Updated 2 years ago
meets oCeLoT
April 23, 2020
by Machinelf
Aaron Peacock, also known as oCeLoT has been a producer on the scene since the late 90s. Originally from San Francisco, he made it over to the DMT Squat in downtown NYC in 2001, notwithstanding Doctor Spook warning him that we New Yorkers were fookin CRAZY, but he trudged on, rapidly becoming a favorite object of affection of Swedish Astrid, a new squat tenant of me and Wylie’s Tribeca Trance Mission, a lover of Venezuelan beauties, and a drywall specialist in our squat, becoming quite adept at making oCeLoT sized holes in the walls. Once he brought down a wall and we found a whole designer’s apartment full of clothes. And then a dungeon with bondage stuff with Planet of the Apes memorabilia and cages.
It was like a real-life dungeon crawler video game.
Aaron always had his brick laptop with him, even at the bridge. This was right about the time he had started making music, even amidst all the chaos, and I was probably the first to list his first CD, Aural Sects.
One of my favorite tracks on Aural Sects is Crank Yer Socket:
This music still holds up today, and inspired a whole new generation of trance producers, including fellow Portugese Mentalecho, who credited oCeLoT as one of his influences.
Aaron quickly absconded out of New York, conveniently missing the cops invading the squat (another story for another day!) and built quite a career for himself, with many releases and tours.
He eventually made it to Portugal and settled down, where we find him today.
So, Aaron, where do we even begin? How was THAT for an intro!?!
Wait, Astrid liked me? Wasn’t she Wileys GF?
No, just a cuddle muffin. A chewless chew toy. She just adored you.
And Wylie? No way! Astrid’s mate was God.
I just remember Viviana and DANG I could certainly go back in time a few times to repeat that little bit, but like most of the blur that passed for living back then, I just kept going. I suppose getting a job of some kind and stabilizing what the part I didn’t seem to get.
Viviana went on to the relocated Tribeca Trance Mission on Reade street. But looking back, I’m glad we got to see you get your start in 2000!
I’d been trying to make electronic music since 1993, but none of it was contextually appropriate for the people I tried to inflict it upon until such a time as I learned to “try to make it sound a bit more like trance if playing it for trance parties”…
So, my 2001 NYC sojourn would have been instrumental in getting this idea across, as I pulled my San Francisco head out of my Hippie ass and went to events around the 7 boroughs (although they would be so much cooler as Burroughs) including The Bridge Party (or the 3 in a row on the same spot one particular day, did it start with the Nitzhonot-playing crew with no subwoofers or end with it?)
We didn’t even know what “Nitzhonot” was back then LOL but it was everywhere.
Yeah, NYC was in crazy mode where we had back to back outlaws in the same spot extending days with different crews. Must have been a wild change from California.
As if I were always going to go back to California, from the get-go… I’m not even from there. I’m born and raised in Minnesota and Wisconsin FFS… I don’t really have much contact with people back in California either, except for some emails here and now during this epidemic.
I’ve been living on a mountainside in Central Portugal for nearly a decade now, and Lisbon before that, and basically touring was my social lifeline to all the people I supposedly was part of the lives of, and it all just sort of evaporated over the course of changing trends and interests in trance scenes and my corresponding irrelevance to them etc.
I’ve mostly seen stylistic trend shifts that benefit box-think copycats and harm original music makers, and this seems rather deliberate in scenes determined to keep a rolling lineup of 600 euro timeslots and maintaining organizational hegemony over social networks by genre-based loyalty campaigns.
we ended up re-creating the system brick by brick in our little rave-genre-petty-fiefdoms
Dude! I have always been in the same spot! Playing the weird shit mixed with oldies. I have way too much ADHD to not get bored by endlessness in track selection. That’s why I always booked myself to play early before all the drugs kicked in.
Let’s get to the most important part – the music. I’ve taken a long break! So I’m out of the loop. Still making music!?
Yeah Jeff I am. I have WIP [Work-in-Progress] full-length Split-Personality album split between more “chill” and more “aggro” music that’s the Aaron and Invisible Orchestra… coming soon,
as I try to learn flamenco guitar… plenty of practicing guitar and drumset and stuff at home these days… not that I wasn’t sheltering in place before it was cool… maybe I should call myself “the hermit” or maybe you have a name for me…?
Here are the Bandcamp links:
i also have a free archive linked on my page at http://ocelotmusic.com/archives.html
it’s not very well fleshed out yet… i’ll eventually get more stuff in there…
Also, check out The Borgasm. That band is definitely huge on the New Age Swing scene…legends…
https://ocelot.bandcamp.com/album/welcome-to-the-borgasm
my Youtube channel with some of my new stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDXZG08HPpuTCsZC-mOa9qw
In terms of oCeLoT psytrance….
here’s a 90 minute mix of my tunes I made for a friends podcast back in February…
▼THIS IS▼
https://mega.nz/file/OFVzWKiK#Js1avPfKpVTweurSfq5Jy77TNUo2MsIPKQDNYBYcH9g
▲THE GOOD SHIT▲
here are some other psytrance Youtube videos:
< a collab with Yab-Yum (Ajja and Gaspard) from back around 2006
< one with Goa Nirmal that came out on Sangoma
< a track from 9-lives
“insane” witha vocal sample altitude check lol
< from Style is not a Style
Can I come to one of your Portugal parties Aaron?
I dunno if i’d let that masked potential mass shooter into my trance party or not lol, kidding/not-kidding… “things you only worry about when you make trance parties in USA”
I hope you’re surviving Corona! Must be killer on big organizers. How are things there?
yeah, i wanna go out, but even with no lockdown, I’m drawing blanks thinking of
1) places to go hang out within an hour of here, vs Lisbon 3 hours away
2) where i would move to if I sold this place and bailed…
the view is great, my land is great. my little house is great. the cultural/social side not so great, and generally every party I went to made me want to go home or elsewhere, it’s such a main-floor sniffy-druggy cigarette-smoke loud-noisy-mid-highs experience that it makes me want to crawl to the chillout, which is usually nonexistent in Portugal.
Then where else?
I’d say “Switzerland or Germany” where they know what’s up, but it’s largely kiddie high-tech events where the only people my age think the UN and WHO conspired with 5G to make coronavirus lol…not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, a far contrast from the parties of yore, where NASA staff and neuroscientists attended and the vibe was clean and high.
I’m with you on the anti-pseudoscience tip.
And my late friend Wilson Leary, Timothy’s nephew, spoke of those same people (I think people from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley) when he did Moon Raves in the early 90s. A lot about cops getting called in Woodside.
So… is there no place for a middle ager in Europe?
old folks events persist, but that became an ossified religious cult, an orthodoxy, and ask any Israeli friends what comes after the GoaRetro musical movement. nothing, it stays there forever. Welcome to the Catholic Church 2.0
…so I’m on board with the “futuristic space musical evolution – social evolution – cultural evolution – industrial evolution” movement, and this has basically sent me back to the late 70’s early 80’s where world music fusion jazz and progressive psychedelic rock had finally caught up with minimalism and where even Fela Kuti was making quartal and quintal “open” harmony that sounded similar to minimalism a la Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, this all got stalled and killed by the 80’s obsession with money and drum machines and guitar solos and big hair, but anyway, I see that naturally feeding into stuff like Gong and Kraftwerk and even the new-wave leading to synth-pop, at it’s more ambient electronic side, and basically re-analyzing why Goa (New Beat and EBM) harmony seemed like a natural outgrowth for much of that stuff, and basically going beyond Goa.
So (I’m trying to visualize this) resurrecting the lost direction of 1970s synthesizers and classic progressive rock… kind of like Italo Disco being a lost path of disco…
musically speaking, electronic music, the lot of it, is nothing compared to the thousands of years of music leading up to it, and even as a constituent member of the “modern primitivism” movement along with rock etc, can certainly stand to absorb a bit from other musical traditions, as i mostly saw electronic musical styles stuck up their own buttholes, staring up their own genre rectums. like so many
patients in a mental hospital, each with their own repetitive tick, you see 7 soundsystems that each play a static holding pattern all night/day long, like a band that only plays ballads… jeesh, I think even Journey, the bic lighter sales representatives extraordinaires, managed to have a non-balladic banger or 2…
we should aim higher and update to quantum post-futuristic something or other… not sure where i’m going with this rant here, but I like lots of mellow jazzy (no soloing wankery please) groovy worldly music these days. is this indicative of my age? lol
virtual hugs from 8 feet away from you,
Aaron, who hasn’t been laid in over a year even before the virus…
Don’t worry you’re not alone.
aaron- the artist formerly known as ocelot, lol