Now that you’ve solidified your brand around this tour, can we expect you to do the label / album combo that every producer seems to do these days? It seems like there’s a standard progression.

I mean… I wouldn’t rule it out. I don’t have anything really set in stone yet, but I’ve always wanted to do something. I don’t know if a label is the right word, but I’d love to do something where I could help shine the light on kids who probably deserve it.

I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Kennedy Jones. Back in the day when he was popping off and trap was just becoming a big thing. He and Ookay were doing their b2b sets at all the big festivals, and right around then was when Kennedy found me. Because he started playing my music, and because he introduced me to who is now my manager; that’s a large reason why I’m here today. I just was fortunate enough that he decided to read my email after the fifteenth time.

I’m so bad at reading my emails and responding to kids. I get USBs and I hardly ever listen to them. It’s not like I don’t care, it’s that when you’re on the other side of the fence, you see you all these DJs sitting on their high throne. Like, why won’t they listen to my music, all they have to do is sit on their ass and eat chicken wings all day. Now I’m on this side, it’s like yeah when I have an hour off I like to sit and chill and not think about anything.

Well, you also went through Icon Collective and you had a plan for this as a career. A lot of these kids trying to get discovered are literally bedroom producers who work at Publix or something.

Slushii was. He worked at Best Buy and now he’s here. And to be fair, one of the most helpful things for me in my career, which sent me to Icon, which made me sit down and plan a business around my brand for seven or eight months was trying to give USBs to all these DJs and no one caring, and me realizing that this was not the way to do it, I’m not ready, I need to figure out a new way to do it. And I just needed to work harder. So, I hope that me not necessarily responding to kids helps them realize that too. But, maybe every 50 fuckin’ emails, I’ll find that one Slushii or whoever.

So shine the light right now. Who’s the best, undiscovered producer out there that you know about?

That’s the problem is the guys who I consider undiscovered, now they are discovered, because everyone else started playing their music too. Michael Sparks made that song “Ja Rasta” that I play in all my sets. I’ve known Michael for a really long time, and he was making big room and stuff that wasn’t really breaking the mold, and that song really broke the mold. I’ve definitely been putting him on after that. Other than him, Crankdat is easily going to be the biggest producer of this year. I’m just lucky I got a track with him before he got too big. Tisoki, on the heavier side, him and Wavedash and that whole crew, are super revitalizing brostep and dubstep that can have melody and rhythm and doesn’t have to be the same shit over and over again; and actually be music and cool.

I really fuck with that stuff and, not that he’s undiscovered, but I think he’s going to be a lot more in people’s faces this year is San Holo. His sets and his music are so fucking weird. It shouldn’t work, and it does. It blows my mind. Kids go nuts. He’s one of my favorite people on the planet. The reason I even started working with him is because he got put on support for a couple of my shows. I had never met him before, and after those two days, we went from being complete strangers to best friends. That’s how he is.

So what’s next for you?

I have the Off The Deep End EP coming out. We put out the first track, “Claim To Be," which was a long time coming. It’s one I was really happy to finally put out into the world, but there are three more tracks coming out on it, then we’ll package it all together. We were going to put out the EP before the tour, but at a certain point last year, just because the climate of electronic music was so weird, we kinda pumped the brakes on releases a little bit. We didn’t want to go too far one way or another.

So, at the end of 2016 going into now, Soundcloud started to deteriorate. Spotify came in and is the new king of electronic music, and with that brought the pop-friendly stuff like Louis the Child, Hotel Garuda, Manilla Killa, and all these others. So, with that, came all the dudes in the middle who just cling on to whatever they think is going to be hot and they were going towards that Spotify pop route. I’ve written a bunch of stuff like that, but I’ve been writing stuff like this for three years. I have a lot of vocally driven, melodic stuff but I didn’t want to put it all out and just be another dude trying to chase another fucking trend. And, I didn’t want to go fully down the complete underground dubstep road, because I have shit like that too. And so it was like, either way, I was going to be fucked. So, instead of doing either, we did none, and thankfully, I’ve been able to continue touring. And now I’m putting out everything.

The EP is classic Jauz underground heavier shit, and then after that, I have some more melodic stuff, some poppier stuff, some heavier stuff. And, I’m just going to keep putting it out and writing more shit. And this is the year where I’m going to just put out ungodly amounts of music. I’m so excited, man. It hurts when you want to put out all these tracks, but getting to the point where I’m at in my career, you get afraid. And then you have to remind yourself that you can’t be afraid because I wasn’t giving a fuck about anything when I put out all the old-school Jauz records and that’s how I got to where I am. So this is the year where I’m going to remind myself to just not give a fuck about anything and just put out whatever the fuck I want.