As one half of Pleasurekraft, Kaveh has spent over a decade shaping a sound that blends techno with cinematic depth and a cosmic edge. With roots in Washington, DC and a background in film, his music leans as much into atmosphere and ideas as it does the dancefloor.
Ahead of his back-to-back set with Shay De Castro at Re/Form this weekend, we caught up with him to talk about musical influences, the evolution of the Pleasurekraft project, and what keeps LA close to his heart.
Dirty Epic: Kaveh, you’re from Washington, DC originally, correct? In your music it’s not hard to hear some of the progressive of the label Yoshitoshi, notably Dubfire and Sharam’s project Deep Dish which was from DC. Would you consider them as a sort of predecessor to Pleasurekraft or something of an inspiration in the DC scene?
Pleasurekraft: Yeah, born in Washington D.C. (coupled with being of Iranian descent) it’s hard to miss the Deep Dish comparisons as far as influence. But what really influenced me from Sharam and Ali (Dubfire) was their label Yoshitoshi and their sets – I’ll still throw on their Global Underground Toronto mixes from time to time and while it certainly is an artifact of its time, many of the producers of that era that were dispersed through those mixes and appeared on DD’s label still exert a creative influence on what I’m doing. Artists like Chab, PQM, and Luke Chable will always be producers I’ll go back and listen to for inspiration.
DE: You released a full album titled Growth and Form last year. What sparked the decision to take on a full album, and what were you aiming to explore or express musically and artistically with it?
Pleasurekraft: Anyone that knows Kalle and I personally knows that of our musical diet, techno is what we consume least, so our third album On Growth & Form was really the next installment in this continuous journey of exploring non-club tracks. It’s basically an opportunity or platform to share with the people that only know Pleasurekraft as a techno act – a broader range of what moves us. If I had to list my 3 favorite Pleasurekraft track, I don’t think a single club track we’ve made would make that list.
DE: Pleasurekraft’s sound has always had a cosmic, cerebral, storytelling quality to it. How intentional is that, and what do you want people to take away from your sets or productions?
Pleasurekraft: Half of my bachelor’s degree was film school, and while humans by nature heavily skew toward the visual, I have always tended to ‘see’ music, and this has naturally bled into the music we make, particularly from 2017 on, when I really wanted to focus on developing the ‘cosmic techno’ sound. More importantly, once we got the party music out of our system (all the pre-2017 tech house stuff that now makes me cringe… which is a good thing I think!) I really wanted to sneak in ideas outside of music that I felt and feel are important things to think about; the apex of this culminating in the music video for “Panopticon (The Patron Saint of Global Surveillance)”.
DE: Most people are slow to admit they are part of the latent Progressive House/Progressive Trance movement. Do you see yourself as a part of this rich musical history? Or are you just making what you want to hear, and it inadvertently just falls into categories that wind up sounding similar?
Pleasurekraft: My eyes tend to glaze over when people start listing the ways in which humans are unique in the animal kingdom, but I do think our capacity for the kind of language we possess makes us promiscuous categorizers. We seem to feel the need to label and compartmentalize everything around us to cut down on the sheer complexity our brains need to navigate. And of course, music is not immune to this feature of our being. So while I kind of understand what you mean when you say “Progressive House” and “Progressive Trance” – I see no distinct boundaries that separate one genre from another because all these categories often bleed into one another – across not only genres but across time as well.
If you say Progressive House to someone, their age will dictate what kinds of music their brain will instantly recall. Are we talking about 10 minute tracks with hardly any breaks of drops from the early 2000s championed by artists like Sasha & Digweed, old Sander Kleinenberg, labels like Yoshitoshi and Saw, or are we talking about Swedish House Mafias catalogue (which to someone unfamiliar with dance music, it could not be two more opposite sounding genres) and yet they both get labelled as ‘Progressive House’.
Our brains generally don’t like nuance or change from the things we’ve already labeled and created a mental space for, so when whatever it is out there called ‘progressive house’ evolves, which pretty much all things do, people are happy to get into arguments with complete strangers about what constitutes “real” <fill in the genre here>.
And then combining different elements from different genres, for example, drums and rhythmic aspects from one genre and lead melodies from another and so on… they’re more aggregates which we feel the need to name. So I don’t really think about this stuff much if I’m honest. The songs are what they are.
When we first meet Michael Keaton’s character, Riggan, in Birdman, the camera pans to his dressing room mirror, and if you look close, you can see a little note he’s wedged into the bottom right of his dressing room mirror – a Buddhist proverb that reads A thing is a thing. Not what is said of that thing. It cannot be put more simply or profoundly.
DE: Who are some producers you’ve been digging lately for your DJ sets? What specifically should people be listening for when they hear your selections? Such as themes, concepts, ideas like harmonic layering, etc.
Pleasurekraft: If I’m being completely honest, I think most of the techno scene, and I probably mean mostly ‘peak-time techno’ since we are category loving apes, has become quite stale since the pandemic. I think what it means to be an ‘artist’ in this scene today is vastly different from what it meant 20, 10, even 5 years ago before the pandemic.
Now I’d be a complete hypocrite here if I started whining and getting upset about all these changes given what I mentioned previously about change being the only constant, as not only has the scene changed, but so have I and so have all of us. While I would love to sit here and rattle off a bunch of names of artists that I think are amazing (and there certainly are a few), the truth is I feel a visceral disconnect with the current peak-time techno scene. That said, it has also presented me with a real opportunity and desire to dig back into my music collection and resurrect tracks that I have always loved but haven’t played in years. Records that still sound incredible and will be completely fresh to the ears of current 18-24 year olds. So I’m quite thankful for being able to play these tracks out and seeing how they land with the new generation of clubgoers.
DE: You’ve played quite a few parties in LA over the years. What makes LA parties unique from your perspective, if anything?
Pleasurekraft: I think artists end up having cities that for a variety of reasons just ‘get’ what they’re doing on a level that other markets don’t. There’s too many complex and causal arrows to give any one simple reason for this, but I’ll just say, for whatever reason, LA has always ‘gotten’ what Pleasurekraft is about. From the early days of “Tarantula” through the evolution of our sound into cosmic techno and the synth-wave stuff that is peppered throughout our 3 albums, Los Angeles has been there for the entire ride, and I can’t really say that about a lot of cities, so it makes each show I play here that much more special. But let’s be real here, the palm trees and weather, the food, and the ocean certainly don’t hurt, and I am very happy to call LA my new home outside of music as well. Looking very much forward to July 19th – Re/Form is always a pleasure to play.
Pleasurekraft has never been one to stay in a single lane, and Kaveh’s reflections here highlight a project built on intention, depth, and constant evolution. Whether drawing from early 2000s progressive, challenging the current techno landscape, or exploring beyond the dancefloor, his approach continues to shift and expand.
This Friday at Re/Form, expect a set that looks forward as much as it looks inward.
Links:
RA: https://ra.co/dj/pleasurekraft
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/pleasurekraft
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