The paranoid electronic pop music is how I describe Big Data's songs. Uh they're basically pop songs with sort of scary undertones, paranoid undertones. It's it's like the field of taking massive, massive quantities of data and trying to distill that into stuff we can use, stuff companies can use, stuff the government can use. All this information that we're all creating constantly, uh is being collected somewhere and once I had the name for the project, all the lyrics kind of started skewing towards this more paranoid and uh you know, technology related angle. You must have known that I was dangerous. You must have made up on the place.

I bet you didn't know someone could love you this much. When you know that much about someone because of the data that they are leaving behind, you can sort of become obsessed with them. And I love thinking about that in terms of love. When love is probably the wrong word for what that is. So we're here at the Grove, as you can see, we're going to be playing up here later tonight. Uh it's going to be a couple hundred people here. It's free and it's outdoors. It's going to be pretty awesome. Uh yeah, we're really happy to be here and it's going to be fun.

My earliest musical memory is uh when I was five years old and my parents bought Thriller and that was I remember them putting it on and I like freaked out. And uh I just kind of ran around the house and jumped around a lot. That was kind of the first time I can clearly remember music like messing me up. Because of the sort of presence of computers in music making, it you can kind of you can kind of create your own instruments now. Uh and that's really cool. Like when when I had the when I started playing shows, you know, when I wrote this music, I was never thinking in terms of how to perform it. I was just thinking in terms of, do I like the way this sounds or not?

There isn't a set way to write a hook. Uh it's definitely different every time. And there aren't necessarily tricks. I think it's just you have to trust your gut and your instincts. You have to keep things simple. And just try to make things that are memorable. Stuff that you would want to hear that you don't necessarily feel exists. You want to create the music that you wish existed. It's almost like the easy part is making the art and then figuring out how to distinguish yourself from these zillions of other people making art and then make a living from that. That's the the challenge. Um so I think in order to to get there, you have to be an entrepreneur.

And you have to be creative about how you market yourself and uh how you use the internet and, you know, the different tools that are out there. Because there certainly are more tools than ever before. You have to be really creative about how to do that. The thing that I use is is actually a drum MIDI. It has nine different pads. And uh for each song, I try to sort of deconstruct what would be the nine most sort of important things that I could actually physically play. And I map each of those sounds to one of the nine pads on my drumming thing. And visually, I love that the idea that it looks like a conductor or something. I sort of want to be like the crazy scientist conductor guy.

My name is Alan Wilkis, otherwise known as Big Data. And this is my backstage diary at the Summer Grove concert series.