Your early remixes came out of a desire to create club music that was softer. Is that still a goal in your music?

I think so. Before I started as Cashmere Cat I was picturing a Justice show where there's a huge roaring crowd, or everyone's on drugs going insane. But when I make songs now the environment I picture isn't a club or a concert, but a young girl or boy listening in their room and just being alone.

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There has always been a lot of feminine energy around Cashmere Cat. The name is soft and sensual, you used photos of woman friends as early press pics, and you've said you wanted to move away from the bro aesthetic of DJing.

Yeah, maybe. I'm just doing whatever feels good, but I do think that early on there was an element of that; the music was really sweet and I'd have my hair in front of my face and my arms are all skinny and funny looking. People would be like, “Oh, it's just a cute little girl DJing.” I definitely ran with that early on, but now people know it's an awkward-looking white guy.

You've said that where you grew up in Halden was always behind the musical curve. Where did you find the stuff you were interested in?



Online. I was hoping to find something that would excite me and that I could call my own. I'd use Kazaa, which was like early Napster, so peer to peer sharing, and find interesting stuff. I do remember being fairly extensive in my research and so hungry to find new music.

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What music did you hear growing up that sparked that desire for weird sounds?

I was on this family vacation and my mum, I don't know how, but she'd gone into a gas station in the middle of nowhere and bought Discovery by Daft Punk. Like, a year after it had come out. We'd listen to it on repeat for hours. It was so mysterious and weird, and I'd make up all these stories in my head about how the music was made. I remember being really intrigued by it all.

Your first two EPs got a lot of attention, but they were also pretty odd. Did you expect your next step would be to start working with massive mainstream acts?

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When I started the project I jokingly set two goals for myself; I said I wanted to work with Kanye West and Jackie Chain, who's a rapper and owns a weed store in Miami. He was my favourite rapper. As it went on, it became a lot more interesting to me to work with people and not just computers, and that's an experience I didn't get to have growing up because there weren't that many people who shared the same interests.

You've worked with Kanye, but how's it looking with Jackie Chain?



I tried to follow him on Twitter and he hasn't followed me back. I'm so bummed out.