Wajatta
On Brainfeeder
BIOGRAPHY
Wajatta began in the most fitting of places: an underground warehouse party in 2017, where Tejada was playing a late-night DJ set and Watts, a long-time fan of his propulsive techno productions, was in the audience. From there a friendship blossomed, formed over strong coffee, similar backgrounds and shared interests: ‘80s sci-fi films, old-school hip-hop. Watts can currently be seen nightly as the bandleader for CBS’s The Late Late Show With James Corden. ...
Wajatta began in the most fitting of places: an underground warehouse party in 2017, where Tejada was playing a late-night DJ set and Watts, a long-time fan of his propulsive techno productions, was in the audience. From there a friendship blossomed, formed over strong coffee, similar backgrounds and shared interests: ‘80s sci-fi films, old-school hip-hop.
Watts can currently be seen nightly as the bandleader for CBS’s The Late Late Show With James Corden. He first burst into American audience’s lives as the co-host of IFC’s groundbreaking variety series Comedy Bang! Bang! Over his 15-year career as a solo performer, he’s honed a unique style that blurs the lines between music and comedy, as is evident in his 9-minute TED Talk in 2012, as well as multiple comedy specials for both Comedy Central and Netflix, and at the invitation of Jack White, the record Reggie Watts Live at Third Man Records. Everything he does is 100% improvised — most notably, the multi-layered music tracks he builds on the fly, looping his beat-boxed rhythms and soulful vocals into spontaneous musical inventions that are funky, hypnotic and often hilarious.
In Wajatta, Watts infuses those same techniques into Tejada’s sinuous sounds, creating a refreshingly playful take on electronic music — one in which it’s often hard to separate the machines from the human voice. “There’s a lot of stuff happening that you may not realize is Reggie,” Tejada explains. Though he’s a big fan of Watts’ uncanny beat-boxing skills, Tejada prefers to disguise those effects among the pulses and patters of his analog synths and vintage drum machines. “It’s cool for it to be like, ‘I didn’t know that was his voice.’”
Tejada, for his part, has been at the vanguard of West Coast techno since 1994, releasing a succession of acclaimed albums, singles and EPs for such prestigious labels as Kompakt, Poker Flat, Cocoon, Plug Research and his own long-running imprint, Palette Recordings (est. 1996). Among his best-known tracks are the moody, mesmeric “Farther and Fainter” (from his 2011 Kompakt full-length Parabolas) and the 2005 underground banger, “Sweat (On the Walls)” — now a staple of Wajatta’s high-energy live shows, where Watts delivers witty, freestyle riffs on the track’s original spoken-word vocals.
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BIOGRAPHY
Wajatta began in the most fitting of places: an underground warehouse party in 2017, where Tejada was playing a late-night DJ set and Watts, a long-time fan of his propulsive techno productions, was in the audience. From there a friendship blossomed, formed over strong coffee, similar backgrounds and shared interests: ‘80s sci-fi films, old-school hip-hop. Watts can currently be seen nightly as the bandleader for CBS’s The Late Late Show With James Corden. He first burst into ...
Wajatta began in the most fitting of places: an underground warehouse party in 2017, where Tejada was playing a late-night DJ set and Watts, a long-time fan of his propulsive techno productions, was in the audience. From there a friendship blossomed, formed over strong coffee, similar backgrounds and shared interests: ‘80s sci-fi films, old-school hip-hop.
Watts can currently be seen nightly as the bandleader for CBS’s The Late Late Show With James Corden. He first burst into American audience’s lives as the co-host of IFC’s groundbreaking variety series Comedy Bang! Bang! Over his 15-year career as a solo performer, he’s honed a unique style that blurs the lines between music and comedy, as is evident in his 9-minute TED Talk in 2012, as well as multiple comedy specials for both Comedy Central and Netflix, and at the invitation of Jack White, the record Reggie Watts Live at Third Man Records. Everything he does is 100% improvised — most notably, the multi-layered music tracks he builds on the fly, looping his beat-boxed rhythms and soulful vocals into spontaneous musical inventions that are funky, hypnotic and often hilarious.
In Wajatta, Watts infuses those same techniques into Tejada’s sinuous sounds, creating a refreshingly playful take on electronic music — one in which it’s often hard to separate the machines from the human voice. “There’s a lot of stuff happening that you may not realize is Reggie,” Tejada explains. Though he’s a big fan of Watts’ uncanny beat-boxing skills, Tejada prefers to disguise those effects among the pulses and patters of his analog synths and vintage drum machines. “It’s cool for it to be like, ‘I didn’t know that was his voice.’”
Tejada, for his part, has been at the vanguard of West Coast techno since 1994, releasing a succession of acclaimed albums, singles and EPs for such prestigious labels as Kompakt, Poker Flat, Cocoon, Plug Research and his own long-running imprint, Palette Recordings (est. 1996). Among his best-known tracks are the moody, mesmeric “Farther and Fainter” (from his 2011 Kompakt full-length Parabolas) and the 2005 underground banger, “Sweat (On the Walls)” — now a staple of Wajatta’s high-energy live shows, where Watts delivers witty, freestyle riffs on the track’s original spoken-word vocals.