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Page 1 of 3 Editor's Note:
Surely, a big frustration for an artist is lack of deserved recognition. Recognition that would and should be facilitated by the media. The worst (and unfortunately frequent) scenario is an artist who takes out time and lets a media rep pick his brain for a prospective endearing news piece that will never see the light of day. [It sucks when it happens to the author(s) of said piece too.] Such has been the case for producer-on-the-rise Nicolay whose interviews – I actually have two! – have been held for months and I’ll take the blame for that. The In-depth interview you’re about to read happened seven months ago after a Nicolay show in LA. It still holds value today.
How much of what we just heard was new shit?
About 50 percent was new. It’s a struggle sometimes because I play my own catalogue… I mean, I could play other peoples’ shit but when I get a night like this, I just want to school people and let them know what I’ve been doing. The good thing is I feel like, always in LA, they go crazy over it. I dunno what it is but I get so much love here.
That’s crazy because that’s the same thing a lot of American underground cats say about Europe.
Well I guess from an American perspective, I’m an exotic person because I’m from a different country; I dunno if that has anything to do with it, I think that it does. For people here listening to my stuff they hear a lot of things where maybe it’s like, “Wow! That’s kinda different.” For Europeans there are a lot of groups that tour there regularly, like eMC, and they get a lot of love because they’re exotic to them. We kinda just swap.
 How was the reception in SF?
It sucked.
Yeah? Aahhh
Actually let me rephrase that, the reception was excellent but we were dealing with a fuck-ass club promoter that cut our set short 40 minutes in because he felt like he wanted to hear more Top 40 shit.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?
He cut my set. Between you and me, and everyone else, I came very, very, very close to kicking his ass. I’m glad I didn’t -- I’m not a violent person. It was a really, really bad situation but I’m glad tonight we got some Cali-style reception.
That sucks.
There’s gonna be haters every now and then. There’s gonna be people that simply do not understand it. I’m not too worried about it, I felt sorry for the people that came to see me. Sometimes you’re at the wrong club, tonight you saw me at the right club. The crowd was right on track, and that makes it a perfect night.
Have you been surprised by the amount of people do get it?
I look at it this way: I come to LA, which is one of the biggest, baddest, dopest cities in the world. I’m a simple dude from Holland. I go to LA and people come to see me. There’s a lot of cats that came specifically to see me and I feel that that’s very special. I’ve reached all the way to LA and so many people show so much love. People were feeling it!
Is this the kind of thing you were thinking about when you first started?
I never really thought past the actual music-making at that point. I was continuously making beats, I was never really thinking about even releasing anything. I was just doing it to do it, but then the Foreign Exchange thing happened. You get more professional as you grow into it. When I started I wasn’t thinking of anything like this, I’m not doing it for money, or trying to change the game or whatever, I’m doing this because I love this music.
Is your approach pretty much the same from when you first started making music?
It is exactly the same. I still just make music all day. I still just really make music for moments like this when I can play music for people and see them freaking out. The cool thing is they got their favorites from my older shit, and I coupled it with some of the new tracks and people were with it, they were following it.
Fave new shit?
I try to play one or two new Foreign Exchange tracks just because people really really want to hear that. Outside of that, I’ve finished an album with Kay, the Time:Line record, I played a lot of those just because that’s what I’m pushing and that’s the stuff that right now I want people to hear.
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Interviews 
