When I profiled Bill Salas in April 2007, the man better known as Brenmar was 21 years old and described his life as a “series of phases”—and at that point those phases already included indie-rap beat maker, bedroom electro-pop auteur, and experimental musician (in which guise he combined psychedelic drumming with electronic noise). Given Salas’s youth, this stylistic hopscotch came off like a young artist’s search for his niche. Six years later, he seems to have found it.
One of the few constants in Salas’s output over the years is that it’s really hard to categorize. Even when you feel like you can unpack his influences on a particular track, his interpretation is always sufficiently skewed to poke out of any box. The sounds he’s drawn from lately have included a couple decades-old varieties of house—underground 80s tracks and the kind of hot-selling 90s stuff, inflected with pop R&B, that used to be marketed under the broad rubric “club music”—but the way he chops them up and rearranges them recalls contemporary DJ-producers such as Diplo and Lunice. The samples are diced more finely than in the originals, in denser, more strobelike configurations, and the feel is hyperactive and tweaky.
