Totally Blissed Off

BLISSED OUT IS nestled amongst the strewn sawdust of the in-transition Market Hotel at Broadway and Myrtle Avenue and its sound is perhaps the truest representation of that location put to tape thus far. J trains whiz by with constant industrial screams. The air is stale and the band’s equipment scrappy. Hip-hop beats blast from passing cars. There’s not much sunlight. Mix these elements together, twist a few Optimos and you’re getting the Blissed Out experience.

Sitting down with Alex Winter and Sasha Winn, the band’s two members, at the dilapidated venue, I get the scoop on the band’s origin story, post-Black Dice aesthetics, obsession with Hot 97 and how, in order to be truly DIY, you have to steal your mom’s car for a tour now and then.

As an only-in-New York sort of band, Blissed Out is best understood as a direct descendent of the city’s avantgarde forefathers over the last decade.

Both members cite Gang Gang Dance as a major influence, which makes sense in the midst of its cacophony pastiche of tribal new age elements, hip-hop references and creative sampling. The duo originally met at an all-day festival held at The Yard in Gowanus, vibing over powerful sets from High Places and Telepathe. Instead of going out drinking after the show, Winter and Winn took the day’s inspiration and jammed for the first time. The two became a fully operational project last autumn.

“We were sitting on rocks in a backyard somewhere, sipping on 40s and smoking cigarettes and realized this really kind of works,” explains Winter. “That was in the very beginning of October and we just started playing more.”

Blissed Out has been on its proverbial grind since that moment—often playing multiple shows a week and handling all of its own booking and promotion. The duo tracked its first release, Secrets, during a show at Silent Barn last winter and recently linked-up with influential tape label Mirror Universe for White Triangle, its first cassetteonly effort. For a trip to South By Southwest this past March, Winter hit up his mom for a little car loan to run some errands and ended up temporarily stealing the vehicle, rigging a mixer to run through the cassette deck and turning the whole thing into a gigantic amplifier that enabled the band to perform guerilla sets while on the road and outside major venues in Austin.

“We weren’t getting offers at that point. No one really cared, or at least they didn’t want to put money into something,” Winter continues. “It was like, fuck it, we’ll do it on our own. If we can do everything ourselves, let’s keep doing it. When I was younger, I was super into independent hip-hop in New York with groups like Company Flow. They started their own label, pumped out mixtapes and took that world back to its roots.”

It might bewilder listeners to learn how a group like Blissed Out takes its biggest influence from hip-hop, yet the group has loads of New York pride and feels that the genre is the strongest music that the five boroughs have produced during this generation. Local rap culture even uniquely defines the duo’s goals. As they tell it, the ultimate dream would either be a placement on legendary hip-hop station Hot 97 or getting its releases sold by street-level mixtape vendors.

“If we could get to the point where we could somehow sell our mixtapes to people that sell tapes on the street and they would want to buy and distribute our stuff, that’s goal number one,” says Winn.

In turn, Blissed Out’s best track thus far is a nutso remix of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” that guts Alicia Keys’ voice and throws its defaced ghost among Kushed-out synths and oddly syncopated Baltimore club drums.

“I got a shitty sample through shitty speakers of Alicia Keys,” says Winter. “It was off the CD. I actually bought it. We wanted to do something that represented a broader idea of Brooklyn. We usually close with it when we play shows now.”

The duo is also currently prepping what it refers to as an “abstract mixtape” that builds on the idea of gutting, chopping and screwing rap and R&B singles. The guys plan to slow the tracks down, splice the samples and add live electronics to give the material a basssaturated pulse. For sure, these projects demonstrate Blissed Out’s skill at taking already disposable music and then sampling, cutting and recomposing to create a sound akin to the beautiful trash that they live amongst.

>> BLISSED OUT July 9, Cake Shop, 152 Ludlow St. (betw. Stanton & Rivington Sts.), 212-253-0036; 8, $8. Also, July 12 at The Knitting Factory.