<img src="http://gooutdoorlife.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/branchezbranchesoutofhiscomfortzoneonem222em53845.jpg" alt="Branchez Branches Out of His Comfort Zone on 222" title="Branchez Branches Out of His Comfort Zone on 222" />As the summer heat dissipates into the air on a Friday night in Hollywood, antsy partiers seep into Create Nightclub from the city streets and generate friction on the dancefloor.
Up onstage, Branchez is loading the decks. He eases into a halftime beat and then drops the fader to announce, “This is my first headlining show in Los Angeles.” The crowd welcomes him in with a loud cheer and the inevitable hands-in-the-air motion. The phaser slams forward as the voice of A$AP Ferg proclaims, “I’m on a new level,” and the beats engulf the club.
Branchez is owning the night as he celebrates his self-released debut EP, 222, alongside friends and soon-to-be neighbors—the native New Yorker is making the move from his New England nest to sunny Southern California.
The youngest of three children, Branchez grew up in a house constantly filled with funk and soul music. His father, a piano player and fulltime lawyer, taught him to intently listen to each instrument and break apart different rhythms, spawning Branchez’s interest in percussion and hip-hop-style sampling.
After class-clowning around in high school, Branchez attended Bard College in upstate New York, where he studied electronic music. The EDM explosion hadn’t yet occurred in the US, and his production school’s curriculum then was vastly different from what today’s contemporary dance music schools offer.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1IEJoNF59s]
“I had to battle to get respect as a beatmaker,” explains Branchez. “The teacher and most of my peers were more [into] doing noise and experimental contact mics and field recordings. I was one of the only ones making actual beat-based music. At the time, I was frustrated because I felt like I wasn’t getting respect for the stuff that was coming to me naturally. But it forced me out of my comfort zone, and in retrospect, it’s always good to push yourself. Even if you think you won’t like it, you’ll probably find something from the process you can take and grow from.”
Branchez abandoned his comfort zone over the past couple of years to craft the buttery 222. Avoiding the traditional hip-hop technique of sampling old records, he instead created unique samples himself.
“The EP was a huge learning process for me,” says Branchez. “It was the first time I learned how to sample myself to make legal music that felt true to my process. That was the story of the EP: a lot of highs and lows [and] just focusing on a song for two weeks and not liking it, which is something I never really dealt with in my career to that point, because it was just so personal.”
With 222 now making the rounds, Branchez is ready to move on from the experience and continue to grow. Once again, Branchez finds himself revisiting the musical lesson he learned from his father in his youth: Listen closely with vigor.
“I look back at the EP,” says Branchez, “and once it was already finalized, I was like, ‘The music I made in the interim, I was almost more proud of—almost.’ A lot of artists probably feel that. When a project comes out, they’ve already moved on. Now that it’s out, I get to sit back and realize how proud I am of the project. What’s equally positive is that I’m really, really excited about the music to come and the stuff I’ve [made] in the past year.”
222 from Branchez is available now on Branchez Music.
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