flyover

an open-format music series featuring artists with ties to the midwest underground

 
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FO-003: Tekk Nikk - The Fool

◇ Limited run, available on cassette only ◇

This lo-fi, 808 forward, post-electro 7 track EP was written and performed by Nikki Pfeifer on hardware and recorded live in one take.

Mastered by Ryan Miller

Art & Design by Shawn Reed

Available via Bandcamp or local pickup in the Twin Cities--email flyoversound[at]gmail.com to coordinate. No shipping charges via local pickup.

Also, new shirts are now available on Bandcamp. These long sleeve beauties were designed by the one and only Shawn Reed and printed in his silkscreen dungeon.

flyover & Nikki Pfeifer are fiscal year 2024 recipients of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

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side effects 2024

Come for a very chill, good time on the Number 12 Cider patio with us, again! Bring your dog, bring your friends.

Sound provided by Feel Free Hi Fi

2pm-10pm | FREE

Yasmeenah
Tekk Nikk
Feel Free Hi Fi
Kerosine
D. Untethered
Stevie

There is free parking at Number 12, a food truck, cider, and darts.

614 N 5th St, Minneapolis, MN 55401

RSVP | MNvibe

flyover & Nikki Pfeifer are fiscal year 2024 recipients of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

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PREMIERE: Mutual Identities - Ace High [The Hand You Were Dealt, Particle Magazine]

New music alert! Minneapolis duo Mutual Identities have a tape dropping soon. Pre-order The Hand You Were Dealt on Bandcamp–available digitally on August 1, tapes ship soon after. We caught up with Ethan and Nathan to talk about their first physical release. Stream track A1 “Ace High” above. 

It’s been nearly three years since we last checked in with Mutual Identities. What have y’all been up to?

We've been quite active! Over the past three years, we've played numerous gigs around Minneapolis and greater Minnesota. We've also released six projects, a mix of singles and EPs—although one EP got the boot from Spotify's automated deletion and permanent ban! But that's a story for another time.

Back when [flyover] last covered us, we were roommates with our shared home studio. Now, we've gone our separate ways but relocated our music gear/production set up to Origin Studios—a multi-unit hub for music and arts in Minneapolis. It's buzzing with friends spread across different units, each doing some seriously cool stuff in the city.

Our studio setup is shared with AKKO, Malion, and our buddy Steve (no, not the Steve you're thinking of). We've created a collective production setup with hardware always ready to go. It's a special space we're fortunate to share with close friends who are equally talented musicians, promoters, sound techs, visual artists—you name it!

We’re premiering “Ace High,” one of two new Mutual Identities tracks from an upcoming cassette EP. How’d the tape come together?

We're thrilled—it's our first physical release!

About a year ago, we were hanging out with our friend Willy (XMINUS1) in a chill spot at the Red Sea, chatting about some of our unreleased tracks. Willy was keen on collaborating for a themed release on his label, Particle Magazine. We jumped at the chance to work on a concept EP and were pumped to have someone eager to put out our music!

The tape runs 45 minutes on each side. Side A features our EP with two original tracks and remixes from XMINUS1 (MPLS), Alexis Rose (formerly known as Astrolex, MPLS), Linquency (Chicago), 8circuit (Seattle), and Eve Defy (Seattle).

Side B is the first 45 minutes of our Communion Sundays 2023 live PA set in Minneapolis. We wanted to show the two core avenues of our music project: Production and live hardware performance. 

“Ace High” is a fast, dark, squirmy techno ripper with a rectangular waveform. Are the sun-soaked house vibes from, say, your flyover mix long in the rearview?

No, not necessarily—though these days, we find ourselves creating music at faster tempos with a bit more edge. If you listen to Ace High, you'll still catch hints of those melodic chords and our typical song structures, which lean more towards a "song" vibe than just a "track." The dubby atmospheric pads in the background remain a key element of our sound and continue to play a significant role in our production. As we journey forward with our music, we're drawing from all our inspirations while focusing on tempo and rhythmic styles to shape our sound.

[Note: The “track” vs. “song” debate is fraught and emotionally charged for many in our community. flyover does not endorse the definitions deployed by Mutual Identities. -Ed.]

Mutual Identities’ tagline is “an ever-changing sonic experience…” I even own a shirt with that slogan across the front. Would you walk us through some of the changes that brought you to your current sound?

We've been deeply inspired by many live hardware artists since we started. Every year, we catch another live act and are just blown away by their sound palettes and the execution of their sets.

These experiences have led us to make significant changes to our own live setup. After the second year of The Great Beyond, Ethan realized we needed to upgrade our main drum machine from a sampler to a high-quality drum synth. Nathan had a similar epiphany—he needed a more complex polyphonic synth for our live performances. Exploring new genres in his solo work has opened up fresh avenues for our collaborations.

We both came to understand that we needed equipment with more "life" to be more intentional with our low end, kicks, and sub-bass. We also wanted the ability to manipulate core melodic elements with synths instead of samples.

Have you been playing a lot of poker lately?

Gambling away that sweet, sweet Spotify streaming revenue…

Jokes aside – this EP taps into the unpredictable and often unfair distributions of life’s trials and tribulations. Geopolitical events both here in the US and across the globe have been on our minds a lot over the last couple years. 

Follow Mutual Identities on IG, grab the EP on Bandcamp. 

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PREMIERE: Sleem Gleam - Totally Pitted [Made of Magma, Kajunga Records]

Made of Magma is out via Kajunga Records on May 17, 2024. We hung ten with elusive clump of stardust Sleem Gleam (aka Ryote) to get up to speed on the record.

What is sleem about the gleam?

That’s the slime, the squiggle, the off-kilter, the acid, the midwest grit, the tubular factor. Paired with a humble glimmer you get a wacky little combo. It’s serious in a silly way, or vice versa. The Sleem Gleam alias originally formed to be a member of the synthpop duo Slurpuff. The band inevitably didn’t release any of the tunes we were working on, but we had fun and created interesting lore around our characters. Sleem Gleam had to live on and evolve beyond that.

Track A2 is “Totally Pitted.” It zips, it soars, it’s totally far out. It embodies the style of DJ sets I’ve heard you play in recent years. Overall, the project and record have a different sound than Ryote releases. Did the project form instantaneously, or did it take time for it to evolve?

Totally Pitted was actually the first track I started working on within this sonic ecosystem. That was at the end of 2019. I wanted to make faster music. Banging, but not too abrasive, more like rock music or something. Most of my inspiration was coming from surf rock, new wave, and upbeat psych stuff, so I tried to combine some of those elements with a techno/electro structure I was much more used to. The bass line, zappy sounds and general structure of this track sat dormant for over a year. My friend Brandon recorded some guitar parts for it, and it had a brief phase of being a full-on surf rock track. To fit my vision a bit more accurately, I eventually reworked and paired back the guitar to let the bass line and percussion shine. The track got finalized in 2023 so I could play it at TGB, where I always aim to deejay upbeat surfy stuff.

Should we anticipate more from both Ryote and Sleem Gleam? Will the projects co-exist?

They’ll definitely co-exist. As my tastes as an artist have grown and changed, I’ve alway been fine with simply expanding what Ryote can be, whether that’s fast, slow, art, music. It all intersects for me. The concept and mythos behind Sleem manifested itself so quickly that it demanded to be its own thing, truly an alter-ego. The essence of the project needs to stay pure and concise. I have more Sleem tracks to release, and I definitely wanna ride the wave as long as I can.

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flyover 12: TML

On a Tuesday night in November 2023, four Minneapolis DJs played at Brooklyn’s Bossa Nova Civic Club. We’re excited to present TML’s closing set from that evening. The mix is a dark and heavy beatdown that eludes classification. It’s full of sharp turns, hard techno, banging electro, and leftfield heaters old and new.

TML, or Peter Lansky for long, visits NYC regularly. “I try to go once a year to see friends and hear as much music as I can,” he said after his most recent trip last November, “and eat food.” That trip also presented Peter with the opportunity to close down Midnight Creatures, a recurring night thrown by Minneapolis’ Acme Collective at Bossa Nova Civic Club. Peter shared a bill with Minneapolis mainstays Byzarra, Llyynnxx, Ori The Ghost, and Acme boss Gerardo, who DJs as El Niño Indigo. Kanyon provided local support and played “one of the better live techno sets” Peter’s heard in years. His set as TML was recorded between 2 and 4 a.m. 

About half of the tracks Peter played that night were brand new; many of them were released just days or weeks before the set. How does he stay up on new releases and seamlessly weave those new tracks in with the old? 

“It's like a disease,” Peter said of his music discovery process. “Obsessive” is another word he used. A lifelong music lover, Peter first noticed symptoms in high school, symptoms that became overbearing when he started throwing parties and playing DJ sets. “There was a long time where that is all I was doing,” he said. “I got in the habit of going through large amounts of music every single week.”

On a Friday night in July 2015, Peter was double-booked at First Ave. Not long before LCD Soundsystem’s late-2015 reunion, frontman James Murphy rolled through Minneapolis to DJ in the Mainroom, and Peter opened. Upstairs in the Record Room, a Minneapolis techno crew called System flew in British Murder Boy and Downwards Records co-founder Regis for a heavy, heady club night. Peter was on that bill as well. 

“That was a crazy night,” he reminisced with a laugh. “I played my first [ever] live set before Regis, and James Murphy was up there watching me. I was like, this is fucked…it was surreal because I was so nervous about this live set, but I had known James Murphy for a while, so he came up and watched, and I was like, I'm sure he's so disappointed in me [for] playing live techno.”

Peter recalls the night foggily. His partner Sarah was also there. “Sarah was drinking a Red Bull, and James Murphy yoinked the Red Bull out of her hand and was like, hold on, I'm gonna make you coffee…part of his [rider] was a coffee setup in the green room. He also had a champagne rider that he did not expect to be filled, but it was filled, and I was the only opener, so I drank so much super expensive champagne…I had to open Glam Doll Donuts the next morning…so my alarm was going off at 6:30. I fell asleep on the couch, and [Sarah] was shaking me awake…yeah, it was a crazy night.”

How did Peter end up drinking James Murphy’s top-shelf champagne in the First Ave green room after playing two gigs in the storied venue in the same night? To find out, we have to go back nearly ten more years, back to the founding of a party named for an LCD Soundsystem track. 

On a Saturday night in September 2006, First Ave took a chance on Peter. They gave him the keys to the VIP Room (later renamed the Record Room) for a monthly dance party with a rock lean. 

“Too Much Love” would be the name, a nod to the second track on LCD Soundsystem's first LP. Peter would DJ as Sovietpanda, the name of his music blog, in part to help establish an identity that emerged from the internet into the physical world.

It’s worth noting that LCD Soundsystem and DFA Records aren’t just a passing interest for Peter–by the time Too Much Love began, he was already enmeshed in a DFA community that he helped foster. Peter started the DFA Records Livejournal community in the early 2000s, and was on first-name terms with James Murphy and Jon Galkin, DFA’s founders, long before the first drink was spilled on the Too Much Love dancefloor.

At the height of the buzzy music blog era, Too Much Love supplied college-aged Twin Cities revelers and music junkies with a direct injection of floor-ready hits and remixes of old and new dance and rock tracks. Too Much Love quickly built an audience and took over First Ave’s Mainroom on Saturday nights, where it held a weekly residency for six years, before returning to the Record Room and wrapping up in 2014. 

After establishing credibility and gathering momentum, Peter was able to book everyone from local DJs to international touring acts. “I booked a bunch of DFA folks and Tim Sweeney, and whenever, like, LCD or Holy Ghost! would come into town, we would have them [play],” he recalled. “But I [also] had Dustin [Zahn], Zak [DVS1], Steve [Centrific], and Silent Servant…Silent Servant played the best Too Much Love set ever, because he played the blog stuff and the DFA stuff, probably stuff you'd never hear him play, because he got the history of the party. He understood it.”

With a $3 cover that was liquidated to $1 with a student ID, Peter didn’t pay full rates for these acts. He often booked acts who were already coming to the Twin Cities for another show after making “humble offers” that artists accepted. 

“I just wanted people in the room,” Peter said of the bargain bin door price. “I booked all these other DJs through word of mouth. We lucked out to have LCD and Arcade Fire in town on a Saturday…First Ave did get them limousines to all come down and play [the party]. That was during the first year [that] we were in the Mainroom. We also had Diplo that month, which was an accident, but those [bookings] helped with word of mouth around town.”

Word of the unique and intensely enthusiastic vibe of the parties traveled quickly. “[The] LCD and Hot Chip guys, when their friends were coming [from] overseas, they'd be like, if you want to go to this party, it's weird. They're a bunch of kids losing their minds to whatever.”

On Saturday, February 3, 2024, Too Much Love will return to First Ave. For the first time, the party will be held in the 7th Street Entry. 

As for the new venue, Peter wants a more vibey atmosphere than a Mainroom slosher can provide, and the Record Room is long gone; Theory of a Dead Man rocked too hard in 2015 and brought First Ave’s intimate club crashing through the Mainroom’s ceiling. After repairs, First Ave did not reopen the room, leaving a massive hole in the Twin Cities’ underground nightlife that, nearly a decade later, has not been filled. 

Peter hopes attendees don’t expect a rose-tinted cash grab for this round of TML in the Entry. “I'm missing clubs a little bit, so I was like, I'll do it in a smaller room. I'll play all night. It's not going to be a nostalgia thing. It's not going to be a throwback thing,” he said. “I'll play music from the time, but not just bloghouse…I want to make sure that people know not to expect, I don't know, Crookers remixes or something.”

Anyone who shows up to Too Much Love in 2024 expecting to relive their indie sleaze glory days might be missing the point. “Too Much Love, for me, even though we played old music at the time, was very much an anti-nostalgia thing. The best times are now, the best music is coming out now. I want to showcase new music, so I wouldn't want to do a throwback party.” 

The Bossa set reveals avenues of sonic exploration Peter may take during Too Much Love 2024. “The Bossa party is what I'd been missing,” he said. “It's such a great place. It's small, it has a fog machine, it has great cocktails…I don't know why we don't have that here, but I love that place, and I was so happy when Gerardo asked me to play…it was a total blast.”

“We were talking about the disease…I don't know what compels me to keep doing this. [But] after that night, I was like, oh yeah, this is kind of what it is.”

Tracklist:
Florian Kupfer - Dereliction [Ediciones Capablanca, 2023]
Stenny - Onda [Ilian Tape, 2023]
Simo Cell - Whispers [TemeT, 2021]
Ron Morelli - Put Your Head On The Floor And Have Somebody Step On It [Bite, 2020]
Geeneus - Ja Know [Dump Valve Recordings, 2001/Bingo Beats, 2004]
L/F/D/M - Bang!
 [Urban Kickz Recordings, 2022]
Mala - B [Self-reissued, 2021]
Surgeon - Box [Tresor, 1998]
Atrice - Backrooms [Ilian Tape, 2022]
DJ Slip - Track 4 [Missile Records, 1996/2016]
Privacy - Python [Klakson, 2020]
Regis / Female - Backlash (Mix 1) [Belief Systems, 1997/Downwards, 2020]
Vladimir Dubyshkin - I Decided To Fly [трип, 2018]
Rhyw - Sharknado [Voam, 2022]
Mosca - Laminar Flow [Rent, 2023]
Luca Duran - Ojos Cerrados (Laksa’s 3rd eye rolla’ Remix) [2023]
Major Lazer, J.Balvin, El Alfa - Que Calor (Cardozo edit) [2023]
Blawan - Justsa [Ternesc, 2021]
Deathplate - Untitled (Stable Mix) [2021]
Reptant - The Clique’s Clack [TRUST, 2022]
Stenny - Quadra [Ilian Tape, 2023]
Rhyw - Engine Track [Fever AM, 2023]
Ctrls - Sleepkillers [Micron Audio, 2022]
ABSL & Anetha - Boa Dormant [Mama Told Ya, 2023]
Guber - Wrong Ibiza (Ploy Remix) [宀 Music, 2022]
Talismann - Xilverback [Talismann, 2021]
Pariah - Squishy Windows [Fever AM, 2022]
hkkptr - organik [Silencer, 2023]
Privacy - Go [Klakson, 2019]
Pearson Sound - Cobwebs [Hessle Audio, 2020]
DJ Gonz - Further Trip [SELN Recordings, 2022]
Skanna - Heaven [Skanna, 1993]
No Spiritual Surrender - Spinning Circles [L.I.E.S. Records, 2019]
Dillinja - Deadly Deep Subs (Remix) [Deadly Vinyl, 1994/Razors Edge, 1996/Metalheadz, 2015]
Fischerspooner - Emerge [International DeeJay Gigolo, 2001]

Follow TML on Instagram and SoundCloud

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PREMIERE: DJN - Fine [Humboldt EP, Tiger Tapes]

Who’s DJN? Let’s find out. Humboldt EP is available now via Tiger Tapes.

Tell us about Iowa, the electronic music scene, and IowaTechno parties.

I grew up and graduated high school in Waukon, IA, which is a small rural town centered in the NE corner of Iowa. After graduating, I moved to Cedar Rapids and discovered the electronic scene a few years after that, which at that time was growing and thriving exponentially. We had multiple underground shows and parties going on almost every weekend, not just in Cedar Rapids, but also in Iowa City and Des Moines. IowaTechno started 9 years ago and was my friends and my attempt at throwing our hat into that ring, as several of the big promoters in Iowa had either ceased doing parties or were doing them very sparingly. We started small with bar shows at local dives, and eventually grew our scene and following into several warehouse spaces in the Cedar Rapids area. Things were really on a roll until Covid happened, and we struggled to get the scene back on track in the aftermath. Unfortunately, the scene seemed to have diminished in that time frame and IowaTechno disbanded, our last show being on 10.27.23. We had 9 solid years of successful parties, which is no small feat, but the environment unfortunately became unsustainable. 

You just released a very cool EP Fleur with breaks, bass, and techno followed by your new single, “Fine” off of the forthcoming Humboldt EP. How has your time living in Iowa and attending Minneapolis parties influenced the music you produce? 

Coming up in the electronic scene in Iowa, I was exposed to a lot of different genres of electronic music through my own discovery and from attending parties and listening to my friends mix. My time in Iowa I spent primarily focused on house music, but in a sense I felt pigeonholed in that respect and it made it complicated to break out of that mold, so to speak. My treks to Minneapolis opened the floodgates of what music could make a dance floor move, especially breaks and electro, which unfortunately weren’t very well received when I would try to play them in Iowa. Since I’d been regularly attending Minneapolis parties over the past year and a half, it had allowed me to open a creative part of me that had been yearning to come out for quite some time. Since I’ve moved here, I’ve written some of my best material to date, and I feel like that is heavily influenced by the events I’ve attended and the DJs I’ve danced to here in the Cities. I’m grateful for those events and those artists who showed me that it’s ok and encouraged stepping outside your comfort zone, and do/play/create what I feel, instead of putting out what I think people want to hear. It’s been very freeing from an artistic standpoint. 

How long have you been making the trek to Minneapolis parties?

Since I lived in Cedar Rapids, IA for so many years, it was kind of few and far between since it was a 5.5hr drive, but I was able to make it up once or twice a year since 2008. It was only when I moved back to NE Iowa that I was able to make the trip more frequently since it was only a 3hr drive. And now that I live here it’s only a 15 minute drive to most events, so that whole facet is still kind of unreal to me but I’m absolutely loving it. The only issue is that there is so much going on, it’s hard to choose where to allocate my energy!

Which came first, producing or DJing? How have they influenced each other?

I started DJing in early 2008, and shortly after that I started producing. I used Reason for many years, moved to Logic Pro in 2012, and now I’m using Reason rewired in Logic Pro and I’m loving the functionality of those two programs together. As for how they influence each other, I would say that the music I DJ tends to push my productions in the same direction, as I like to weave my own tracks into my mixes. 

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PREMIERE: AutoClub - It’s You [Apparition, Kajunga Records]

Minneapolis late-night stalwarts Mike McClure and Craig Lambert, known collectively as AutoClub (an amalgamation of their respective Autokinetic and Midnight Music Club monikers), are dropping Apparition via Kajunga Records on September 22. “It’s You” is a crackling dubby house cut that toes the line between still-chilling patio vibes and peak-time warehouse debauchery. Expect similar expertise from the remaining tracks on Apparition; Kajunga’s tenth release cements the label as a Midwest dance music institution, and AutoClub brings decades of dancefloor-inversion experience to a must-have release for any house head. 

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side effects 2023

flyover and Feel Free Hi Fi are throwing a party

Come for a very chill, good time on the Number 12 Cider patio. There will be loud music, a food truck, cider and friends.

Sound system provided by Feel Free Hi Fi

2pm-10pm | Free

Music by:

Tekk Nikk
Allen Hz
Kerosine
Fluid Tranquility
Private Guy
Feel Free Hi Fi
Honesty In Motion

There is free parking at Number 12, there’s a Twins game that day so parking will be a little wild. Snag a free spot! See parking details here:

https://number12cider.com/freeparking

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