LA-based Darin McFadyen, aka Freq Nasty DJ and producer, will play several gigs while back in New Zealand over the summer. Photo / Supplied
Another trip around the sun, another turn of the wheel, and another spin of the decks back home in New Zealand for Darin McFadyen, aka LA-based pioneering Breakbeat DJ and music producer Freq Nasty.
McFadyen has lived in Los Angeles for over 20 years but still comes “home” to visit family and friends in summer. And to play a few gigs, too.
This year he’s playing a few dates around the motu, including Aum festival, at South Head from December 30 to January 2, which celebrates community and creativity as much as performance, a vibe McFadyen is fully in tune with.
He says he sees a “phantom nostalgia” among younger generations – Generation Z and Alphas – for a time before social media and digital devices, and a commensurate reconnection with his music that first made waves in London back in the 1990s.
“The inability to connect due to growing up on screens and texting instead of talking and less face time during the pandemic have led to the idealisation of the 1990s and 2000s,” McFadyen said from California just before Christmas.
“It’s the same way that [I think] about Woodstock and the 1960s, a time of immense explosion of culture and freedom.”
He foresees a return to a more analogue culture oriented toward community and personal connection without devices.
“Growing up without social media for us meant that we could live our teens, and our parties and our messy rave nights in relative obscurity and without the self-consciousness that younger folk have today. And I feel for them.”
McFadyen speaks from a wealth of experience. His smash hit Booming Back Atcha featuring Phoebe One brought fame in the EDM scene in 1999 and several years of headlining gigs and festivals around the globe.
His bass-heavy take on ragga, hip hop and dancehall was popular among clubbers and musicians alike and he was in hot demand working with household names such as Junior Delgado, Fatboy Slim, Rodney P and Roots Manuva to name a few.
Ultimately, the pressure took its toll and McFadyen had to step back for a time, partly to process the loss of a loved one to cancer, but also to forge another path through meditation, studying under Professor of Comparative Religion Venerable Sumati Marut.
He still had to pay the bills, however, and spent many nights mixing and making music after hours of training and listening to broadcasts from the Dalai Llama.
It was towards the end of his full-time studies that he hit another musical high note, producing and mixing the single Creator alongside friend and long-time collaborator DJ Switch and relatively unknown singer Santigold.
McFadyen spent much of the next decade playing DJ sets and running workshops in meditation, mindfulness and yoga at festivals, including repeat runs at Burning Man, investigating the effects of music on the mind and body.
He also launched Giveback.net in 2008, in which musicians could donate to activism campaigns, one of the first being the Tibetan People’s Uprising Movement that featured a collaboration with Bassnectar on the single Viva Tibet.
“If we can help spread the idea that creating positive change in the world elsewhere is an investment in our own security and happiness, then I’m a happy DJ,” he said at the time.
And now he’s looking to turn his energies and experience towards another challenge in addressing one of the most pressing problems facing younger generations today: coping in a digital world.
“The Flight Mode project that I’m launching is really based around using the mind force training that I’ve done for 20-odd years ... to try and help us deal with some of these technologies that are really eroding our sense of self, our sense of wellbeing, our connection to each other,” he said.
His idea is to use the power of music to break down barriers and to connect people with each other and their own culture and, hopefully, wean them off the digital space.
And now, as the wheels of fashion and style turn and repeat, he’s finding new audiences that might benefit from his programme on the back of connecting with his music.
“Breaks and Garage have come back again. It’s cyclical and it’s been done several times and as a musician you have to understand that you’re hot when you come out for a while, then you see other people come in and take the limelight,” he said.
“People appreciate the music and I feel really privileged to be able to play that music around the world as something that I helped to form and create.”
And technological advances have led to some new ways of making music and sounds, he says, but it’s still all rooted in the records of the 1960s and 70s funk and soul.
“What I do love is that it’s bringing back this culture of getting offline, getting off our phones, getting back together as a community. That’s the way we connected in the 1990s.
“I just feel very privileged to have spent 25-plus years in the music industry, to be able to play my music around the world, and I’m very excited to be back in New Zealand and the Aum festival, to play some dates around the country and reconnect with some of my roots, with my family, and with people in Aotearoa.”
Freq Nasty plays Aum Festival on New Year’s Day, Ignition Fest at Matamata on January 9, The Social in Napier on January 10 and Sol Festival in Christchurch on January 17.