.jpeg)
Interview
Eve Defy is a Seattle-based producer creating mind bending and boundary pushing music through live hardware programming. One of the PNW’s best kept secrets, Eve Defy’s notable releases on Seattle labels Apt-E & illegal afters tracks are essential for enthusiasts of experimental electronic dance music. Through their singular style, they shirk predictability, and embrace sonic astonishment.
Having followed Eve Defy for many years, it's a pleasure to finally feature them on the show.
How would you classify your sound?
Adventurous, mainly. I like trying things, I don't like genres, certainly not sticking to them throughout the runtime of a set. I think I've gained a reputation for being quite an intense DJ, which I won't deny, but I do really like having the opportunity to play lighter, subtler, sunnier slots. I maybe tend towards the frenetic and chaotic, but really I want variety. I like being on call for the shock and awe peaktime/closing stuff, but anything, even the most exciting things, will get boring if that's all you eat.
Can you describe your approach to production? What philosophies lie behind your music-making?
Improvisation and spontaneity have always been very important to me, from when I was playing guitar in bands to now, it's part of why I'm so reliant on hardware and physicality—I'm really not very clever, not much of an engineer, it's all quite primitive honestly. Of course I've become better and better at all the granular, detail-oriented work one does in the box, but it's mostly an end stage for processing and mixing whatever is recorded, maybe a little fiddling with the arrangement here and there. There's no real vision, it's mostly habits and instruments, occasionally some idea or conceit to get a jam rolling but then it's really just the sound of the machines.
I think the whole "flow-state" thing is a bit fetishized honestly but it does seem like a fleeting kind of enlightenment in a certain sense, where something is happening, something is being achieved, but part of what is being achieved is a lack of presence in the happening, the process at hand. I guess I feel sheepish about how easy it is to romanticize that sort of thing, even though all that does line up with my approach in particular. I just really don't like cliché. There's a great Anne Carson essay floating around called Variations On The Right To Remain Silent where she basically sets up cliché as the polar opposite of what we might call mysticism, and I think she's right about that (I tend to think she's right about a lot of things).
Is there a personal ethos behind releasing exclusively on PNW labels?
This is a great question, the flippant answer is I'm just too lazy to send out demos, so pretty much all of my published music has been via dear friends and local labels championing me, which is a profound honour and much more meaningful than having my stuff out on some big popular european label or whatever. I do want to go farther afield, I'm just not very ambitious, zero grindset for better or worse. I like making the stuff, I like getting a dancefloor howling, but obviously all the extraneous bullshit like promotion and whatnot sucks. That being said, I do not think my work is separable from the environs of the PNW and my attachment to/relationship with this place, but there's not much to say there that doesn't strike me as a bit corny (see above). As aforementioned, certainly I very much like to think all of this stuff has a mystical edge to it, but maybe that's just cope and mental illness, who knows. Actually another writer I really like passed away last week, Annie Dillard, she's got a wonderful book about living on Lummi Island that I just reread, Holy the Firm. Very beautiful, highly recommend for PNW-appreciators.
Can you share your thoughts on the state of the scene in the PNW? What are we moving towards, and in what ways could we use some catching up?
Well in a very broad cultural sense we're moving somewhere grim, especially with the PNW being something of a heartland for technocracy. Generationally speaking we drew a pretty short straw, not a fun century. But that's part of what makes this stuff so important, even moreso in an era of such profound spiritual destitution and confusion. I extremely dislike the rhetoric that raving and such is de facto revolutionary or radical in any meaningful political sense, I think that's obviously false and people should be honest about the bourgeois trappings of our subculture. In Seattle your average warehouse party is like $45, it's terrible really. I'd love to see less booking of headliners from across the Atlantic or whatnot, that's fine for bringing incurious people into some club that can make money hand over fist from bar sales, not sure I see the point of throwing thousands of dollars at big RA-hyped names if you're then going to charge for prohibitively expensive tickets just to break even—especially when our locals are so good and so passionate, and especially when the supply/demand ratio is so a bit out of whack because it's bloody 2026 and everyone's a deejay now (which, to be clear, is cool and very good!) But overall things have felt very protean and fresh lately, lots of lovely newer faces with good attitudes and spirit finding their way into the scene, and that's a real joy, the most important thing of all really.
Tell us a bit about your mix?
This actually follows on directly from what I was just saying about the scene, because it's re-recording of a set I played earlier this year at a particularly sublime renegade affair out in the rainforest, the effort the organizers put into it was monumental, especially given that it was free to attend. A proof of what can be done if there's real passion bound up with a meaningful ethos, I was honoured to be asked to play. A very wet but glorious weekend. I had a vague plan going in but didn't really know quite what to expect and it ended up being very improvised, especially after the hour mark. It was nice to put the Heavy Sounds rig through its paces, lots of tracks that are near and dear to my heart in there.
What's on the horizon for you (personally, professionally, spiritually, or musically)?
I have various projects and pieces mostly finished and waiting for publication, including some of my non-Eve Defy abstract work (!) so maybe some of those will see the light of day soon. Besides that I don't really know, as I have said two things I really lack are vision and ambition. Part of the reason I started publishing unmastered stuff on my bandcamp is because I'm just sitting on so much material that I don't really know what to do with. Who knows, maybe eventually I'll put more of an effort into sending demos out. Probably not though.
For more from Eve Defy follow them here: