MartyParty to play ‘Purple Opera’ at The Bottleneck tonight

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The Bottleneck is about to be transformed into an opera house. The cause: electronic dance music by the melodic stylings of MartyParty.

Coined “purple opera” by fans, South African DJ Martin Folb (aka MartyParty) produces a unique electric bass, broken hip hop genre of emotion-filled music through melodic sounds you don’t generally hear in other EDM workss. Hence the need for a new genre name.

“There are stages of being intense; stages of being pretty; it just comes off being more of an operatic movement than anything else,” Folb says. “People can tell it’s mine whether it’s house music or dubstep or hip hop. It’s my voice.”

He doesn’t exactly have a conventional musical upbringing.

Graduating from the University of Cape Town with a bachelor’s degree in computer sciences and recruited to work for a booming dot-com company in Silicon Valley, Folb immigrated to the US to spend 12 years as a programmer, architect and manager of the company. Then he hung up his hat(s) in 2005, went to Costa Rica to surf, and spent evenings casually learning Ableton Live to make music (and fill his free time).

Hours of rigorous editing, managing files, algorithms, workflow is all very similar to building songs entirely behind a laptop, Folb says. He fell in love with it.

“Whether you’re programming an application, whether you’re programming a song, it’s the same discipline,” Folb says. “At the end of day the difference is when you push play on a song it makes music. When you push play on a program, it starts an ATM machine or something.”

His extensive programming background has helped him forge a new pathway for EDM; his mission is to change how people feel about computer music. In some people’s minds, he says, electronic music will always be repetitive looping or just beats.

“You could have ‘kick, snare, kick, snare,’ and people will listen for hours,” Folb says. “But to me that’s not music.”

The musical composition that you can do when you’re sitting in front of the computer with the software these days –the notes, chords, melodies, scales, etc. — are way more complex than you can do with actual instrumentation, the producer continues. Similar to the complexity of classical music.

“I’m kind of the pioneer of pushing electronic music toward the classical discipline, so it has the same sort of status, he says. “There is no reason a kid couldn’t be born tomorrow that could be the next Mozart with a computer.”

This doesn’t come without challenges. As original as his “purple music” gets, once he releases a track online, 100 copies of the song will be created by the end of the week, Folb says. Everyone uses the same programs and drum kits to create the same sounds as their favorite artist and everyone has access to all the good stuff.

“We’ve had this sort of saturation where every kid in the world has realized they can make one song and become famous, so everyone has picked up computer music,” he says.

To get beyond the norm Folb uses driving through scenery on tour as a catalyst to compose sounds he wouldn’t have thought of sitting at home. “You get a little taste of Nebraska, or a little taste of Chicago,” he says.

“Within a few months, I will have heard people have done similar things and then it becomes…normal,” he says while laughing. “That’s how it happens. It’s very influential art.”

It just takes one person to make one song go viral and all of a sudden it’s an entire genre. (Remember “Harlem Shake”?) Live shows are the only sacred places to share original music because at least you know the people present are the only ones hearing it. Until someone shares it online.

But it’s an exciting movement to be a part of, Folb says. You just don’t know who will create the next genre, but we all know all the genres are dead right now, he says.

“It’s all about what the real producers are going to come up with next? What is the next sound? I’m just hoping it’s melodic sounds, and I’ll embrace it.”

The show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15.