In December we featured the LA deep house label Young Adults—run by Leeor Brown, of Friends of Friends, and David Fisher, who together also DJ under the same name—in our roundup of Labels to Watch in 2013, and now they’ve hooked up an upbeat FADER mix—a little harder and sharper that some of their past, more nap-by-the-pool, slow disco stuff. The Crazy P track at 22 minutes is still my favorite, but some label exclusives by Chamboche and Grown Folks with LOL Boys thoroughly jam too. The label’s House Slippers compilation comes out on April 23rd. If you’re in Austin this week, Brown’s other label Friends of Friends will be throwing their annual SXSW day party on Thursday, from 2-8PM at Barcelona, with a special Shlohmo vs. Salva B2B, and sets by Grown Folk, Jerome LOL, Daedelus, Natasha Kmeto and more.
Download: Young Adults’ FADER Mix
How did you first meet? FISHER: Leeor and I went to high school together. We’ve known each other a long time. We both got into music more like on a underground hip-hop kick. It developed from there into electronic music, experimental stuff. It definitely brought us closer. Leeor was doing PR, and we were both doing radio shows. He was in Santa Cruz, I was in Berkeley. We’ve always been feeling similar stuff, and playing a one-up game of can you top this, look what I found kind of thing as most music lovers do. BROWN: That’s how real DJs do it, right? I think we both came together a lot on Kompakt techno, the four-four stuff that was real popular in Europe, like Get Physical and all those kinds of labels. We were really repping hard and DJing and whatnot, but really before that kind of music was okay in the States. We’ve been growing musically together for a long time, and with me doing Friends of Friends and whatnot, doing PR, things developing and we decided last year maybe people are ready, and maybe we’re ready to put ourselves out there and put on a stamp on something we’ve been doing at home on our own for years. FISHER: Yeah, it’s definitely been in the talks for a long time, but making it a reality was something that came about as a result of Leeor establishing Friends of Friends, being like, in the scene in LA but not real being able to put our finger on it. This was our attempt to actually manifest it in a physical way.
How did the name Young Adults come about? BROWN: It’s exactly what we are, man. I’m turning 30 this year. It’s just the idea of getting older but being young at heart. We wanted to move forward and have a feeling that you can get older and do it gracefully and with integrity and still have fun. FISHER: It also spawned out of this resistance to accept responsibility, grow up, all these things we were facing in our later 20s. When we finally came up with the name, the concept, stuff just started to happen. It started the wheels turning. We both got married a couple years ago, and now Leeor’s got a kid. I’m probably not too far behind. It is this really crazy phase where we just decided to take things head on and not really use being young or being a kid as an excuse, because we can’t really fall back on that forever. It was a hybrid of accepting responsibility, but also not wanting to lose touch with what’s hot and what’s fresh right now.
You’ve been DJing under the name Young Adults for a while though, right? BROWN: For a good four years now. We had house parties and friend’s parties. I’d say we were the epitome of the bedroom DJ. All of our friends knew we did it and we were good at it, but we didn’t really expand outside of that for a while. We started doing mixes and putting them up online very sparsely. We’re vinyl-only so we would record a million mixes and then not put them up because we were freaks and we would hear something that we would not like in there and never do anything with it. Where it looks like we made two mixes over a span of three years, we’ve really made hundreds and we’re just perfectionists and couldn’t let them go, if you know what I mean.
Dave, do you have a day job that is outside of music? FISHER: I’m a salesman. I work in the family business. It’s like an automotive tool company. We import tools. I’m basically sitting in front of a computer, calling dudes in the Midwest all day and playing that role and bumping Soundcloud mixes and house music along the way. It’s pretty interesting. BROWN: This is the epitome of a passion project. FISHER: It’s definitely driven me to be more inspired, because after a long day, I don’t have much energy, but I’m driven to express myself creatively, so this has been definitely an outlet for that.
Tiger & Woods – Pitch [Editainment]
Psychemagik – Beauty & The Bass [White Label]
Chamboche – Into The Murk [Young Adults]
Crazy P – Heartbreaker (Huxley Remix) [2020 Vision]
LOL Boys & Grown Folk – Ghost Path [Young Adults]
Waze & Odyssey – Our World [Throne of Blood]
Sleepyhead – Good Love [Party Guy Records]
Tensnake – Mainline (Dub) [Defected]
Tigerskin – Try The Impossible [Future Classic]
Volta Cab – Strange Days (Creative Swing Alliance Remix) [Illusion Recordings]
Jacques Renault – Back To You (Paradis Remix) [Lets Play House]