Two Cities, Two Modes
Gridlok has lived on both ends of California and knows exactly what each one gives him. Los Angeles is energy — the entertainment industry gravity, the density of producers and artists you can actually vibe off, a city that pulls creativity out of you through friction and proximity. San Francisco is the opposite. It’s where you go to disappear into the studio. Let the fog in. Concentrate on the beats.
Neither is better. They’re different kinds of productive. LA gives you collaborators and momentum. SF gives you focus and isolation. Gridlok has used both deliberately — knowing which mode the music needs and putting himself in the right environment to make it happen.
The Haight District studio, tucked away in one of San Francisco’s most storied neighborhoods, is firmly the second kind of place. When we arrived, Jamal — featured in BASE Vol. 04 — was already there, rolling joints in the corner. The session had a specific energy before a single question was asked.
“San Francisco is where you come up and hide out, get in the studio, and let the fog in. Concentrate on the beats.”
How Gridlok Finds New Artists — and Why Most Don’t Make the Cut
Gridlok is direct about how he evaluates new music: buzz travels before the file does. If something is genuinely good, he will hear about it from someone he knows before the producer ever reaches his inbox. That’s not gatekeeping — it’s signal detection. The music that matters finds its way through word of mouth first.
Cold submissions land differently. If a producer he has never heard of, with no mutual connections, sends him a tune directly — without anyone else in his network having mentioned it first — the odds are steep. Not because the music can’t be good, but because good music rarely stays invisible. It drips outward naturally. When it hasn’t, that silence says something.
What he is looking for is harder to define than a checklist: raw energy that needs somewhere to go. A vibe. Something that excites him. He knows it when he hears it. The rest, however technically accomplished, stays in the folder.
“If it’s gotten to me directly from you and I haven’t heard about it from somebody else yet — 99 out of 100 times it’s not ready.”
Project 51: Futuristic but Urban, Now but Later
Gridlok’s label Project 51 has a specific sonic identity, and he articulates it with a reference that holds up: Blade Runner. Familiar setting — Los Angeles, downtown, streets you recognize. But flying cars. Neon. A future that feels lived-in rather than imagined. Futuristic but urban. Now, but later.
That tension is what he chases in the music. Not retro. Not purely experimental. Something that sits at the intersection of where electronic music has been and where it hasn’t gone yet — with enough grounding in the physical, the human, the urban, that it never loses its body.
Tracks that don’t fit Project 51’s identity don’t disappear. They find other homes — a label that’s been asking for something, a collaborator who needs exactly that sound. The music goes where the vibe pulls it. Gridlok’s job is to read that correctly and let it move.
“It’s futuristic but it’s urban — it’s now but it’s later. That’s what Blade Runner pulled off. Drum and bass is that.”
On Technology, Legitimacy, and the Long Fight for Electronic Music
Gridlok has watched the cultural status of electronic music shift across his entire career — and he places that shift in a longer historical arc. Hip-hop went through the same battle first. Samplers and drum machines weren’t considered real instruments. The people using them weren’t considered real musicians. It took decades for that perception to change.
Electronic music fought the same war. The tools were unfamiliar, so the output was dismissed. Now, he says, it’s almost flipped: technology is so central to how people live their lives that music built from it connects more directly than ever. The barrier that once excluded electronic producers has become the common ground.
When he got his first sequencer, it couldn’t even do audio. The gap between that moment and what a producer can build on a laptop today is not incremental — it is a different world entirely. One that arrived faster than anyone anticipated.
“This is what we all wanted — for it to not be looked at as not music. And that took a lot of convincing.”
Talent, Honesty, and the People Who Last
Gridlok doesn’t romanticize the path into the music industry. He is clear-eyed about the filtering process: some people get bored and leave, some realize they’re not as good as they thought, some never get that honest feedback at all — surrounded by people who told them they were great when they weren’t. None of those paths lead anywhere useful.
The ones who last are the ones who are real with themselves. Who can absorb constructive criticism and use it. Who are doing this not because it’s a phase or a hobby but because it is genuinely their life — from young until dead, no exit planned. Talent plus that kind of commitment is rare. When you find it, it announces itself eventually.
Background doesn’t determine outcome. Gridlok comes from troubled youth. There are middle-class kids in the dance scene right now finding their way in. Both have a place. What matters, stripped of everything else, is the talent and the honesty to develop it.
Why This Interview Still Matters
Gridlok filmed this interview in San Francisco in 2011. He no longer lives there. He no longer lives in the United States. Today he is based in the Netherlands — because the American DnB scene, for all its depth and talent, could not provide the economic foundation a career like his required.
That is not a footnote. It is the story. One of the most internationally recognized American drum and bass artists in the world left the country that produced him because this culture has never had the infrastructure to sustain its own. WOMP TV exists, in part, because of exactly that gap. We document the scene. We platform the artists. We build what should have been built a long time ago.
The knowledge Gridlok shares in this episode is as sharp and relevant today as it was when he sat down in that Haight District studio. Sit back. Crank the volume. Pay attention.