Love and Electrik

I meet up with Love & Electrik on a Friday afternoon on Granville Street, the main strip of Vancouver’s nightlife industry. Our destination is one of the last vestiges of a seedier, less-commercial Downtown Vancouver, a filthy arcade sandwiched in between a pizza-by-the-slice place and the Vogue Theatre. I have a bottle of whiskey and five dollars in quarters. They arrive with their entourage, managers Jeff Herrara and Aidan Wright from The Hastings Set, ready to go. We are so punk.

Roxy Aiston, the band’s vocalist, immediately zeroes in on a Playboy pinball machine and I spy a Street Fighter II Turbo arcade. We are going to be taking photos and drinking whiskey in this arcade. I am hopeful that we will cause enough of a ruckus to get kicked out. When I ask Kevin Mah, the duo’s keyboardist and producer, if he plays Street Fighter, he says, “Of course. Street Fighter, man, I’m Asian. I used to wander around causing trouble and hanging out in 7/11s playing arcades.” He loses in the first round to a character I don’t remember being in the original game. He points out that this is shameful and I agree. We decide to play another version of Street Fighter, which includes Marvel Comics characters and I tell him I am going to destroy him. I don’t. Instead I get my ass handed to me and figure that it’s time for me to try and get these folks drunk.

The duo is in high spirits. They recently had their single “Sex Video” signed to Tremendous Records, a new strictly digital label announced by Chris Taylor of Last Gang Records that is to be handled by DJ GrandTheft (of the Team Canada DJ duo). And just yesterday they found out they are about to embark on a Red Bull sponsored tour across Canada with 18 dates… their first shows outside of Vancouver.

“It’s still kind of sinking in, we’re just absorbing it. It’s a dream come true! We’ll probably get a little nervous in the weeks coming up to it but we’ll still be working our asses off to get ready,” Kevin tells me. “It’s funny because we’ve had so much support from people in Vancouver. All the DJs and style setters are speaking so highly of us and coming to all our shows and there’s so much support that we almost feel like a sports team that has to represent Vancouver. People want to see us do well and that’s part of what pushes us.”

Their manager has warned me in advance that they’re lightweights and also warns me against encouraging them to drink dark liquors. There is a certain glee in his voice when he tells me this, which I interpret as encouragement. We play more arcades and drink whiskey and work on causing trouble, but as it turns out it’s really hard to get kicked out of a sleazy old arcade on Granville street. Roxy beats Kevin at Virtua Cop, a shooting game from the early Nineties. They also ride doubles on a motorbike game with a sign that specifically says ‘one rider only.’ They figure it’ll look “awesome” and it totally does. Once it becomes clear none of us is brazen enough to get kicked out, we go outside to where my editor and the band’s managers are hanging out.

On the way to a nearby park, they mention that they really want to talk about The Hastings Set and this guy Chin Injeti. “It’s a collective,” Kevin says. “It revolves around music, but there’s a lot more than that. There’s artists involved, there’s photographers involved and a lot of dancers. It started out as a party scene because of Chin’s involvement but it’s also a recording studio and has grown into becoming this artist management thing with lots of ambitions for the future.” Although they have been making music together for almost seven years the band seems to credit Chin with their ‘discovery.’

Chin—who is not present at the interview—seems to be an almost mythic creature. The band and their Hastings Set colleagues speak of him with affection and reverence. They insist that he be mentioned in the article. The Toronto native and current Vancouver/L.A transplant was a founding member of the Juno award winning group Bass is Base, has won multiple Canadian music awards and currently works producing tracks for big name American acts like Dr. Dre, Nas and Busta Rhymes as well as Canadian home town heroes like Hot Hot Heat and Bedouin Soundclash. He is attributed with “spearheading” The Hastings Set and seems to be a central figure in everyone’s hopes.

Roxy explains meeting him: “I became friends with Chin on Facebook and we put out this mixtape and our friend Nina Mendoza blogged about it and next thing we knew we got this message from him and he said that he was a big fan of ours and he loved our stuff and he invited us to play at a party. We had no idea what The Hastings Set was at that time but eventually the ball got rolling, we played the party and that was the night that we got accepted in.”
“It was our first Love & Electrik show,” Kevin adds. “We had changed our name and it was the first time we went on stage with our brand new concept, our new look and new style and we were honestly surprised by the response we got. It was the first time we had that feeling that we were on to something.”

Jeff Herrera remembers that party well; “I was working by the elevator—it was an underground party in, like, the basement of an office building and I was busy making sure it didn’t get shut down and I remember hearing them and being like, ‘Woah, what is this?’ I think we all were… Then Chin invited them to the studio.”

At this point we drink a little more whiskey because I’m committed to the idea of being a crazy, out there, gonzo rock journalist and they are committed to being rockstars. When police officers walk by we get a little nervous and I move my bag in front of the bottle. We are dorks. We cannot even get kicked out of an arcade.

“We’re big science fiction geeks,” Kevin tells me. “There’s this thing we know about called singularity. A lot of people think that’s where we’re going as human beings in the future. We see technology surpassing us already but the idea is that we shouldn’t be afraid of the machine taking over us, because we’re going to grow with it and its going to help us live longer and become a part of us.”

Kevin calls this Tech Shui and it’s an idea that Love & Electrik try to bring to their music. Even their name Love & Electrik implies this principle. Roxy eleaborates: “Love being the organic side, and Electrik being obviously the more technology driven side and kind of fusing the two together. Kevin’s such a mastermind with technology and I’m kind of this girly girl that has a big beautiful heart.” At this point I feel it’s pertinent to remind them that Roxy is better at Virtua Cop.

Kevin ignores this comment. “I’m a producer first and keyboard player second. Her thing is very organic with a sexy voice and this persona that she brings. Just kind of fusing those two.”

It’s around this time that Kevin takes off to work. He asks my advice on modes of transport because he has eight minutes to get to the other side of downtown. I tell him to run because a cab will go slower in downtown traffic. He hugs Roxy and shakes my hand, asks her for money for smokes and takes off running. Sitting for a while longer with Jeff, Roxy, Aidan and my editor, I decide that I like The Hastings Set and Love and Electrik and that I want them all to do well. They probably will.

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