Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/577402
Kaskade's route to the DJ booth is unconventional—in more ways than one. For starters, he can't pass unrecognized through the 8,000 revelers gathered here at the Wynn nightclub XS, even though unrecognized is exactly how DJs usually pass. (Did you know what Calvin Harris looked like before he started dating Taylor Swift?) Dressed in a crisp short-sleeved blue shirt, rolled-up jeans, and sneakers, Kaskade, 44, could be mistaken for any preppy partier more than a decade younger—except that in order to get to XS, you'll have to pass multiple billboards featuring his likeness, all of them looming large over the Strip, advertising his two-year residency here. Thus, his procession unfolds like the tracking shot through the Copacabana in Goodfellas. We wind our way down the casino's expansive corridors lined with vibrant red carpet. A shortcut through a dark empty restaurant leads to the outdoor Encore Beach Club, where Kaskade will play a pool party the following afternoon. As he walks past the backslapping bachelors and scantily clad bachelorettes who've arrived tonight to party and hear music from his new album, Automatic (Warner Bros. Records/Arkade), and his eight previous albums, arms stretch across the velvet rope to snap a quick picture. A security guard whose stony visage says "Don't mess with me" keeps us moving. It's 1:20 am. Many in attendance are already wobbly. Kaskade, on the other hand, is completely sober. Not just now—always. Which brings us to the other way Kaskade defes convention. He will spend at least two nights every week for the next two years traveling from his home in Pacifc Palisades, California, where he lives with his wife and three young children, to Sin City to play electronic dance music, a catchall term for everything from techno to dubstep. It's a genre that alarmists the world over link to the illicit drug Ecstasy, yet Kaskade won't take so much as a sip of beer. "Sure, there's a lot of extracurricular activities that go on," he says on our ride from the photo shoot to the hotel. "In entertainment, there's a level of this, no matter what you're doing. I live my life; they live theirs. For me, this scene begins and ends with the music." And, truth be told, tonight's bacchanal is nothing that young Ryan Raddon could have envisioned for himself back in Chicago, long before he became Kaskade, when he frst started messing around on some turntables a friend had stolen. ("He will go unnamed," Kaskade says.) At the time, back in the late '80s, house music was synonymous with the Windy City, and a teenage Raddon would take the train from his home in Northbrook, Illinois, to a 16-and-over club called Medusa's in Wrigleyville to listen to it. "I was like, What is this?" he recalls. "Oh, cool, you can go to Gramophone [Records] down the street and buy it? Then we would go over to my friend's mom's house, and I was like, Oh, this is how you segue and match records." It would be another few years before the dust settled on the grunge movement and electronic music rode its frst big wave of popularity, with artists like the Chemical Brothers, Moby, and the Prodigy enjoying a brief ubiquity. During this time, Raddon bounced around, frst to Provo, Utah, to attend Brigham Young University, then to New York, before returning to Salt Lake City to enroll in the University of Utah. By then he had his own set of (legitimately purchased) turntables and a collection of records that numbered in the hundreds. "There was a club called Club Manhattan," he says. "I just went to the owner and asked, 'What's your slowest night?'" The following Monday, the entrepreneurial undergrad enlisted his friends to pack the club, a completely anachronistic Art Deco basement joint that had likely never seen anything remotely resembling a rave. "It was a hobby," Kaskade says with a shrug. That gig lasted fve years. In 2000, he moved to San Francisco with his future wife, Naomi, a fellow snowboarder he had met in college. Techno and its sibling electronic styles were once again losing ground to rock bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes. "I think the reason it didn't really stick back then is because the sound and the art hadn't really incubated," Kaskade says. "It wasn't totally ready." "In entertainment, there's a lot of extracurricular activities that go on. [But] for me, this scene begins and ends with the music." photography by danny mahoney (xs) Kaskade onstage at XS. 80 vegasmagazine.com