Jay Tripwire is kinda crazy.
However, Jay Tripwire is also Vancouver’s biggest tech-house producer and something of a champion of the Vancouver sound on an international level. A great many of your fave techno and house producers are from Vancouver. Name’s like Konrad Black and Matt Jonson were part of the Canadian techno exodus to Berlin in the early to mid naughties, and with good reason.
But Jay’s still here, playing clubs across Europe like Fabric and Watergate, putting out records on labels as varied as Tonality, Pokerflat and Nordic Trax and generally carving out a niche as globe trotting techno madman.
I tend to think of there being a very traditional Cascadian sound amongst a great deal of Seattle, Portland and Vancouver’s producers of electronic music. A somewhat stoned sheen to a techy backing of a soundtrack of somewhat psychedelic and green (both environmental and otherwise) proportions). Jay’s music fits in here perfect. A recent live performance as part of the Vancouver Jazz festival put him in the position of being Miles Davis to his own troupe, guiding some of Vancouver’s best live musicians that have been involved in electronic music, in a trek somewhat deeper than anyone was prepared for.
It was solid, it was out there and it was fitting for a producer who uses the name Tripwire. A sound ready to drop bombs at a moments notice, if we as a willing listenership are only ready to cross that line.