Show caption Grant Kwiecinski, AKA GriZ. Photograph: Sam Medina Electronic music GRiZ: the EDM artist using his star power to make a difference The 28-year-old DJ and producer has been helping to transform parts of Detroit through charity work while standing up as a rare LGBT voice in a mostly heterosexual music scene Katie Bain @bainofyrexstnce Wed 12 Dec 2018 11.16 EST Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

Share via Email

The electronic music crowd isn’t famous for getting up early, yet here we are at 11am on a Sunday, rolling our yoga mats on to the marble floor of the most opulent building in downtown Detroit. A hundred people sink into chair pose as deep house, played by the DJ at the front of the room, reverberates off the soaring ceilings of the famous Fisher Building, an art deco palace built with auto industry money in the 1920s. Tourists snap photos of the scene as they pass through a lobby decorated with a dozen glittering Christmas trees. Behind a desk, the security guard nods his head with the beat.

And two mats down from me, the reason for the season is standing on one leg with his eyes closed. His name is Grant Kwiecinski, the electronic artist known to most as GRiZ. A native of the Detroit suburb of Southfield, GRiZ one of the more successful artists in the live instrumental electronic music scene, having headlined festivals including California’s Lighting in a Bottle and Michigan’s Electric Forest. He has repeatedly sold out Colorado’s Red Rocks amphitheatre and traversed the US and beyond on his own headlining tours while also running a record label, All Good, and releasing a steady flow of music, including five albums since 2011. In 2017, the saxophonist became one of the few openly gay artists in the aggressively hetero mainstream electronic music scene, coming out via a HuffPost op-ed in which he described the depression and anxiety that plagued him during the years he kept his sexuality a secret.

It’s a lot to list on a résumé for an artist who’s just 28 years old.

More pressing to the scene at hand, however, is that he’s also the namesake of 12 Days of Grizmas, an extravaganza of charitable giving for which fans have descended upon Kwiecinski’s home turf of Detroit for nearly two weeks of parties, events and – as fans will tell me over and over again this weekend – “good vibes”. (Kwiecinski is in fact spreading them right now as he poses with fans while in tree pose.) All proceeds from Grizmas 2018 go to Seven Mile, an after-school program providing music, art, and coding education to more than 100 Detroit students annually. Ending with two sold-out shows this Friday and Saturday at Detroit’s masonic temple, Grizmas is a sprawling community engagement project that’s intensely well-intentioned and exceptionally planned, down to the “Grizmas 2018” tags sewn into the merch.

“To me, Grizmas is like Burning Man,” Kwiecinski says, “because as soon as it ends, we take a week off then start planning for next year.”

Now in its fifth year, Grizmas doesn’t raise money by just donating a percentage of ticket sales or throwing standard-issue electronic music ragers and calling it community outreach. Grizmas 2018 kicked off on 4 December, and there’s thus far been caroling, a day of volunteering, a gathering at a local arcade, art therapy and meditation. This yoga event is sold out, as is the one later this afternoon. Tonight, Griz will host fans and friends at a bowling alley. Later this week there will be a roller disco party, an open mic night and a discussion on mental health in the age of social media. Even the very loud and properly ravey Grizmas party Kwiecinski played two nights ago at a local youth boxing gym served hot chocolate instead of alcohol.

Grant Kwiecinski, AKA GRiZ. Photograph: Sam Medina

In a particular musical scene where passion, deep talent and a strong sense of community are often overshadowed by the stigma of overconsumption – of drugs, alcohol, lights, sound – Grizmas is shockingly wholesome. It’s also effective. In its five years, the event has raised more than $100,000 for Detroit music education-related organizations and given fans an outlet for their philanthropic impulses.

“A while ago it was like, if I’m frustrated about something I’ll just bitch about it then continue doing my thing,” says Kwiecinski, who also raised more then $6,000 for the LGBT organization It Gets Better as part of Giving Tuesday. “But then it was like ‘Something has to change, and nothing’s going to change unless I make something happen. So, I made something happen, and by doing it, it grew into this grander thing.”

The hub of Grizmas is at the corner of Broadway and Gratiot, in a usually unoccupied storefront donated to Grizmas by a local real estate firm, Bedrock. (Bedrock was founded by the billionaire Dan Gilbert, who is credited with singlehandedly sparking the revitalization of downtown Detroit by infusing $5.6bn into the neighborhood.) Here, on a clear, frigidly cold Saturday morning, the Grizmas pop-up store is open for business, with all proceeds from the limited edition T-shirts, jackets, sweatshirts and more going to charity. In the shop I meet volunteer Nicole Merget, 25, who drove hundreds of miles from Tennessee to take part of Grizmas. She first saw GRiZ at Bonnaroo 2015, and tells me she can’t remember how many times she’s seen him since.

“And I’m just as excited to be back with all the friends I’ve met and to be doing these volunteer things,” she says with genuine zeal while arranging T-shirts, “as I am to see the shows this weekend.”

Kwiecinski and a guest at the pop-up shop. Photograph: Sam Medina

Jared Berman and Harrison Diskin are also tooling around the shop, each wearing Grizmas scarves and Santa hats. Two of Kwiecinski’s best friends since childhood, Berman runs all GRiZ merchandising, while Harrison is a talent buyer at React, one of Detroit’s leading electronic music promoters. (The city has been a US hub for electronic music since techno was developed here in the 1980s and 90s.) The guys tell me that five years ago, this intersection, like much of downtown Detroit, was still the post-apocalyptic sprawl of urban decay for which the city became notorious during its decades-long decline.

This morning, people are out walking their dogs and browsing around boutiques for Christmas presents. There are murals, indie coffee shops, restaurants, an ice skating rink populated by small children and the parents propping them up. While the revitalization of Detroit has certainly not yet reached all neighborhoods, Kwiecinski, Berman, Harrison and every Uber driver I have this weekend attest that the city is vastly safer, cooler and more appealing now than in decades past. (“This neighborhood, it used to be all drug dealers and prostitutes,” a driver tells me as we cruise down the pleasant-seeming Cass Corridor.) In downtown, this transformation has drawn the same types of young people that make up the GRiZ fanbase.

“Years ago, there was this mass evacuation of young people leaving Detroit to go to Chicago or New York or LA,” says Diskin, who lives downtown, not far from the pop-up shop. “Now I’m having conversations with a lot of those same people about how can they come back and find jobs here, because they visit on holidays and see this exploding culture and community and want to be a part of it.”

While last week it was announced that thousands of Detroit residents might lose their jobs with the potential closing of one of the city’s GM factories, experts say the tech, education and medical industries are now primary drivers of the local economy and are helping fund the city’s current cultural renaissance, in which Grizmas is playing a merry little part. While fans have requested Grizmases in cities across North America, Kwiecinski and his crew say the soul of the event is here in Detroit.

The guys agree that getting people involved who’ve never heard of GRiZ is an important step for the future, and one they’re achieving this morning by luring passersby into the store with free coffee. Meanwhile, their primary goal is to give fans and friends a platform to do nice things for others and to power up on good vibes and holiday cheer, like iPhones recharging to full battery. In the face of news headlines that can be devastating to the point of numbness and inaction, this accessible, utterly sincere community effort feels comforting, essential, even.

“I think a lot of the reason we do Grizmas is because we feel it’s necessary,” says Diskin, “like, if we weren’t doing this, we’d kind of be shitty people. When we proved to ourselves that we had the ability to do it, doing it became our responsibility.”