores. Just look at how EDM stars use Snapchat: it’s a looking glass into purgatory. Over and over they walk boringly through airports, like Sisyphus in athleisure clothing. Their Facebook pages are hinterlands of confetti cannon videos, their Twitters a polite riot of pastel-neon flyers.
Cutting through this dreck with japes, passion and punk energy is Powell, a London-based producer of jerky electro who has gone from cobbling together tracks on GarageBand to sharing a label, XL, with Adele and Jamie xx. Years working a day job at an ad agency have also helped turn him into music’s most entertaining self-promoter. Consider this arsenal of attention-grabbing pranks. After his gurning University Challenge contestant namesake Oscar Powell went viral, he cut up clips into a music video; on Valentine’s Day he created a website where you could email the message “You said it would be alright, but it’s not” to a former lover.
For one track, Insomniac, he sampled the Nirvana producer Steve Albini but when Albini approved the sample and complained “I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth”, Powell printed their email correspondence on a giant billboard. Another billboard featured his own email address, to which hundreds of people sent messages. Journalists are handed a sheet of faux-diva guidance notes on how to interview him, like: “Pretend, for everyone’s sake, that you’re into sharks.” Taken from his debut album Sport, his new video Jonny features fans filming themselves smashing watermelons.
In person, Powell could easily be a bad boy in a teen TV serial: tall, athletic and handsome, with a slightly lazy eye that makes him appear punchdrunk. For him, these japes aren’t just knowing marketing. “It’s not like I’m Johnny Knoxville,” he says, arranged at 45 degrees on a sofa in XL’s offices. “I do these things because I think they’re interesting. I don’t like Facebook, I don’t like Twitter. I stuck my email address on a billboard instead, and I had a thousand real conversations. One girl even told me she had cancer. This is actual social contact. It became an interesting study: what if I actually invite people to troll? And there were none.”
During his former boardroom years, Powell found “the frustrating thing about working in advertising is that ultimately you don’t give a fuck, you just want to get paid”. Music, by contrast, is an almost dangerously all-consuming passion. “You want to say so much but the process of getting it out is so hard and painstaking,” he says. “People ask me: ‘Why are you always beating yourself up, why do you make yourself so angry, why are you always worried?’ I put so much pressure on myself. I hate the process of making music, it terrifies me. It’s like taking a really difficult shit.”
Even so, Powell describes his debut album as being defined by its “energy and playfulness”, all desiccated post-punk drums, fizzy synths and blurts of people shouting. His music has a groove, but never lets you settle into it. This jarring quality comes, he says, partly from growing up going to drum’n’bass raves in London in the late 90s. “Friends were leaning in from the side with a bottle of champagne, smoking spliffs, rewinding records... you’d clang mixes and no-one gave a shit. I loved that rough and ready spirit.” Deadpan vocals prang into motorik rhythms, cheap electronic squelches and looped guitar solos, all in the space of a single track. “There are still some moments of tension and release, though, where you’re like: ‘Finally Powell, stop trying to bite my brain,’” he says of his restless music. “I like going from groove to chaos and back, that conflict.”
He’s a DJ too, piling up Belgian new beat and bits of Skype conversations into headspinning sets. Still, you’re unlikely to bump into him on a dance floor, thanks to a “slight aversion” to today’s house and techno styles. “Everything’s warm and atmospheric. It’s about creating an environment where everyone knows what’s going to happen. I prefer things to be confident and stand out – put your neck on the line with a sound,” he says. It doesn’t always go down well with people expecting blissed-out flowing sets. “You end up hating the audience,” he says. “You think they’re idiots because they don’t like what you do.”
Conflict, contradictions: Powell’s resistance to any one style is partly down to being of the generation who grew up devouring everything online instead of a physical scene. To him, this lack of boundaries is a positive. “House in Chicago, jungle in London, things that exist around geographies – it’s harder for them to occur now because of the fragmented way people consume stuff,” he muses. “But as an artist that’s more exciting; you’re not relying on other people to create something that has an identity.”
Powell may be a salesman at heart – at one point he uses the phrase “multifaceted media landscape” – but he’s come up with a one-of-a-kind product. Amid today’s churn of bland personalities, it makes for a compulsive purchase.
Sport is released on 14 October via XL
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