The Detroit Electronic Music Festival (DEMF), now known as Movement Electronic Music Festival, has always been a living monument to the inventors, innovators and pioneers of electronic music. So it’s good to see that amongst all the nostalgia lives a passion for the up and coming artists of the EDM world. Thus enter Cameron Argon aka Big Chocolate. The 22 year old, bright red mustache sporting California/Nevada native who now lives in Seattle, exudes excitement about his involvement in the EDM world. When I sat down with @bigchocolate before I could even say a word, he heard a beat from the nearest stage and immediately started dancing in his chair. His passion was exuberant, coupled with a down-to-earth demeanor that made him easily relatable and made my Job enjoyable and easy. His set at the Electric Forest staged was packed with all kinds of chest-rattling trap and a frenetic crowd that was easily the biggest crowd at the stage all weekend. In the shadow of the skyline defining Renaissance Center, he dropped a smorgasbord of his own tracks from his new Clean EP as well as top 40 trap remixes of Lil Mama’s – Lip Gloss, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s – Can’t Hold Us and enough bass to register on the Richter scale. Every drop brought a true ear-to-ear smile to his face as well as an ecstatic and healthy seizure like display that showed his honest love of what he does. And in what must have been a hearkening back to his earlier days of music, the people brought the controlled chaos and crowd surfing of his metal days to this EDM newcomer’s set. I sat down with him this Sunday for an interview found exclusively here on edmsauce.com:
Let me start with the most flippant question, is the song “Blue Milk” a reference to the drink in Star Wars: A New Hope?
Oh I hadn’t thought about that. No, not at all. [The title Blue Milk] is 100% random (laughs).
I noticed that on your facebook, you recently posted “please don’t send me your metal anything,” what made you feel like posting that?
I don’t know. People just got mad. But basically what it’s like is people would send would send me like the worst, a bad metal demo. Really bad. When they send it to you all the time, when you haven’t really been involved in metal in forever and you’re like I don’t want to hear this anymore. I don’t want to hear it and they got mad.
I also noticed that a lot of people would reference your friend Mitch Lucker (former frontman of the metal band Suicide Silence, who tragically passed away in a motorcycle accident this past November) in saying that he would be disappointed in your new direction of music towards the EDM world.
He was one of the key figures in kinda moving me away from metal. When I met him, he was into some other stuff but he was one of the main drives for me being an artist at all today. But that’s the kind of stuff that people don’t understand. You can’t just get on the internet and try to explain it to people because they’re just gonna act like an asshole. Mitch was one of the key figures pushing me in this direction [toward EDM], almost more so than anyone else at times. I think he assumed I knew I more than I actually did. He would talk big about me, and I would think ‘man, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ We had a great relationship and kids just don’t understand that kind of stuff and every once in a while I’ll get frustrated. At first, I was in the habit of if you would post something and everyone would be excited about it, the first person who complained is who I would respond to, but now I just don’t care about it. The internet is a new way to talk to people, you know what I mean? It’s the first time in history, people are able to say things to other people, without doing this [points back and forth between himself and I indicating face to face interaction] and that is a new, fresh idea to people and it will eventually die off.
In the past, you’ve toured with Warped Tour, but not with the same style of music that Big Chocolate is playing now. I’ve noticed that you’re again going on Warped Tour this year as Big Chocolate and since your music now as Big Chocolate is not traditionally Warped Tour, how do you think you’ll be received?
This year is really cool. There’s me, Crizzly, Run DMT and Stephan Jacobs all on Warped Tour and those are all kind of unusual Warped Tour electronic acts I think. I have no idea what it’s going to be like. I think it’s gonna be sick. I’m never skeptical because of Kevin Lyman [the founder of Warped Tour]. You can’t question that guy because when he’s making decisions he knows what he’s doing. Like the first year I got on Warped Tour it was really weird because I hadn’t been doing my own music that long and I felt like I lucked out. I only started playing clubs after I played Warped Tour. I didn’t think about the transition to being more of an electronic artist then, but it’s gonna be weird to come full circle [in coming back to Warped Tour]. I’ve heard from some people about this upcoming year and they seem really excited about it.
On “Red Headed Locc,” you have so many different styles and genres and no two songs sound similar. What are your future plans for new styles into your music?
Yeah. I would eventually like to get more clubby. Especially lately [pointing to the festival] I’ve been listening to a lot of great techno club music, and that’s why I’ve been looking forward to this [Movement] festival. I’m kind of trying to find my style and through that process I’ve touched a lot of different things and a lot of it has been, not so much looking for a style, but just listening to music. Especially on “Red Headed Locc,” it was very experimental, touching all kinds of music. Not one track is alike. It was weird when “Blue Milk” started getting popular off of [Red Headed Locc] people would hear that trap and then come back to the album and it was the only trap song on the album, and then the whole album was real strange [to them]. But I’m trying to get more defined, I’m trying to learn more about what kind of music I want to be known for. So I still haven’t really felt like I’ve hit a place that really suits me, which is kind of nice.
Here at Movement, a lot of the acts are established names in the electronic music world. To contrast that, are there any up and coming artists that we should be looking out for? Are you collaborating with anyone?
This sounds really dumb, but I spend a lot of time on SoundCloud. With the continuous play feature, it became real easy to continuously listen to and find New Music. So you could listen to a song and also look for more music. It’s really easy to find what producers are listening to what, and what they like, as well as their mixes. It’s cool because I can find a producer who has 80 followers, 80! And the tracks will be cool and that’s always nice. It’s just a lot people in their bedrooms and I don’t know what kind of background they have but I like their tracks. The SoundCloud community is a great place to find people who make music. But lately, there’s this guy named Durante who I’m collaborating with right now. He’s actually here at the festival just hanging out. He had his first release with OWSLA on OWSLA’s Nest. OWSLA has great taste; the stuff they put out is always good. So he’s one guy you should check out. I don’t know man (laughs), there’s so much. You’ll have to ask me after Warped Tour (laughs).
Is there anything we should be looking for in your set tonight here at Movement?
Well my whole set is brand new tonight. I’m just starting fresh. I’m playing with, or focusing on, my new album or EP, Clean, and I’m playing a lot of what I’ve found on SoundCloud over the last two months (laughs).
Photo Credit: Ashley Beimert
