By Daiana Feuer
Don’t call 12 Steps a concept album, Tittsworth is just conceptual. He likes his music the way he likes his lunch: fresh, raw and beating. Exotic things. Jesse Tittsworth also has a pet dog and watches movies. Sometimes he kicks back listening to ‘40s and ‘50s albums. He’s domesticated—“with a great libido,” he adds. He also hopes to introduce molecular gastronomy to club music.
What’s this about libido? We’re talking aphrodisiacs: artichoke, raw oyster, snake blood, sheep penis, and giant custard-filled fruit. Aphrodisiacs are not an instant high like drinking lemon extract (94 percent alcohol, “tastes like razors,” he says).
Aphrodisiacs work cumulatively. Eaten often, certain exotic tastes fortify your libido, or they boost your zest for life, thus enhancing your libidinal jouissance. Which then sublimates to whatever vessel you pour creativity into. Exhibit A: Mr. Tittsworth describes his DJ set…
“I’ll start familiar or groovy and try to climax it at the end with something super energetic and then maybe segue out with guilty pleasures. If the groovy stuff is boring them, you have to step up the energetic a little faster. I might like to pound the energetic stuff or just climax for an hour, but certain crowds don’t have the threshold for that: it’s too much for them, or it’s too noisy, or too fast for them. So you end up having to do a cyclical wave sort of thing where you go in and out, in and out, as opposed to a linear ramp up. I keep a loose strategy in mind, but I don’t
believe in hard set rules.”
Totally beyond the pleasure principle, commanding us by natural law to enjoy as little as possible, to keep us cubby-huddled within a comfort zone. Such a state almost sucked Titts into a suburban home with a desk jarb, drinking too much, until he realized the uncreative life equated to a tambourine making shadows in a cave. Tittsworth wants to try new things, combine flavors and sounds. If it’s strange, he’ll either eat it or sample it for a song.
A Sunday, sunshine and coffee, on a long, narrow couch surrounded by feng shui meets cubist wall decorations. A nail for a small mirror hangs empty across the living room, by an open balcony overlooking Koreatown. Tittsworth’s shirts and underwear are folded neatly on the left part of the couch. He sits close by and plays the second remix he ever made, Milli Vanilli’s “Girl You Know It’s True,” that happened to get Diplo’s attention.
“The most interesting things are breaking the rules. It’s like that whole trend of molecular gastronomy (the intersection of food, science and art into a texture-flavor clash architecture). Really weird sort of out there type of things. I try to conceptualize. The new album is about taking weird concepts and things that I felt would help grow club music.”
Tittsworth describes and demonstrates, halfway through the chorus, “Girl you know it’s…” skips, M & V get busted lip synching, and suddenly the breakbeat slides in underneath. “This was before Ableton, before sequencers could really speed up and slow down,” he says. “I had to think of innovative ways to go from 90 BPM to a club tempo immediately, doing those sort of stabs.
“I made a song on the new album that makes a beat out of turntables being bumped, then the record skipping becomes stabs in the song. I try to think of things out of the ordinary and try to make music that’s more than just a collection of disposable beats for the most part. A lot of times you might also think of things that have inspired you musically, whether sounds, songs or types of movements, and how you might learn and re-portray it in a new refreshing way.”
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