Evian Christ, Photograph: Sam Ibram
A decade elapsed between Evian Christ’s contributions to Kanye West’s Yeezus and the release of Christ’s debut solo album, Revanchist. By the time of the album’s October 2023 release, the producer had abandoned his sideline as a producer for pop A-listers.
After working on Yeezus, Christ – the stage name of Northern English DJ and producer Joshua Leary – produced tracks for Tinashe, Travis Scott and Danny Brown. But he soon realised that he preferred DJing to production-line writing camps. And so, in 2013, Leary launched the ongoing club night TranceParty in London.
The concept spawned from Leary’s observation that experimental club nights were often too serious for their own good. “Same unimaginative lineups, same boring graphic design,” Leary tells Check Check. “Low stakes, low risk, low reward.”
By contrast, Leary wanted to enhance the feeling of freedom while paying close attention to the sound system, strobe lighting and visual projections. And he was determined to make TranceParty a snobbery-free zone – somewhere you could play Sash!’s “Adelante” or any number of happy hardcore hits without facing the censure of too-cool club kids.
TranceParty quickly grew, welcoming guests such as SOPHIE, Travis Scott, VTSS, Bladee, and Arca, and hosting events in London, Amsterdam, Barcelona and New York. But Leary never stepped producing. After signing to Warp in 2015, he began chipping away at a batch of tracks that drew influence from the sounds and atmospheres that characterise TranceParty as well as the work of golden age trance and prog house producers like Sasha and Judge Jules.
Revanchist surfaced last October and Leary is now bringing the album – and a variation of TranceParty – to Australia, including a major AV show for Melbourne’s RISING festival. We spoke to Leary about TranceParty, Revanchist, his biggest inspirations, and why he doesn’t care about the opinion of “some loser” at Pitchfork or Resident Advisor.
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Check Check: The perception is that after your early success, you withdrew and re-oriented your career around trance. But your immersion in trance goes way back. Can you tell me about the origins of TranceParty and what distinguishes these events?
Evian Christ: Well, that perception is broadly correct. But I’ve been running TranceParty for over a decade now, so I’ve definitely spent the vast majority of my career in that world more than the things I found early recognition for, like working with Kanye or whatever.
I remember seeing Arca, Total Freedom and Shayne (from Hood By Air) play some small thing at a bar in NY back in, like, 2012 maybe, and thinking it was much more exciting than what was going on in the UK at the time and felt compelled to find a way to bring that to the UK.
Likewise with Travis Scott and SOPHIE [playing at TranceParty in 2014] or even more recently when we did the event with Snow Strippers and Phreshboy [in March 2024] – very often stuff that is so obviously exciting at a particular moment in time gets completely overlooked by the entire events industry; same unimaginative lineups, same boring graphic design, whatever is in some critical echo chamber, usually a year late, low stakes, low risk, low reward.
With TranceParty, I keep myself entertained by working fast and very freely to bring through whatever I’m into at any given time. And although now it’s bigger than ever, even early on we kept selling out the shows, so I realised pretty quickly that a lot of people felt the same way as me and were into the same stuff as me or trusted my judgement. So I just kept doing it, basically, and I really enjoy it.
Your events are renowned not just for the music but also for the lighting and visuals. Tell me about the visual aesthetic and how significant the lighting is to the whole experience.
Yeah that’s the other thing: a lot of these more novel or experimental club music events were taking place in venues that were just not that good. The atmosphere was not good and the events were not fun. A lot of clubs where the music policy is “good” are not that good, you know? Maybe the sound system is good, but it’s not a fun place to be. And contrastingly, a lot of the more basic clubs where the music is not that interesting are really fun because they’re prioritising the overall experience.
So I was interested in trying to solve that problem. Quite quickly I figured you can do things to venues to make them better. You can make things, you can hire things, you can bring in your own people to do that stuff and learn from them along the way about lighting, about power distro, about fabrication, about the logistics of these things.
The experience matters more than the names if you want people to come back, so just book one less DJ and hire a really good lighting designer instead, right? Most venues are a blank slate. When I realised that, I really locked into what it was we were doing and kept doubling down on that approach.
When did you start clubbing? Was there an epiphanic moment that’s had a big influence on the parties you host, your ethos as a DJ and/or your productions?
No. I just went to mainstream clubs in Chester, which is the nearest city to where I live, very studenty or whatever. Then I got sort of thrown into this experimental music world and it struck me that all the events in that world seemed overly serious and a bit moody in comparison to what I was used to. So I tried to find a way to reconcile those two things, I guess.
Total Freedom was a big inspiration for my style of DJing early on though. And in terms of my own music, early on I remember seeing Ben Frost live and being blown away by that, which you can kinda hear in my music probably. My recent Essential Mix is very obviously inspired by Sasha, so I’m somewhere in between all that I guess.
Revanchist sounds like a complete artistic statement, a world unto itself, but it was a long-time coming. Did you have high standards that prevented you putting out something sooner? Or was making an album just not that appealing to you?
I was not that bothered about making an album to be totally honest, but I signed up to it with Warp so had to eventually do it. And then when I finally got round to it, we had a million problems with samples. That was the first issue. Then when I finally resolved some of those issues, there was a lot of staff turnover at the label and the record got kind of lost, I guess.
Then I started messing around with the mixdowns and opened a whole can of worms there. But it made the record sound better ultimately, because I was applying new skills and techniques I’d learned to pretty old music, sort of updating it a bit.
When this guy Dom [Flannigan] came in to run the A&R side of the label, he got hold of the record and expedited the release of it and now everything’s fine. But a lot of that music is really old. Like, I saw something online that said I was playing “On Embers” in shows in 2014, which is probably true. Obviously I refined it a lot since then and some of it is newer, like the track with Bladee.
I don’t think I’ll ever make a record like that again though. Probably I’ll never do an album again, I guess. It’s not really my thing, but we’ll see.
How do you feel about being seen as an ambassador for trance, especially now that trance is back in the zeitgeist?
I guess to a certain type of person I am, but only in a very niche way really. Most people who are actually just into trance have no idea who I am. I think my legacy… that sounds obnoxious of me to even imply I have one, but if I do, hopefully it’s more to do with putting an end to the idea that experimental electronic music has to be serious and boring and part of this self-referencing canon of other serious experimental electronic music.
I love different types of trance and play a lot of it, always have. Obviously, I just did a very proggy Essential Mix. Sometimes I play harder stuff, but it’s not really about that per se. I don’t exactly know how to put it, but it’s more about finding a way to express yourself with whatever it is you’re into and not having to worry about whether some loser at Pitchfork or Resident Advisor is going to be impressed or not.
Evian Christ 2024 Australian tour
Thursday 6 June – The Naval Store, Perth
Friday 7 June – Civic Underground, Sydney
Saturday 8 June – Sugar, Adelaide
Sunday 9 June – Max Watt’s, Melbourne
Tickets on sale now
