Brendan Angelides is a San Francisco based electronic music producer who records and performs live as Eskmo. In the past five years he’s released over a dozen singles and EPs while touring throughout North America and Europe. Angelides also runs the Ancestor label, which issued his “Hypercolor” and “Angus Dei” singles in 2009 to positive reviews from numerous magazines, blogs and tastemakers. Ninja Tune recording artist and film composer Amon Tobin hailed his work as “some of the best production I’ve heard in recent times.”
In the past two years his multi-genre compositions have been featured on influential labels like Warp Records and Planet Mu. He’s also remixed works by diverse artists such as Bibio, Spor, STS9, andBar9, to name a few. While Angelides’ tracks encompass a wide range of electronic styles, he avoids classifications. Bleep.com described his tracks as “Masterfully produced… sophisticated, post-Dilla hip-hop funk”. His last single of 2009 entitled “Let Them Sing” on Mu was met with equal praise and described by sites like Boomkat as “[Putting] Eskmo on his own electronic plateau.”
Angelides’ performance moniker was inspired by San Francisco experimental music icons The Residents’ 1979 album “Eskimo”. Drawn to the album’s character-based stories and shamanistic themes, he dropped the title’s middle “I” and launched his Eskmo project in 1999 in his home state Connecticut. Prior to that, in the mid-90s, he was introduced to renegade funk combo Primus and UK breakbeat techno wizards The Prodigy. The music virus soon took hold. He learned to play bass and formed bands while absorbing ‘90s electronic music from Aphex Twin, Frankie Bones, 187, Dieselboy, The Chemical Brothers and Moby among others.
Angelides initially made music to share with friends using a primitive Miracle instructional keyboard, a four-track recorder and a bass guitar. He used a Roland keyboard to record his first formal work, a CD titled “Machines on Task”, for a school graduation project. After high school, between 1999 and 2005, he wrote two full-length albums that he gave away at small shows. During this time he spent two years working on music in a secluded lakeside house in Connecticut. It was there that he also wrote gentler, melodic material released later under his other production alias, Welder.
Delving into conspiracy theories and moved by the 9/11 attacks, his music took a darker turn. However, by 2005 he grew tired of his remote outpost and emerged to explore new environments and sounds. “The [conspiracies] were separating me from people,” he says of that period. “I wanted [people] to be motivated to come together and make change, but it had the opposite effect. I realized that music could be a tool to bring people together.”
Following a month-long backpacking trip to the UK where he heard emerging electronic sounds at London club Fabric, he began composing and releasing breakbeat tracks on labels like Vertical Sound, Downbeat and Cyberfunk. During this period he began working with other styles, developing his genre-less approach, music that DJ Mag described as “twisted, funky…quite magnificent.”
